LIBYAN TRAVELS BENGHAZI PAGE

Eastern Libya, World War Two Battle Grounds With Roman And Greek Ruins

This Is The Benghazi Page Of Libyan Travels

After leaving Tocra we drove to Benghazi, the second largest city in Libya. It is over a thousand km east of Tripoli the capital of Libya. Benghazi, like Tobruk was he scene of great battles in World War Two and changed hands five times in the Battles that raged between The British Commonwealth troops, including The famous Desert Rats led by Montgomery and The German Africa Korps led by Rommell. General George Patton was leading the American forces and there was a contingent of The Free French Army also in action in the area, notably at The Battle Of Bir Hakeim

We stayed in the decrepit and dodgy Omar Khayam Hotel. Why dodgy? Suspicious characters in abundance; lifts not working except the creaking claustrophobic service lift which had a nasty habit of getting stuck between floors. I hate having to do a commando roll in and out of lifts that are only half open as I always imagine it's going to start moving again and guillotine me in half. There were exposed electrical cables in the rooms including the bathrooms; keys and door handles that wouldn't work, just rotated endlessly until jiggled with the right knack, (a skill that only one particular hotel staff member seemed to have); and a general air of decrepitude. But it was cheap enough. We ate an unsatisfactory overpriced meal in a Turkish restaurant which was a bit disappointing really. We chose the wrong one for the right reasons. It looked busy and full of locals when we first passed it but when we returned later it was dead. The next morning we visited three large souks and more importantly three butchers where we bough fresh meat and offal to take back to the Brega refinery where, at the time of writing, properly butchered fresh meat was hard to find. We also took a photo of the butchers to make sure that travelers to Benghazi got our meat from the correct butcher.

We also found a fish market and restaurant combined where we ate squid: a rare treat.

We took the company bus leaving Benghazi in the afternoon. On the bus journey we stopped briefly at a roadside café where we bumped into Salem our laundry-man in Brega (see below). He was traveling in the same direction as us, returning to Brega from his home town of Benghazi. He runs the laundry for six thousand workers and is one of the most reliable workers in the whole camp. God bless him.

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We arrived back at the work camp in the early evening. Rather depressing actually. Brega is always a place that is better to leave than return to.

You can now return to the home page or check out the photo gallery of this, the first trip around the historic ruins and site of antiquity including, Qasr Libia, Apollonia, Al Bayda, The Temple of Zeus, Cyrene, Geigab, Slontah, Tocra and finally Benghazi.

Or you can check out other travels in Libya to Leptis Magna, Subratha and Tobruk over the following eighteen months. We also visited Al Bidri, Al Marj, Derna, Zliten and many other places all listed in the left hand column. During one such trip returned to Benghazi on our way back from a trip to Tobruk and the eastern Jebal Akdar

On another journey we returned to Benghazi via Green mountain and The Temple of Zeus This time we stayed in a guest house near the company offices and bus station. This saved us money and meant we didn't have to stay in the dodgy Omar Kayam Hotel, see above. We feasted on fifty pence schwarmas in the streets and found an Internet place from which I e-mailed people the day after we arrived. The following day our driver didn't turn up which wasn't entirely unexpected as he had told us he had missed his family a lot and needed to be with them for the Eid but maybe, in fact, he had seen, and dreaded as much as I had, Richard's itinerary for our last morning in Benghazi which involved visiting seven different places at all points of the compass around the town. A friendly chap from the company drove us to the Souk Giride where I tried to do a spot of Christmas shopping but many places were closed for Eid. Actually our driver and his brother were there in fact waiting for us and we drove to the docks together where there was a large wholesale fish market. We bought some squid, which the Libyans also know as calamaris. The squid family of fish is no more easier to categorize and define than other fish and no sooner had I started asking questions about the type, name, species etc than I was met with the usual blank incomprehension larded with contradictory information so I gave up. We bought a variety of fish to eat there and then. One guy sells; one guy guts and cleans; and one guy cooks them. He deep-fried them in flour flavoured with cumin. We ate them with lemon. We then returned to the bus station for our journey back to Brega where we were greeted by the stench of smoldering rubbish and sulphorous hydrocarbons: Very different from the Green Mountain air.