Note: I wrote this originally as an email to friends on 17 February 2008 from my 4-star room at the Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel (‘bab’ means gateway — a Libyan attempt at positioning itself with respect to the African continent). I remember that in some of our meetings with government officials, this date (today, the 40th anniversary of Qadaffi’s coup) was talked about, but I’d forgotten all about it until now when I read of all the celebrations currently going on in Tripoli to mark the occasion.

I spent a week in Libya, and felt very lucky about it as very few Americans are granted visas. This dispatch pertains to a frenzied overnight car journey I made to the Sahara. I knew it would be mad-dash sidetrip, but I figured, correctly, that I wouldn’t be back anytime soon, so I went for it. It stands as one of the most exotic and memorable excursions of my ever-deepening travelling career.

At Libya’s border with Tunisia and Algeria, Ghadames sits.

Or reclines, in a Bedouin kind of way. Lazily, I give you Lonely Planet:

“There’s nowhere on earth quite like Ghadames, which could just be our favourite place in Libya. The Unesco World Heritage-listed old city is a magical evocation of an idyllic caravan town of the Sahara – a palm-fringed oasis, the sense of an intricate maze, stunning traditional houses huddled together for company amid the empty spaces of the Sahara, and extensive covered walkways that keep the desert heat at bay.”

I think I liked most the post office (see photo above), where a member of departing caravans would search through bags hung on a hook in the passageway to see if any letters were bound for destinations along his anticipated route. And the lookout (see photo), from where someone would scan for signs of approaching caravans; like sailors on a sea of sand, the Ghadamsis wanted always to know what was on the horizon.

* * *

In the carpet-bedecked tent for tourists at the base of the dunes I lie on cushions. Several black men in traditional Tuareg nomad garb tend to tea trays near the entrance, conversing in Arabic (or is it Berber? Or even Tuareg?). Now, for some years I’ve maintained a habit, which I highly recommend, of travelling with old novels set in the place I’m visiting. From my pack I extract 1939’s Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (who wrote The Little Prince as his last literary act before being shot down by Germans off France’s Mediterranean coast; he was an aviator with the Aeropostale). At random, I crack it open – you will not believe me – to this passage:

“Then the slave, without a word, fills the stove with dry twigs, blows on the glowing embers, fills the kettle, setting in motion for a girl’s task muscles that would uproot a cedar. He is untroubled. Absorbed in the sequence of actions: brew the tea, look after the dromedaries, eat. March under the burning of the day towards the night, and long under the chill of the naked stars for the burning of the day. Happy are the northern lands whose seasons can compose a legend of snow in summer and a legend of sun in winter; sad are the tropics where in the sweating-room nothing really changes, but happy too is this Sahara where day and night swing men so simply from one hope to the other.”

The weather, on this mid-winter early evening however, is balmy, warmish, neither hot nor cold; I’m very comfortable in a T-shirt and trousers. The tea is sweet, like I like it, and poured from a height so it froths like cappuccino. The bread is hot and fresh, and the sand baked into it squelches against my tooth enamel as I chew.

* * *

In the hotel lobby, I bump into the US defence attaché, visiting from Tripoli with his family for the weekend. I ask something I’ve been wondering all week: “So is Libya all right now as far as we Yanks are concerned?” “We’re still keeping an eye on them.” But assuming the government here continues to straighten up, I think, just give ten years to this expansive, stable, storied, oil-rich and well-located territory of 5 million inhabitants and it will become what my old boss Kudlow used to refer to as ‘a real country’. One of a handful in Africa.

Inshallah (god willing).

Your humble correspondent,
Jeremy

PS  Though I felt surrounded by the mystique of camels since arriving here, the closest I actually got to one, funnily enough, was in the lunch I ate in one of the Ghadames’ traditional houses. If my guide (whose name was Mohammad Ali; he trained not as a boxer but as an air traffic controller) hadn’t pointed this out, I’d have thought it was tender and mild stewed lamb.