Libya comes in from the cold

[tolibya]

After years of isolation, Libya is finally starting to get the attention it deserves. Joanne O'Connor explores the Roman ruins and spectacular desert landscapes of North Africa's hottest destination



'I'll give you twelve dinars for the necklace.' Walid shakes his head sadly. 'Oh all right then, fifteen. Fifteen dinars.' A look of pain ripples across his face, as if I have offended him. 'How much then?' I ask, exasperated.

'No dinar! I don't want your money. It's a gift.'

Something very odd is happening. This is the fourth shop in Tripoli's old town my friend Andie and I have walked into, clutching our hot little wad of money, and so far we've failed to spend a single penny. It started in the market, when the man on the fruit stall wouldn't let us pay for a bag of dates. Then, in the patissierie, the boy with the eyelashes as long as a camel's shyly insisted that we take two pieces of baklava. And now Walid is fastening the beads around my neck and inviting us to have a cappuccino with him in his tiny Aladdin's cave of a shop in the copper souk.

This wouldn't happen in Marrakesh, I think to myself. But this is not Morocco, this is Libya, where tourists are still rare enough to be seen as a source of mild curiosity rather than wallets on legs. Against the deafening clang of hammers on metal from the surrounding workshops, Walid says something I am to hear several times during my stay here: 'Your gift to us is that you visit us and you go home and tell people that Libya is not a bad place. We are not bad people.'

Libya has come a long way since the dark days of the 1980s when the shooting of a WPC outside the Libyan embassy in London and the bombing of a Pan-Am flight over Lockerbie, turned it into a pariah state. Now, 37 years after he took control of the country, Colonel Gadaffi seems to be curbing some of his more antisocial tendencies. In 2003 Libya officially took responsibility for Lockerbie and renounced its weapons of mass destruction programme. UN sanctions were lifted and tourists have been trickling in ever since.

Like most tourists, I've come on an organised tour. To get a visa you need to book with a tour operator and it's forbidden to travel around the interior without a guide. There are 11 of us in our group plus Stan, the tour leader, Milud, a local guide, and a chubby young man with freckles and red hair. He doesn't speak any English and, at first, nobody seems to know who he is, but Stan tells us that every time they go to the bathroom he shows Stan his gun and winks, so we surmise that he's our armed guard. At least I hope that's what he was.

The Observer Sunday January 21 2007