‘One thousand, nine hundred kilometre beach begin here,’ announces Abdul, waving his arm at a flat milky-green wasteland studded with cones of freshly tipped rubbish. I’m taken to meet a friend of theirs who runs a tourist village. Photographs are taken. Along another meaningless swirl of motorway into the centre of the city. A number of Italian colonial buildings remain, including a Venetian-style governor’s residence, now the headquarters of the local committee. It’s a Friday and there aren’t many people in the streets. Those that are about seem to favour Western dress. There are more sharp, Italian-style suits than there are tarbooshes and djellabas.
Lunch is long and formal. The tables are big enough for a peace conference, and conversation is in the polite international style, with bursts of animated misunderstanding punctuated by longer periods of silence. Afterwards we prowl around two good-looking mosques, and a small square dominated by a classical copperdomed cathedral, now also a mosque. I climb the wide stone steps that lead to the portico, only to find the massive west door bricked up. Perhaps anxious to correct any bad impression we might have got from the boarded-up cathedral, Abdul takes us to a Catholic church and mission run by Franciscans, closed in the early years of the revolution and reopened in 1976 after a Catholic - Islamic pact was signed in Tripoli. Seven priests and thirty-five nuns keep it open all week, and offer mass in five languages: Arabic, English, Italian, Polish and Korean.
The bishop of Cyrenaica, a short, genial Maltese, explained this eclectic mix. Poles work on a lot of the urban construction projects and the Koreans on the Great Manmade River Project, Gaddafi’s epic scheme to bring fresh water from underground aquifers thousands of feet below the desert to irrigate the coast. At one time the project used Filipinos, very good Catholics.
‘There were thousands of them,’ sighed the bishop, wistfully.
Our day in Benghazi may have lacked sparkle, but the night is memorable for one of the most dangerous journeys I’ve ever undertaken. Our hosts had organised a trip to a local restaurant, not by car or pink coach, but in horse-drawn buggies. Though a battle-hardened film crew are perhaps not the best people to take advantage of such romantic transport, it all started well enough, until we turned off the quiet street, up a slip road and onto an eight-lane motorway. At one point it seemed as if our driver, who obviously thought his place was in heaven, had panicked. The horse certainly had. He swung his head from side to side, eyeballs staring manically skywards, nostrils pumping away like pistons as the traffic roared by.
Eventually, we found sanctuary in the crawler lane, and remained there for what seemed like hours, before we found our exit. The food was as good as anything we’ve had in Libya, but I did miss the alcohol that had been my only hope of surviving the journey home.
Day Eighty-Three
BENGHAZI TO SIRTE
No sign of the horses this morning, which is a relief, as we have the best part of 400 miles to cover. The pink coach is once more at our disposal and Farsi, the video cameraman, is back in action, recording our walk from the lobby to the door and the door to the coach, whilst Abdul photographs him photographing us.
In the middle of a roundabout on the outskirts of Benghazi is a huge installation commemorating the Great Manmade River Project. Its centrepiece is a circular stack of pipes embedded in concrete looking like a giant metal cake. Around it, the cardinal points of the compass are marked by 30-foot-long pipe sections. I climb inside one of them.
About 13 feet in diameter, it feels more like a small Underground station than a water pipe. A quarter of a million of these sections were used in the first phase of the project alone, and apparently the number laid now would stretch from the southern tip of Italy to the Orkney Islands. There have been unforeseen problems, however, one of which is the high saline content of the underground water, which is causing corrosion and leakage that is either very serious or little more than expected, according to who you talk to. Abdul, not surprisingly, is of the latter opinion. A group of passing schoolboys sees us filming and pandemonium and excitement break out. They point, shout, laugh, until their enthusiasm is cut short by our driver, Faraj, who climbs down and gives them a terrific scolding. Their faces fall and I can see momentary fear in their eyes. It’s a pity, as this is the first time we’ve seen any reaction from Libyans on the street and I was rather enjoying it. We’re herded back onto the pink coach, sedated with Richard Clayderman and driven south, into increasingly dry, hot, stony desert.
Instead of trees, there are electricity pylons and instead of wheat fields, there is scrub grass interspersed with pipeline, the occasional flaming head of an oil well, trailing a dirty black slick along the horizon. Near Brayqah, concrete holding-tanks, into which the Manmade River disgorges, nestle in the gritty sand, each one as big as two football pitches. A little further on, a metal arch with Gaddafi’s likeness painted on it marks the entrance to a massive dusty white complex, where the giant pipes are made. By now the Clayderman tape has reached ‘Tulips From Amsterdam’ for the fifth time, and cries for a lunch stop, or even an engine failure, are increasing. Thirty miles later, Abdul and Faraj spot three trees, close enough together to qualify as a picnic spot.
The picnic lunch is a big disappointment. And I mean big. Jumbo-sized white boxes reveal salad, chicken and cold chips. And it looks as if we might be here for some time. Whilst attempting a tricky and not strictly necessary three-point turn, Faraj has run the back wheels into soft sand and the coach is spread across half the carriageway like a beached whale. Various passing vehicles are flagged down to help, including a lorry with twenty kneeling camels in the back, all nodding away gently like toys on the back shelf of a car, but none has any towing equipment. The police arrive with a chain. It snaps. By now we have an expectant audience of fourteen people, twenty camels and a small car park of vehicles. Faraj looks as whipped and chastened as the little boys he screamed at this morning.
Eventually, a low-loader with a bulldozer on board, heaves us out and we carry on our way.
Mile after mile of salt scrub numbs the senses, but Mohammed has a treat in store for us. An in-coach movie. It turns out to be Lion Of The Desert, a Hollywood biopic of the great national hero, Umar al-Mukhtar. The irony of the Libyan national hero being celebrated by the Great Satan doesn’t seem to worry them, and we settle back to a truly blood-drenched couple of hours. If the Libyans are happy to have Anthony Quinn portray their hero, then presumably the Italians would have been relieved that the villain of the piece, Colonel Graziani, is played by Oliver Reed, and Mussolini by a stratospherically over-the-top Rod Steiger.
By these standards, the casting of Sir John Gielgud as a Bedouin was pretty obvious. The Lion Of The Desert brings us safely to the birthplace of The Guide Of The Revolution. Besides being Gaddafi’s birthplace, Sirte is a potential new capital of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Republic. Modest outskirts of low mud and brick houses give way to a complex of hotels and government offices. Landscaped towers of white stone and black glass could be a corporate HQ in California, until you get inside and find the decorative style is pure Arabian Nights, festooned with spangly curtains, brass lamps and throne-size chairs which take three people to move. A Pan-African conference is to be held here soon, but at the moment, as with so much of ‘official’ Libya, this grand and expensive campus is deserted. Abdul finds us some food, though once more it’s Western rather than local, but at least there is a bowl of harissa, the hot pepper paste, to breathe life into our hamburger and chips.