Lake Chouwen

[wayfaringwordhack]

Went on a hike with the family today to Lake Chouwen* in Jabal Moussa.

Lebanon is a beautifully mountainous country with steep valleys and scads of interesting vegation.

A few photos for your enjoyment, but there are much more stunning photos on the net.  I am so out of photographic practice and just could not do the colors justice (and I just can't compete with drone-captured images for angle, etc).

Ti'Loup is always ready to strike a pose.  What a ham he is.



Going toward the lake:



First unobstructed glimpse from the vantage-point platform. (I don't know what happened to the image quality when I uploaded it, but I am too lazy to fix it):



The water really is this green:



On the shore at last:



Back out of the river valley, we sat down to have a meal at one of the two little restaurants in the village.**  So many types of fruits grow here in abundance.  Pomegranate season is almost upon us.***



Yonder is the way home:



Some views remind me a bit of Reunion Island, but there was a little stretch of the road that winds along that steep slope on the left that faintly recalled to mind a portion of El Camino de la Muerte in Bolivia.  Only this road was paved and I wasn't zooming down it on a mountain bike. :P I felt confident telling Ti'Loup that, no, we weren't going to fall off the side of the mountain.

_______________

* Because words in English or French are transliterated from Arabic, there are a few other spellings, among them Chouwan.  "Jabal" is a transliteration of the word for "mountain."

 

** I do NOT recommend eating at either.  There is a weird animosity between them as they try to "steal" customers from one another.  We got stuff from both, and at the first place, they brought J a tea, which he did not order, and then charged him for it, even though he told the lady when she brought it that he didn't ask for it, and she just insisted he drink it. He thought it was a hospitality gesture while he waited for the kids' saaj to cook.   J and I ate at the other restaurant because she had grilled meat, and the food was really, really not great. Worst I have had in Lebanon.  And waaaaaaaay too expensive. :(. That we fell for eating there even thinking the food was expensive is down to having paid something similiar at a seaside restaurant and having so much leftover that we had two doggy bags of leftovers and one whole grilled fish that we hadn't even tasted.  But this lady, when I asked what the menu was, told me SHE was the menu.  When I asked the prices, she kept saying, "Whatever you want.:"  Yeah, right. Fell for that one once at the Giza pyramids in Egypt.    When I finally told her that in my culture, I need to know the price, she wrote it down on a piece of paper so the competition wouldn't overhear.  

 

*** Even though the pomegranates aren't yet ripe, you can still find them for sale.  The Lebanese are crazy about unripe fruits:  plums, raisins, almonds...  They usually dip them in some salt and have them for an apéritif snack.

Comments

[asakiyume]

What breathtaking landscape! But my favorite is the unripe pomegranates because I've never seen unripe pomegranates before, and they look like rose hips. That's interesting about the Lebanese liking unripe fruits--do they like ripe ones as well?

[wayfaringwordhack]

They do look like rose hips! The Lebanese also like ripe fruits. :D I think--and I may be wrong--that there is a bit of heady anticipation in eating the unripe fruit, like you are giving yourself a taste of something you have been waiting for for so long. But the unripe and ripe tastes are not at all comparable, so I dunno. :P Maybe it is kind of like when you wear shorts on that hot day in February, even though you know the snows will be back: Take the thing while you can! Sieze the day. Anywhere but here, where they have a steady year-round supply of SOME seasonal fruit, it is hard to imagine that they do it out of sheer hunger of something fresh.

[asakiyume]

Oh: and Ti'Loup is TOTALLY cute. Love his smile.

[wayfaringwordhack]

Anything I could say in response to that would be (rightly) considered biased. ;)

[asakiyume]

**blowing kisses at both of you**

[rimturse]

Such a gorgeous place, and Ti'Loup is growing like a weed!

And yes, absolutely ask for prices. Who would want to commit to buying something without knowing the price?