Goodbye Tunisia, Hello Libya
This picture is of our final sunrise in the Sahara, those are old Roman ruins on the right, and this portion of the desert as you can see is quite grassy.
On our last night in Tunisia we were dropped off at the border town of Ben Guerdane. This is a sizable city, but it’s not in any guide books as basically no tourists come here. Being about 30 kms from the Libyan border it was the best place to stay the night before meeting our agent the next morning at the Libyan border. To travel to Libya by law you need to be with a tourist agency, so we agreed to meet ours at the border as we did not want to fly from Tunis to Tripoli. After checking in, we decided to take a walk around our hotel to look for a small cafe to eat dinner at. We had 20 dinars on us, and we needed 12 for the pre-organized taxi ride to the border. I wanted to keep 3 dinars or so in case we needed to phone at the border, which left us with 5 dinars (about 3 bucks) for lunch and dinner. It was pointless to get more money since the minimum exchange or withdrawal amount would have left us with way too much and since it’s a closed currency we wouldn’t be able to exchange it back. We were thinking we could eat at like 4pm to merge the 2 meals into one. Once we got on the main street where some restaurants with outdoor patios are, everyone started to stare. There were at least 50 men (since there are no women that are at these outdoor cafes) sitting there looking at us in silence. I swear if there was a DJ spinning the music would have ground to a halt. If one guy had his mouth so wide open in shock that his cigarette fell out, I would not have been surprised. So feeling slightly uncomfortable we walked around the block and decided to go into this really small shop with baguettes on the counter. When we walked in the lone teenage boy (about 16 years old) manning the stall looked obviously surprised. As this was not a tourist town, the small menu on the wall was only in Arabic. We pointed to the baguette indicating we wanted that but basically no communication was possible. He ran out to grab a friendly older guy in a suit on the street who could speak French, and he relayed to us that this stall served egg sandwiches and OJ. We ordered the sandwich and the boy started to pan fry an egg as the older guy shook our hands and said goodbye. The sandwich consisted of a French baguette, an egg, some olives, and a spicy harissa paste. When we tried to pay, the boy refused! I kept trying to give him our money but he kept waving no and wouldn’t accept it, just like the OJ vendor in the non-tourist town of Gabes. With the money we saved we were able to buy a pack of cookies and some water…sweet! We ate the sandwich on the roof of our hotel watching the sunset, knowing we couldn’t have had a better final meal in Tunisia thanks to the generous kid.
The next morning we were dropped off at the border. There was a palpable sense of tension in the air here as people were trying to get through. Luckily, there were 44 Dutch people also trying to cross when we were. They had about 15 different orange painted cars/trucks with company stickers all over (big companies like Pringles had sponsored some of the cars). We had a bit of trouble getting through due to a Visa mishap with the tour company, and they had trouble getting through since there were so many of them and their guide had a ton of paperwork to do. So basically we just hung out at the border with this group for about an hour. Their trip was extremely cool; they were taking 90 days to drive from Amsterdam to South Africa for the World Cup! It was pretty amazing how they could get so many people together to do this. Some took time off school (they looked like college freshmen), some had unpaid work leave (big age range here), and some looked downright retired (as in they looked 65). What they all had in common was that they were “crazy” (their own words). Supposedly 2 years earlier a few of them drove to Beijing for the Olympics and had an awesome time, so this time they organized a trip for the World Cup. Di and I were thinking that maybe we’d try planning something like that for the Sochi winter Olympics since the Vancouver ones were so awesome. Anyone want to start recruiting sponsors?
Anyways we finally made it through the border and now we’re here in Libya for the next 9 days. Wish us luck!
10 responses to “Goodbye Tunisia, Hello Libya”
Leave a reply to Sherm Cancel reply
Recent Comments
 | Emma on The Wonders of Ancient Egypt a… |
| Emma on The Wonders of Ancient Egypt a… |
 | nancy on Home Sweet Home |
| May on Home Sweet Home |
| Andrea Sam on Home Sweet Home |
fromwonderintowonder 
I had been follow your blog. Looked like you have a blast Good job. Enjoy your life experience together.
90 day roadtrip sounds pretty fun especially with that mixed bag of folk
let’s drive from Beijing to Tibet… you guys put way too little pictures on your blog!
lin didi, the rest of the pictures are on flickr! we are trying our best to upload them as we get wifi. click on the flickr icon underneath our profile pictures to see the sets 🙂
wow.. i can’t believe that the locals keep refusing your money… that is very interesting… not at all what i would expect… that’s awesome!
yah… i fig that one out after i post the comment.
i didn’t know posterous’ blocked in china, glad u got to the rest of the pics in flickr
Hi – we are looking to travel through Libya later this year and if you’re pleased with your guide and the company you booked through I would love to know the name.. thanks
Hi Ains, we used a travel company called Ocean Tours http://www.almuheettours.net/ We had to book a private tour as we were going from the Tunisian border to the Egypt border and thus the tour was extremely expensive, especially for the hotels you got in return. I also found the owner of the company (Sami) quite unorganized. However the 2 guides he arranged for us were fantastic, especially the one in the North Eastern part of Libya. His name was Hedi Gabriel and his email is Gebriel_BS@yahoo.com. I found the Northwestern part of Libya more interesting and beautiful, as well as the desert, both of which we did with our first guide (I don’t have his contact). Hedi speaks perfect English as he lived in England for a long time. If I could have done it all over again, I would have contacted him first to see if he couldhave been my guide in the NW (Tripoli, Sabratha, Leptis Magna) and the desert (Ghadames and further south). However Hedi’s specialty is the NE around Tobruk. Hope that helps. If you have anymore questions feel free to ask, thanks for reading!
I’m happy to tell you about my recent trip to Morocco. We travel as a group of 6 (2 families with teenage children), always the six of us, and every year we go to a different place. Money permitting, we love to travel, but we tend to stay away from organized tours in the usual sense of the word since so often they tend to protect from really getting into the places, skipping from one tourist attraction to the next. This year we decided to go to Morocco, mainly because it seemed inexpensive, but after the vacation we were definitely in love with the place. We flew into Marrakech and were impressed immediately upon arrival by the airport building: its incredible roof outside is like lace and the sun shines through it, casting beautiful shadows on the pavement: there already was an incredible atmosphere greeting us. We took a taxi for 6 (a minivan) and for 15 euros were taken to Marrakech, with hundreds of scooters speeding around us! Our hotel was right off the Jeema el-Fna – an orderly chaos of smells, colors and sounds, by day and into the night! We hadn’t yet learned to not fall for taking pictures of guys with cobras (after you do they demand money), but that is how it started! We spent 2 days in Marrakech visiting the traditional tourist destinations (the souk, the Saadian toumbs, the Majorelle Gardens, the Tower of Hassan II and so forth) before we were met by our travel guides (sahara-magic .com) that we had selected for the real tour: Hassan ghana of sahara-magic(he speaks 5 languages, and is half Tuareg, half Berber) and said (he absolutely doesn’t speak any foreign language but drives fine!). From the outset, we found Hassan an incredible person, full of joy, outgoing, but never intrusive. We left for Ouarzazate where we visited the Kasbah Ait Benhaddou (a lot of movies were made there) and then off to the Todra Gorges. Here we stayed in a hotel built in the caves! How wonderful! If you want I can give you its name. The next legs of our trip were the classic ones: Erfoud, Merzouga, Rissani, Zagora and Ouarzazate: you can do them with any tour operator, but what we experienced is unforgettable. At Erfoud we had lunch at home with Hassan’s family: What a welcome! We ate couscous the way they make it and drank REAL mint tea, his sister’s friends were doing henna tattoos, and did it to us, too. The next evening we headed for a desert oasis on camels, to spend the night in a berber tent distinctly counting every star in the Milky Way (well, almost all). How can we forget, while at his family’s home, how Roger ‘vomited’ from having drunk milk in his morning coffee?!?!? But that mishap actually led to an interesting experience! Hassan ‘s mother massaged special points of Roger’s wrists and feet with ‘magic’ oil, and incredibly, somehow, after a quarter of an hour, Roger was good as new. And how can we forget our stop on the way to Zagora, stopping to take a picture, when suddenly 2 children leaped out from nowhere offering a pony made of mud, they had made with their hands, in exchange for some candy! And when they accompanied us through the tiny dark inner passageways of a small town in the south, revealing the meaning of poverty, enabling us to quietly and respectfully peek into the everyday life of people in southern Morocco. And how can we forget our lunch, eating Berber pizza, in a small rug factory, sitting in the midst of all those dancing colors and so many types of fabric! I could go on for hours recounting the feelings, more than the places we visited. Thanks to Hassan(organizing everything down to details like cool drinking water, snacks, SD cards for my camera and making us always feel safe in places that are so strange to us in culture and language) and to said, who, though silent and not speaking our language and understanding little, was an incredible and fun travelling companion. Feelings, understanding the land and the people of the country we are visiting are what we seek when we travel and that is definitely what we got this time. And our children thank us for it, too.