by Chen Liang
I felt kind of lost in the Jamahiriya Musum.
This was not because the national museum of Libya, housed in the Assai al-Hamra (the Red Castle) of Tripoli, is too big.
It is because the museum, with an excellent and incredibly rich collection of classical antiquities, offers an overview of the country's nearly 3,000 years of history which is not easy for a visitor from East Asia to take in in a two-hour visit.
Berber, Phoenician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, and Turk... These are all cultures and civilizations that have had a profound influence on the history of Libya at one time or another and have left the country with dazzling statues, marbles, mosaics and ceramics, all of which are well-represented in the museum.
Many of the things on display seemed too strange and mystical for me to really understand.
I had not expected to be so overwhelmed with the wonders of so many different cultures in a museum in an Arab country.
However, trying to take in such a rich history in such a short time was only one of the difficulties, and indeed a minor one, that I encountered while traveling to and around Libya. During my 10-day stay in the country, there were many other unexpected things giving me much to ponder both during and after my visit.
Difficulty
I was invited by the Libyan General People's Committee for Tourism for a press trip to the secluded country from December 27 last year to the 5th of this January.
Though Libya has begun its gradual return to the international community and has relaxed its stringent rules on tourism, I could still feel the side effects of the many years of sanctions against the country.
There are still few flights connecting the country with the outside world. When I tried to book air ticket from
Beijing to Tripoli, I found I had no other choice but a flight including stopovers in both Frankfurt and Malta.
The 17 hours in the air certainly did not make things easy, and getting over jet lag also took its toll.
But the hardest part of my trip was actually getting used to "Libyan time."
I had to learn to accept waits of from one to two or more hours at every stop on my itinerary.
Usually lunch is around 2 pm and dinner around 8. But I had to learn to expect that these times could fluctuate from between 2 pm to 6 pm and 8 pm to 11 pm.
All stores close at 2 pm and don't reopen until 5 pm. But the banks do not reopen at all in the afternoon. So I had only several hours in the day to find a bank and exchange money for Libyan dinars.
It took me a couple of days to get over my impatience with the different attitude towards time. But once I got used to it, my worries were over.
Then I found that such difficulties were truly insignificant and the journey was filled with all kinds of wonderful surprises and discoveries.
Tripoli
Tripoli, together with Benghazi, is the capital of Libya, and its main port and seat of administration.
It was the starting place for my journey in Libya, and the Jamahiriya Museum was the starting place for my tour of the city.
The museum, located in the city's center, is adjacent to the port, the massive Green Square and the old walled town-- the Medina.
Green Square is surrounded by milky-colored buildings, all of which have conspicuous green window frames and doors.
From the square, visitors can stroll into the Medina, or old Arab town, the real heart of Tripoli.
It is a labyrinth of narrow streets lined with a variety of busy traditional markets, or souks, selling everything from spices piled in colored pyramids to hand-made copper pots and Islamic crescents, from jewellery made in Italy to shoes and suitcases made in China.
It is safe and easy to explore by oneself.
There I found the relief-covered Arch of Marcus Aurelius, the only Roman monument left in Tripoli, surrounded by towers of mosques, a primary school housed in what had formerly been an Orthodox church, and many Arabic houses with stone Roman columns left in their whitewashed walls.
The Libyan shop owners, obviously not yet tainted by mass commercial tourism, display a detached attitude toward their customers.
Though miraculous discounts are rare, bargaining is a dignified process, something that I found much more to my liking than hypocritical warmheartedness.
When the sunset tinged the white clocktower in the Medina and the migratory swallows returned to their temporary nests in the Red Castle, I sat outside the Heritage Cafe, sipping mint tea and puffing on my shisha (apple-flavored tobacco) pipe.
It was not difficult to imagine oneself a character in "The Thousand and One Nights."
The Italian occupation from 1912 to 1945 left its obvious mark on the city outside the Medina. Ice- cream-colored buildings, in blues and pinks, line the city's byways.
I had a dinner in a restaurant housed in an Italian building. The room was Italian in style, with a lofty ceiling and tall, narrow shutters, but the decor was Arabian with scrolls in Arabic calligraphy on the walls and Arab copper pots on the tables. But my meal, consisting of soup, macaroni and fish, was kind of a mixture.
Ghat
The main focus of the press tour was a three-day festival held just before the New Year in Ghat, a town in the far south of Libya. It is close to Algeria and the ancient caravan routes through the Sahara.
Until I arrived at the airport, I didn't know that we would travel to Ghat with the tourism minister of Libya and have a chance to interview him on the special plane.
Probably because I had too many questions about the country, it turned out that I asked him almost nothing. But I clearly sensed from the things he said that Libya is determined to open up its tourism.
The flight was less than two hours. As the plane descended for the landing, I saw yellow sand dunes and barren mountains on a plain that seemed to stretch to infinity. Seeing no traces of life, I felt like we were landing on the Moon, or Mars.
Not just the landscape, but the people living in Ghat as well, were very different from those living in Tripoli.
They are mainly Tuareg people. With their dark skin, they are obviously African in origin.
Later that afternoon, we attended the opening session of the 2003 Ghat International Tourism Festival, which was celebrated with songs and dances performed by the local people.
I noted that the clothing, singing and dancing of the Turegs was quite different from that of the Arabs living in the North.
The Turegs' traditional robes are much more colorful, in blues, greens, reds and yellows. Their singing, usually in chorus, accompanied by such simple percussion instruments as petrol drums, is full of variations and lively rhythms. Their dancing, with strenuous swings, can be truly exciting.
The annual festival had an atmosphere of carnival. There were performances of songs and dances every evening during the festival. But we didn't watch any of them from beginning to end, as they always went on into the early hours of the following day.
A camel race was held on the morning of December 30. Twenty slim Arabian camels competed in a race of some 20 kilometers for a prize of about US$360. The camels, riders and spectators, all dressed in their festive best, and the rolling sand dunes offered an excellent chance for some striking photos.
Sahara New Year
On December 31, we set off for the Acacus Mountain area, where the Sahara offers some of its most dramatic desert scenery, for an outdoor New Year's Eve.
During our juddering two-hour trip in a four-wheel drive vehicle along the ancient caravan route, we passed a former battlefield where a bush with round and thick leaves known as "desert toilet paper" grows rampant, rocky plains with mirages dancing on their mirror-flat surface, desolate valleys where the Libyan sun and wind erode rocky cliffs, and, it goes without saying, sand dunes.
First came small dunes leaning against rocky slopes and then the huge dunes of different heights with steep slopes, and sands of different color -- grays, yellows and pinks, which you would feel safer going down on foot.
Crossing the dunes is truly like crossing a sea. The waves of sand undulate for as far as the eye can see in every direction.
But it wasn't all sand.
After lunch, we entered the broad gorges of Acacus Mountain. There we saw a huge limestone arch framing a yellow sand dune, with the blue sky as a backdrop, as well as some of the finest prehistoric rock art in Africa.
The rock paintings are scattered over dozens of sites in the gorges. They are of herders with spears, sheep and cows, and even giraffes and elephants. All vivid and similar in style, they depict the development of human society and the animal life that was once abundant in the Sahara.
They can be dated back to as early as 4,000 years ago, said Mohamed Fakruum, curator of the Jamahiriya Museum.
"They can be found almost everywhere in the Acacus Mountain area," he said. "These are only the sites along the road."
When the sun dropped, we arrived at our camp site. Against a rocky hill, it faced a boundless plain dotted with numerous rock formations in various shapes.
There we had a dinner of roast mutton and the North African staple, couscous, around a campfire.
As midnight approached, everybody seemed to want a little solitude to think about the coming New Year.
I walked into the desert and was soon away from the clamor. After several more minutes of walking, I found myself in a kind of stillness and silence I have never before encountered.
No cars, no animal sounds, no people around. I was the tiny and only soul under the clear stars, watched by those rock formations in human or animal shapes.
I felt that I could have stayed there for hours. So when I returned to the camp ground, it was already 2004.
Leptis Magna
We came to our last destination in Libya, Leptis Magna, after an almost 24-hour bus ride from the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast.
The journey was truly exhausting. When I faced the remains of the Roman city, arguably the finest in the Mediterranean, I was as thrilled as if it had been my own discovery.
About 120 kilometers east of Tripoli, Leptis Magna was buried in the sand for the better part of 1,500 years. It wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that Italian archaeologists started to piece the city back together.
Built originally by the Phoenicians and later occupied by the Carthaginians, Leptis Magna eventually became one of the most important cities in the Roman Empire and was the birthplace of three Roman emperors.
That helps explain its massive scale, which you can sense while wandering its cobblestone roads radiating out in all directions, from the lofty Honorary Arch, and from the gigantic relics of temples, baths, the forum, the three-tiered theatre and a coliseum big enough to hold up to 35,000 bloodthirsty spectators.
Because we were already several hours behind our schedule, we had only two hours to explore the spectacular ruins.
I quickly got lost and could not find my way out of the forest of Roman columns and huge boulders. I could not see any other tourists around to ask the way and the only sound was the breeze blowing off the Mediterranean.
Fortunately almost everybody in our group got lost that day, so that we had an extra hour in Leptis Magna.
But of course it wasn't enough. There are always regrets left after a trip. But one cannot ask for "miyamiya" (100 percent, or perfect, in Arabic).
