Yearly Archives: 2018

Byblos is much nicer and has much more to offer than my shitty photos make it appear.

Beirut, Lebanon.

I can’t hear the word “Beirut” without also hearing the prefix “war-torn”, but although the building next door to the Intercontinental Phoenicia has suspicious looking damage:

the rest of Beirut that I’ve seen consists of car parks full of Ferraris next to marinas full of expensive power boats surrounded by hundreds of people enjoying the cafes and restaurants or walking along the corniche, which is what they call the seafront around here.

And then we have the Club Lounge at the Phoenicia:

Excellent canapes, superb local wines, impeccable service, and the personal attention of Mariam make this the best place to be in Beirut.

Mustn’t forget the hotel limo that collected me at the airport and was a slightly higher spec than the usual – a Bentley:

Morning view from the hotel room:

But only if you open the window and poke your camera through the gap, precariously dangling from the 17th floor. Otherwise, the “spectacular sea views” offered by the hotel look like this:

Hotels out here have a hard time keeping the windows clean because of all the sand in the air, and this hotel seems to have simply given up trying.

To get anywhere in Kuwait City you have to keep running for your life across 6 lanes of SUVs doing 60mph:

I thought Bahrain would be crowded with tourists because of the Grand Prix. All the hotels are sold out, but the only people I’ve seen at mine is a handful in Ferrari team uniforms. (Just the plebs. The drivers stay somewhere private.) Maybe because it’s a night race everyone else was in bed while I explored Bahrain Fort for over an hour with nobody else there except a security guard at the gate. Not a particularly thrilling place but much more atmospheric with no people and no noise, and its rare to have a UNESCO world heritage site entirely to yourself.

The National Museum was also deserted.

Muharraq Souq was a different story, one of crowded chaos, but still without tourists.

Muscat felt a bit Mediterranean and the rest of Oman was old fashioned subsistence goat farming. Dubai is clean and rich and new and tall and wide and calm. Bahrain is old and small and crowded and noisy and hectic.

In Dubai, everyone you see out is Arab or white, and everyone working in the hotels, shops, and restaurants is Indian, or thereabouts. In Bahrain it seems like Indians make up at least two thirds of the population.

Then Kuwait. The airport is a chaotic shambles and its dusk by the time I get out. There’s so much dust and sand in the air that the darkening skies seem filled with smoke as if things are on fire. Traffic is heavy and absolutely everyone is driving like an utter maniac, seemingly all going the same way. It feels like a neighbouring power has invaded and people are fleeing for their lives. I haven’t watched the news lately….

But no, it’s just normal. Kuwait is just one of those places where the driving is so frenetic and the infrastructure so car-based and pedestrian-blind that you have to take a taxi if you want to cross the street without being killed.

The hotel is also a shambolic mess, and the executive lounge is very limited. The only people in there sound like American Sunday school missionary-type teachers, there to save the poor little a-rab children, and because Kuwait is a completely dry country the strongest option to take the edge off their fantastically annoying conversation is not going to be enough…

Pop quiz: whats the capital of Bahrain?

10 points if you said Manama. 5 points for saying anything at all.

Done well today, in all aspects except taking photos. Lazy morning in my private sauna and then on the private beach at Le Meridien, sister hotel to the Grosvenor. The complimentary car provided by the hotel to take me to the airport was a very nice BMW 7 series. Got an alert about an aircraft change for my flight with the awful Fly Dubai which meant I got in first on the new configuration and was able to pick a business class seat on my economy ticket, making it substantially less awful.

And then Bahrain. I’d booked it before the grand prix switched places with China and had too many plans in place to change once I found out about the swap. I now expected an overrun hotel and no possibility of upgrade.

First, I was met at the airport by the hotel driver who led me to a very nice Mercedes S-class AMG. First impressions of Bahrain are that it is very much smaller and denser than the other gulf states, but the car certainly wasn’t.

Then the hotel. Seemingly quiet. Maybe all the F1 people are at the track. Saudi Ferrari outside with the registration number “1”. Upgraded to a suite. Not quite the same level as the Royal Suite, but still very nice, especially as it’s costing me nothing but a few freely earned points.

And access to the Club lounge, also surprisingly empty, with excellent service, a perfect martini (first time on this trip that my instruction to make it with two olives has been correctly implemented), and the most delicious little canapes of steak with blue cheese, of which I had 8 portions…

Then a walk around Manama Souk. Like the rest of Bahrain, compact and densely packed, and with so many apparently imported workers that it looks and feels even more like India than Terminal 2 at Dubai airport does. So of course, you drive your car through it. I mean, it’s barely wide enough to walk through and full of people, but you’ve got a horn you can lean on and you’re not going to get hurt so why the hell not?

Some deafeningly loud traditional music going on. Today I learned that Bahrain’s traditional music is “whack a drum as hard as you can and scream as loud as you can in a confined space”, which some people, for example deaf people, might call charming.

In the souk you can buy everything from:

to:

And it’s the middle-east, so you can also pick up your daily household needs such as: