Our Wild Journey Travel diary

LIBYA

11th November 2008

At 8 o'clock in the morning we got up, that means in our time 7 because we didnt't think about adjusting time, and started preparing the car for our guide, we put some stuff on the roof and instead of the fridge we made up an "emergency seat" for Andrea, who would have to squeeze in behind the driver's seat. :o( Getting out of Tunisia didn't take us so long and in front of the Libyan customs we met Bilgasem Shlebk, our guide, who had already waited for us longer than 1 hour because we had the wrong time...ooops! :o) It took some time to get through the border but we had nothing to do but to wait because Bilgasem, for the lot of money he got from us, would do all this! At 1 o'clock we were finally on our way, starting the 1700km crossing from Tunisia to Egypt. In one of the first towns we took a full tank for an unbelievable 10 EUR!!! Rene took a photo of the fuel price! Our guide also took us for lunch there, sandwiches with hot chicken...Andrea even found some chips at the bottom :o( and we noticed that they "recycled" the straws - the ones we got were already used! :o) After that we got on our way to Tripoli to visit Bilgasem's home.

His wife made us an excellent libyan dinner with camel meat, nice sweets, fruit, coffee, tea and all sorts of things...at least something for the big amount of money he got from us! :o))) So Rene "sucked" up the food like a vacuum cleaner! :o)
After some relaxing we took our drive through Qaddafi's country and went to camp at the beach close to Leptis Magna, where we would go the next day.

12th November 2008

After a quick breakfast we entered Leptis Magna and spent about 3 hours there. Leptis is a huge ancient Roman city, built in the 7th century B.C. and is in an amazingly good condition. We marveled at these Roman remains, took lots of photos and listened to some info from Bilgasem. And while Andrea stopped to look at the old baths Bilgasem and I headed for the ancient brothel! :o) At the exit we saw the first big billboard of Muhammad Al Qaddafi and had to take a photo! Rene bought the "Green Book" (Qaddafi's solution to all problems of humankind) :o) and Andrea a straw hat against the sun.

In the heat of the day we moved on towards the Egyptian border, Andrea's body starting to hurt from being squeezed in the back, Rene's from having the steering wheel right under the nose - only Bilgasem snored away happily on the passenger's seat! :o)
Libya is definitely richer than Tunisia, it seems like Tunisia is the agricultural part and Libya the more industrial one, with lots of new buildings (even though unfinished but still new). But also here the same like in Tunisia - rubbish everywhere, our guide said that Libyans are quite simple people. But nice and friendly. Only the driving is more than horrible - it is a constant Formula 1 race and Rene often swore at the crazy traffic! Here one often finds car wrecks on the side of the road, completely damaged and left there to rust away! :o)
We camped in a place around Sirt - Qaddafi's home town, which is a little cleaner than the rest of Libya!

13th November 2008

This day we spent 12 hours in the car! :o( We had a lot of driving to do and decided to take the shortcut inlands and not through Banghazi. The shortcut is ca. 400 km of straight road, no fuel station, no village, just nothing but stony desert! Of course we stopped to buy a headlight for Andrea and have lunch (and even were followed by secret police till Bilgasem told him off...). In the middle of the long desert stretch Rene got tired and let Andrea drive, which quite surprised Bilgasem - he asked if he should take a taxi to follow us. :o))))) But still decided to get into our car, hold on tight to the "handrail" and let everything be "insha'allah" (god's will!)
Finally, after 700 long tiring kms we arrived in Tobruk, where we camped on a field just outside the city!

14th November 2008

Today was our last day in Libya, from Tobruk on we still had a good 100km to drive to Am Saad at the border. In the morning we visited the war cemeteries, quite solemn, nice places. The German one is really different from all the others, it's a castle, something reminding Rene of Walhalla - stark and mystic. After this we bought fresh, warm bread and it took only a while to get to the border. Am Saad is a horrible little town full of quite poor people, we bought some meat and found ourselves harassed by some mentally ill man, who even tried to steal my knife! This negative experience gave us a strange feeling. We still had a tea with Bilgasem before we left the Libyan side and moved on towards the Egyptian customs...bye bye Libya, bye bye Qaddafi!