As we sit down for breakfast, it starts pouring with rain. We watch a car spin 180 degrees in the road and there is a unanimous decision that there will be no biking in the mountains – or anywhere today. The last thing anyone wants is in an accident on slippery roads. One group decides to go shopping and then to look for a cinema; another group rents a car to go sightseeing; my husband, Richard, discovers that Beirut has only one golf course, close to the airport. He makes a call and discovers that they can rent him clubs and shoes, and off he goes. I take a taxi and head out to the suburbs in the hills where a friend lives in Roumieh, next to Broumana. I have noticed in all the Lebanese towns and villages the untidy mass of electricity cables, alongside the roads and crossing above the streets. My friend tells me that everyone is connected to the mains electricity, but this goes off every day for about six hours. Some enterprising people have set up massive stand-by generators and several households are then connected to them – as soon as the mains go off, the stand-by generator supply kicks in. So there are two sets of cables to every house, and none of them are underground. Broumana is an affluent and popular tourist area with lots of umbrella pine trees and some beautiful old typically Lebanese style houses, built out of local stone and with colourful wooden shutters on the windows. There are some stylish hotels and numerous restaurants, many of which shut down once the summer season is over. The renowned Broumana High School is here, a boarding school where some Saudi families send their children. Richard returns from the golf course with some amusing stories. He paid his $40 fee at the entrance gate and, was taken in a golf cart to a scruffy maintenance shed, surrounded with tractors and machinery. He was offered a caddy, (“No, I can find my way around!”) and a handful of old balls (“I don't need so many, I never lose balls!”) He lost most of the balls, and was then found lost himself, walking the wrong way down a fairway, in spite of the huge numbers designating the holes and signs indicating where to go. He was assigned a caddy and enjoyed the rest of his game. We now head to Amman on our bikes.
