“Tripoli?” said the British Airways agent at Heathrow Airport near London, searching my passport for the hard-to-obtain visa.
“God help you.”
It’s difficult to think of a place, in our 21st century, left to pioneer. For Americans, that would be Libya, a complicated and confounding land on the North African coast, opened in February after 23 years of a travel ban tighter than Cuba’s.
When British Airways Flight 898 landed in Tripoli last April, our chief local contact, Soleiman Abboud, appeared at the end of the Jetway, a Rothmans cigarette burning between his fingers, his impossibly white teeth spread into a grin. Abboud seemed to have the run of the airport, although he wore a sport jacket, not any official uniform.
Behind him hung a portrait of Col. Moammar Khadafy, in trademark Ray-Bans and a sign, “Partners Not Wage Earners.” That’s how Brother Leader likes to think of the long-suffering Libyan people, pawns in his grand socialist experiment, now more than three decades old. Abboud collected our passports and vanished into the uncrowded arrivals area, beyond the immigration desks.
I had gone to Libya expecting secret policemen lurking in the shadows, gloppy food in the hotels and animus in the medinas. The few Westerners who slipped into the country in the past decade, like journalist Tony Horwitz, had painted a depressing portrait of the desert fiefdom, an oil-rich land where the fun had gone out of life, a place of vacant streets, no liquor and bureaucratic delays that made Singaporean subway rules seem loosey-goosey.
Showpiece hotel
“In Tripoli,” Horwitz wrote, “there was no pulse to take; walking through the city was like holding a finger to a mummy’s wrist.”
Abboud reappeared within minutes to wave us through, and customs officials ignored our bags. The van to the hotel arrived and our group of 10, organized by the adventure travel company Mountain Travel Sobek and led by one of its founders, Richard Bangs, checked into the Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel, without delay or incident.
Opened last year to great fanfare and at a cost of more than $150 million, the 299-room Corinthia Bab overlooks the gleaming Mediterranean west of the city and is Tripoli’s showpiece hotel, the best example of what Libyan officials hope their nascent tourism industry can become. More than a quarter of the Corinthian staff, at this point, however, hail from Malta, while Libyans, having never had a five-star hotel in their midst, learn the ropes of luxury service.
Our group included an investment banker from Washington state, who’d lived in Tripoli as a child; a globetrotting Hollywood agent curious about how Libya compared to Sri Lanka; and a government contractor in his early 60s, looking for a new adventure after helping to clean anthrax out of buildings on Capitol Hill.
As we toured Tripoli’s medina, a brief walk from the hotel, I was struck by how refreshingly tranquil it was. This was not your typical Middle Eastern souk, a riotous, rattling, sputtering engine of commerce and emotion. A few children set off firecrackers in the street. Cascades of sparks poured from a metalworking shop, where men smoked silently from hookahs. But there were no hordes to elbow, no hard sell, no streams of beggars, as there are in Cairo.
All tour groups to Libya still require a guide and a police escort. Our ground operator in Tripoli, the charming and resourceful Ssini Sharif of Azja Tours, maintains offices in
Tripoli and Ghat, a town 600 miles to the southwest on the Algerian border, from which we would set off into the desert. Our security man, the stone-faced and silent Mabrouk, a father of four, came from the Tripoli police detective division.
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| Lynsey Addario / The New York Times |
The terrain is hardly welcoming for a tourist dragging a suitcase to a tent site in the Wadi Adgat, near the Akakus mountains in Libya. |
Armed with a pistol that he kept hidden in a fanny pack, Mabrouk might have been there to monitor our activities, but he also helped dissolve red tape. Later, the few times some slow-moving soldiers stopped us at one of Libya’s ubiquitous highway checkpoints, Mabrouk handled formalities in mere minutes.
At night, along Omar al-Mukhtar Street, named for the Libyan colonial-resistance hero, ear-splitting American pop, including hip-hop, issued from almost every one of the tiny stalls, which sold, well, not much. Toiletries, copies of The Green Book, Khadafy’s ubiquitous manifesto, and various yard-sale variety items. In the market for a live baby gazelle? Prices are flexible.
Crossing the streets, which are free of lane markers and stop signs, proved a more interesting adventure. The Libyan custom is to simply wade into traffic, index finger of one hand raised above shoulder height. Miraculously, cars lurch to a halt.
White robes swaddling his stick-thin frame, a new guide, Bilal Aghali, appeared the morning after our arrival to take us to Leptis Magna. The archaeological sites at Sabratha and Leptis Magna, west and east of Tripoli, are among the best-preserved Roman cities in the world.
Ancient Phoenician port
At Leptis, built by the Phoenicians in the seventh century B.C. as a trading port, the dust from the chariots, the cackle of clowns and the screams of gladiators still seem to hang in the salty sea air. Grand limestone buildings with intricately decorated marble facades still stand; one is not left merely to imagine them, based on the careful placement of a few crumbling rocks. A gray stone penis, carved into one ancient wall, marked the entrance to the street where Roman prostitutes strolled.
Thrilled at a chance to show Americans what Libyan history has to offer, our guide expertly fielded every question. Scrums of schoolgirls wearing headscarves hurried up to stare at us, as curious about the Westerners in their midst as we were about them.
Mutual photography, which I feared might bring the wrath of officialdom, ensued enthusiastically.
When I handed one of the children my camera, so that she and her friends could see themselves, it was clear they were fully familiar with digital technology, and more. One girl giggled and said, “Good shot!” – in English.
Back at the hotel, I bought some of the most amusing stamps I have seen anywhere, a set titled “American Aggression.” At 200 dirhams apiece – about 15 cents, at the rate of 1.3 dinars to the dollar (a dirham is 1,000th of a dinar) – they featured not only the requisite defiant images of the colonel but also a series, in blazing comic book colors, of enormous Libyan surface-to-air missiles annihilating fully armed American fighter jets.
As with so many things Libyan, however, even the sale of such a potentially inflammatory item came with a bright smile and a shrug.
Despite American airstrikes designed to kill its leaders, and a Bush administration that has enflamed Muslims around the world, I found the Libyans to be warm and self-deprecating. And despite being branded a rogue terrorist state by the international community, I felt perfectly safe in both urban and rural areas of Libya.
Largely inhospitable
Although Libya, one of the Middle East’s largest oil producers, boasts 1,000 miles of Mediterranean coastline, visited for years by bargain-hunting French and Italians, 99 percent of the country is desert, much of it nearly uninhabitable in summer months, when temperatures reach past 140 degrees. That’s where we were now headed, with a sleeping bag I had purchased in a panic just before leaving for Libya.
It turns out that I needn’t have worried. In the Sahara, we would sleep on the sand, under the stars.
From Tripoli, we flew south on a rickety, 1950s-vintage Fokker to Ghat, a Graham Greene sort of place where hard-eyed men from Soviet-spy central casting sat smoking under ceiling fans, unmoved by the muezzin’s loud call to prayer. Three hours later, after a rib-rocking ride in 4x4s, we met our Tuareg guides and their 14 camels at the base of a sand dune in the spectacular Akakus mountain range, with summits of nearly 5,000 feet along the Libya-Algeria border. A freshly slaughtered goat hung from the side of a white pickup truck – the staple for most meals in the coming days.
Under the watchful eye of Mama, their stately, obsidian-skinned leader, the nomadic Tuaregs, their faces hidden by indigo veils, led us over Pyramid-size dunes and through rocky mountain passes, to wait out the midday sun under a lone grouping of acacia trees. Climbing the dunes, over the next several days, we looked and felt like Lilliputians playing in a Brobdingnagian sandbox, slipping and sliding and tumbling down.
It’s a good idea to train a bit before you go to the desert.
Medical help can take a while to arrive, and heatstroke can creep up on you, especially in April, when temperatures on the desert floor can top 110 degrees Fahrenheit. If a Tuareg tells you the hike has an hour to go, plan on three.
From time to time, I grew too thirsty to speak, and felt the crabbiness and rapid pulse that occur when the body’s core temperature rises. Extra water and a bit of rest quickly solved the problem.
At night, without tents, we shook scorpions out of our boots and sleeping bags, before falling asleep under a shining canopy of stars and a moon as bright as a headlamp.
Tin Talahat, in the heart of the Akakus range, is this sector of the Sahara’s version of Monument Valley, with stone arches big enough to drive a car through, but done only in two colors of limestone: red and gray. There, our camels enjoyed their first taste of water in weeks.
Part of Libya’s magnetism, at least for now, is the lure of the forbidden.
“That’s one of the biggest draws,” says Nathaniel Waring, president of high-end outfitter Cox & Kings, which runs customized trips to Libya. “A big chunk of business in the next couple of years is going to be people who want to go and see ruins that have been closed to the outside world for so long, in the same way people went to Angkor Wat when Cambodia opened.”
High hopes for horizon
The Libyan tourism minister, Ammar Mabrouk al-Taif, promises 100,000 new hotel beds in Libya by 2010, some resorts and golf courses, even a yacht club. Liquor, though, remains banned, even though a top-flight hotel like the Corinthia Bab absolutely screams out for well-made martinis. Pear juice and nonalcoholic Beck’s beer do not quite cut it when you are paying upward of $350 for a room, although the hotel’s lavish (and expensive) breakfast, lunch and dinner buffets ($18 to $30) made up some of the difference.
One member of our group applauded the Libyans for not budging on that point.
“Where else can you go and not drink for two weeks?” he said. “It encourages you to find other ways to socialize.”
The biggest hurdle to mass tourism in Libya may be its dubious reputation. Even with Khadafy finally agreeing to settle claims over the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and promising to scrap his nuclear weapons program, many Americans – and Europeans and Asians – still tend to lump Libya with other terrorist states.
“It’s going to take time for memories to fade, and some aggressive messaging from Libya to change those perceptions,” Bangs said.
Others see that scary reputation as a drawing card.
“The bad reputation will affect people who haven’t traveled,” Waring said. “For those who have, it’s part of the appeal.”