Our wonderful school organized a hike up in the Al-Shouf Cedar Reserve. If you've been reading this blog, you'll have noticed we already done one hike up there. Since it's a HUGE reserve, it was a completely different hike starting from a completely different area. We headed south outside of Beirut to get to the trail head. The goal of the hike was to hike up to the summit and then get to not only see the sun set over the west of Lebanon but also to see the moonrise over the Bekaa valley. This is extra special because it was a blue moon (when a third blue moon happens in a season that has four full moons). I guess this only happens every two of three years so it's unique. No, it's not blue.
This post will mostly be pictures because it was just one of those happy walks where the world seems perfect. Nothing super interesting happened except for happiness and good conversation. The world seemed like a much smaller place up there. I am in a country and could see two other countries that I never thought I would be in. I was with people that are interesting, kind, friendly and way more fun than I ever thought I would meet in Lebanon. I'm not sure why I find it so deeply profound that people from all over the place seem to agree on what beauty in nature is. This was it.
Our groups split up into difficulty levels to get to the summit. Being a stubborn (but not physically fit) hiker, I took the hard one. Honestly, in the end I think we had the easier hike. We went up steeper stuff initially, but we did avoided the longer somewhat steep climb that exhausted everyone else.
View near the summit, overlooking the west of Lebanon.
Still climbing! It was great that some of the ACS people brought their kids to hike with us. The one kid I was hiking with speaks 4 languages and told me he prefers French because its the easiest. Once again, when is all this Spanish I took going to come in handy?
The sun starting to set.
I'm still a little confused about these pools that we saw around there. Apparently, the Chinese (someone else told me Japanese and then I heard Germans later) gave Lebanon money for them to build these reservoirs for the animals. Please, if someone understands this let me know!
Overlooking the Bekaa valley. The moonrise is going to be on this side. We could see Mt. Hermon (technically a cluster of mountains) which is in the Anti-Lebanon mountain range. The two major mountain ranges in Lebanon are the western range, the Lebanon Mountains and the eastern range, the Anti-Lebanon mountains. Just so you get an idea, the summit of Mt. Hermon is at about 9,232 feet. It actually is the dividing point between Lebanon and Syria and considered the highest point in Syria.
Our friend and fellow ACSer, Tracy. She suffers from the same torture inflicted by her husband that Ryan inflicts on me. They both sings parts of songs and then we get them stuck in our heads for days. I was so glad to bond with her over this and know that others feel my pain.
The gorgeous Bekaa valley. In a future post, we will head over this way to go to a winery called Massaya. The valley has incredibly fertile ground which makes it the most important agricultural area in Lebanon. I still haven't made it to Baalbek, where there are some really cool Roman ruins, but I'm sure we will before they fall down.
We are at the summit! Time to grab a comfy spot and shove some food in our mouths.
So....we found the perfect spot to sit and look over watch the sunset but it also happened to be in the way of everyones picture taking. Oops. We snapped a few pictures before feeling too guilty to sit there anymore.
Ryan has this thing where he makes me ugly laugh. I just don't get it.
The sunset (and also the background on my computer). This is an extra amazing picture considering we had just totally broke the lens on the camera and lost some other semi-important parts in the process.
Ryan practicing his shadow puppeting.
It's almost gone!
Time to turn around and head over to the other side of the mountain and see the moonrise. Tiny moon over the mountains.
Moonrise over Mt. Hermon
And this is where it just got too dark and I got too distracted to take any pictures. We both got cold, which was a first since arriving in Lebanon and still had a great time. Fireworks were going off in the west (I guess they are common to light off at weddings) and looked amazing over the clouds. Andre, the tour guide from the last hike we went on, made us all chocolate fondue that could not have tasted better. People drank wine and talked and fell down in the dark (not because of the wine- the moon wasn't quite high enough for us to see where we were going for a while). We hiked down with the moonlight as our flashlights. Thank you everyone that went with us- we had a blast and loved sharing that beautiful experience with you!
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