Travel Log 3 - Libya

16/01/08
Our only option was to take a taxi to the border and take the long, dramatic walk to the Libyan side. The first of seven passport checks was made by a Tunisian official with a faintly ridiculous uniform. Getting out of Tunisia was easy enough though it was getting into Libya that was going to be hard. The second to last check was made by the non-uniformed (therefore assumedly, more senior) Libyan with the best coiffured moustache. We were left on tenterhooks for nearly an hour in no man's land as he drove off with our passports, assumedly because our required tour guide had our visas and seemed not to have turned up. We spent our time watching the expensive cars slip through and ancient Peugeot pick ups with filigreed rear ends and an ancient man who looked as if he had walked straight from the desert with only the stick in his hand and the blanket around his shoulders, all gesticulate wildly with the officials. Our guide, Mohammed, arrived and promptly asked us 'where is your car?'…oh dear. It was another half an hour and a final passport check by the 'Police Tourist' before we set off in Mohammed's neighbor's flash Mitsubishi.

Mohammed was a delicate looking man with an ill-fitting suit and his neighbor, was a bit of a player with a leather jacket and hood permanently raised. We stopped for lunch in an empty restaurant for apparently traditional Libyan food of spicy couscous and bean tomatoey soup followed by minced spiced meats and rice with fizzy drinks a pattern that was to be repeated. The was a strange awkward dynamic at the table in the echoey restaurant as the neighbor spoke no English and Mohammed very little.

Libya seemed to be a building site of a country. The green of the Libyan flag was visible everywhere. Nearly all woodwork is painted in it. The living standard here seemed generally high, on an economy fuelled by oil visible widely throughout the country.

The amount of money which must be spent on keeping the innumerate guards, soldiers and police in work and the huge posters must be huge. Also Libya's rejection of liberalising tourism which could bring a lot of money in a county with several World Heritage Sites and vast desert wilderness is intriguing. The hassle we had to go though and hit to our budget was huge and left us needing to cross the country almost as quickly as possible. It makes you realize how much oil Libya has.

The surge in construction all over Libya is due to the recent lifting of the trade embargos and the influx of foreign investment but my god, are the buildings ugly and it is hard to imagine any of them lasting any length of time.

On the way to Tripoli we stopped at the Roman city of Sabratha where we walked down its original streets past bath houses with mosaiced floors. Mohammed insisted on clambering over everything, throwing bits of what I handed him the intention of finding out if they were Roman pottery into the bushes, scooting about on the mosaiced floors and sitting on the Roman toilets (the mime of him defecating being the closest we have experienced to real communication with Mohammed) . Its second century amphitheatre, established by the Phoenicians then re-settled by the Greeks then Romans, was a three story construction dubiously reconstructed by the Italians when they were the ones running the show.

It seemed ironic that the reconstruction was discernable by its worse craftsmanship. It did not entirely make sense that the reason given for us requiring a guide with us at all times while traveling through Libya was that Western tourist had been found to be stealing artifacts yet no one seemed in the least bit interested in the World Heritage Sites maintenance.

The road to Tripoli, which loomed from the arid ground like a sun bleached skeleton, was regularly punctuated with Gaddafi’s image, either cheery with arms outstretched like an advert for a hotel or sternly looking skyward, wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses like a Top Gun pilot. In both cases it was all rather disarmed by the government issue clip art backdrops.

From the ground level Tripoli could be Whitechapel. It had a similar level of uncleanliness and similarly dressed people selling similar things but with the addition of white gloved traffic police and far more bloodthirsty driving.

We met Mohammed’s boss, Mahmood in our flash hotel. It had the same air of grandeur about it as the Roman City with none of the class. The crumbling teeth in Mahmood’s fixed grin did not detract from his snake eyes.. We spent quite some time faffing around with him and his boss Sami, trying to get what we paid for (all accommodation food and travel) as they attempted to give us less with more an more preposterous excuses.

There was a strong sense of the ‘gilded cage’ very reminiscent of that described in Hergé’s Land of Black Gold in which an almost identical situation is described, Tripoli is our San Theodore and Gaddafi our Colonel Sponsz. We are similarly unable to leave the hotel or eat what we want or drink what we want or talk to who we want. We are getting the full socialist dictatorship experience as described in a text written over half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War.


17/01/08
We visited a city with the same empty sense as the one the humans return to in Planet of the Apes, named Leptis Magna, a 7th century city and the crown of Rome's African empire, under the leadership of Septimus Severus. Its central point a senate / market and a walled area as big as a football pitch and strewn with headless and castrated statues and broken columns. The whole place was almost empty. It is perhaps a trite point to make but a decadent society consumed by its own greed did ring certain pertinent bells.

We spent the night in the eerie town of Sirt which was under siege from a motorcade of excitable wedding revelers hooting their horns and setting off fireworks we at first assumed to be firearms. People were evidently having fun in this country and we were not getting any of it. Our meal times with Mohammed and his neighbor were becoming filled with more and more awkward silences partly due to the language barrier and partly due to failed attempts to ask probing questions about the country’s regime and possible dissent. The closest we heard to acknowledgment of dissent was rather convoluted. We noticed the neighbor's car has displaying a Brazilian football air freshener from its rear view mirror and yes, it turned out that the neighbor enjoyed watching football on the TV. But, in Gaddafi’s Green Book- The Answer to the Problem of Democracy (his answer to Mao’s little red book, and our answer to long car journeys) it states that, ‘sporting clubs… are rapacious social instruments, not unlike the dictatorial political instruments which monopolize power’, to which Mohammed conceded that these days Libya is more modern than it once was.

18/01/08
The days became a saga –the food was repetitive and plain and eaten in specially designated, empty tourist restaurants. We do not speak to anyone other the Mohammed who’s English is worse than our French and we are having to endure the driver’s same six CDs, although one of them is a by the Berber musicians, N’Tayaden, which is a ray of light. We are forever being stopped at checkpoints where Mohammed handed over one of his stack of copies of our details in Arabic. What on earth was being done with all this information? Was it going into some vast filing cabinet in one of the mysterious buildings we have passed?

The drive from Sirt to Bengazi was over by early afternoon. The landscape had been quite monotonous; flat arid land and a covering of rubbish that lay for fifteen metres either side of the road. After a great deal of cajoling Mohammed let us leave the hotel we were stationed in by ourselves. We walked down what was to all intents and purposes an Eastern Block sea front replete with mandatory crumbling concrete, but it lacked the grand communal areas. We made our way to the naval base in order to take pictures of the boats to spite the Orwellian ‘administration’.

On the drive we had tried to find out more information about The Great Man Made River. A giant pipe running from the interior of the country to provide water to vast dry arid reasons. Quite how big the environmental impact of this quick fix solution will be is unclear but if it's to be believed, Gadaffi's son has a big job to make this country green.


19/01/08
We visited Cyrene on the way to the border and as uncultured as it sounds, unlabelled Roman remains described by a man clearly making it up as he went and saying it in a made-up language, started to loose some of its original charm. Apollo’s fountain was striking as it trickled out of the mountain into a jet black, man made pool and through the city in irrigation channels. Also the vista out across the miles of flat land out to the sea was spectacular. Mohammed told us ‘UNESCO will make him nice’ some time in the future.

The drive did provide one surprising aspect a sudden change to a Mediterranean climate with all around being green and dramatic and cavernous gorges which provide a welcome break from the flat arid landscape of the past few days.

During the evening in the hotel with a red interiors the Egyptian proprietor overheard our conversation and said to us privately, ‘you will like Egypt, there are plenty of women and you can have beer. It is not Guantanamo’.


20/01/08
We were driven to the border and eventually allowed to leave Libya. On the Egyptian side we very easily bought visas and passed through into a whole new country and mindset. As we walked through no man’s land the people behind the fence were very keen to practice their English on us and smiles on peoples face was quite different to the reserved nature of the Libyans, it was good to have some interaction. We took the relatively plush bus four hours to Marsa Mutrah and over-nighted in a pound a night hostel run by lonely looking man and his knot-backed father. It was an all time low on the cleanliness front but it had a certain Parisian struggling artist's charm to it. Egypt immediately seemed to have a greater deal of poverty than Libya but a good infrastructure, and certainly a more welcoming people.