Towards the end of Ramadan I traveled through Al Marj on my way to Tobruk in Eastern Libya to visit among other places, the war cemeteries from World War Two.  We traveled from the oil refinery in Brega on the company bus to Benghazi on Sunday morning at ten o'clock.  The bus, a sixty seater, painted in the company colours of red white and blue, with the company logo, an amoeba prostrate with an oil derrick mounted on it, was full.  A smaller bus was laid on for the rest of us.  A fourteen seater Coaster, a model of bus I know well and fear from the Lockerbie sanctions air ban days when I used to travel overland to Djerba in Tunisia.  They are bum numbingly uncomfortable, but as long as you have use of your knees you will always have a place to rest your chin.  At least the journey was quick and we didn't stop for food because it was Ramadan.  At twelve thirty we arrived in Benghazi and by one o'clock we were on the road to Tobruk with our driver whom we had met for the first time that day.  We made good time, a bit too speedy at times actually, and on the way pulled in at a wrecked old town called Al Marj al Qadeem.

Al Marj al Qadim is about 1150 kilomtres east of Tripoli, the capital of Libya and is between Benhgazi and Tobruk. Al Marj al Quadim, also known as Barce was once an ancient Greek town, then Arab, then Turkish and then latterly an Italian colonial municipality. Its main claim to fame is that it was destroyed in an earthquake in 1963.  The clearance program does not appear to have started yet.  If one was not aware of the squalor and poverty in parts of North Africa one might assume it was uninhabited and indeed uninhabitable but in fact it's more or less normal: par for the course.  As with many places in Libya its history of repeated invasions and occupations are mirrored in the ruins and buildings.  I hesitate to say the word architecture.  There was an old abandoned Christian church with a cockerel weather vane; what appeared to be an old Greek Orthodox Church with DOM engraved in the stone; the remains of a Turkish fort; there was an old colonial Italian municipal office and there were the remains of the town railway system where a line used to run to Benghazi. The Libyan stationmaster of this tiny boondocks railway outpost, with a once weekly train, was sent to Britain for training to, of all places, Clapham Junction, the busiest railway junction in the world.  It probably drove him mad.  It is also one of the coldest bleakest stations in London.  There are no railways now in Libya.  As ever in Libya in these situations an amiable chap showed up to show us around, knocked on doors, woke people up, got keys to buildings and stuff like that.  In point of fact the man with the key to the old crumbling station could not be woken so as usual in these situations we climbed over the fence and through a hole in the wall where another group of guys intrigued to see foreigners, but not hostile, showed us their water pump, made in Leeds, head office in London according to the brass manufacture's plaque.  The pump is used to take water from a natural underwater spring and pump the water up to the water tower for distribution to the local town but it was not working due to a missing drive belt but he assured us that apart from that it was in good working order and had been since the 1950s when it was installed.  Rotting rusting cars were being  used as walls and coralls for livestock.  One piece of land was corralled of entirely by car doors!  We had a nice chat with a chap working on a chicken battery farming and egg production project who showed us some old black and white photographs from the time of the earthquake. 

It was time to eat but I refused to have our picnic in Barce as the squalor and litter inhibited my appetite so we drove out to the desert highway where we lunched on the sandwiches I had made earlier:  ham pork loin with Sainsbury's pickles and Coleman's English mustard with Anchor butter on flat Arabic bread.  Our driver did not partake due to Ramadan restrictions and anyway ham is haram, (unclean), not kosher, so to speak, for Muslims.  There were no restaurants open during the day due to Ramadan and it being nearly Eid al Fitr a three or four day holiday period. We continued our journey on a long boring desert road.  This kind of desert is not the classic desert of undulating curvaceous beauty that can be seen in South West Libya but a scruffy expanses of scrublands and tussocks of brown desert grass the visual monotony of which is only occasionally relieved by police control points or piles of rusting oil drums.  Mercifully I slept until we arrived in Tobruk.