Damour River

I was chatting with a friend from Holland when I mentioned that I had spent the day in a river. ‘River?” she wrote back, “I thought you lived in a desert’?

No, I don’t. Lebanon is the only country in the Middle East that does not have a problem with water (for the moment). The country has about 40 major streams, and many more springs. Most of these rivers are fed by precipitation, and run dry in summer, but a few are perennial (about 14 of them); they have sufficient water even in the dry summer season.
Sure, it gets mighty hot in summer, but it gets mighty hot in Atlanta, USA as well, and that’s a swamp.
One of the larger perennial rivers is the Damour river. It’s not really a river in the Dutch sense of the word. Our rivers are about 800 meters wide. This one is about 6.
The Damour river is about 40 kilometers long, and starts in the mountains near a village called Dahr al-Bayder.

Why am I telling all this? Because today I ‘lounged’ in the Damour River, and had a picknick where it crosses the Jisr el-Qadi, the Arab name for the ‘Bridge of the judge’. I am told that this name originates from Ottoman (Turk) times, when the bridge was built by the local judge.

Pre-requisites for a picnic in Lebanon are a pair of surgical gloves and a large garbage bag. Other picnickers tend to just get up and leave after an afternoon in the outdoors, and in general leave their plastic plates and cups, bottles, Kleenex, coke cans, juice cartons, plastic cutlery and anything else plastic behind. So the first thing you need to do is ‘re-sanitize’ the place. Once that’s been done though, you’ve got yourself a prime spot. That is, of course, if you are not to close to one of the many restaurants on the river who believe that LOUD music is a ‘must’ for their afternoon lunch crowd.

That all said, if you walk upstream far enough , out of reach of the blaring speakers, and have filled a garbage bag or two with waste, you’ve got yourself a nice little spot, with a stream running by it.

Not bad for a desert.

(Picknick spot on then Ibrahim River will follow shortly)