Day three on the Lebanon Mountain Trail

Day one you are excited. Day two you are sore and still excited. Day three is where the trail actually starts, because day three is the first day you walk without an opinion about it.

The Lebanon Mountain Trail runs four hundred and seventy kilometres from Andaqet in the north to Marjaayoun in the south, through seventy-something villages, and the thing nobody tells you is how much of it is other people's back gardens. You walk out of a cedar reserve and into somebody's terrace and they wave at you like a bus going past.

The cedars

I had seen the cedars on the flag my entire life before I saw one standing up. They are not tall the way I expected. They are wide — they go sideways, in layers, like something that decided verticality was a phase.

The grove above Hadath El Jebbeh has trees in it that were alive before most of the countries I have been to. I sat under one and ate an apple and felt approximately as significant as the apple.

My grandmother used to say the cedars remember. I thought it was a nice thing to say. Standing in there I thought, no, she meant it literally, and she may have had a point.

What day three costs

• About twenty-two kilometres, most of it exposed after eleven in the morning
• Two litres of water minimum, three if you are stubborn about not filtering
• Every conversational topic you and your walking partner had left

You stay in guesthouses, in villages, with families who cook for you. This is the actual reason to walk the LMT and not some other long trail. You do not camp your way through Lebanon in a sealed bubble of gear. You get handed dinner by someone's mother and asked, with real curiosity, what you think you are doing.

I did not have a good answer. She fed me anyway.