Playing to your strengths

When you’re barreling back down towards Beirut on the Nahr al-Mot highway, staying in the right hand lane means a workout for your car’s shocks as you hit sewer cover after sewer cover. Smoothing out the ride means either driving in the left hand lane as faster motorists drive on your back bumper or zoom past you on the right, or making a ‘middle lane’: half left lane, half right lane or half right lane, half shoulder (where it exists). Once you’ve found a way to avoid the sewers, there are only the potholes and globs of dried cement that fell from leaking trucks to maneuver around. This, of course, is to say nothing of the hairpin turns. The highway suffers from both design problems and a lack of maintenance. [pullquote]All complaints about dropped calls, slow speeds and high prices aside, the country’s ICT infrastructure is still its most advanced[/pullquote]