There is a strip of tarmac that runs below the Sea of Sand in Libya between the towns as Ghat and Ghadames and eventually leads to the Acacaus Mountains. These towns are on the tourist routes, (if that is what you can call a route that is only visited by very well equipped four wheel drive cars) and because of this the signs telling you where to go next are in Arabic and English.

On one particular adventure Louise and I had to take a car out of the desert, a car that had broken its differential after the challenging crossing of the sand sea so we had to travel further to the east than “the tourist” would normally go. The road took us into a town, an extremely large town where ALL of the writing and speaking was in Arabic. At this time my Arabic was sketchy to say the least and after an hour of trying to drive east we were finding a lot of dead ends or roads that became narrower and narrow and we had to back out-nobody seemed to mind our preambles at all.

I will just have to ask someone I thought, so as a cafe hove into view we stopped and I popped in. To my delight I discovered that all three of the men inside spoke English, so we got talking and astonishingly discovered that they hailed from a all the corners of North Africa. There was a Moroccan, a Nigerian and an Abyssinian and I wondered why they were here in Libya and soon found out that it was not safe for them in their own countries but Gadafi welcomed them here!!

Eventually after a few cups of tea and much talk of life the universe and everything the Abyssinian hailed a taxi and guided us to the outskirts of the town where we headed north towards Tripoli to rejoin the rest of the group who had crossed the sand.