Scorched by Sahara on desert trek

By Susan Spano
Los Angeles Times

JOHN MOORE / ASSOCIATED PRESS A Tuareg tribesman walks in the desert town of Ghadames where locals hope for more tourists as Libya opens to the outside world.

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GHAT, Libya — Scientists think the Sahara Desert has been hot and dry for the past 3,000 years.

I can't speak to that, but I can attest to its profound hostility to humankind for four days on a trek in southwest Libya with Mountain Travel Sobek, an American adventure-travel company.

The spring trip was billed as an "exploratory adventure." Ten American travelers — some experienced outdoors enthusiasts who had "Lawrence of Arabia" fantasies, others ordinary, nonathletic tourists looking for exotic sights — joined a late-spring tour. We traveled 700 miles south from Tripoli to the oasis hamlet of Ghat, then into the Acacus Mountains, where ancient rock art in secret places suggests the Sahara was once temperate enough to succor giraffes, buffalo and man. It was the first American trip in Libya since the U.S. government lifted its travel ban.

Exploring Libya Tour companies Among U.S. companies offering Libya tours are: Mountain Travel Sobek, 888-687-6235 or www.mtsobek.com Geographic Expeditions, 800-777-8183 or www.geoex.com Adventure Center, 800-228-8747 or www.adventurecenter.com Distant Horizons, 800-333-1240 or www.distant-horizons.com Travcoa, 800-992-2003 or www.travcoa.com Archaeological Institute of America Tours, 800-748-6262 or www.archaeological.org Travel Dynamics International, 800-257-5767 or www.traveldynamicsinternational .com/libya The French company Hommes et Montagnes has extensive experience in Africa: 011-33-4-76-66-14-43 or www.hommes-et-montagnes.com Libya cruises Some Mediterranean cruises, on small-ship and luxury lines, are adding stops in Libya, including Clipper Cruises and Silversea. Travel agents can give details. More information Although the U.S. government in February lifted restrictions, the State Department still has a travel warning in place, saying Libya may be linked to international terrorism and urging Americans to be cautious. Phone 888-407-4747 for recorded text or see www.travel.state.gov Web sites with background on Libya include www.libyaonline.com and www.lonelyplanet.com Seattle Times travel staff and news services

With us came Bastien Stieltjes and Ludovic Bousquet, two tough, sun-blasted guides from Hommes et Montagnes, a French company with 30 years of experience in tourist treks to the arid no-man's-lands of Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, Tunisia and Chad. They were supported by a host of indigenous Sahara Tuareg cooks, porters and camel herders. There was also strong, silent Mabrouk, a Libyan "security agent" who stuck with us through the worst, although he generally looked like he'd rather be drinking mint tea in Tripoli.

The most inhospitable season for trekking in the Sahara is May to October, but even by the end of April, when I traveled, the great 3.5-million-square-mile desert that stretches across northern Africa can get a little toasty. As a result, the trip was more agony than ecstasy.

It started out well enough. We flew on Libyan Arab Airlines from Tripoli to Ghat, which sits on a desert flat and looks a little as I imagine Palm Springs, Calif., did before sprinklers. It has an Italian colonial fort and a Gaudi-esque old town or medina, built of sand and dung, mostly melted away and abandoned after a devastating freak flood in the 1960s.

From there, we took Toyota Land Cruisers out of town. These were like any SUVs on U.S. freeways, except for the goatskin water vessels strapped to the sides. It was hot — 95 degrees, I'd guess — but as an enthusiast of America's desert Southwest, I know discomfort is the price of admission.

Our first night's camp was on the flank of a huge sand dune, where we frolicked with the enthusiasm of Florida kids on an Alaskan glacier.

Sitting on a mat, we ate spicy soup, followed by couscous, rice or pasta covered with vegetable-and-goat stew, prepared by Kader, our Tuareg cook. Then there were the traditional three glasses of tea: the first "bitter like life ... the second strong like love, the third sweet like death," as 20th-century Sahara desert naturalist Theodore Monod wrote.

Abandoning the vehicles, we unrolled our sleeping bags. The next day's eight-mile trek took us across a flat scattered with fossils and arrowheads, then over a pass that gave us views of a seemingly endless fretwork of charcoal-colored mountains, lapped by alluvial fans of sand. After climbing another row of dunes and crossing another flat, we stopped for lunch under a lone acacia tree, where we melted like spent candles. It was 102 degrees.

	JOHN MOORE / AP : A boy cleans up after lunch in a home in Ghadames, Libya. Americans are visiting Libya's towns, ancient ruins and desert since the U.S. lifted some travel restrictions earlier this year.

We waited until 4 p.m. to get going again, vainly hoping to avoid the cruelest heat of the day. By the time we pitched camp under another solitary acacia in a wadi, or canyon, we were exhausted. One member of the group had an eye infection and seemed close to heat exhaustion; another had stomach pains, caused, he soon realized, by kidney stones.

But our humor remained good, especially when we learned we had only four hours to hike the next morning.

Alas, we realized the next day, four hours of hiking by Tuareg estimation is seven hours for soft Americans. There were some dim scratches of rock art and bizarrely shaped mountains to see along the way. Mostly, I socialized with Stieltjes, one of the guides, a tall drink of tea who looked a little like Johnny Depp and read philosophy during rest stops.

By the time we camped under a rock overhang, I was thinking I might be able to complete the trek, despite the long, hot days in the inhospitable desert. Others, though, were holding private discussions with trip leader Richard Bangs. Late that afternoon, he addressed the group, offering us the option of aborting the trip. Six of us decided to leave, including the two clearly indisposed members of the group. Bangs, who handled the situation calmly and thoughtfully, said he would stay, allowing three others to carry on.

The vehicles couldn't get to our campsite, though, so we hiked the next morning to a more accessible spot, another longer-than-predicted slog ending in another interminable afternoon on the mats, all of us supine, singing pop hits from the 1960s. At 3:30 p.m., Bangs put his thermometer in the sun-cooked sand. It registered 132.8 degrees.

Finally, the Land Cruisers crested a nearby dune, taking those who didn't want to walk two more hours to our final campsite in a starkly beautiful countryside surrounded by rock arches and sculpted hoodoos. The vehicles had brought more water, giving us enough for sponge baths from tin bowls. The night was cool.

The next morning, we gave those who were going on our private stashes of candy and clean socks, then headed out of the desert — a 200-mile trip that took 9-½ hours, with stops for rock-art viewing. At one point, I saw a four-horse chariot scratched on the side of a boulder, bespeaking the mysterious desert empire of the Garamantes, who ruled southwest Libya for 1,000 years until about 19 B.C., when the Romans arrived.

For the members of the trip who went on, things only got more miserable. They endured an eight-hour sandstorm and suffered six breakdowns — mechanical, not mental — on the ride out.

Bangs, who accepted it all without complaint, later said, "You go. You try."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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