Susan Spano takes us along on a US tour group’s (Mt. Travel Sobek) journey to Libya:
Best of all, Libya, like China in the 1970s, remains largely untouched by the despoiling hand of commercial tourism. There’s a prevailing air of naivet? and freshness unlike any I’ve ever felt.
Visitors have been trickling into Libya all along. It received 300,000 foreign tourists last year, mostly Europeans drawn by Libya’s fabled Roman ruins, considered the best outside Italy, and its sandy Saharan south, which in the last decade has taken the place of strife-torn Algeria as a destination for desert treks.
Then he showed me how to cross the street in Tripoli, where the roads aren’t divided into lanes, there are no stop signs and vehicles move in herds. You walk out bravely, with a raised hand and index finger pointing heavenward, as if to say, “Fail to stop at the risk of Allah’s wrath.” It worked.
Lonely Planet has a Libya Travel Guide.
