Long Way Down Read online

  We climbed the steps into roofless, doorless rooms that were cut in sandstone. We came to a small courtyard and Charley suggested it might have been for concession stands or where they sold beer maybe: immediately I went into bartender mode.

  CHARLEY: Ewan wanted to know if Romans had beer and I had no idea. He was serving though and I leant on the imaginary bar.

  ‘What’ll it be, sir?’ he asked me. ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘A flagon of wine and, er, a glass of sherry for the wife.’

  ‘Right, sir, coming up.’ He was pouring from an imaginary pump. ‘Come to see the lions, have you, sir?’

  ‘Naw, here to see that famous Charley Boorman gladiator.’

  ‘You know,’ Ewan said, ‘he’s not all he’s cracked up to be. Sherry, for the missus was it?’ He poured a glass. ‘I mean he’s not bad, but he’s not all he’s cracked up to be.’

  ‘He’s the only reason I came,’ I said sourly. ‘Got any crisps? Actually forget the crisps; I’ll take a bag of pig’s ears instead.’

  ‘Got some in the back, sir,’ Ewan sought pig’s ears. ‘Yeah, he’s all right that Boorman, but he’s not all he’s cracked up to be.’ He handed me the bag. ‘That’ll be fifteen Roman shekels.’

  We climbed to the top tier of stone seats and got a fantastic view across open ground to the shore. We could make out where the rest of the buildings had been now – the stumps of pillars, the last layer of stone blocks: the place must have been enormous. Down below we checked out the acoustics and even now when you spoke or sang out the sound seemed to ping right back at you, like having a speaker or stage monitor there in front of you.

  It was getting late and our guides had booked hotel rooms for us in the capital. A few miles with crazy drivers, absolute nutters all around us. Like Ewan said, they were right up your bum and much worse the closer we got to the city. We passed under a massive metal arch and were really in Kaddafi country now; his picture was everywhere: on billboards, buildings, in the hotel lobby. I noticed he was always looking up, chin thrusting, kind of arrogant. We decided it was fortunate we had guides after all, certainly as we came into Tripoli, because the road signs were telling us nothing and the road systems, Jesus; we’d come to what we thought was a roundabout and the next thing we knew it was actually a dual carriageway.

  Finally we got to the hotel and by now I was knackered, the sand still sticking in my throat. Ewan and I set about unpacking our bags. ‘I’m glad we decided to crash here,’ I said, ‘instead of pushing on.’

  ‘Me too. We’d only wear ourselves out and have a horrible accident or something. Another hundred and thirty clicks to wherever it is, not worth it. Pity we didn’t know anything about that last place, wasn’t it?’

  I was smiling. ‘So we didn’t know the name. Hey, after a while one set of Roman ruins starts to look like another. You know what I mean, it’s like join the dots, isn’t it?’

  Ewan was killing himself. Claudio on the other hand was filming and he piped up from behind the lens as he does now and again: ‘It is a little embarrassing that you don’t know anything about the place,’ he stated.

  ‘Shut up, Claudio.’

  In my room later I put my boots on the balcony, squeezed the damp from my pillow and sorted through my bag. It really was very busy outside and it was a relief to arrive in the dark and cooler air; we’d have a nice surprise when we woke up tomorrow with the city laid before us. It took a day at least to figure out a country, the roads in particular. Here we were in Libya with 2500 kilometres of coast road ahead of us. The drivers had been crazy and I hoped that the further away from the capital we got the better they might become.

  As we’d left the ruins earlier I’d seen a couple of young sisters, hand in hand and dressed in matching clothes. I’d had a pang for home – Ollie used to dress our daughters in matching clothes and now I really missed my family.

  Again I studied the text my wife had sent me; she was right, enjoy it, Charley. That’s what I had to do. I thought about Claudio’s comment. OK, so Ewan and I weren’t overly aware of the history. I wonder how many people actually are given this is Libya and they have fewer tourists in a year than the Isle of Wight does in a week. It didn’t make it any less inspiring and besides, this venture wasn’t supposed to be a history lesson. I enjoyed just soaking up the sights, learning as we went along. Anything we weren’t sure about we could always ask, or check up later.

  I started thinking about David and Jimmy taking off in darkness and driving back to Tunis, sorting the trucks in the middle of the road, gear here, gear there, what they needed to take. Looking back I think Ewan and I might have seemed a little blasé, like it wasn’t a big deal the two of them not being allowed into Libya. If that was true, we hadn’t meant to. We were genuinely upset, but we had spent four months trying to find a solution, and in the end we’d had no choice.

  We’d see them again in Egypt. We had a long way to go before that. My mind began to race through what lay ahead, how little time we had, how many miles we had to do…and that was just this country. We had to make the ferry in Aswan next Saturday or we’d lose a week and we couldn’t afford that because we’d made a commitment to UNICEF in Ethiopia. I mustn’t think about it, not now, not after riding all day. Ollie was right, forget the bigger picture. Wake up, Charley. For Christ’s sake wake up and smell the coffee.

  EWAN: We were blasé about David and Jimmy, a little nonchalant I suppose, that two members of our team had to go. They had been gutted, and I think our attitude had only added to their upset. It was something I regretted, and I sent David a text to let him know we were thinking of them both.

  I was equally worried about making the ferry that would take us the length of Lake Nasser. The cars and bikes had to be there on Saturday and we’d not sail until Monday. I hated the idea of the vehicles travelling outside our supervision. I also had no idea how we would do the mileage and the thought of racing on and on all the time was beginning to piss me off. We had only six days and we were still in the north-west of Libya and there was every chance we’d be held up at the Egyptian border. Even if we weren’t we still had to get all the way down the Nile. Fuck, it annoyed me; the last thing I’d wanted to be was a slave to the clock. I’d accepted it in Europe but now we were in Africa and nothing had changed.

  CHARLEY: Riding through Libya following a van full of official people makes it very difficult to meet anyone, and perhaps that influenced our decision as much as the time pressure we were under. We’d left Tripoli at eight o’clock and it was already thirty-three degrees. Ewan pulled alongside me. ‘Hey, Charley, only thirty-three. Christ it’s fucking freezing.’ We had a laugh and he indicated the back of the Nissan. ‘Take a look, Jim Foster, taking Jimmy Crankshaft’s place.’

  Camera in hand, Jim was straddling the spare wheel wearing shorts and T-shirt with his legs apart; first thing in the morning it was not a pretty sight, especially given the fact he had the shaft of a shovel sticking up between his legs. Next to him, stuffed behind the straps that held the second spare, were the underpants that had chafed Ewan’s arse. They’d been there a few days now and if they didn’t fall off maybe we could auction them in Cape Town.

  There were buses everywhere – minibuses crammed with people they just seemed to pick up from anywhere. Tripoli’s not high-rise, in fact it’s a pleasant, atmospheric city, and we rode through the centre, coming to Green Square where an old fort overlooked a lake. The buildings were two storeys, white mostly, though some of them with a splash of minty green. We were in the old part of town and I could pick out a few coffee houses but the city seemed all but untouched by tourism. There were some signs of modernism, mind you, like mobile phones and a few decent cars. It’s easy to forget that even under what we’d consider oppressive dictatorships people do what people do, they go to work, they go to the coffee shop, there’s beach life. I even saw merry-go-rounds.

  Out of the city we could see warships at anchor just offshore. The land was flat, the trees
short and bushy and everywhere I looked there were thousands of plastic bags, plastic containers, just dumped by the side of the road. After the cleanliness of Tunisia it gave the whole place a down at heel, ugly feel. It appeared that if you had something to chuck away you just did, whenever and wherever you pleased.

  Once you got away from the city the quality of tarmac declined considerably with potholes and sand encroaching from either side. The whole place had a parched feel, the air hot and dry. Apparently there are no natural rivers in Libya only wadis: valleys that hold water after periods of heavy rain. The lack of natural flowing water was evident in the atmosphere; there was not even a vague sense of freshness even though it was early morning. As we went deeper into the country we passed more farmland. We saw fruit growing, rows and rows of small trees that looked like nurseries. A few miles further on, we passed a horse in the back of a pickup. A low pickup, car-sized; the horse was just standing there.

  EWAN: We’d seen a camel in another pickup, on its knees with its head facing the upcoming traffic, nonchalantly chewing the cud; a camel and now a horse. I guess they had to be transported somehow.

  The litter was oppressive and with it that insistent odour of garbage. It didn’t bother me too much; it was as it was and I was excited about the city we were heading for. Not just any city, an ancient city. Our guide was called Iystiri and for eight years he’d been showing people the magnificence of Leptis Magna.

  He told us it had been established about 1100 BC, but it’s mainly known as the city of Septimius Severus. A native of Leptis Magna he became Emperor of Rome in the second century and died in York, of all places. Just as we’d ridden the Appian Way, Charley and I now walked a road that led from the great arch of Septimius all the way to Alexandria: in the other direction it had stretched to Carthage. The arch itself was incredible – it had been smashed into pieces centuries before, but in 1920 a group of Italian archaeologists had excavated the stones buried in the sand and reconstructed them. The road itself was exquisitely paved and stretched as far as the eye could see about six feet below the level of the sand. Some of the stones were decorated with images of Septimius and his sons – copies apparently, the original pieces in a museum in Tripoli. There were also huge triangles and our guide explained that they were in fact Venetian from a much later period, put there to keep evil spirits away. There were eight Corinthian pillars with eight Gods, palm in one hand and crown in the other, and four spread eagles, the ancient symbol of power. We could see ramparts, remnants of the old walls and discovered that in the city’s heyday they had run for three kilometres. We saw images of the Gods, Diana in her short skirt and Apollo completely naked.

  ‘Well hung,’ Charley commented quietly. ‘Well, he is a God after all.’

  Some of what we were exploring had been discovered as late as 1962 and the excavation was still going on three years ago. Charley was shaking his head in wonder. ‘Imagine finding it,’ he said. ‘Digging it up and realising what you had: it must have been incredible.’

  Iystiri pointed out that the middle stones in the street had a camber to them and told us that in the old days water flowed under them; it came from the wadi of Leptis Magna three hundred metres away. Wadis supplied the whole city with fresh water, for drinking, bathing and sanitation.

  ‘There used to be shops here,’ Charley said, ‘right here. And houses, business places and people.’

  ‘Not so many mopeds though,’ I put in.

  ‘No, right: I bet they had those little chariots to tear about in, the kids I mean, you know, drawn by greyhounds or something.’

  CHARLEY: We came to a corner where our guide pointed out another cosmic battle; this time the defender of the city was a winged penis. Yes, that’s right, a winged penis doing battle with the evil eye. According to Iystiri the penis fought the eye to keep the same evil spirits away. The piece of limestone where the battle was captured had been there since the second century so we just had to press a palm against it for luck. Ewan looked sideways at me. ‘Well, mate. We’ve touched a penis in Libya. Not what we set out to do perhaps, but a winged penis at least.’

  ‘It was placed here in communist times,’ Iystiri told us.

  Ewan and I exchanged a puzzled look. ‘Communist,’ Ewan said, ‘in the second century? Jesus, really, I just don’t know anything about anything.’

  It didn’t make a lot of sense. Surely communism was Marx and Lenin: Russia in World War I?

  ‘Did he really say communist?’ Ewan asked again.

  A voice lifted from behind the camera. ‘I think he means Commodus,’ it said.

  We came to an open, grassy area. It had been a kind of sports field where people wrestled and messed about. Across the street were the remains of the public baths.

  ‘Turkish baths,’ Ewan reminded me, ‘from Long Way Round, remember?’

  ‘Where we were beaten to a pulp,’ I said.

  ‘Scrubbed to within an inch of our lives,’ he was shaking his head with a smile. ‘Imagine it, having a bit of a wrestle with your mates then coming over here for a bit of a bath.’

  The wind had picked up and was bringing sand, very hot and hard on the eyes – a warning of what was to come. The guide led us through the baths, which he referred to as Hadrianic – I suppose from the time of Hadrian whose wall we’d already been to. The Romans were really muscling in on this trip now, weren’t they?

  Iystiri showed us the outside pool first, the floor of which had been mosaic, the sides marble. We could still make out great slabs of stone, plinths where statues had once stood. He took us to what he called a ‘Hot Room’ where there had been additional pools, or basins, as he called them. He showed us where the pipes came in – one for hot water and one for cold; the hot water heated by massive furnaces. Above each was a cistern holding water from the wadis and slaves worked all the time to keep the fires burning. Hot air was captured and pumped through tiles in a flue system that was covered over with marble. Heated walls and floor, it was amazing. The engineering was incredible and to think this all went back to the second century. Some of the people brought their own slaves to the baths to massage their masters with olive oil. They’d start in the sweat room, have a massage then go to the hot room to clean the oil with scrapers. After that it would be the warm room before finally plunging into the massive pool in the open air. Ewan made the point that little had changed over the years: in Leptis Magna they had a bit of a wrestle then went to the baths for a swim and sauna; at home we might go to the gym and have a bit of a workout then go for a swim and sauna. The only difference was the cost of membership.

  There were dressing rooms and everything and anyone was allowed to use the baths though the wealthier people also had them at their villas. It was so forward thinking; they even had a sewerage system complete with communal toilets. In the open air Ewan and I perched on a stone bench with lots of keyhole-shaped apertures punched through it.

  ‘So Ewan,’ I said with concentrated effort, ‘how’re the slaves?’

  He took a moment to squeeze. ‘Fine, fine. I got a right good new one the other day.’

  ‘I had a hell of a time at the vomit bath the other night,’ I told him. ‘You know, the one we saw in the street; must’ve done it three times, but then I did have four meals.’

  Underneath your bum running water passed through a trough so your doings were swept away as soon as you’d done them. In front of your feet was another trench: you did your business then scooped with your hand and…well…you can imagine.

  ‘You have to watch for the bloke further up, mind,’ Ewan said pointing. ‘Make sure he didn’t double-scoop, you know what I mean?’

  ‘No double-scooping. Right. You don’t want corn in your scoop.’

  Iystiri took us into the forum or marketplace that had pillars running the perimeter in a rectangle. There had been a portico built above them housing lots of stalls, shops and arcades; the central area had been open to the air. One wall was intact and it gave us a tremendous sense of
how it would have been: the hustle and bustle of trading cloths, fruit, spices, incense maybe, even livestock and slaves. The entrances had been decorated with the heads of two gods, one of which was Medusa with the snakes in her hair. From the forum we went to the Severan Basilica, originally the law courts but, after the Romans converted to Christianity, this place had become a church decorated by stones carved with griffins, one of which lay smashed on the ground at our feet.

  EWAN: The basilica really made an impression on me. I loved the griffins, who had the body of a lion with the head and wings of an eagle. Iystiri told us they symbolised eternity. I found it moving, the thought of this ancient civilisation, long gone, painting images of things they believed would last for ever.

  The whole place was amazing, so unexpected and moving, and as near a glimpse of everyday Roman life as you could get. I had such a vivid image of the people of Leptis Magna going about their lives. I was reminded again of how important it was to stop and take time out from the journey and from racing on ahead.

  Back at the bikes, we had a major discussion with Russ about what we were going to do next. The choice was either to stick to the coast road and see places like Benghazi and probably not make the Aswan ferry, or speed across the desert road tomorrow. The ferry took us to Sudan and it only went once a week. If we missed it, we would be turning our schedule upside down.

  Charley was mulling it over: ‘I know we’re rushing, but what choice do we have?’ he said. ‘Of course we’d like more freedom here and in Egypt, but we have the whole of Sudan ahead. Once we’re done with the boat in Egypt there isn’t anything to stop us.’