At the end of a very, very long day, I found myself back up on the col... (Col des Cèdres)
At the end of a very, very long day, I found myself back up on the col between the Cedars and the Beka’a. The last time I was up here, I was with my partner and we were treated to a sunset so psychedelicised, that I still can’t quite believe the colours Mount Lebanon turned before the night fell. Yesterday, my companions were the mildly insane but extremely funny content creation crew from Tamyras, who had been on the road with me, filming a promotional video for my forthcoming book, Getting Lost in Lebanon. It’s a collection of my Insta posts about Lebanon over the course of the last year and so we thought it would be fun to visit a few of the places mentioned in the book, as well as a few others and compile them into a short video clip – a kind of ‘On the Road with Warren’, if you like. The Col was our last stop for the day and while the sunset didn’t quite deliver in terms of colour, the experience was wild, nonetheless. Last year, the Col had been dry as a bone. This year, there were bands of snow decorating the heights, thick, dust-streaked ribbons of off-white, downslope from which springy cushions of bright purple flowers feasted on snowmelt. The view, as ever, was magnificent but it was the wind that was truly (and at times literally) breathtaking. It was so powerful that our car rocked back and forth, as though buffeted by a hurricane. We’d planned to film one last segment here, where I would say something thoughtful about the day, but that wasn’t going to happen. It was hard enough to stand upright. So instead, our last stop turned into an impromptu celebration and hair whipping in the wind, we danced, laughed and shouted as the sun set over the Mediterranean.
by wsinghbartlett / Instagram