My Completely Amazing, Exhausting and Challenging Trip Through Lebanon, Madrid, Mexico City and now Guadalajara

I'm having a much harder time than I thought I would letting go of work and being in my own company.

Me on the balcony of my hotel room in Gemmayze in steaming Beirut, July 7.

Hi Caftaners!

I write to you from Felipe Angeles International Airport well outside of Mexico City as I await a flight to Guadalajara—the last leg of my insane traveling July that took me first to Lebanon (homeland of my mother’s family) for a week, then Madrid for about five days, then back to NYC for two jet-lagged nights, then to Mexico City where I renewed my temporary visa for another three years and stayed on a week, and now to the city they apparently call GAYdalajara because it’s, well, SO GAY.

It’s been the kind of whirlwind journey I haven’t had in a few years and I’m very aware of the privilege of being able to do it, both because of a flexible freelance schedule and because of economic bandwidth that I know not everyone has. But I also sublet my place in Queens for the entire month and I’m not a fancy traveler, so a calculation showed that this entire month of travel might be cheaper than a week in Provincetown, where I hardly go anymore because it’s hard to find a place in high season for less than $400 a night.

I’ll talk about the separate stops in a second, but I just want to note that the need to post something to you all felt visceral. I’ve struggled a great deal on this trip with letting go of work, and of my relationship to my laptop, and simply relaxing and having a good time and seeing what each day brings. I’ve realized how, after 20-plus nonstop years of freelancing for a living, I am simply addicted to reporting and writing—that I feel deeply uneasy when I go without doing so for longer than a few days. I’m not entirely happy about this aspect of myself, but there it is. I also feel downright remiss about not publishing a Caftan interview this month. I’m working on setting up one for next week with someone I have real fondness for. And I certainly would appreciate any leads (just email me: timmurphynycwriter@gmail.com).

I’ve also not seen a friend since my friend Gabriel and I had dinner the night I arrived in CDMX (then they went back to NYC the next day.) Have I, uh, met some folks since then? Yes, lol. But it’s not the same as friends.

The richest part of this trip so far has been the week I spent mainly at the beach and high in the mountains in Lebanon with my NYC friend Mike, who is half-Lebanese but (unlike me) actually speaks a very functional Arabic and knows our tiny little homeland seemingly inside-out, he’s been there so much. I’ve never been in Lebanon in the middle of the summer and have never known the full delight of being at its beaches at that time—but especially high up in its mountains, where the air is cool and clear versus the steambath of Beirut and the coast. Here we are on the coast in a little town north of Beirut called Anfeh…

And here we are in the mountains…

The little mountain house we rented for two nights in the Kadisha Valley.

We ate so well on this trip—a lot of mountain dishes I’d not been familiar with, like okra and eggs (not shown here).

Jeannette, the nun who runs an old monastery in the Kadisha Valley, with Jenina, her Muslim helper. "(“She’s not Christian,” Jeanette told us, amusingly, when we met her.)

Mike and I with a bunch of friendly Syrian workers we met while hiking. They were building somebody’s fancy mountain house.

We were mainly in the Kadisha Valley, which is this stunning, seemingly endlessly deep gorge that has countless ancient Maronite Christian monasteries tucked into it—and then we spent two nights in the village of Akoura (you don’t pronounce the “k”), in one of the most charming guest homes (surrounded by orchards) I’ve ever visited.

Mike with Guita, the matriarch of the family that the guest house is named for. This is a very accomplished family with lots of doctors and execs—the kind of Lebanese family where I can never figure out why they sometimes talk in Arabic and sometimes in French, or when they decide to switch. Guita is one of those irrepressibly friendly personalities. Her son runs the enterprise but she is undoubtedly its face. Also, the meals here were amazing. (All you’re seeing here is a bit of dessert.)

I took a shot of my bedroom at this guest house before we left because it was one of the most enchanted rooms I’ve ever slept in and I wanted to remember it.

Dinner outside on a lovely night in the mountains.

The past few months, people coming and going from Lebanon told me that the country was fine despite the fighting with Israel—that the only part of the country that was truly affected was the southern border. And that’s exactly what we found. It was strange to be in a country whose summer of beach clubs and mountain restaurants with breathtaking views was humming along as usual, when right now—well, often, really—the word “Lebanon” evokes chaos. We chatted a lot with middle- and upper-middle-class Lebanese we met along our trip and, to a one, they all said they wanted a peace deal with Israel that would allow Lebanon to stop constantly being waylaid by chaos. They dismissed the idea (mine, really) that Israel wanted to permanently reoccupy southern Lebanon for its own purposes, pointing to the fact that neither Jordan nor Egypt had skirmishes with Israel at their borders—because they didn’t have a powerful Iran-backed entity making constant trouble with Israel, as Lebanon has in Hezbollah. I can’t account for how many Lebanese exactly, but it seems as if many if not most desperately wish that Hezbollah, which also operates as a charity arm for the country’s Shia underclass, would permanently collapse, or at least demilitarize itself. They point out that it’s more loyal to Iran, its funder, than it cares about the future of Lebanon. They just seem exhausted by the country constantly being set back by war and don’t seem to have strong feelings for or against Israel—more like Israel is like this entity that’s not going away, so they may as well normalize relations with it.

To my eyes, the only tangible sign that the recent conflict had inflicted material damage on Lebanon was how relatively cheap the guest houses and hotels were, because they were underbooked. (Just as we were leaving Lebanon, the families of the global Lebanese diaspora, assured things were okay, were starting to come to the country for their long summer visits as they always do.)

The highlight of this trip to Lebanon for me—my fifth in 20 years—was spending so much time in the pristine mountains in summer. It was truly glorious.

This is the terrace of an unfinished or abandoned house in the Kadisha Valley where, to the sound of church bells, I took a blissful hourlong nap while Mike hiked to the bottom of the valley to visit a half-abandoned village. As you can see, I was far from the ledge when I fell asleep.

One of many waterfalls/swimming holes where we (briefly) dunked ourselves in icy cold water.

After Lebanon, I parted ways with Mike and went on to Madrid, where I hadn’t been before, to spend time with my friend François who lives in Paris (used to live in NYC)…

…and a bit of time with my friend Fabio who splits his time between NYC and his native Brazil…

Madrid was quite beautiful, much as I thought it would be—in fact, with its Beaux Arts wedding-cake architecture, grand boulevards, warrens of small quaint streets, and ample greenways, it reminded me of Paris, albeit a bit brighter chromatically and with everything in Spanish. We enjoyed our rooftop pool and I had a fairly decadent time, to be honest. Madrid has what seems to me a freakishly high rate of beautiful men.

And then I was back in NYC for a mere 36 hours before I hopped on yet another plane to come to Mexico to meet the deadline to renew my residency visa, which I got a year ago and now just managed to renew for another three years, at which point I can make it permanent. (I pursued this as a Plan B when you-know-who was elected again last year. If you want to know how I went about it, start here, as I did.)

I love Mexico City—this was my fourth trip, and it’s a really great city, huge and full of beauty and culture, and of course ridiculously cheap against the American dollar…

Huge soccer statues in CDMX’s iconic Chapultepec Park…

I mean, look at those cakes!

The Palacio de las Bellas Artes—probably CDMX’s most famous edifice.

Lovely quinceañera girl outside the Franz Mayer Musem, where I saw an underwhelming Dalí exhibit. Yes, I asked if I could take her photo!

Kids in a fountain in Alameda Central—one of the oldest public parks in North America—right after a typical late-afternoon summer rainshower.

The lake in Chapultepec Park alongside which I had another lovely doze.

I love the 1920s-1930s architecture of Condesa. I know it’s overhyped but it’s still one of the most beautiful and verdant neighborhoods I’ve ever seen.

….but I’ve also been lonely in Mexico, anxious to get back to work, and exhausted from the tourist life of constantly following a blue dot on your phone as you walk from A to B. Thing is, I sublet my place in NYC for the entire month so I’m not back until Monday, at which point I’ll stay with friends for a few nights. And until then, I’m in Guadalajara (yes, I’m finishing writing this in my hotel room), the spectacular historic center of which I haven’t seen yet, although I have walked around my hotel neighborhood, Colonia Americana, and it feels a bit like the lovely, lush residential streets of L.A.

Caftaners, thanks for letting me check in with you—as I said, I REALLY needed to—and hang in there with me until I’m back doing interviews in August. I’ll leave you with a photo of this Mae West lips couch made by Dalí, which was part of the aforementioned rather disappointing exhibit I went to in CDMX…

… and with this photo of a guy in CDMX shaving shawarma for tacos, which is something that Lebanese immigrants brought to Mexico—and hence also something that binds together the two halves of my July so far. xo Tim