In a file picture tourists visit the temple of Bacchus at the Roman acropolis in the historical city of Baalbek in the Bekaa valley on July 23, 2008.HASSAN AMMAR/AFP/Getty Images
Visiting this historic town in the Bekaa Valley has always been exciting.
Its Roman ruins, including a temple to Bacchus and a massive colonnade from a temple to Jupiter, are among the most extensive and intact anywhere in the world. They take your breath away.
Over-nighting at the century-old Palmyra Hotel that sits right across the road from the ruins is definitely an experience too – it's so steeped in the archaeologists of the 1930s that you'd swear Indiana Jones was about to walk through the door.
And just entering the town had been an adventure in itself, until recently.
From the mid 1980s until about 2006 there was no mistaking the fact you were driving into Hezbollah country. Enormous billboards depicting the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini who inspired the Lebanese Shia militants greeted you as you approached the town, just before real-live Hezbollah fighters greeted you themselves at a checkpoint.
There was no getting away from it: The town was the birthplace and headquarters of Hezbollah.
Baalbek felt austere, abstemious and a little dangerous in the 1990s. Alcoholic beverages were not to be found, nor were women who dressed immodestly.
Not anymore. There's no checkpoint coming into town, the only security people you see are uniformed members of the Lebanese Army, and the roadside cut outs of Ayatollah Khomeini and several Hezbollah leaders look more like a promotion for a museum than menacing warnings of what lies ahead.
As for alcohol, you can buy it from stores on a number of streets and order wine or beer with your dinner in some of the town's cafes. Women in tight-fitting jeans are not as numerous as they are in Beirut, but there's no shortage of them out in public.
Having warned a friend what she could expect to find on our arrival and how she should comport herself, it was ... a bit of a letdown.
But what's missing from Baalbek can sometimes be found elsewhere. A drive through Dahiya, a Shia community in South Beirut, quickly taught us that.
Dahiya is the area to which Hezbollah moved its political headquarters more than a decade ago. The people here all profess to be devotees of the organization's leader Hassan Nasrallah.
It's also the place that was most heavily targeted by Israel in its 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Many apartment blocs were levelled in the hope of rooting out the Hezbollah leadership; hundreds were killed.
Remarkably the community has largely been rebuilt with only a few open areas testifying to the buildings that once stood there.
Those were the scenes my friend was busy photographing on our drive-through when we finally encountered Hezbollah security.
It arrived in a beat-up old Mazda that overtook us and then slowed to a stop with its four-way flashers blinking. Thinking it was having car trouble, our driver proceeded to overtake it until the Mazda passed us once again and signalled for us to stop.
The man was dressed in a blue sweat suit; a woman in the passenger seat was in black hijab. She looked back sternly as the sweat suit interrogated our driver. Motioning toward my friend in the backseat, it was pretty clear that this member of Hezbollah security wasn't happy about the photography.
Our calm, diplomatic driver explained that we were mere tourists taking pictures of Baalbek and many other sites in the country. Why, the Hezbollah man wanted to know, would we possibly want to snap photos of seemingly ordinary apartment buildings? It was a good question.
But our driver was not to be outdone. When Hezbollah said we'd have to follow him to a security office, the driver explained we'd be late for our flight. When he wanted to have the camera, the driver discouraged him, saying it would not go down well with Hezbollah's new international image.
My friend was afraid he'd ask for the digital disk and there would go about 900 photos of four days in the country. He looked us over and concluded we couldn't possibly be a security risk. He told the driver to call him the next time he was driving people in the neighbourhood and, with that, he returned to his Mazda and the black hijab.
It was ... a bit of a relief.