Libya Retrospective (December 2009)

Libya might not immediately spring to mind as a prime tourist destination, but it’s been on my mental radar for over a decade. In 1998, while travelling with Joanne through the Middle East and North Africa, we tried to get Libyan visas in Morocco and Tunisia and were turned down (“Why don’t you apply in your own country?”). We did get as far as reading the Libya section in the Lonely Planet North Africa guide, though, and it sounded wonderful: Roman ruins and spectacular deserts. In 2004, we talked about doing a Libya trip over Christmas, but I ended up resigning from my school in Cairo, and instead Joanne and I rendezvoused in Indonesia to go diving on Pulau Weh; this was unfortunate timing as we arrived just in time to be caught up, but not swept away, in the great Boxing Day tsunami that devastated the Indian Ocean.

Fast forwarding five years, Joanne and I both still wanted to see Libya, so when we decided to meet up in Italy at the end of my cycling blitz through the Balkans in December, 2009, we started arranging a Libya trip as part of our travels. Unfortunately, since our first attempt in 1998, all sorts of new rules have been introduced to force tourists to take a guided tour and to have a tour guide with them at all times, while the black market in foreign currency which once made Libya relatively cheap has disappeared with the end of economic sanctions. All this ended up making our trip pretty exorbitantly expensive, at least by my cheapskate standards, but we figured that the opportunity cost of not going now and trying to arrange to go another time would be even higher. We bought Air Malta tickets to take us Rome-Tripoli-Malta-Sicily, and found a travel agency that came well-recommended, then gritted our teeth and paid for the tour.

The process of getting a visa proved to be a ridiculous soap opera for me. Both of us had to get a stamp put in our passports translating the information page into Arabic. This in itself is ridiculous, as most Arabic-speaking countries, or the Chinese or Iranians or Armenians or Ethiopians for that matter, seem to be able to figure out Roman script just fine. I’ve heard that the reason is that Libyans have (or had in the past, perhaps) passports written entirely in Arabic, and that the EU made them translate the information pages into Roman script, and that Colonel Gaddafi wanted to have a tit-for-tat retaliation. Whatever the reason, the Libyans won’t help you out by telling you where such a translation stamp can be found, and to complicate matters, the stamp is supposed to be authorized/notarized/something-ized by your country’s foreign affairs ministry, or at least by your embassy. Some internet searching turned up a place in Ottawa for Joanne to get it done, but my attempts throughout the Balkans were less successful; many translation services didn’t have a rubber stamp to stamp things into the passport, and the Libyans wouldn’t accept a translation on a separate slip of paper. I struck out in Sofia and Tirana, and was getting really frustrated when Joanne found a place in Rome that would do the job. It was actually a bit hit or miss once we got to Rome, but it all worked out; the translation bureau was used to doing this sort of thing, had a rubber stamp and did the translation of my name and date of birth a couple of days before our flight.

The flight down to Tripoli on December 18^th was a far cry from the days during the post-Lockerbie air embargo on Libya, when most travel to Libya involved flying to Tunis and then catching buses and taxis for the long overland drive to Tripoli. We had a long delay in Malta, spent listening to the increasingly improbable tall tales of an old British man, and it was after dark when we got through immigration and wandered out to find our tour guide, whom I will call Hisham to avoid getting him in trouble with his government. At least paying the big bucks got us a guide with perfect English; Hisham had grown up until age 14 in England, where his father was studying and working. By the time we made it out to the car, we’d learned that his family was Berber (the indigenous non-Arab population of much of North Africa) and that he had little patience for the pontifications of “the Colonel”, the man who for 40 years has ruled Libya with an iron fist. He complained of the repression of the Berbers by the Arabs, a complaint common to Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. We drove through the sprawling concrete suburbs of Tripoli in the dark, looking for a place to eat, and ended up in an open-air café close to the harbour, with sea breezes ruffling the palm trees and the old city with its monumental gate lit up by floodlights.

We stayed not in a hotel but rather a small apartment building owned by our tour company above their offices, where James, an immigrant from Ghana, worked hard to keep the rooms immaculate and our breakfast plates full. Across the street was a police building, and we were warned not to take any pictures in this direction, as the secret police would be watching and would not be amused. On the morning of the 19^th, Hisham arrived and we set off to see the sights of Tripoli. It’s a city with an ancient past; its name harks back to the Tripolis, or Three Cities, that occupied this stretch of coast in classical times: Sabratha, Leptis Magna and Oea (the ancient name for modern-day Tripoli). It was a major port in the Muslim period, ruled over by a Turkish governor nominally subservient to Istanbul, but with a fair amount of local autonomy. The old city has a number of old mosques and bazaar shops from the Ottoman period, while in the surrounding neighbourhoods Italian colonial architecture crops up here and there. Most of the cityscape, however, is dominated by generic concrete boxes in various states of disrepair. Tripoli certainly doesn’t exude an air of great prosperity, despite the large oil revenues that flow into the country. Hisham said that most Libyans believe that Gaddafi has become personally immensely wealthy along with his relatives and associates, while the country as a whole has languished economically.

Our first stop was at the National Museum, a storehouse of the historic and artistic wonders of the country. The two great attractions of Libya for tourists are the Sahara (which, short of time and money, we were going to have to skip this time around) and the great classical ruins along the coast. The best sculptures, mosaics, coins and other artefacts from the various ruins are all in the Tripoli museum, and we had a wonderful morning taking pictures of mosaics and marble torsos. The museum was almost deserted, except for a gaggle of art students from Tripoli university who were gathered in a room full of nude sculptures, practicing their life drawing. I guess in a Muslim society, you’d be unlikely to have nude models posing for your art class, so this seemed a clever compromise. There were a few interesting pieces of cave art, as well as the jeep that a young Gaddafi drove during the military coup that installed him in power in 1969. At the entrance to the museum there is an amusing poster showing Gaddafi and his new best friend Silvio Berlusconi ogling the marble statue of a nubile nude female: very appropriate on both counts!!

Hisham, Joanne and I then wandered around the old town of Tripoli, visiting a few mosques and old buildings, and letting Joanne magpie around the silversmiths’ shops. One of the few real vestiges of Roman Oea is the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, standing in a square in the old town. It was carved to mark the visit of the Roman Emperor to the city, and was subsequently buried in drifting sand, preserving its carving quite well. The arch now sits a couple of metres below the present street level. One of the nicest restaurants in Tripoli faces the Arch, and Joanne decided that we should have dinner there one night. It became a running joke between Joanne and Hisham as to whether our tour budget covered a meal in that café of stew cooked in a stone amphora which had to be smashed open to serve the food. Every day Joanne would ask whether tonight was the night, and every night Hisham would claim it was too expensive.

That afternoon Joanne took a nap, Hisham went off to work out at his gym, and I walked around the streets, trying to get a feel for the vibe of modern Libya. There was heavy traffic on most streets, although not of flashy new luxury cars. Most of the vehicles seemed to be second-hand cars a decade or more old, many still sporting the country stickers of where they had been imported from: the Netherlands, Germany and, most commonly, Switzerland. The irony is that Switzerland and Libya have been locked in a ridiculous diplomatic row for the past couple of years that started when Geneva police arrested (and subsequently released) one of Muammar’s sons and his wife for mistreating their Filipina maid while visiting Switzerland. The Libyan government has reacted with its usual impetuous nature and banned oil exports to Switzerland. It has also arrested two Swiss businessmen who were in Libya when the row erupted and kept them in prison for over a year. The Colonel has been handed extra ammunition in his campaign by the silly Swiss vote to ban the construction of minarets, allowing him to claim that Switzerland is the epicentre of an anti-Islamic crusade against Libya and calling for a jihad against the Swiss. Somehow the rest of the EU was drawn into the dispute, and for a couple of months after our visit, EU nationals were unable to get visas to Libya.

This sort of diplomatic flap is nothing new for Libya, nor unique to Switzerland. While we were planning our trip, Canada and Libya had a spat over the Colonel’s decision to visit Newfoundland on his way back from the UN General Assembly, and the Newfoundland Lieutenant-Governor’s refusal to turn over her official residence for Gaddafi to stay in; a subsequent request to allow the Colonel to erect his tent in the LG’s garden was also a non-starter. Subsequently the Libyan government, or at least part of it, declared that no Canadian tourists could come to Libya, a declaration that was denied by the Libyan embassy in Ottawa, but which was confirmed by travel agents who reported that Canadian tour groups were being forced to cancel their trips to Libya. Luckily we both have EU passports in addition to our Canadian ones, and the ban on EU visitors hadn’t yet come about, so we got in without a hitch.

The streets of Tripoli are full of pictures of the Great Man himself. There are two forms: either towering posters in which he always seems to be smiling (in an “I’ve got all the money and you don’t!” sort of way) and clasping his hands together or holding his Little Green Book, or small photos on display in businesses and for sale in shops which specialize in his image. The other popular subject for posters is the African Union, a brainchild of Gaddafi’s that was implemented on September 9, 1999 (9-9-99, as the posters point out) to increase African unity. Not many concrete steps taken so far, but a great forum for Gaddafi to strut his stuff on a friendly stage. I walked by the headquarters of the International Popular Committee for Gaddafi Human Rights Prize (really; I’m not making this stuff up!) and was amused to see that it was closed and seemed not to be in use. Maybe it’s not really so popular?

The next day was spent exploring our first big Roman ruin: Sabratha. We drove west for an hour, through heavy Tunis-bound traffic and scrubby, dusty countryside, to reach a sprawling site beside the Mediterranean. Both Joanne and I really liked the place, almost completely deserted and with lots of layered sandstone contrasting photogenically with the blue skies. Sabratha was first a Phoenician port, and one of the most striking structures is the Tomb of Bes, a rather over-reconstructed Phoenician tower tomb dating back to the 4^th century BC, looming skywards like a missile, albeit one with cute carved lions at its base. The rest of the site dates from Roman times: a couple of forums, merchants’ districts, the ancient port which once exported wild animals, slaves, ivory and olive oil, the theatre district and the vast, beautiful theatre. The houses still had mosaic floors in place, while the baths and public latrines were easily discernible. A few columns and headless marble torsos balanced in place beside the sea, and the stones of the olive merchants’ warehouses were still stained with spilled oil. The theatre was magnificent, with its three-story backdrop of Corinthian columns looming high behind the stage, and the seats sweeping back above the passageways. I’ve seen a lot of Roman and Greek theatres, and the only other one I can remember that is this large and this intact is the striking black basalt theatre of Bosra, Syria.

We snapped lots of photos, followed the polished presentation of our endearing local archaeological guide Mufta (“My name means ‘key’ in Arabic; I am the key to unlock the secrets of Sabratha!”) and sat gazing out over the Mediterranean, the transportation highway of the classical world. Just beside the ruins, a series of wooden fishing vessels were pulled up on the beach. Mufta told us that these were some of the boats used to smuggle illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa into the EU via Europe’s soft underbelly: Malta and Sicily. Colonel Gaddafi encourages the trade as a way of annoying the EU. Libya itself is full of migrant workers from south of the Sahara; most menial labour is done by men from Niger, Mali, Ghana and Burkina Faso, willing to work for $10 or $20 a day, wages for which no Libyan would bother getting out of bed.

We were just on our way out of the site, back to the car, when we realized that we had skipped the museum. We argued with Hisham about whether it was covered in the tour price (for what we were paying, it certainly should have been) and then trooped back into the museum for 15 minutes before it shut for lunch. We were both glad that we did, as the museum was stuffed full of fantastic statues and some exquisitely detailed mosaics, my favourite form of Roman art. I don’t know whether I’ve ever seen such finely detailed mosaics as I saw in Libya on this trip; they seemed more paintings than arrangements of coloured tiles. Subjects ranged from abstract geometric designs to life-like depictions of animals, birds and fish to mythological scenes. My favourite in Sabratha was a huge floor from, I think, a Byzantine church featuring an immense and detailed peacock.

We returned to Tripoli through, of all things, a rainshower. My status as a rain god, able to bring precipitation to the driest places on earth (the Sahara, the Atacama, Central Australia, the Taklamakan) was reinforced. It was a break in the usual weather pattern that we experienced, in which sunny, pleasant mornings gave way to very strong afternoon winds blowing up clouds of dust and sand.

Early the next morning we set off on a long road trip. Hisham drove while Joanne busied herself with tunes; there was fundamental disagreement over what was great music, with Hisham a huge fan of dance music and techno and Joanne and I more dinosauresque in our tastes. Our route led us southwest, through increasingly dry countryside, towards the ancient caravan town of Ghadames, down near the point where Tunisia, Libya and Algeria meet at a point. We passed through a few dusty, featureless towns before turning off to see a couple of ancient Berber granaries, fortified enclosures of dozens of rooms, often several stories above ground level and accessible only by precarious pseudo-ladders of dried and cracking tree branches driven into the adobe walls. They looked like Escher engravings, their jumble of rooms and storeys seemingly optical illusions. Historically each room would have held the grain of a different family; the various families of a district would have united to build a fortified joint storehouse to guard against the ever-present threat of bandit attacks or raids by desert Arab Bedu.

The first granary was down in the dusty, featureless plain, but the second, Qasr Nalut, was up on an escarpment, nestled amidst the crumbling arches of an abandoned Berber village (the inhabitants had been built a new village of soulless concrete nearby in the 1970s). The views down to the plain, the wonderful jumble of arches and irregular walls and the general air of deserted desolation was a welcome relief after hours of dust and decrepit trucks. We stopped for lunch in a nearby town, and then our highway meandered up and down across a sandstone plateau before entering a long wadi that led eventually to Ghadmes, 600 km southwest of Tripoli. We arrived in the late afternoon, and I spent the remaining hour of daylight walking through the walled date plantations to the old town and having a quick sneak preview before our official tour the next day.

The next day was spent prowling around the old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site now completely uninhabited. Once again, as at Nalut, the government had built the inhabitants of the traditional adobe medina a new town of concrete apartment buildings. The new town lacked the atmosphere and beauty of the old one, but had running water, electricity, indoor plumbing and lots of parking, so the inhabitants quite gladly moved house. The old town was left to crumble for a decade or more before foreign visitors and UNESCO pushed the government into preserving the town before it crumbled into dust. The result is fairly amazing, a museum town quite unique in feel.

The town is out in the unremitting sunshine and heat of the desert sun; even in December, the temperatures got pretty warm by mid-day. In order to keep houses and streets cool, the town was built as a maze of covered tunnel-like streets with courtyards and houses opening off these corridors. The Stygian darkness is pierced by dim skylights set into the roofs every once in a while, giving rise to a striking banded pattern of light and dark as the passageways curve gently away into infinity. With no outdoor clues to help, I was soon hopelessly disoriented, although Joanne did a much better job of keeping her bearings. We were both glad to have Abdul Rahman, our local guide, to show us the way around. Some of the houses are being renovated; their owners still have the keys, and see the potential for tourism to generate some revenue. Small groups of labourers from Niger trundled up and down the corridors with wheelbarrows, repairing walls, whitewashing and then painting colourful geometric designs on them. Benches were built into the walls for neighbours to sit and chat, whiling away the long, hot afternoons. They were unoccupied now; the vast caravan trade that made Ghadames one of the most famous towns of the Saharan trade network, a commercial rival to Timbuktu, is gone now, as is the street life, the markets, the cries of merchants, the bustle of camels and horses. There is great aesthetic beauty to old Ghadames, but it is a melancholy beauty that cries of loss and bygone greatness.

For me the highlights were the mosques, their whitewashed minarets a glaring contrast to the blue skies, their courtyards a welcome escape from the gloomy labyrinth of the covered streets. After taking hundreds of photos, we finally made our way past the deep spring which made life possible in Ghadmes and to a restored old house for a lunch of roast camel. The house, decked out in traditional finery, was cool and spacious, and we reclined on cushions on beautiful rugs sipping tea and admiring the painted decorative flourishes on the walls. We climbed up to the roof and looked out over the sea of other rooftops, punctured here and there by palm trees or minarets. From above, it was clear how much of the town was in ruins; some of this damage dates back to an air raid in the Second World War, while some comes from the exodus of Ghadames residents to the bright lights of Tripoli, leaving their old family houses to decay. Looking out over the town, for the first time since arriving in Libya I felt as though I was in Africa, rather than in the Mediterranean world. I could feel the pull of the Sahara, and regretted that we weren’t headed south into Niger and Chad, following in the footsteps of many generations of camel caravans before us.

We ended the day by driving to an old Turkish fort a few kilometres out in the desert. Ras al Ghoul (I had never realized that the English word ghoul comes from Arabic) wasn’t much to look at, but nearby were some rather scenic dunes. We climbed up dutifully, hoping for a breathtaking sunset, but the sun merely faded into a gray haze on the horizon, leaving Joanne and I to blow bubbles over the Sahara sands (trying in vain to recreate pictures we had taken eleven years earlier in Tunisia, not far from Ghadames). I wished we had enough time and money to head out into the deep desert, but it was not to be.

The drive back to Tripoli was uneventful, with a stop at one last Berber granary and then at a small Berber village situated spectacularly on the very edge of a vertiginous escarpment. We took photos of ourselves leaping upwards near the edge, then got back into the car for the rest of the long drive back to Tripoli and our familiar guesthouse and the ever-smiling Charles.

The next leg of the trip involved a flight to Benghazi, the second city of Libya, 700 km by air, or over 1000 km by road, to the east, on the other side of the Gulf of Sirte. We bid a temporary farewell to Hisham at the airport, as in Benghazi we would have a new minder for the next three days. Saad was a bit older and quieter than Hisham, but spoke excellent English, acquired while studying aeronautics in the UK. We sped away from the airport, headed northeast towards the Greek ruins of Cyrenaica, racing the clock to fit in all the sights before they closed.

First up was Tocra, a small and largely unexcavated city beside the sea. Although there was little in the way of actual sites, Adbul Marwa, an enthusiastic local guide, helped bring the jumbled stones to life. The real highlights, however, were an Italian fort (built out of the stones from the Roman city in 1912) and the tortoises that overran the site, butting shells with each other in a funny mating display. There were some fine mosaics in the Byzantine church and attached bishop’s palace, while the walls of the gymnasium were still covered with two-thousand-year-old schoolboy graffiti.

We sped along the coastal road to Tolmeita, ancient Ptolemais, another city still largely buried beneath the sands of time. We scarfed down a quick lunch beneath the trees of the museum before admiring the usual marble sculptures and mosaics and taking a quick run through the ruins. Only a few blocks of what was once the main city of Cyrenaica have been dug out, but they attest to the wealth of the city, and to the engineering prowess of its inhabitants. Vast subterranean cisterns stored 6000 cubic metres of water beneath the forum. We listened as Hakim, our guide for Tolmeita, told us how the city had suffered in the great Jewish Revolt that convulsed Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica in AD 115, and then the massive AD 365 earthquake, before slowly sinking into oblivion after the Arab conquest and the establishment of new cities. It was amazing to think of how many decades of excavation still remain in Tolmeita and Tocra, and how many artistic treasures and historical surprises are still buried beneath the farmers’ fields there.

Our last stop of our whistle-stop tour was probably the most interesting. We raced along back roads away from the coast, through limestone hills that provided a lush contrast to dusty Tripolitania; no wonder the Italians were such eager colonizers of Cyrenaica in the early twentieth century. Just before closing time, we drove into Qasr Libya, where construction in the 1950s had unearthed an unexpected find, a floor decorated with fifty mosaic panels, apparently from a Byzantine church. The quality of art was a bit cruder than in the breathtakingly detailed Roman mosaics we had seen elsewhere, but they were fascinating nonetheless. There were personifications of rivers like the Tigris and the Euphrates, and also of the little town of Olbia-Theodoria, where Qasr Libya now stood. There were plenty of animals and fish, including an unexpected scene of a deer eating a snake. The highlight, however, is the only known contemporary portrayal of one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Pharos of Alexandria, the monumental lighthouse at the entrance to the harbour. It is shown as a massive square tower, accessed by a drawbridge, topped with a large statue of the sun god Helios; behind it is another statue atop a smaller structure.

We drove at a more leisurely pace, through the gathering dark, through the green countryside towards Al Bayt, the modern town where we were staying. By a happy coincidence, a conference of Libyan doctors was ending that evening at our hotel, and we were able to gorge ourselves at their final-night buffet.

We awoke the next morning, Christmas Day, to a rise of exceptional beauty that set the scene for a wonderful day. The day was devoted to the main tourist attraction of eastern Libya, the Greek city of Cyrene. On the way out of al-Bayt, we stopped in to see a ruined temple of Asklepios, the Greek god of healing. Not much to look at, but a nice deserted, wind-swept site on the pretty plateau. We got to Cyrene early and found, for the first time all trip, a number of other Western tourists, mostly Italians driving their own four-wheel-drives on their way to the Sahara. Our guide for the site, Abdul Gaafar, was the former archaeological boss of Cyrene, and was very knowledgeable and keen to share his stories of the city’s glorious past.

Cyrene, like the other cities around Benghazi, lay on the eastern side of the fundamental fault line dividing the Mediterranean in pre-Roman times. To the west lay predominantly non-Greek city-states, mostly Phoenician; the three cities around Tripoli were all founded by Phoenicians. To the east lay the Greek-speaking world, of which Cyrene formed a part. Even after the Romans turned the Med into their own private lake, that boundary was important; to the east of it, in places like Cyrenaica, Greek remained the language of business, everyday life and even government, while to the west Latin prevailed. That boundary would later become the boundary between the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire and the Roman Catholic states of the west. This meant that the cities we saw in Cyrenaica had long Greek histories before the Romans ever showed up. This meant lots of Greek inscriptions to be seen, and often two quite separate city centres: a Greek agora and a subsequent Roman forum; a Greek theatre sculpted into a hillside and a later Roman one built free-standing and impressive; small-scale Greek baths and huge Roman ones; Greek temples and then huge, bombastic Roman ones.

Cyrene has been extensively excavated, and so there were a lot of details to catch our eye: graffiti and inscriptions in the old Greek gymnasium, mosaic floors, wonderful statues. The gymnasium has had all the columns around its edge re-erected, giving a vivid feeling of what the place must have felt like in its heyday. The inlaid marble floors in an opulent villa built by one of the Emperor Hadrian’s freed slaves spoke of the luxury of the Roman period. We walked down from the upper city to the old holy sites of the lower Greek town, past Greek baths excavated into the rock of a cliff, to the old temple of Apollo. I loved the feel of the town, and even the hordes of Libyan tourists who showed up as lunchtime approached couldn’t take away the blue skies, the golden stones and the air of history. Some of the Corinthian capitals, in place of the usual acanthus leaves, had instead the leaves of the medicinal plant Silphium. This plant, endemic to Cyrenaica, was one of Cyrene’s major exports but was harvested to extinction in Roman times.

We had lunch with crowds of Italian tourists, and then drove a few kilometres to the vast Temple of Zeus; it is one of the few temples that the Romans rebuilt much smaller than the grand Greek original. The city was badly damaged during the Kitos War, the second of three large-scale Jewish revolts against Roman rule; in AD 115 Jewish diaspora communities in Cyrenaica, Egypt, Cyprus and the Levant rose up and killed their Roman garrisons and the Greek and Roman civilian populations, inciting bloody reprisals by the Emperor Trajan. According to contemporary accounts, almost 220,000 people died in Cyrenaica alone, and the land was left depopulated, requiring colonists to repopulate it. The original Greek temple was one of the largest Doric temples in the Mediterranean, an Archaic structure of massive columns that owed much to Egyptian temple architecture. After the temple was torn down by the rebels, the Romans rebuilt it on a much smaller scale inside the original enclosure; maybe this was because the town was no longer such a huge population centre. The sandstone of the temple was so full of fossil seashells that it seemed to be more shell than sand.

From the Temple of Zeus, we drove through a pretty, deserted countryside, atop the limestone plateau with its maquis scrub; from the surroundings and the azure waters far below, we could have been in Sicily, or Montenegro, or southern France, or southern Turkey. No wonder the Greeks and Romans, and later Mussolini’s Italians, so loved the area: it reminded them of home. Abdul Gaafar and Saad pointed out the ruins of villages, the small mounds of prehistoric ruins, the berries and flowers and herbs. It was a wonderful afternoon to be alive and to be driving down to the Mediterranean out of the Green Mountains. We ended up on the coast at Apollonia, once the port for Cyrene. Again, not much was excavated, and most of that was Byzantine (Joanne and I had little patience for most Byzantine ruins, with their ponderous churches, sloppy workmanship and re-used stonework.) On the other hand, the theatre is wonderful, facing out to sea (how did audiences keep their eyes on the stage with such a magnificent natural backdrop), and even the Byzantine churches had lovely columns carved from striped marble that caught fire in the late afternoon light. The sunset over the Green Mountains and the ruins of Apollonia was a perfect way to end Christmas.

On our way to the airport on Boxing Day, we stopped by one last historic site, a remote and obscure piece of prehistoric Berber art, a series of surprisingly modernist figures carved into rock at a tiny village called Slonta. The carvings were completely unlike the classical formalism we had been seeing for days. Here strangely misshapen faces, carved to follow the natural contours of the rock, peered out of odd corners of the stone, beneath bulging elephants or atop a sinuous snake. It was hard to make out figures at first, but as our eyes adjusted to the style, we could make out human figures dancing and sitting, and clusters of faces staring out urgently like Gothic gargoyles. I wished we could have stayed longer to look at the carvings and try to decipher them, but time was ticking on inexorably, and we were several hours from Benghazi airport. We hurtled across the lush green fields of the Green Mountains, through an area much favoured by Italian settlers in the early 20^th century, pausing for a moment to savour the Fascist colonial architecture, now abandoned and derelict, in a farming town. As we approached Bengazi, we passed through an area where overgrazing and over-cultivation had turned the land into a dust bowl. We then dropped down to the coastal plain, away from the greenery, and made it to our flight with time to spare.

After a lazy afternoon and evening in Tripoli, spent getting an awful haircut and eating excellent Lebanese food and Turkish pastry, we were ready for our last full day in Libya. We had saved the best for last: Leptis Magna. We already knew that it ranked up there with Ephesus, Pompeii, Palmyra, Petra and Baalbek as one of the greatest classical ruins in the Mediterranean world. We just hoped it would live up to the hype. We needn’t have worried. Leptis Magna was, in fact, magnificent. The amphitheatre and the Circus Maximus, outside town beside the Mediterranean, were immense and very impressive. The Circus actually had seats facing outwards to the sea so that mock naval battles could be staged for the amusement of the crowds. We made our way into the heart of the old town, via the huge port complex beside the silted up harbour.

The city of Leptis Magna was always an important port for the Romans. Its hinterland produced grain and olives for the Roman market, but it was also an important export point for slaves, wild animals for the Roman Coliseum and ivory. Its most important export, though, was an Emperor. Septimius Severus, who rescued the Empire from civil war in AD 193, was born in Leptis, and lavished funds on it to tart up his hometown, particularly before he came on an official visit. As a result, everything in Leptis is on an epic scale. It’s also well-preserved, since it was deeply buried in sand over the centuries, preserving walls and columns a couple of stories deep. For tourists today this is perfect; instead of foot-high wall foundations, you’re surrounded by a storey or more of Roman masonry and marble, allowing you to see what the city would really have looked like. It’s a bit like Pompeii or Herculaneum, except on a much bigger scale.

We started with the elaborate Arch of Septimius Severus, commemorating the big guy’s trip home. It’s covered by wonderful carving, although the originals are now in the Tripoli museum. In places, you can see where the carvings were left unfinished, perhaps because of the death of the Emperor in 211. We wandered through to the monumental bath complex, with brick walls still 2 storeys high. It’s one of the largest Roman baths I’ve seen, and it was only one of several equally impressive baths known to have existed. The Severan Forum was huge, full of impressive carved Medusa heads and arched arcades; it must have been even more impressive, even more a statement of the wealth and power of the Empire, back in its heyday. Behind one of the enclosing walls, the judicial basilica, the law court, was covered in amazing carving of the labours of Hercules, of centaurs and warriors and satyrs. Inscriptions in huge carved letters proclaimed the greatness of various emperors.

Down towards the sea, we came upon less bombastic architecture at the octagonal market. There were standardized measures of length, volume and area to prevent cheating, and reliefs of trading ships carved on the walls. Everywhere there were massive columns, carved from striped marble and granite of exceptional quality, probably imported all the way from Egypt. These were so well carved and so well preserved that in the 17^th century, the French consul to the area shipped off dozens of the columns to France, where they now decorate the Palace of Versailles. Other columns lay on the shore, where they were abandoned during subsequent, interrupted attempts at looting by the French. Some of the columns bore Corinthian columns with silphium leaves, as in Cyrene. Here and there we came across old Phoenician inscriptions, and we kept an eye out for the phallic depictions scattered around the site. Unlike some other Roman cities, these were not signs to the local brothel. Instead, they were supposed to ward off the evil eye, and one carving shows a phallus with legs (and its own subsidiary phallus) doing battle with the evil eye. There are so many inscriptions in Leptis, lining the excavated facades of the streets, that it would take experts years to translate and catalogue them all. We felt very much part of the bygone city as we wandered through the grid of streets.

We finished up at the theatre, with its wealth of carvings and its theatre district. Inscriptions over the grand door report on the renovation of the complex by a local magnate. Smaller carvings report on particular plays being performed, like tattered posters of plays gone by. The theatre is hardly as impressive as Sabratha’s, but it’s still a wonderful structure, with the distracting view of the Mediterranean waters behind, and the vast sweep of the ruins visible in all directions from the upper seats.

We drove back to Tripoli more than satisfied with our overdose of classical ruins. That night, as Hisham picked us up to take us to dinner, Joanne asked once again if we were going to the Marcus Aurelius arch café to eat stew-in-an-amphora. Hisham said no, and started driving towards a fish restaurant before pulling a U-turn and heading towards the arch. The stew was worth all the anticipation, baked to perfection in its clay jar before being extracted by smashing the top. We dined well, staring out over the lit-up Roman arch and basking in the historical ambience.

Our last morning in Tripoli was spent at our guesthouse, relaxing. We left slightly left to catch our flight to Malta, and this caught up with us as we got stuck in endless traffic, and then Hisham got pulled over by a traffic cop. He searched long and hard for his driver’s license, but when he finally found it, the cop spotted that Hisham had two licenses (one that he had lost, replaced and then found months later) and promptly wrote him a huge ticket that probably cost him a few day’s profits from the trip. As we drove off, Hisham grumbled that he’d had about as much of Libya as he could take and that he should move back to Malta and its nightclubs and beautiful women. (He was off to Malta in 2 days’ time for a New Year’s party holiday.) We made it to the airport just in time, passed on the opportunity to buy the famous “Stamps of American Aggression” for sale in the souvenir shops, said goodbye to Hisham, and headed off on the brief hop to Malta, glad to have entered the strange modern world of Muammar Gaddafi and the fabulous ancient ruins that are its highlight.