I almost enter Libya

AM hitching proved to be better, and I saw the impressive still-standing ruins of the very intact roman-built coliseum in the town of El Djeb. After passing through the town of Sfax, that evening I reached Gabes, and slept at the youth hostel ("beet shebab") there.

A number of young vagabonds were staying at the youth hostel, including my friend Antonio, and Jerry, a Dutchman, who had apparently been driving back and forth across Northwest Africa in his rattletrap diesel Mercedes for years. A number of us pooled our resources to buy fuel, and a team of our Nederlander pilot, an American, a Chilean, a Canadian, a Swiss, and a Norwegian rode with the "flying dutchman" inland to see the oasis town of Chenini, as pictured on all of the Tunisian tourist brochures. It was a very spacey experience to ride in the Mercedes, windows up, a/c on, with the Rolling Stones blasting from the tape player, and look out the window to see faceless tattooed women in black robes, holding their white veils in place with their teeth, camels pulling plows through the stony soil, and other disorienting sights.

On our way we stopped at a beautifully maintained German war cemetery, in close proximity to two interesting concrete pillbox emplacements built by the Germans in 1942 to command the main road. More than 10% of the German graves were marked "unknown".

All of the fresh vagabonds with the exception of yours truly were extremely excited about the desert scenery away from the coast. They couldn't stop talking about how amazing it was, never having seen a real desert up close before. I kept my mouth shut, as it was really just like the familiar deserts of Western America, where I had done plenty of camping, and therefore the scenery seemed normal to me. In the early afternoon we reached the oasis of Chenini, a strip of vividly green date palm trees surrounded by dun colored rocks, which was about two miles long, but never more than 200 yards wide. Now THAT was something new and exciting for me to see, and I became as enthusiastic as everyone else ! We stopped the car near some mud-brick buildings and started wandering around. The local people were friendly, and seemed glad to see us. But there were no souvenir shops, and nobody was trying to sell us anything, and that seemed rather strange until we figured out that there are TWO oases called Chenini in Tunisia, and we were at the one without the eight-story-high cliff full of picturesque hollowed-out rock dwellings ! The "Chenini" which all the tourist brochures were touting was another 140 kilometers southwest, by a different road from the coast.

Oh, well, we all agreed to check out "our" Chenini, well off the tourist path, and see what there was to be seen. Surprisingly, there were quite a few interesting things in that small green desert outpost. When one of the local boys offered to show us the alligators, we snorted in derision, but soon we were having an impromptu tour of a crocodile farm ! We saw the spring where the water just bursts upward out of the sand, and had a drink of the wonderful, cool artesian water. An old French redoubt, said to have been built by the romantic French Foreign Legion, also displayed it's ruins to us. And I found some really interesting and colorful bugs and caterpillars, new to my experience.

From Gabes, a few days later, Jerry drove four of us in the pay-as-you-go Mercedes transport south to the resort isle of Djerba, separated from the mainland by a narrow channel of salt-water. There were a few big resort hotels on a long, windy beach, mostly closed down for the season. Nothing of any historical or cultural interest was to be found, so before too many more days had passed, Antonio and I found ourselves standing at dusk at the Tunisian/Libyan border post, planning to hitch-hike across Libya to Egypt together.

Clearing the Tunisian outgoing formalities was easy, but I was refused entry by the Libyans. Rats, they told me my one week transit visa had already expired ! I had gotten the visa in Rome more than a month before, and in order to even apply for a visa, I had to pay to have all of my passport information translated into Arabic characters by an approved translator, and then pay to have an approved checker certify it as correct. Once this was accomplished and notarized, I had abandoned my passport at the Libyan consulate after informing them of my plans. It came back stamped with a visa, all in Arabic, of course, giving me one week to cross Libya from Tunisia to Egypt. No tourist visas were possible. The Libyan border officials informed me that, instead of having a week from the time I entered Libya, my week had started on a particular day, and already expired. Of course they hadn't told me that, and, not being able to read Arabic script, the first time I realized it was as Antonio waved to me from inside Libya, and I turned away back into the dark Tunisian night. I paid way too much for a share taxi ride to Ben Gardane, the nearest town inside Tunisia, because the cabbie knew I had no other options, and therefore no bargaining power. Once in Ben Gardane I was taken in for the night by a very nice schoolteacher and his brother. Neither of these good men concealed any shady second agenda behind their genuine hospitality. The following morning I hitch- hiked 200 miles back north to Sfax, the site of the nearest Libyan consulate.

Libya under Mohammar Khadafi was an interesting place. Having everything in Arabic was such a serious issue, that Khaddafi had ordered 1600 concrete kilometer posts along the main coastal road to be uprooted, to be replaced by new posts. The new markers carried only Arabic numerals, while the discarded ones called out the kilometers in both Arabic and roman numbers. But that is getting a bit ahead of the story.

Next time: Excitement with my fellow-countrymen