I was fortunate enough to have immediate plans to occupy my time so that I did not have an opportunity to feel flat. One of these was to travel to Lebanon together with Paul van der Stelt, to both speak at the XIth Annual Convention of the Lebanese Dental Association, at the end of August.

We were invited by professor Tony Zeinoun, President of the Lebanese Dental Association, and Dr. Ziad Nouieim, Chairman of the Scientific Committee following on from my meeting Professor lbrahim Nasser at the Louisville meeting in 1997.

Until I was invited I knew very little of Lebanon but soon learnt where it was (at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean) and some of the facts about the Civil War that lasted from 1975 -1990. The invitation was so warm and enthusiastic that I promptly accepted and was pleased to get my travel arrangements which resulted in five days in Beirut for a four day meeting. Out of this period we were encouraged to be tourists for two days and others may be interested in an account of one of those days. What did we do? David Smith had said to me "if you do nothing else you must visit Baalbek". So, we booked a tour to Aanjar, Baalbek, Zahie and Ksara winery. We had a small group including three others from the conference and a wonderful guide, Rita. This trip took us across the Lebanon mountain range to the Bekaa valley. On the way we stopped for a coffee break and Rita introduced us to Labneh. This was something that we saw all the local people eating at this cafe in the middle of nowhere and consisted of a large pancake like piece of dough spread with a local soft goat cheese and then dotted with herbs, black olives, and tomato. The whole thing was then rolled up and presented to the customer; this was absolutely delicious and as we'd had quite an early start, very welcome at this point in the morning washed down with strong espresso style coffee.

Our first official stop was Aanjar, a small village which is populated mostly by Armenians who had fled to Lebanon from Turkey. However we were not there to experience a cultural exchange but to visit the Aanjar ruins, a walled and fortified city built in the first century AD. Although this had completely fallen down much of it has been reconstructed using the original stone and faithfully following the original plan and it is now a very impressive site with beautiful colonnades and sufficient reconstruction to enable you to close your eyes and begin to imagine what it must have been like to live here.

It was clearly a thriving market town full of shops and must have been extremely important in this valley location. As the rest of the group headed back along the main "street" I went the other way as I had read in my guide book that the northern end was inhabited by members of the Syrian army; although there is no evidence that the people I saw were army personnel I certainly saw people and a number of the small reconstructed houses were clearly inhabited by modern day people. We carried on heading close to the Syrian border in order to visit Baalbek. Both Paul and I have visited many Roman and Greek archaeological sites in Italy and Greece but I think it is true to say almost nothing compares with this magnificent collection of temples. One temple, the Bacchus temple is almost complete, only missing its roof and has the most wonderful intricate carving even on the ceilings of the external walkways around the main temple. Baalbek was originally Phoenician and there is evidence that people have lived here as far back as the end of the third millennium BC. Most of the existing temple structure was built by the Romans during the first century AD and later and Rita was wonderfully able to describe to us in words how it once was and the sequence of events which led to the current quite extensive complex. Sated with culture and hot from the sun we were pleased to know that our next stop would be lunch in the town of Zahie, the main market town of the Bekaa valley. I mentioned to Rita that we had not yet had the chance to experience Arak, the Lebanese equivalent of Pernod and Ouzo. She was horrified as she knew that we had been there already for a couple of days and been introduced to Mezze which she said should traditionally be eaten washed down with Arak. At lunch we were offered Arak courtesy of the tour company and encouraged to really savour our food the Lebanese way. Lebanon is not well known as a wine producing country but does produce excellent wine and is now beginning to make an impact on the rest of the world. We were fortunate that the Bekaa valley is the main grape growing part of Lebanon and following lunch we went to visit the Ksara winery for a tour of their caves and to sample a variety of their wines. Driving up to the winery you could have imagined that you were either in France or in California, where most of the Chateaux and wineries are built in a traditional style. Ksara was no exception and the caves running into the hills were also very similar to other wineries I have visited elsewhere.

Refreshed by this final part of the official tour we then drove back over the hills again and into Beirut returning along the Green Line as we had left. The Green Line is the location of the front between the Christian east and the Muslim west during the war and many of the buildings along the street which forms the main demarcation and around here still show evidence of the dreadful fighting that occurred over many years. Deserted buildings with no windows, pock-marked by machine gun holes and often with masonry at unbelievable angles but not yet fallen down. Adjacent to these badly damaged buildings are brand new blocks of flats and offices living side by side in this fascinating city, which we felt privileged to visit.

Looking back at this trip from my Scottish base I now feel privileged to have had the opportunity to visit Lebanon at a time when it was possible to explore in the way that we did.
Although I am a fairly intrepid traveller I suspect that if the meeting had been at the end of September, rather than the end of August we would not have had this opportunity.