by Ted Simon
Sousse is a big town of eighty-four thousand people. Hassan the engine driver lives here, but his directions are hopelessly inadequate. Maybe he never meant me to find him. Anyway, I have spent too long now looking for him, and it's too late to ride on. I come across a beautiful old part of town, and a hotel of mosaic, tiles, lofty arches and cool interiors. A room for a dinar. Behind the hotel is a tiny lean-to shelter crammed with rags and boxes where I can put the bike. A man in a torn and dirty kaftan watches me struggle to manoeuvre the bike in through a narrow gate, ten minutes of hard work, and then says: 'One dinar.'
I am furious at him. 'You should have told me before,' I yelp.
That's right, you tell him. Let's have some English justice and fair play around here. God, Simon, you are a prick.
I argue the price down to something reasonable. In the morning, where I thought there was only room for the bike, I see there are people sleeping too. The information hits me like a custard pie in the face.
There's a lot of water everywhere. The roads near the sea front are under two feet of it. Do they mention this in the brochures? I see a package of Nordic tourists washed up in a hotel lobby. The hotel looks as though it has absorbed its own weight of water.
Crossing overland to Sfax I see another antediluvian wonder rear up ahead of me, a vast wall shot through with rows of ragged windows bars my way like a small mountain range. At the last minute it veers off sharply to the right and becomes the remains of a colosseum.
El Djem is flooded. Sfax also. The watery greyness keeps me going. Along the coast now, more life, more traffic, mud-brick houses, market gardens, date palms, donkeys, camels, all the things you read about, see in pictures. When you get there you know none of it was right.
Riding cautiously in the wet I have only gone one hundred and sixty-five miles by mid-afternoon. I decide to stop at Gabes, very aware of the Libyan frontier coming close. I want to prepare for it somehow. Tunisia is not part of the war. It is a Western-orientated, tourist-conscious, bilingual country. Libya is belligerent, fanatical, oil-rich and runs according to the laws of the Prophet Mohammed, or so I am told. I decide to post all my exposed film off now, and at the last minute remember a document I'm carrying that has an Israeli stamp on it and send that away as well. Images of search and interrogation flash across my mind. They make me both shiver and laugh at myself. Extreme situations always seem absurd until they happen.
When does the 'B' movie become a documentary? Back at the factory in Meriden we laughed about my untried, unprepared motorcycle. 'Chances are,' said one mechanic, 'if you don't worry about it, it'll go all the way with no bother.' I chose to worry. I took all the tools and spare parts I could carry, and half an hour later the oil fell out. Because I was prepared?
Does it rain because you carry your umbrella, or because you don't? It's a personal matter depending on how you remember it. The way I write my own history it's low on winning streaks. I never could gamble. I like to work things out in advance, but it bothers me to think of what I might have been missing. I've done too much hacking away against the grain of life. Without all that solemn effort, maybe, I could have gone further, faster, easier.
Remember what my headmaster said thirty years ago, that tar-stained old walrus. 'Simon, you think too much.'
Thinking's like a black tunnel. Once you're in it you have to think your way through to the other end. At least I think so.
The Libyan immigration man, if that's who he is, has a limp shot gun folded over his arm and hunting boots laced up round his trouser cuffs. He appears happy. He has several duplicated forms in Arabic, and points to where I should sign. I am being processed into Libya like a monkey, by sign language. I put my name to everything without question.
He takes my passport. 'Helf, he says. Helt? Oh, health. His first and only English word. I produce my vaccination certificates, grinning (like a monkey) and pass on. There's a lot of hanging about. Nobody will speak to me in a language I understand. The customs chief is in a shiny silver Italian suit, with a carton of Marlboros under his arm. He touches a few of my dusty things fastidiously.
'Visky?' he says. And that's his English word for the day. The Infidel Monkey shakes his head and enters Libya. It is not that they cannot speak anything but Arabic. They will not. It is part of the Libyan crusade for Islam. We are not always kind to our foreigners and it is a sobering experience to have the tables turned. In the good old days, I suppose, one would have spoken English at the top of one's voice until the natives just naturally gave way, but then we had Queen Victoria to fall back on.
On my left, a few miles of sand dunes and then the sea, blue fading to grey. On my right, desert, and nothing but desert. The map says there are fifteen hundred miles of it to Nigeria as the crow flies, if a crow could. Above, the sky is clear in all directions. Ahead the road is an impeccable two-lane tarmac. A mild wind raises a curtain of dust over the desert, nothing awkward, just enough to blurr the outlines of a few camels. There is no trace of a human presence anywhere. I stop to taste the emptiness, listen to the silence, like the hiss of a blank tape playing. It's a bit awesome. Although I could easily do the hundred miles to Tripoli before nightfall, I know that I must sleep out in a real desert tonight.
The city-bred boy in me is frightened, and all the usual alarm signals go off in my head. Can I ride on this stuff? What will happen if I sink into it? Is it safe? Who might come by in the night? A tingling mixture of fear and anticipation, waiting to combine into something like joy. Once the decision is made it's easy. I choose a spot among some dunes on the seaward side and prop up the bike thanks to a metal disc welded on to the end of the swing stand, one good idea that did get carried out. Then the tent. Where? Which way? How anchored? Every action is part of a routine to be studied and perfected. How many times will I be doing this? Hundreds? It is worth getting it right. I use the bike to anchor one side of the tent, and find a boulder for the other side. What about the fly sheet? Will it rain? It seems impossible. The sky is clear from horizon to horizon, but still, just in case . . . Then in goes the bedding: The flying jacket folded inside out makes a great pillow. So it goes on. As I move round the bike I try to notice everything about it, chain tension, tyre tread, anything coming loose, falling off, trying to build up a picture of it as it should be so that any change rings a warning bell. . . and sure enough there's a rocker box cap loose. I can see the thread.
Those bloody things. What a fucking awful design. Fifteen seconds of profanity to make their ears burn in Meriden. Must remember to tighten it, with jointing compound. No! Do it now. You'll forget. And while you're about it check the battery level.
There's the Optimus stove to fill from the tank, a messy business because I can't see the level in the stove, and it's hard to control the flow of fuel anyway. Must find a better way. There are stuffed peppers canned in Hungary to eat with rice. The whole performance, unpacking, checking, Cooking and clearing up keeps me moving and thinking for nearly two hours. I have almost forgotten where I am. With coffee and a cigarette I settle back into the astounding hush of the desert and remember, and then a really fierce flood of joy comes rushing over me.
Just look at me. Look where I am. Isn't this too bloody fantastic for words? It's me here, not Lawrence of Arabia or Rudolf Valentino or Rommel and the Afrika Korps. Me, and this little machine, we made it here.
The sun has run off into the sand somewhere in Tunisia. The stars are making unbelievably big holes in the moonless night. I am in a stupor of delight. If the journey ends tomorrow it will have been worth it, but a premonition sweeps away all doubt and for once I allow myself to know that the journey will not end tomorrow and that there will be many times when I will feel this same overwhelming joy. Tonight we are showing t ‘A’ film.
Life never leaves well alone. I feel the wind change, see the lightning at sea, hear the thunder. In early morning the storm moves inland. It rains very heavily and I'm afraid the water may undermine the bike and drop it on the tent and me, but
I did choose slightly higher ground and it should be alright. I decide to sit it out. At last a break in the rain. I pack hastily, the tent full of water and sand, and get back on the road to Tripoli.
All I know of Libya is The Road, a thousand miles of road, good fast highway, stretched along the African coast like a washing line. Libya hangs from the line like a giant's bed sheet, pegged on by Tripoli and Benghazi, blistering in the sun. They say there are some lovely damp spots down below among the folds at Kufra and Sebha, but what I see from the road is outrageous.
Out in the desert I see a tent, the old kind made of hides strung on poles in graceful peaks and troughs where the Sheik of Arabee forced our forebears to swallow sheep's eyes and murmur 'delicious'. Out of the top grows a television aerial. Alongside the tent are two gas bottles, and beside them is parked a new Mercedes limousine. The owner strides out in billowing white cotton, leaps in kicking off his sandals, and presses a leathery foot down hard on the accelerator.
A little way along the road, on the other side are two camels tethered next to an aeroplane.
Every man in Libya, employed or not, single or married, gets a weekly oil dividend from the state. In the towns people are doing up their places. Every other shop sells paint. And every other shop sells audio optical gear from Japan. The Koran is proclaimed throughout the land on triumphal arches set across the roads. Alcohol and women out of wedlock are forbidden. Whisky is twenty-five dollars a bottle and forty-eight hours in gaol for a first offence. Women wrap themselves in a chequered shroud, holding it in their mouths so that sometimes only an eye and a tooth are visible. You must not look at the eye. (Who would want to? The one I saw glittered like glass.)
Tripoli looks as though it were recently bombed. It still has an Italian air about it, I think, from the colonial days. The Italians are back with contracts. In my hotel red-necked Italian pipe layers lounge in the breakfast room reading comics. The hotel is very expensive and I have to go to the bank. There are three cashiers, but the man ahead of me in the line reaches into his plastic shoulder bag and brings out a pile of notes a foot high, mostly in tens and twenties. Now all three cashiers are counting his money. Halfway through a stack someone shouts a greeting, a cashier replies, has a little chat, loses count, and starts again. It takes twenty minutes before they manage to get through it all without interruption. I draw one five pound note and wonder why they don’t just give me a handful.
From Tripoli to Sirte is three hundred miles, and I'm really flying with the engine singing for me and everything rapping along nicely. There's a lot of rain, but I'm less nervous of the wet now, on tar at least. The land and sea lie flat out forever, and I can see the weather coming maybe fifty miles ahead. I have never seen so much weather. I can see where it begins and where it ends; I can see the blue sky above, and the approaching storms and then the good times beyond. Remarkable. Like having an overview of past and future. I am a world spinning through visible time. The weather so much resembles history. Great forces meeting, interacting, discharging their energies. Over there the blackest of clouds is shedding doom on the land below. What does that poisonous-looking deluge represent? Plague? Famine? Civil war? Those who are under its terrible judgement can certainly not see beyond it. To them it must seem as if the universe is engulfed. While I can see that it is a momentary thing.
All morning I'm flying along under the weather, with my head down at seventy, left arm resting along the handlebar, listening to the rroomm-rroomm of the engine, the zappitty-zappitty of the anorak rippling in the air stream, the crackling of the visor on the open-face helmet. This part of the coast is more fertile; olive groves, thousands of date palms, settlements with paddy cultivation, many wells with curious stepped walls on either side of them. There are many big white Peugeot taxis on the road. Outwardly they are the familiar blank modules of industrial civilization; inside, turbans, fezzes and veils huddled over bundles of rich fabrics. The effect is like a refrigerator packed with shrunken heads, or a digital display that tells fortunes. Thousands of these taxis run immense distances between Tripoli and Cairo. Sometimes I see one leave the road without warning and plunge into the open desert. Only with shaded eyes can I see the dark speck of a tent on some distant rising ground.
Now it is getting noticeably drier and wilder. Soon there's only desert on both sides, and the wind is whistling clouds of it across the road. Sand flickers on the tarmac like flames and, in places, dunes are building up on the surface. Many camels graze at the roadside, where, for some reason, there seems to be more shrubbery, lanky young animals starting away in fright at the unfamiliar sound of the bike. I see a sandbar across the road and relax on the throttle to slow down. No change. The engine races on and suddenly it's urgent. Brakes on, clutch out, and I lean forward to switch off the ignition, since there is no kill button.
The carburettor slide is stuck. I have to ride on like that for twenty miles, an interesting problem until I get to Ben-Gren, where there is shelter, petrol and a cafe.
My first roadside repair is easy enough once I get out of the flying sand. The garage owner is so intrigued that he gives me a free spaghetti lunch with meat sauce and grated cheese. There are very few strangers in Libya,
and I am able to see how the absence of tourism allows people to take a natural and generous interest in travellers. I am highly privileged.
It is dark long before I get to Sirte, and a road barrier looms up with a diversion arrow pointing off into the open desert on my left. My lights can pick up no track there, but the tarmac ahead looks fine, so I go cautiously ahead. The tarmac widens abruptly, and I begin to grasp that I am on an airstrip. After a while a jeep rushes up behind me and stops. It is full of army. A lieutenant in British-style uniform takes my passport and searches through it with a torch. Their faces are most impassive, and I am expecting trouble. Instead they all take turns to shake my hand warmly and wave me on. A nice moment.
I have just decided to sleep out when I get to the police checkpoint at Sirte. The guard insists that I go straight to a hotel. I ride up the muddy hill to spend the evening among men lounging in pyjamas, curly slippers and tasselled fezzes, playing tric-trac and smoking elaborate pipes. The clerk pretends to speak English and I ask him why the wells have stepped walls round them.
It is like this,' he says. 'From here is Benghazi three hundred and fifty miles, and . . .' Ah. Yes. I see.
Three hundred and sixty-five miles, to be exact, is quite a long way on a motorcycle. I'm up early and flying again. After a few minutes of sun, the rain breaks over me. For three hours I ride through it, constantly grateful that the electrics hold up. There are two shaky moments on ridges of dried mud made soapy by fresh rain. Other than that I am only wet. The rain has worked its way through the seams of the rubberized waterproofs, and my boots are squelching.
When I come out from under the roof of rain cloud the desert around me looks like primeval swamp and the camels make suitable monsters. Rivers of floodwater rush along the side of the road. Then, within hours, everything, myself included, is dry as a bone again.
Benghazi's tallest buildings are already in sight when I run out of petrol. Evidently the petrol is poor since it is not delivering the expected mileage, but I feel stupid and annoyed with myself for being caught like this.
I stand by the roadside to wave at the traffic and the first car stops for me. It is a little Fiat saloon with two young men in the front and a large bundle of laundry on the back seat which turns out to be not laundry at all but an elderly female relative.
The men are clean-shaven, tidily groomed in Western dress, and energetically helpful. They shower services upon me. We siphon some petrol from their tank. They escort me into town and help to find me a hotel. On the way, at a petrol station, they fill my tank and absolutely refuse money. And finally they lend me a pound because the banks are closed.
The Oilfield Hotel is my home for a week. It costs one pound to occupy one of the three cast iron infirmary beds in a room, but most nights
the other beds are empty. Only once do I have a room mate, a coal-black Nubian cook on his way to work in an oil rigger's camp near Tripoli. His friendly chuckles when awake are offset by the loudest snore I have ever heard. In the night I throw everything at him, but the express trains continue to roar in and out of his nostrils. If he stayed one more night I would have to move out.
The Egyptian Consul confirms that it is entirely out of the question for me to cross into Egypt by road.
T suppose I can always try,' I say.
His smile is the one reserved for troublesome idiots.
'Yes. You may try.'
I research all the other ways into Egypt. By ship? At best long-winded and uncertain, but now captains are refusing to take their vessels into Alexandria.
By air? Terribly expensive for the bike and also, at present, uncertain. I could fly myself and road freight the bike, but I am warned that I might never see the bike again.
The Sunday Times has offered to send credentials to help me across the border. It seems worth waiting a bit. Benghazi is, at first, an enjoyable city. It has lovely squares with palms, pools and fountains, and a big bazaar, a gold market, cloistered shops full of desirable objects like ivory backscratchers and musical instruments.
In the same street as the hotel is a motorcycle repair shop. Kerim el Fighi, the owner, cannot do enough for me. I have the run of the place, and decide to paint the boxes green. The gleaming white fibreglass offends me now. I want a bike that loses itself in the landscape, rather than standing out. I even wind green tape over the bright chrome of the headlamp and handlebars.
It is easy to make friends here. There are so many young men around with nothing to do. They are courteous, inquisitive and good company, but very cut off from the world and from knowledge in general. They seem hungry for involvement, and prowl the streets like wolves, but there is nothing to occupy their minds except the latest film which they are likely to see several times. The new money has liberated them, but for what? They seem very bewildered by the changes, and the obvious conflict between the religious values preached by Ghadaffi and the Koran, and the New Age of Technology. In any case it is all speculation, over endless rounds of fizzy drinks. In Benghazi, at least the women are freer of purdah, and many walk around in Western dress, but they are still quite unapproachable.
