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I IGNORED THE US GOVERNMENT’S WARNINGS AND FLEW TO LEBANON ANYWAY

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An American YouTuber lands in Beirut anyway, State Department warning be damned.

Luke Korns had been putting off this trip for two years. The travel vlogger promised a trio of friends he’d met backpacking across Europe — Michel, Samer, and Thomas — that he’d come see them in Lebanon, a country the U.S. State Department was actively telling Americans to reconsider visiting because of terrorism, armed conflict, crime, and civil unrest. In September 2019 he finally booked the flight, routed through Qatar into Beirut, and turned the whole thing into a video titled “I IGNORED THE US GOVERNMENT’S WARNINGS AND FLEW TO LEBANON ANYWAY.”

• Korns flew into Beirut via Qatar to keep a two-year-old promise to friends Michel, Samer, and Thomas, whom he’d originally met while backpacking Europe.
• The trip included a hike to the Jannat Chouwen waterfalls near Yahshoush in the Mount Lebanon Governorate and a boat trip to Palm Islands Nature Reserve, also known as Rabbit’s Island, off the coast of Tripoli.
• He also drove off-road to Qurnat as Sawda’ in the Jabal al-Makmel range — the highest peak in the Middle East — where the group found patches of snow still on the ground in September.

A Promise Kept Despite the Advisory

The U.S. government’s Lebanon advisory wasn’t subtle heading into 2019 — it urged Americans to reconsider travel altogether, citing the same risks that show up in warnings for far more volatile places. Korns didn’t argue with the advisory in the video so much as set it aside in favor of a personal debt he owed three guys he’d met on the road. That’s the frame for the whole trip: not a geopolitical dispatch, but a guy showing up for friends who’d been waiting on him.

Michel, Samer, and Thomas picked him up in Beirut and took over the itinerary from there, which is a familiar rhythm for anyone who’s spent time backpacking long enough to collect friends in random countries and actually follow through on visiting them.

Waterfalls, an Island, and the Roof of the Middle East

The itinerary his friends built for him ran through three landmarks that have nothing to do with the images conjured by a security advisory. First stop was the Jannat Chouwen waterfalls near the village of Yahshoush, up in the Mount Lebanon Governorate — a hiking destination, not a hotspot. From there they took a boat out to the Palm Islands Nature Reserve off Tripoli, commonly called Rabbit’s Island, for swimming and diving in open water just offshore.

The trip’s centerpiece was a drive up to Qurnat as Sawda’ in the Jabal al-Makmel range, the highest point in the entire Middle East. Even in September, the group found snow still sitting in patches near the summit — a detail Korns clearly didn’t expect to run into on a Mediterranean-adjacent trip.

The Case Against Blanket Warnings

Korns leaned into the contrast between what he’d been told to expect and what he actually found — hospitality, scenery, and a level of everyday normalcy that didn’t match the tone of the advisory. He wasn’t dismissing the reasons for the warning outright; he was making the point that a blanket advisory can flatten a whole country into a single risk score and erase everything else about it.

You can think what you want, you can believe what you hear but, in the end, you’re gonna miss out on a whole lot of the world.

That line closes out the video, and it’s the thesis of the whole trip — not a rebuttal of the State Department, just an argument for going and seeing for himself before writing a place off.

Friends Who Made the Itinerary

What separates this trip from a typical solo travel diary is that Korns wasn’t scouting Lebanon cold — Michel, Samer, and Thomas built the route, picked the waterfalls, arranged the boat, and drove him up the mountain. It’s the same dynamic that shows up in a lot of solo travel content once the “solo” part gives way to a network of people met on the road who turn into hosts years later. The payoff of a two-year-old promise, in his telling, was a country he says he badly underrated.

Korns didn’t file this one as an act of defiance so much as an overdue visit — and it’s a trip type that keeps showing up on his channel, right alongside the same instinct that sent other creators into places like North Korea and Somalia chasing the gap between a warning label and what’s actually on the ground.