If a photo looks professionally taken, then that credit goes to Paul Woo or Francois DeAsis (check the @FJD in the bottom right corner)
For our last full day in Tripoli, our drive 2 hours east of Tripoli took us to Libya’s crown jewel of Leptis Magna. Our roadside coffee today involved a little bit of cake among intense discussions about allergies and geopolitics:
If you don’t know already, Leptis Magna was a prominent city from both the Carthaginian Empire and Roman Libya, second only to Rome at the time.
First founded as a Punic settlement before 500 BC, Leptis Manga became a Phoenician trading port that prospered for over 1000 years. It then expanded when one of its very own, Septimius Severus, reigned as the Emperor of the Roman Empire.
This impressive structure that welcomes you to Leptis Magna is the very Arch of Septimius Severus, which the Emperor had commissioned upon his visit to Leptis Magna as Emperor in 203 AD.
Words can’t express the majesty of the arch’s size relative to the ruins around it.
Then after the decline of the Roman Empire, the city became weakened by Berber raids, eventually falling to the Muslims in 647 AD and subsequently abandoned.
The city remained buried for over 1300 years until it was unearthed, rediscovered, and excavated by the Italians in 1920 during Italy’s occupation of Libya.
We began our walk through the Hadrianus baths.
The public toilets remain intact and sturdy as ever.
Past the baths we continued down the central Via Trionfale with the Chalcidicum and entry to the former basilica to our left.
We then passed the colonnade . . .
. . . and arrived at the marketplace.
Curious local Libyan onlookers asked us to take a photo with us here. Being that this was a marketplace, we debated whether to charge and haggle them for one, but I guess the first one’s on the house.
Fish were sorted and sold on these table inserts:
We found some little indentations in the floor meant to be used to play games. So we played our game.
Turn the corner west and the theater will be on your left:
Continuing onwards towards the sea, we reached the street where sex workers had made their trade.
Once we reached the coast, we took it all in. The waves crash particularly hard here, contributing to the understanding of how barren history always leaves human civilizations behind. The feelings here also reminded me of how the limbo dream stage was portrayed in the movie Inception.
We then turned towards the old forum:
Climbing up to the very top of the ruins, we were awestruck by the vastness of the complex.
An old basilica borders this complex and on the other are smaller temples dedicated to Hercules, Augustus, and Roma:
Find the creepy arch bearing the 6 heads of Medusa in the middle of the ruins.
We spent almost 2 hours wandering Leptis Magna and then boarded back onto our bus to have a traditional lamb lunch at a local Libyan restaurant.
Afterwards, we regrouped for one final stop at the Amphitheater Circus outside of Leptis Magna.
You can walk inside one of the walls from the bottom to reach the other side and the coastline:
As you exit the amphitheater and look behind you, your brain may do loops trying to figure out how truly big this structure is and has been built into the Earth. Or is it the other way around?
Returning back to Tripoli, we skipped a sunset shisha session by the coast and had an early final meal at a local restaurant where we chose various freshly caught fish on the ground floor for them to cook as dinner:
To be honest, as varied as we tried to make our choices, they did a decent job in grilling everything to look and taste the same to the point we couldn’t discern which was which:
We also took this time to celebrate Francois with a surprise birthday cake! For some reason just like Sampson back in Syria, Francois would celebrate his very birthday on and in the middle of our monsoon.
Seeing that we had booked an 8:10am flight out to Tunis the next morning ahead of time, we chose to turn in early at 10pm to get in our sleep for a 5am wake up call and ride to the airport at 5:30am.
Once Badran assisted us past the initial security all the way to check-in and then to the second security screening, we said goodbye to him, our driver, and our 2 minders.
Just as when we entered Libya, they make us as foreigners wait for all the Libyans stamp through first before finally stamping us out. Be mindful of this if you’re running late to your flight.
There’s a smoking room and decent sized public snack bar at the departures lounge with a very long line in front of it. Not having any local dinars to use we headed straight to our gate to board our flight.
After an uneventful hour departing Libya and landing back in Tunis, we stamped back into Tunisia, reorganized our money to take out Tunisian dinars, and agreed collectively to hail 2 cabs on the Bolt app for brunch at the Four Seasons in Tunis’ upscale Gammarth neighborhood.
20 minutes later, we were reconnected back to the Western world of opulence and excess after 5 sobering and authentic days in Libya:
Saying our sad goodbyes one by one to Corinna, Francois, and Leshawn one by one after breakfast, Paul, Mihaela and I hung back to cram in a tight fitting and last minute one hour hamamm treatment at the Four Seasons.
I negotiated what was originally supposed to be a single opening to accommodate all 3 of us within 2 hours before we’d have to run to catch a 6:30pm flight from Tunis to Rome!
We then landed in Rome at 9pm local time, stamping back into the EU and hailed an Uber. I first dropped them both off so they could make it to a 9:45pm reservation that Paul had booked a week ago (without asking, lol) at Salumeria Con Cucina Roscioli. I then asked my cab driver to continue onwards on a new fare to take all our bags up to an Airbnb I had reserved next to Roma Termini train station.
Surprised that both the Airbnb host Agapi and the cab driver would help me up with the bags up to our lodgings, I checked in and charmed the host to then drive me back to the restaurant where Paul and Mihaela had already ordered ahead for me.
Wow, this is why I wait to have Italian food until I’m back in Italy.
Paul then took us for a walk in the cold city streets for a 1:00am reservation at the Jerry Lewis Project speakeasy:
I was back in bed and totally out by 2am. It’s been a very very long day.
- At time of posting in Leptis Magna, it was 23 °C - Humidity: 64% | Wind Speed: 14km/hr | Cloud Cover: clear and breezy