We are nearly 700km southeast of Tripoli when a sandstorm suddenly swirls around us, engulfing our vehicle in a cloud of fine yellow particles and blanking out the entire outside world. Minutes later it is gone, leaving only a few trickles of sand sliding down the windscreen.
‘It can be so dense and long-lasting that you sometimes need a tractor to get out,’ my guide, Jamal, says. ‘At other times the wind is so fierce that it scrapes the paint off the car – just like sandpaper.’
We are lucky, but that short burst of nothingness is enough to make me realise how unpredictable this Libyan desert can be, how treacherous, and how glad I am not to be on camel-back.
One hour later, in the legendary oasis town of Ghadames, I also realise how sophisticated its early inhabitants were when it came to building. The label ‘green’ architecture sounds like a bit of a misnomer in this desert context, but that is precisely what this labyrinthine mud town is about.
Once known as the ‘pearl of the Sahara’, Ghadames beat even Timbuktu in the table of great trading crossroads. Yet where Timbuktu now conveys a depressing sense of neglect and commercialisation, Ghadames is harmonious, beautiful, compelling. One good reason is that being less known, tourism here is sporadic and embryonic. Another is the regeneration that is starting to take place.
For the past 20 years, the tufted date palms of this Saharan oasis have flourished around a virtually deserted medina (old town). In the mid-1980s, on Colonel Qaddafi’s orders, the entire population of around 10,000 was moved out to concrete high-rises with all ‘mod cons’ in an adjoining new town. At the same time, Unesco declared the medina a World Heritage Site, a move that did not prevent its slow collapse.
Today while the ‘new’ apartment blocks and concrete houses already look decidedly decrepit, the crumbling walled town is undergoing a radical facelift thanks to funding from local authorities who at last recognise its value.
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