Day Eighty-Four
SIRTE TO TRIPOLI
As we set off for another long day’s drive up the coast I ask Abdul if there’s any serious alternative to driving or taking a camel. Wouldn’t a railway help? Indeed, he says, and Colonel Gaddafi is very keen on railways, but there aren’t any in Libya. The national airline has been badly hit by the continuing American embargo on aircraft spares. Motor car spares are equally hard to find, causing many unnecessary road deaths. The Colonel has tried to deal with this by ‘inspiring’ a new design of five-seater vehicle. With glare-free headlights, non-exploding tyres, high-impact bumpers and all round air-bag protection, it would be the world’s safest car. It’s to be called The Rocket of the Libyan Jamahiriya. Now that’s a proper name for a car. Well, better than Cherry anyway.
Nigel is losing his patience with the camera. Not his, but the Libyan government’s. I actually heard him this morning going on about how he hates being followed by a camera. Well now he knows what it’s like. I ask Farsi, the cameraman, what they are going to do with all this footage of us entering and leaving hotels. He seems quite aggrieved by my question.
‘There’s only six hours.’
A few miles short of Tripoli is Leptis Magna, the richest and most magnificent of all the Roman cities in Africa. We pile out and take the tour. It is indeed wonderful, much more grand than Cyrene and much bigger too. A paved street, the Via Colonnata, runs for almost half a mile, and to walk its well-worn slabs is to feel yourself in the heart of a great city. The smaller details stick in my mind, like the beautifully carved dolphins standing on their heads in the market, probably the sign of a Roman fishmongers’ stall, but the massive interior of the new Basilica at Leptis is hugely impressive.
It was used as a law court and to stand in it, dwarfed by the mighty Aswan granite columns, is to experience an almost palpable sense of the brute force of Rome.
Next to it, the 300-foot-long, 200-foot-wide Imperial Forum is like a vast mad monumental mason’s yard. Columns, capitals, decorated friezes, plinths, pendentives, bas-reliefs and massive heads with curls like eighteenth-century wigs lie around as if an earthquake had just struck.
The sumptuousness of Leptis Magna may look very European, but it would not have been built without Saharan money. The bread which Libya so copiously supplied to Rome could not in itself have provided sufficient revenue for excess of this scale. The difference was made up of the wealth of gold, ivory and slaves, brought here on caravans from across the Sahara Desert.
There is a parallel here with the wealth of present-day Libya, which also comes from the desert. Gaddafi’s oil, which is not only copious but also of very good quality, keeps the West going, the same way Libyan grain kept Rome going. Who needs who most?
Day Eighty-Five
TRIPOLI
Our last day in Libya. From the balcony of a monstrous hotel I look out over the harbour. A ferry is loading, one of six or seven ships in port. It’s a hazy, warm day, and the wind that sends the green flags fluttering carries a faint tang of sulphur from the chain of chemical works and refineries that dot the coast. Below me is a green and white-domed mosque, squeezed in by the side of the surging highway that leads towards the skyscrapers of the city. The centre of Tripoli, a wide, open meeting place called Green Square, lies beside the castle, at the place where the old medina and the newer, largely Italian streets meet. The green louvered shutters of the houses remind me of Gibraltar. I still feel frustrated. Abdul, Mohammed and the others have treated us well, but I feel we’ve also been strong-boxed. It’s been hard to meet people beyond the pink coach.
So I’m surprised when a youngish Libyan man approaches me in Green Square. He extends a hand and asks, in good English, what I think of the country. I murmur the usual praise and we shake.
‘I won’t tell you what I think,’ he says bitterly, and is gone.
TUNISIA
Day Eighty-Seven
DJERBA
Seventy-five miles across the Tunisian border is the island of Djerba. It claims to be the Land of the Lotus-Eaters, celebrated in Homer’s Odyssey. In one of history’s most famous examples of R and R, Odysseus and his crew put in here for a while and surrendered themselves to the soothingly narcotic fruits of the lotus.
These days it’s hard to find the lotus or its fruit, but there is a heady local preparation called boukha, made from fermented dates or figs, which seems to have pretty much the same effect. After Libya, where fermented anything was forbidden, the sudden proliferation of hotels offering every sort of inebriant from Baileys to Bloody Marys is a profound shock to us all and a lot of surrendering goes on.
Nor is this the only shock. The sheer numbers of lotus-seekers thronging the north coast of Djerba is in bewildering contrast to where we’ve just been, and indeed with almost anywhere else on this journey. German, Dutch and Swedish seem to be the native languages here.
This sudden return to a world of wine lists and multi-channel television produces an odd sinking feeling and an unexpected upsurge of nostalgia for those trips into the desert in the wee small hours, armed only with trowel and toilet roll.
Day Eighty-Eight
DJERBA
The design of our hotel, a huge U-shaped wall facing out to sea, tries hard to create a feeling of all-embracing exclusiveness, an ample concrete bosom of pleasure, where all your needs will be attended to, where food, drink, recorded music and thalasso-therapy are always at hand.
Try and get away from this fortress of fun and you will find twenty or thirty others, right next door, all offering similar versions of what you’ve got, and before long you realise that wherever you are is just like where you’ve come from.
Somewhere outside the fortress walls is Djerba itself, an offshore island, 18 by 16 miles, flat, dry and agricultural. Compared with the desert we’ve come through, it looks almost lush, but the reality is that rainfall is low, only 8 inches a year, and the water saline. The dates from Djerba’s palm trees are only suitable for animal feed and the olive groves yield low returns. The island’s most productive pastures are the shallow waters that surround it. Fishing here is a traditional industry, carried on by traditional methods.
On the dockside at Houmt Souk are stacked rows of turnip-shaped, terracotta pots. These elegant little amphorae, about 18 inches high, are not for tourists to take home; they’re for catching octopus. Each one has a rim at the top, around which a string is tied, attaching it to a long line of pots which are then dropped into the sea a few miles offshore. For some reason, octopuses are irresistibly drawn to the pots, curling up inside them and presenting a perfect gift for fishermen. It’s a technique that’s been used since the Phoenicians came this way 3000 years ago, and the octopuses still haven’t caught on.
We’ve wangled ourselves aboard one of the brightly painted, low-tech fishing boats, which is setting out to check its lines.
Once out of the harbour, we run into a lively sea, licked up by a freshening wind. The stubby, wooden-hulled boat bounces all over the place as we search for the line they put down a couple of days ago. So competitive is the fishing out here that they mark the line as discreetly as possible, and it’s only after a half-hour search that they detect the green plastic bottle to which the line is attached. By now the boats are bucking all over the place as the pots are hauled up from the sea bed no more than 12 feet below us. I’m hanging on for dear life as we hurtle up and plunge down the waves, but the fishermen are balanced only by knees against the rail as they inspect the pots. There are fifty on this line. One after another contains only sand and seaweed and is tossed back into the water. Not an octopus to be seen. It’s early in the season, they say.