I can remember mist, spooky clouds of swirling mist, lapping around us. We were all perched up high on a huge rock in the middle of a cedar forest.

Around us was a picnic — I can definitely see corned beef. A happy memory: a family picnic in the early 1970s, in the mountains of Lebanon.

People always assume that if you grew up in Lebanon, as I did, your memories must be monopolised by war. Certainly, I have loads of those.

Whenever I think of Lebanon, however, the projector in my head plays nature films — swimming in ice-cold rivers, clambering over deserted Roman ruins, walking rhodesian ridgebacks through pine forests.

Beirut gets in the mood to party

Johnny Paris samples the lively nightlife in the compact but culturally and religiously diverse Lebanese capital

Trekking Lebanon's mountains

A new 190-mile trail in Lebanon takes you from the ocean to snow-capped mountains in a matter of hours

Beirut: why the joke is on the Syrians

Helena Frith Powell makes her first visit to Lebanon and finds humour and familiarity in the landscape

• Our big family adventure in Syria

• Family holiday + Jordan. Does it work?

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• Trekking Lebanon's mountains

This, in my opinion, is the problem with this year’s fad of recommending that you visit Beirut. A huge article in The New York Times at the beginning of the year told readers that the number-one place to visit in the whole world was the Lebanese capital.

The Rough Guide made the capital a “must-see” city of 2009, and CNN showed a film on Beirut, calling it the best party city in the world. I’m not disputing any of this. Beirut is a fabulous place to visit — amazing bars, great food, extraordinary history — but, when you really get down to it, it’s pretty much like any other large, buzzing Mediterranean city, just with a bit of war chic.

To me, the real magic of Lebanon starts the moment you leave Beirut, leave the traffic and noise, and head for the mountains that serve as such a wonderful backdrop. I drove up to Faraya for lunch. The snow had not yet fallen on this sedate ski resort (it normally arrives in December), but the place was still buzzing with hikers and quad-bikers.

I had a splendid lunch in a huge Bedouin-style tent. I always forget just how fabulous Lebanese food is. After a long and lazy meal, I meandered off back down the mountain. I kept stopping along the way — I hadn’t seen the Jisr al-Hajar, a natural stone bridge with an arch of 125ft, since I was a kid.

I drove on, but I was soon out of the car again when I got to Faqra. Just below the road on my left were the ethereal ruins of a Roman temple, half built into the natural rock. I wandered in — there was nobody about. The afternoon sun was melting into the old stones and I sat on the highest point and stared down the lonely valley towards the distant Mediterranean.

The following morning, I was back in my car, heading for the Bekaa Valley, to revisit Baalbek. When I arrived, I parked up outside my favourite hotel in the whole of the Middle East, the Palmyra — which is where all the great and good of Levantine history have laid their heads at one time or another. I had a cup of staggeringly strong coffee in the courtyard over­looking the ruins before heading off for some serious temple-trampling.

Baalbek is an astonishingly beautiful place — an architectural homage to all things bacchanalian, plonked right in the middle of a Hezbollah stronghold. Hezbollah, however, are not the Taliban, and the two live side by side in true Lebanese pragmatism.

Whenever I visit Baalbek, I like to sit on the edge of the temple of Baal, my feet dangling over, feeling the cool, ancient stones on my skin and reading the centuries-old graffiti on the pillars surrounding me. I try to imagine what it must have been like to come across this place for the first time as an ancient traveller. I so wish I lived in an age when you could still be an explorer...

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