A drive southeast of Tripoli is like a trip to a completely different country. The traffic thins out and the suburbs give way to scrubland. Everything is ochre under a hot blue sky. Rebel checkpoints end about half an hour south of the city; after that, who knows what could happen. The worst-case scenario is a fake checkpoint run by loyalist forces ( Read more... )

It was strange coming back through Ben Guerdane, but this time just en route. I waited to recognize that dusty curve of main road, the central town mosque, the little pizzeria. But our driver must have bypassed the centre of town because I didn't recognize anything, and soon we were on that long stretch of highway leading up to the border. On the ( Read more... )

Went down south yesterday into the outskirts of the desert, tracing the Libyan border down towards the dunes and through a lot of small ochre towns nestled in among the low rocky hills. One of them was Tataouine (the two Ts are different - تطاوين), and it was just outside town here that much of Star Wars was shot, the Tunisian landscape being ( Read more... )

 
Yesterday a chance came up to cross the border, but the circumstances were a bit unpropitious. The situation at the crossing is quite difficult - there are several different gates between Tunisia proper and Libya proper, for various passport or administrative checks, and men with guns at all of them. So what happens is that me and Elodie, my ( Read more... )

So I'm here on the Libyan border. Tiny Tunisian town called Ben Guerdane, dusty roads, donkeys pulling carts, beat-up old pickups and men in djellabas, bronzed foreign correspondents posing at terrace cafes, photographers scanning through pictures by their satellite transmitters. Beautiful musical call to prayer round these parts, quite different ( Read more... )