Photo by: Tony Hage

New Yorker Dareen Hakim had dreamed of waking up in her grandmother's house in the mountains overlooking Beirut to a breakfast of fresh fruit jams and a manousheh -- a Lebanese thyme-flavoured flatbread. Her wish came true this week as she joined tens of thousands of Lebanese and other visitors who are flocking back to Beirut, packing nightclubs, beaches and restaurants in a country that just months ago stood on the brink of civil war. "Every time I have wanted to come, there was fighting and it was unstable," said the 30-year-old businesswoman, who is in town making plans for her wedding next year. The tourism ministry said it expects between 1.3 and 1.6 million tourists to travel to Lebanon this year after a breakthrough deal among rival political clans that has brought back a semblance of normalcy to a country once known as the Switzerland of the Middle East. The figure compares with a little over a million last year, 1.062 million in 2006, when thousands fled the country due to the July-August war between Hezbollah and Israel, and 1.140 million in 2005. The tourism ministry said there had been a 97.5 percent jump in tourist arrivals in June alone, to 136,853 from 69,303 in June 2007.