Beirut

9:00 AM — Departure from Beirut Your driver picks you up from your Beirut hotel and heads east on the Damascus highway — climbing through the Lebanese mountains as the Bekaa Valley opens dramatically below on the other side. Baalbek is 90 minutes away and the anticipation builds the whole drive.

Stone of the Pregnant Woman — warm up act that stops people cold Before the temples, stop at the ancient Roman quarry where the Stone of the Pregnant Woman — a single limestone block 21 metres long and weighing an estimated 1,000 tonnes — still lies exactly where it was cut 2,000 years ago. It was never moved. It was never finished. It has just been sitting here ever since. Standing next to it is one of those moments where the scale of Roman engineering becomes genuinely hard to process. And this is just the quarry. The good stuff is five minutes away.