I almost escape Libya

My fourth night in Libya I got down from an evening ride near a small village called Timimi, and walked towards the nearby Mediterranean. I figured a night sleeping on the sandy beach would be better than one on the hard ground. But in evening's half-light I had badly miscalculated the true distance to the sea. I marched for 30 minutes through muddy tidal-flats covered with salty bushes, before giving up. It was obvious that there would be no sandy beach, so I picked a local "high spot" which wasn't too soggy, and stretched out my plastic ground cover and sleeping bag. In the morning I had an unrewarding, half-hour-long slog back to the highway.

One of my rides that day was in the vehicle of a uniformed high Libyan military officer who was traveling somewhere in the company of his brother. When they learned that I was American, the officer launched into a tirade against the American imperialists !! In the course of the next hour, I learned, among other things, that the Syrians had seven huge missiles which could hit Washington DC, that the United States government was offering a reward of 50 million dollars for Khaddafi's death, and that the officer had just completed a series of maneuvers with his local militiamen which would enable them to throw the US Marine Corps back into the sea when they attempted the imminently-expected amphibious invasion. I tried and tried to talk to the guy, but he just was oblivious to any attempt at reason. I found that he had read most of the above horse-waste in a Lebanese magazine. I finally gave up trying to break through his impenetrable wall of bombastic dogma, deciding to simply hope our fearless leader wouldn't realize that I was a spy, sent to learn his top-secret counter-invasion plans.

The historic fortress of Tobruck was only viewed from the high road as I motored past, not taking the turnoff to go and have a closer look.

It proved difficult for me to spend any money in Libya. The one time I went into a store to buy a can-opener and some Chinese canned apples, the owner gave me everything I put on the counter for free, wouldn't accept payment. Men who gave me a ride assumed that I must be destitute, and often tried to give me money. Therefore including the 5 dinars forced on me by my Tunisian Boy Scout friends, I had more money going out of Libya than coming in, which caused problems at the outgoing border crossing.

Not being a very experienced overlander at the time, having only been on the road for a few months, I showed the extra money and my currency declaration form to the Libyan border official.

Mistake. - - - He believed my story of where it had come from, but said "This is very irregular! You must go down the hall and speak with Mr. Raisa !"

So I went back down the hall, straight back out the Libyan door, walked 500 yards back into Libya, 100 yards out into the night-time desert, and went to sleep behind a bush for eight hours, until I was sure that the shifts had changed at the border post. In the early morning I went through customs hiding the extra money, and all went well. I was in Egypt ! The Egyptian border guards compelled a dolmush driver to take me the short distance down over the face of the famous Sollum escarpment, with many switch-backs, to the tatty seaside village of the same name.

It was there in Sollum that I first encountered one of the strange differences between the culture of the western world, and that of Egypt. In Egypt, the unsophisticated people have no social taboo against staring ! Many times in Egypt I found that to stop walking, or try to just sit on a wall for a moment caused the quick formation of a dense crowd of young Egyptian men standing in a tight semicircle around me, the nearest about three feet away, all staring at me intently, generally without speaking. Occasionally, if one of my new admirers was bold and knew a couple of words of English, he would tell me both of them.

As I debarked in Sollum this behavior manifested with a vengeance. There were about 120 young Egyptian men standing around in the morning, obviously with nothing to do, and they immediately crowded around me, as the most interesting thing they had seen in a LONG time. I talked to them in simple English, and found that we could not communicate. I talked to them in simpler Arabic, and found that they did not parse my sounds as a language they should understand. I resolved at that moment to learn lots more Arabic, and began collecting words and phrases in my journal, practicing at every opportunity.

Well, since language wasn't working to communicate, I knew another way, and pulled out my frisbee. Frisbee as a second language was an immediate success. I gestured that I was going to throw it several times, and thought the crowd understood, but when I did snap it towards the nearby onlookers, they dove out of its path in terror !! Obviously this was the very first frisbee any of them had ever seen. I followed the toy and picked it up, and did the trick of flying it up at a 45 degree angle, hard and fast out over the beach sand, and then catching it when it stalled and descended rapidly back towards me. This caused a huge stir, and lots of comment. Pretty soon I had one of the braver Egyptian lads learning to hold and throw the toy, and after that everyone wanted to try it out. I sat on the sea-wall laughing as the big scrum of young men stampeded back and forth along the beach. Occasionally my frisbee would wobble up out of the center of the mass, to be snatched out of the air by many hands, all of which would tussle for it enthusiastically, to be the one lucky enough to launch it on its next wobbly flight. I know it sounds like a wild exaggeration, but I swear on my mother's eyes that there were over 100 folks playing with my frisbee simultaneously. People were getting trampled in the mess.

I pulled my little viewfinder camera out of its heavy leather belt pouch to try to record the scene. This was even more interesting than the frisbee, and the crowd immediately surged around me again, each young man determined to be in the center of the photo. I marched out onto the beach and my crowd backed up ahead of me. When I got them far enough out, I tried everything I could think of to get them to understand that I wanted them to stay there so I could get a photo of the whole crowd together, but every time I took a step back, 120 people took one step towards me. I finally gave up and snapped a photo of a tiny segment of the mass of Egyptian manhood.

To my amazement, when the dolmush was ready to leave, my frisbee magically appeared from the crowd and was given back to me. I had already given it up for "adopted". I rode the dolmush to the dirty little seaside town of Mersa Matrouh, where there was a comfortable youth hostel, settling down there for three nights to rest up and do laundry, etc. The weather was a little bit too chilly for swimming, but I sat in the wan sunshine a lot, and wrote letters. Most of the guests in the dormitory beds were Egyptians, some of whom spoke English, so I worked hard on my Arabic.

Arriving in Egypt, I was a bit apprehensive that the people would react badly to Americans, since the US supported Egypt's enemy, Israel. I was pleased to find that at the time, America was VERY popular with the average Egyptian. Whenever Egyptians heard my nationality, they broke into broad smiles, welcomed me enthusiastically to their country, and told me that they really loved America and her people. After some confusion, I discovered the non-intuitive reason. The average Egyptian's psyche harked back to the Suez incident of 1956 when Britain, France, and Israel colluded in a short, violent military campaign which snatched the Suez canal from Egypt with very flimsy moral justification. America's diplomatic intervention on Egypt's behalf had compelled the aggressive forces to return the canal to Egypt, and that incident was still strong and current in the minds of the Egyptians, in spite of everything which had taken place in the interim.

Next time: The Perils of the Western Desert