Enfe

We’ve been living in Lebanon for a while now, so we’ve seen most of the big name sites. Fortunately, there are plenty of little nooks and crannies to enjoy. The accessibility of these sites has improved dramatically with the arrival of a swanky new set of bilingual guidebooks. These are so much better than the little fold out pamphlets that were parading around before. For those of you who might be curious, the whole set can be downloaded here, or you can look at the one for Enfe here.

It was fairly easy to get there, although we needed to do a certain amount of adaptation. For example, the name of the city on the brochure is Enfe, and the name on the map is also Enfe, but the phonetic spelling preferred by the people who made the road signs is Anfeh. Just something to keep in mind for the hordes of pilgrims who will try to retrace our steps in an effort to pay homage to our greatness.

The map of the city provided in the brochure does correspond well with the actual location, although the lack of street names on the map was annoying. Nonetheless, we were able to find our way and park fairly easily. Once we got out of the car, the girls were in the mood to run off some energy, so we took some time to check the place out.





For some reason, this structure features prominently in all the brochures and guidebooks I’ve seen, so I decided to follow the crowd and take a picture of it myself.



I particularly like archeological sites with a high frolick and scamper factor, but with few chances for children to kill themselves. Enfe did quite well in this criteria, with funerary caves, basins for ancient olive oil presses and salt evaporators cut right into the rock.



About that time, a herd of very friendly goats came over to visit. This one in particular decided to live up to the stereotype by eating a plastic bag.





We decided to offer them some more healthful food.





After much exploring and frolicking, we eventually moved on to the second site in the area, the Abbey of Balamand.