Libya

Then we left Tripoli and drove through the desert southwest to Nalut. From there to a Berber town Ghadames. Though the inhabitants were moved to new apartment houses, the empty old town is in a very good shape for tourists to explore. At the sunset we drive to gigantic dunes on the Algerian border and see a “Blue Man of the Desert” (a Tuareg on a white horse in an indigo cloth with a veil over his face). In the following days we make visits to more old Berber towns from where its population was forcibly moved to new houses. But these old towns are disintegrating. For two nights we are in a hotel in Zliten on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea to see one of the most famous excavation sites in Libya Leptis Magna. Like Sabratha it started as a Punic settlement, but since about 100 BC it got in the sphere of Rom and over several centuries received a character of a Roman city, whose remains one can see today. Earthquakes (mainly the one in 365 AD), decline of Rom and the Arab invasion in the 7th century caused that it ended up under the sand of the desert.

From the Tripoli airport we fly across the Gulf of Sirte to Benghazi in the eastern part of Libya and by bus to Al Bayda. In following days we are sightseeing another excavations of originally Punic and later Roman cities, Cyrene and Apollonia and Tolmeita (originally Ptolemais) which was a Greco-Roman city. We also spent some time in the second largest city of Libya, Benghazi.

After flight back to Tripoli and one night there, I fly via Zurich to Prague, Czech Republic where I land on May 12.

Travel office: Adventures Abroad (AA) – a Canadian travel company

Who took part: There were 15 tourists mostly from North America, a leader from AA, an excellent Berber tour guide and a Libyan government guard with very little knowledge of English.