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We wanted to watch the sunset from the Bedouin camp, but it was only 2:30. We had our fill of Roman ruins and citadels in Palmyra and a still had a taxi driver for the full day.

“So I pick you up in one hour,” he asked when we drove to a Bedouin family’s desert home. No we want to stay until sunset, we told him, for the fourth time.

The reason for his insistence became clear. The family doesn’t speak a word of English. Not the father, with his leather jacket, gold rings and red-and-white keffiyeh. Not his wife who served us tea repeatedly. Not their four boys.

Fifteen minutes of “thank you” and “beautiful” in tourist Arabic and it started getting awkward.

Their boys kept shyly looking at us. Suddenly I realized how the next two hours would be spent.

Step 1: Candy

We pulled out a bag of Vietnamese guava drops and the boys advanced like hungry cats. The littlest one had a hard time untwisting the wrapper, which was an opportunity to test his hand-eye coordination: he had to fetch the candy from my rapidly-moving hand.

We won our first giggles, and consequently, their trust.

Step 2: Soccer

Their home is a tent pitched on a cement foundation, about the size of a transport container. Inside are just cushions and an oil stove. Beside it is a cooking tent, a bath tent, and several meters away the corral for the sheep and a pigeon coop.

There’s a satellite dish for the TV and a diesel generator that powers it. All around them are acres and acres of dry, desolate desert. The nearest water pump is 100 meters away.

It was the biggest backyard I’d ever seen. You can kick a ball as hard as you can and it would still be in their property. So that’s what we did.

A little clumsy dribbling around it and some shots at an imaginary goal had them in snickers.

One hour had passed since we arrived. We didn’t exchange any mutually intelligible sentences.

Palmyra, an oasis in the Syrian desert once ruled by Romans. Click photos for a gallery.

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Step 3: Ruins

A few hundred meters from their tent are the remains of an ancient Bedouin home made of mud. The boys led us there while kicking the ball back and forth.

“Snick!” the oldest one, about 12, yelled when we walked over some burrows in the sand.

Snick?

“Ey, snick. Snick.” He clamped my arm with his fingernails. He bared his teeth. He picked up a bush twig and scratched two dots on his arm. He hissed.

Oh, snake! A snake hole. And so we spent the rest of the walk trying to scare each other with false snick alarms.

Step 4: Toys

We took lots of pictures and videos and showed them the results on the LCD screen.  They watched themselves on the tiny monitor like they it was the latest Disney movie. When we taught them how to take pictures, they couldn’t wait for their turns.

A length of rubber tubing was found and fashioned into a swing when I held it from both ends. It later became a spinning swing when I rotated in place.

A lot of talking. No one cared that nothing was understood from either side.

Step 5: Sheep

Dusk approached and it was time to round up the sheep and put the young in separate pen. If they sleep with the adults, they’ll drink all the milk, leaving nothing for the yogurt and cheese the family sells in Palmyra.

The lambs are quick, but the third-youngest boy is quicker. He lunged at a baby one and grabbed its tail, pulling it in. “Baby,” he said, and brought it within petting range. He’s dealt with enough tourists to know this is a crowd pleaser.

The taxi driver arrived and asked us, as we said goodbyes, if we had brought a gift for the children. That’s what tourists are expected to do. But all we had was the guava candy and some money for the parents.

Judging from their grins, I don’t think they minded this one omission.

Some photos of our afternoon with them:

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A perfect day trip from Byblos (or even Beirut) is Batroun, a town offering a millennial Phoenician sea seawall, Lebanon’s best lemonade, and a roaring nightlife.

It’s perfect for a day trip because it’s compact: three hours are plenty to digest it. The highlight is the seaside old town with an impressive 18th-century stone church above the fishing marina and a nicely restored residential quarter.

Here you can wander among stone homes with loaded citrus trees. Plaques painted in cursive point the way to the tourist attractions, like minor churches, the restaurant-lined corniche, and the remains of a 2000-year old stone wall that held back the sea.

Today this wall is just a few metres long and holds nothing. In front of it is a rock bed pitted by centuries of tides.

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Batroun is famous for two things: its lemonade and its nightlife. You’ll find lemonade stands in just about every corner, but the most popular one – according to its maker – is at Le Garage, a snack bar and pool hall just beside the St. George Orthodox Church. It truly is a rarity of flavour, perfectly blending sour and sweet.

The couple who makes it, in the photo below, keep the recipe secret but say the lemons come from the south of Lebanon.

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Batroun’s main commercial street is lined with nightclubs, known to Lebanese in distant cities. We didn’t sample them, so it’s up to the visitor to confirm or debunk their fame.

To get to Batorun:
Take any microbus on the Lebanese coastal highway. Ask for Batroun. You’ll be dropped off at the entrance to the town. Walk 10 minutes towards the sea and you’ll find everything easily.

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In the town of Koh Kong, near the border with Thailand, there’s a Buddhist spiritual retreat with a bizarre collection of sculptures by its riverfront.

In the photos below you’ll see sadistic-looking sculptures killing people with the heads of animals. You’ll see a man being sawed in half while being pecked by a garuda, a bird of Buddhist mythology.

Ask different people about them and you’ll get different answers: it was made by the Khmer Rouge to turn people away from religion. No, it was meant to scare people to tell the truth.

This article says it’s a depiction of Buddhist hell – what happens when people stray from the moral path.

It’s difficult to get a straight answer, since the Khmer Rouge abolished so much knowledge and culture during its four-year reign of terror. So we are left with our imaginations, to which these statues leave plenty of space.

Click thumbnails to see full pictures. Click on arrows below photos to advance.

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One of the hardest parts of traveling to the Papua New Guinea highlands is knowing what to do when surrounded by forty people who behold you in utter rapture.

Stroll into any market in the Mt. Hagen region and you’ll soon have a captive audience that sees a white person every two or so years.

It’s a helluva performance pressure. With so many eyes on me, I felt an obligation to perform a ditty or show them some pictures of snow.

But our guide assured me that just being there was a big enough show for them. If I smile, shake their hand, and say “Nice to see you” in broken Pidgin, it will give them something to talk about for days.

One can only theorize – wildly – what an equivalent experience would be for us. A pink unicorn strolling through the frozen foods section of a supermarket? An alien visitor expounding on the early works of Pablo Neruda?

The children on the villages are the most curious but also the most bewildered. They stare in unrestrained fascination, but if you look right at one, he’ll take a few cautious steps back, as if you were reaching for something dangerous in your pocket.

It’s hard for me to imagine a situation – beside the irresponsibly hypothetical ones above – where I would feel this completely spellbound. If there are moments when I’m amazed, I instantly suspect it of fraud. It’s a thin veneer, I think. There’s a deus ex machina about to drop his guard.

Style over substance, to us Westerners, has become the rule, not the exception. Marketing machines over-promise and under-deliver, idols come out as schmucks, mediocrity hogs the limelight and we’re left with crumbs of disappointment.

I really hope I didn’t disappoint those kids at the market.