Michael Karam: Personal touch makes Beirut airport experience memorable

Frequent flyer Michael Karam replays the theatre of arriving at Beirut's Rafik Hariri International Airport – his favourite destination to land at on his business travels.

I’ve taken 48 flights this year. I was trying to reach the one-flight-a-week mark but I suspect I’d still be a lightweight compared to the hardcore heroes of air commuting, like my friend who crosses the Atlantic on average at least three times a week and to whom business- class bunks and hotel beds are more familiar than his bedroom. But it is enough air miles to maintain lounge status, the only perk, along with fast track, and to a lesser extent priority boarding, that makes modern air travel, defined as it by the paranoia of a sudden terror outrage, bearable.

That said, despite the horror stories one hears, I have found the world’s immigration and security officials to be, by and large, very pleasant. The British don’t really talk to their own citizens since they installed passport scanners so they don’t count, but the Americans, usually painted as paranoid idiots who’ll happily measure you for an orange jumpsuit if you’re called Ahmed, have too much stubble or say “inshallah”, are very polite and ask intelligent and searching questions. The Irish are easily the most friendly; the Japanese are, as you would imagine, uber-respectful and the Scandinavians, despite a reputation for topping themselves in winter, exude the most happiness. I guess Pilates really does work.

And the Lebanese? Well I suppose I’m biased, but I love arriving at Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport (Rhia). The four-and-a-half hour Middle East Airlines flight from London is the perfect decompression chamber to prepare both the neophyte and the veteran traveller alike for the madness that lies ahead in that the inside of the Airbus resembles the sitting room of a vast Lebanese home in which every extended family member is represented. Now of course, it’s all very sanitised. For the full experience, you have to hark back to the days when you could smoke on aeroplanes and the fuselage was one massive party. Then it was the real deal.

Even when flying stiff upper lip British Airways, the captain will more often than not be unable to resist telling everyone on board that he and his crew are looking forward to a night out in Beirut. The mind may boggle, but apparently the global enthusiasm for our dysfunctional city is contagious.

Disembarking on to the jetty at Rhia offers a host of sensory stimuli. There is the smell – a mix of aviation fuel, cigarettes, sweat and after shave – and the sights: the floodlit tarmac, the bored customs officers, weary dispatchers with wheelchairs and the slightly less scruffy, clearly more senior officials – “the US$100 men” – waiting to receive certain passengers – the MP, the minister’s wife, the designer with a particularly fragile ball gown; it can be anyone – who for the eponymous fee, they will whisk through passport control and, if needs be, customs.

For the rest of us, it’s a short walk through the terminal building past the comforting sepia posters of the ruins at Baalbek, Byblos and Tyre as well as the stalactite-riddled caves at Jdeita. Passengers are told to queue in either the “Lebanese nationals” or “Foreigners” line but no one really pays any attention. The immigration officers are cheerful and polite, feeding data from the landing card into a pre-Pentium computer, before stamping it and then your passport. Then it’s ahlan wa sahlan, and you’re on your way.

Beirut is one of the few, if not the only, arrivals area I know where passengers religiously stock up on extra duty free when they land. But as the whole village is waiting on the other side of the wall, I guess it pays to be prepared. Let’s face it; we Lebanese are an emotional people who travel a lot. The return of a family member, especially a son, daughter, brother or sister, is greeted with varying fanfare. Goats were known to be slaughtered just in front of the old terminal building – less now of course – and there really was a time when quite literally the whole village would all pile into a bus and drive down to Beirut to welcome back one of its own.

Now they can you follow on Instagram, but you still often have to navigate helium-filled balloons, bouquets of flowers and the stooping, black-clad grannies. Outside you haggle a taxi fare into Beirut – $15 is the going rate, by the way; $20 if it’s a nice car – and bundle your bags into the back as the whistle-blowing cop threatens to issue a ticket (he never will, but it’s all part of the theatre).

You finally relax as the car picks its way through the southern suburbs and your driver, who you have never met before, expresses his relief that you made it back home in one piece – hamdella a salameh – offers you a cigarette and a smile.

You just don’t get all that at Heathrow.

Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton.

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