Day Trips from Lebanon

The Bekaa Valley keeps Rome's grandest relics this side of the Mediterranean. Baalbek's six 20-m Corinthian columns still vibrate with summer-festival bass, while nearby Anjar unwraps an 8th-century Umayyad city grid you can cross in minutes, tracing Armenian silk-dyeing alleys. Between stops, roadside stalls roll paper-thin saj bread around thyme and goat cheese.

Twenty kilometres above the coast, a limestone underworld glitters with chandeliers and stalactites the size of chandeliers. Glide in silence through Jeita's cathedral-high cavern, then drop down to Byblos where people have lived since 5 500 BC and the air carries grilled fish and marine tar. The small harbor rattles with gulls and the slap of fishing nets.

At 2 000 m the air thins and smells of resin and snow even in May. The tiny Cedars grove, UNESCO twinned with the Valley below, holds trees that watched Phoenician ships set sail. Down in Qadisha, footpaths thread past Maronite monasteries glued to cliff walls, the only soundtrack your boots on scree and the occasional goat bell echoing across the ravine.

Tyre's Roman hippodrome still runs chariot races in the mind, its stone starting gates gape like broken teeth toward the Med. After circling the track, slide into the turquoise water steps away where columns lie submerged like sea monsters. The old harbor perfumes the breeze with diesel, jasmine, and grilled prawns.

The Chouf mountains roll like green surf above the coast. Inside the reserve century-old cedars creak in the wind, their canopy shading wild tulips and the occasional wolf print. Down in Deir al-Qamar, 17th-century palaces of emirs overlook stone squares where you'll hear the slap of laundry and smell kishk soup simmering in copper pots.

Lebanon's second city refuses to tidy itself for visitors, and that's the charm. The souk maze reeks of cumin, copper, and soap perfumed with orange blossom. In Mina's port, fishermen mend neon nets while cafés pour tiny cups of cardamom coffee thick as syrup. Sun-bleached crusader towers loom above alleys where scooters honk and vendors hawk sesame bread.