My family didn’t encourage me to go hiking in the Middle East, but I did it anyway.

The slower you travel through a place, the more you learn about it.

Lebanon was the first country my girlfriend and I travelled to with as a couple, without friends.

Nothing about the trip was normal, and landing at Beirut Airport and driving to our guesthouse was a cultural smack in the face I will never forget.

But after a nap and a meal at our guesthouse, we felt brave again.

On our host’s recommendation, we decided to hike a local trail called the Sentier de la Lune (also called the Darb el Qamar), a path that climbs from the outskirts of Zouk Mosbeh near Jeita Grotto all the way up to Harissa, where the Virgin Mary watches over the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.

We didn’t have data or GPS—just a screenshot from Wikiloc of the trail route, a few verbal directions, and enough naïve confidence to pull the hike off.

False starts in Aintoura

We’re staying in Zouk Mosbeh and walk the short distance past some garages and abandoned building projects to the small village of Aintoura, where the actual trail starts.

Aintoura traps us in.

The roads in Lebanon’s suburbs are like filaments, ending in confounding dead ends, and always with at least one house that’s home to some vicious, untrained dog with a deep bark.

Outside the UK, I dread encountering dogs.

We waste an hour accidentally trespassing while failing to find the start of the trail. At least treading all over other people’s gardens lets us admire the perfect flowers that grow here.

It’s already late into the afternoon, and the daylight and our patience are starting to fade.

At another lofty dead end, ready to give up and trespass down to the lower road to go home, we spot a row of gleaming polytunnels off in the distance.

They appear to be in the gardens behind the Lebanese Canadian University.

Beyond the polytunnels—a dark crimp in the pine forest that we take to be the head of the trail.

Seeing it is one thing. Getting there is another.

When travelling abroad, some roads just seem like you’re not meant to explore them.

Here, all the roads feel like that, and on the lower streets, we become completely lost again.

But our persistence pays off and, past a petrol station, down one dusty lane and then another, we find the gardens and polytunnels we were just looking down at.

The tarmac road gives up and becomes gravel, then dirt, and a lone sign marks the start of the hike.

Into the pines

The light is already low in the shadow of the tall pines by the time we start.

In the lowering sunlight, the hills around and above us are painted a gorgeous honey colour.

Somewhere nearby, a lone frog lets out a peal of lusty calls, startling us as it does.

The lower end of the trail starts just beyond a horse riding school, complete with a gymkhana arena.

Beyond the equestrian centre, it passes between the edge of a steep hill and some communal gardens, and we pass a man in a floppy sun hat tending to a dry vegetable patch.

“Bonjour!”

“Buongiorno!”

He’s the last person we see until we reach the top of the trail in Harissa.

The dirt road soon becomes a strip of single track that winds up into the pine forest, following the contours of the land and running alongside dried-up streams.

Rockfalls occasionally break the path, and we’re forced to clamber over them.

The smell of pine in this sun-baked part of the world is incredible to inhale. It has a rich, incense-like headiness that mingles with those other fragrant herbs that grow in this bountiful land—oregano, rosemary, and marjoram.

It always strikes me as odd when I see pine trees growing in hot climates, as I associate them with cold, winter landscapes.

They are native to the Levant, but they grow very differently to how I’m used to seeing them in Northern Europe.

Instead of growing arrow straight into the sky, they twist and tangle in low thickets, looking like giant roots.

But pine resin is the dominant smell and pine needles are what’s underfoot as the trail begins to switchback to accommodate the steepening gradient.

Finding bullets

Just as we’re settling into a rhythm, my girlfriend spots the casing from a rifle bullet.

It’s a great find among the pine cones and the rug of soft pine needles.

How it got there is another matter.

All across the Middle East, people enjoy the frivolous practice of firing guns into the air when they have something to celebrate. So that could explain it.

Or it could be leftover from one of Lebanon’s wars, but it’s a bit remote for that to be likely.

Just as we’re starting to forget about it, we hear rifle fire.

It’s too distant to be concerning, coming from the mountains to the east.

I chalk it up to celebratory shooting, but I’ll never be certain.

The climb becomes steeper

We’re drenched in sweat as we continue upwards.

The valleys here are deep, narrow, and wonderfully verdant.

Occasionally, we catch glimpses of Our Lady of Lebanon—a towering statue of the Virgin Mary reminiscent of Christ the Redeemer—far above us, peeping through the gaps in the trees.

The St. Paul Greek Melkite Basilica also hangs brilliantly in the sky, seeming to radiate divine light.

But we have to watch where we are treading, as the drop to our left is sheer, and the path has thinned out into a narrow rut with lots of trip hazards.

One misstep, and we’ll bypass the Virgin Mary and be headed straight to meet the Lord himself.

Signage on the Sentier de la Lune

There is signage on the trail, but it’s in Arabic and French, and none of it pertains to the Sentier de la Lune, making them useless for navigating.

Whenever the path splits, we make a judgment call as to which direction to take.

We don’t panic about it and make the right decisions as, two hours after we said bonjour to the gardener, the slope softens and the path widens again.

Evidently it has reached the crest of the hill it is carved into. The pine forest also thins out here into an airy wood.

But that’s it for the off-road section of the hike; beyond this wood lies the village of Daraoun.

Through Daraoun

Here, an empty road turns a horseshoe bend around the terminus of a deep gorge and continues up into Harissa.

Crossing the apex of the road feels like walking along a dam.

For all its sultry smells and evocative glimpses of Harissa’s skyline, the Sentier de la Lune peters out in the most anticlimactic way imaginable.

The wide and littered Harissa expressway severs the trail abruptly with a broad tarmac barrier, teeming with traffic.

But it doesn’t bother me or my girlfriend. We’re feeling more than a little adventurous, and we’re very pleased to have completed the hike without getting lost or bailing out early on.

And across the expressway is what makes the hike feel worthwhile. What makes visiting Lebanon feel worthwhile.

Statues and sectarianism at Harissa

This beautiful statue of the Virgin Mary has been watching over Jounieh Bay since 1908, before the country of Lebanon existed.

Harissa is visible from almost everywhere along the coast, making a natural pulpit above the Mediterranean and the perfect place to erect such an awe‑inspiring monument.

She looks doleful and has her arms outstretched, as if willing the Lebanese people up and out of the sectarian conflicts that, when she was carved, were still far into the future.

Decades and tens of thousands of lost lives later—no one agrees on the exact number—she still stands, unblemished.

It’s remarkable that through the years when the country barely held together, this statue remained undamaged.

Not every monument in this region survived its wars.

Palmyra in Syria was shattered by ISIS in 2015 and 2016. Fortunately, the Lebanese Army has managed to stop ISIS from waging their ugly and destructive campaign here.

But despite its wars, which were no less ugly or brutal than any other, Lebanon has always managed to survive—just—as a sectarian mosaic.

And the same sectarian tension that helps to trigger conflicts also stops Lebanon from collapsing into the kind of single‑minded extremism that has consumed other parts of this achingly beautiful region.

It’s a strange, precarious equilibrium—both the accelerant and the firebreak for civil war.

For now, Lebanon remains mostly at peace, although it’s deeply economically troubled. It’s a country holding itself together through habit and hope.

Riding the téléférique down to Jounieh

Before taking the téléférique down to the beaches at Jounieh, my girlfriend and I admire the scene.

Worshippers light candles, while teenagers on dates take selfies. It’s heartening to see people enjoying their lives despite everything their country has been through.

But the day is coming to an end, so we can’t linger too long.

The téléférique carries us down to Jounieh Bay in a fraction of the time it took us to walk up the same slopes.

The sun has almost set now.

Thirsty, we pull on a couple of cold beers from a shop over the road.

The swell is quite violent this evening.

Not the worst I’ve seen in the Mediterranean—that honour belongs to a dicey boat trip in Greece—but enough to abandon the idea of a dip to cool off.

So before we get too merry and tempted to push our luck, we finish our beers and hail a cab home.