Recently I met a fellow who was walking to Jerusalem from England. When our paths crossed, he was in Beirut taking respite, eight months into his walk. He had just walked the length of Turkey and Lebanon from Tripoli to Sidon. This was no fair-weather traveller - he had been sleeping on church floors for the better part of a year - but he had worn the travel well. While you couldn’t stare directly at his blinding sock tan without burning your retinas, his youthful looks, fair hair and blue eyes were all intact. If you were to see him passing by your rural Turkish village, you’d notice.
And as he explained it, people had. “One of the most inevitable aspects of walking is that it’s very, very slow, which means almost everyone you pass has time to talk to you.” He had been stopped by thousands of people in Turkey and Lebanon alone, people pulling over to ask after his whereabouts, people calling to him from their verandas, children chasing him down the road. Often enough, when discussing his route with local inhabitants, they’d tell him to be careful in the next town over, those guys, they’d say, were all crooks. Invariably though, the next town over was just as law-abiding as the town from which he’d just come.
As long as his feet were moving, the only interactions he had were positive: people offering him food, water, a place to sleep, people wanting to advise him on the best route forward.
In fact his only brush with trouble to date came in August, while sitting in a café in central Tripoli on a Friday afternoon. Two bombs went off within a kilometre and for the first time in a long walk he saw panic.
What matters most about this episode is not that bombs went off near our walker but that they were unexpected and alarming enough to send Lebanon’s second largest city into frenzy. Living in the relative calm of our central Dubai high-rise, our house in Riyadh or our refurbished Hivernage loft in Marrakesh, we slip into thinking that our neighbours have become used to violence and unrest. But even in so-called ’trouble’ zones like Tripoli, average people are still fazed by explosions.
Forgetting this - as most of us do - makes a walk across somewhere like Lebanon sound outrageous, especially if you have blonde hair that catches the sunlight from a mile off, you’re alone and you speak no Arabic. But violent death is still uncommon in our ever-more violent region. More uncommon, in fact, than they are in the United States, both in absolute numbers and proportionally. You’re about four times more likely to be killed by a firearm in Los Angeles than Riyadh. More law officers die every year in New York than in Jordan. In Egypt, traffic-related deaths are fifteen times more likely than protest-related deaths. You’re about ten times more likely to die driving around Lebanon than by getting caught in a bomb blast.
The fact of the matter is that if a fairly naive young Briton can wander across Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine without coming to harm, you can probably afford to risk that getaway flight from Kuwait to Beirut. After all, stay in the Gulf too long and you may run the risk of death by boredom.
