Anatolia and the Levant 2013

GOING ALL IN ON THE PARIS OF THE MIDDLE EAST

It was getting to be mid-January and we had to decide if we were all in for Beirut or not. I had been reading the The Daily Star every day (or daily). It's a great English language daily published in Beirut. Aside from a few kidnappings of businessmen in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon had been pretty quiet since the car-bombing assassination of the head of the Lebanese intelligence agency in October 2012. And this was despite the civil war raging in next door Syria. 

I had reviewed the travel warnings on the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office website (along with the American State Department's warnings - but in my opinion, those tend to be alarmist and not worth much). According to the Brits, Beirut was ok - though Tripoli, the Bekaa Valley, and Tyre were no go. I had also read Jessica Lee's Lebanon Handbook, which had been very reassuring about traveling to Beirut. So on January 13, 2013, we took the plunge and booked tickets from Istanbul to Beirut for March 4.

Now booking those tickets was a little difficult. Pegasus Airlines was the carrier. Because the tickets were $5 cheaper directly through Pegasus's website over Expedia, I tried booking with Pegasus Airlines. However, after hitting the book button on my computer - nothing happened. No confirming webpage, and no confirming email. Just a blank screen. Odd - but perhaps that is the way Pegasus operated? I didn't want to resend, worrying that I would book tickets twice. So I called Pegasus's american phone number. And I got a strange answering machine message (who uses an answering machine in 2013?). So I called my credit card company to see if I had been charged for the tickets. When the credit card company confirmed there was no such charge, I decided to go the safe way and booked them through Expedia. So much for saving $5.

I immediately sent a copy of my confirming email to my mother - as I knew she'd be excited about our visit to the Paris of the Middle East. Shortly after, I received an email back from her with a copy of a parade of horribles from the State Department's travel warnings. I guess she wasn't excited.

Last we needed a hotel in Beirut. Now surprisingly, hotels in Beirut were not cheap at all. When we had traveled to Cairo in 2011, we had paid about $50 a night for a nice place, and even cheaper when we went to Morocco in 2012. But Beirut hotels were on par with places such as Chicago and London. I ended up booking four nights at the Mayflower for about $100 a night. All I knew is that the hotel was in Hamra, got ok reviews on Tripadvisor, and according to my wife - as she had looked at the photos on the Mayflower's website - there were swords on the walls in the hotel bar.

Anatolia and the Levant 2013

SHORING UP THE ITINERARY  

The winter holidays had come and gone and it was time to get serious about our travel itinerary as we rolled into January 2013. We knew that we were going to spend two days in Istanbul at the beginning of the trip and three days there at the end (as it turned out - due to United Airlines - we spent four - but more about that later). Therefore, I decided to get the hotels lined up for that city. 

In the past, we've just winged it and found accommodations when we were actually in the destination country. And while there is something romantic and adventurous of just going and finding the hotels, it can eat up a lot of time - especially if the first places you look at on the ground are dumps. With the ease of the internet and especially my two most important websites for making hotel reservations, Booking.com, and Tripadvisor, I prefer to find and reserve my hotels ahead of time. I also don't like to stay at the same hotel twice, even if we have a great stay the first time around - I like to explore different hotels - as we learned on this trip, you never know what is going to happen or what you'll get at each place. And that's part of the whole adventure.

Anyway, in 2011 we stayed at the Best Town Hotel, Ahmet Efendi Evi hotel, Titanic Port Hotel during our five days. All three were acceptable, but different. So those hotels were out. Luckily, Istanbul has lots and lots of low price but acceptable hotels - especially in Sultanahmet - the old part of the city near the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque. When I look for hotels, I first go to Booking.com and put my travel dates in. Next I look at the price and ratings that the hotels get on that site. I have found that the ratings are pretty accurate. Once I start to narrow the hotels down, I look at the reviews on Tripadvisor. Usually, I throw out very bad and very good reviews, unless there are an overwhelming amount of one or the other, on Tripadvisor to try to get an accurate picture of each of the hotels. Finally, after I reserve the hotel, I send the link to Becky; I don't want to look at any pictures of the hotel ahead of time, but she likes to find out all the quirky details before we travel (like swords on the wall of the hotel bars - always a good sign).

Anyway, after spending probably an hour or two of perusing hotels, I reserved our first two nights at the Emine Sultan Hotel, though as we would find out later, we would only spend one night there - and it wasn't even real Emine (apparently Emine means McCoy in Turkish), and our last three nights at the Minel Hotel, which we would find out to be nearly impossible to locate.

Next up - deciding whether to take the plunge into Lebanon.