Subject: Post: Some Lebanese food for breakfast, and we headed out of the city to visit the nearby limestone caves, Jeita Grotto. The caves are one of the biggest of their type in the world.<p>Using a bus, a service taxi and an another taxi we arrived to the caves, just 20 kilometers outside Beirut. The place was surprisingly crowded by tourists, which was a fact I wasn't particularly happy of. Even less I was happy of the fact that it was strictly forbidden to photograph inside the caves. You actually had to leave all cameras into a locker outside the cave before entering it.<p>I do understand forbidding flash use in museums and this kinda places, as it can actually cause damage to the environment, but I really do not like places forbidding photography totally. It just signals that the organization responsible for the place wants to retain all rights to commercially photograph there and control the pictures released, and that's what I do not support under any circumstances. Touristic and journalistic photography of public places should always be possible and either free or for a small charge.<p>Anyway, the caves itself were cool. We walked through the upper cave admiring the stone formations, and had a boat ride around the lower cave, where an underground river flows. Check out the Wikipedia link below for further information and for a few photos of the caves.<p>From the caves we got a quite cool ride back home. We took a taxi all the way back to Beirut, and the taxi car was a really classical one, probably around 40-50 years old Mercedes :)<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeita_Grotto" target="_blank">Jeita Grotto on Wikipedia</a> Latitude: Longitude: Security Code:
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