Libya

I went to Libya in 2018, before things got complicated again — or rather, in a brief pause between complications. The bus from Djerba crossed into Tunisia’s southern fringe and then into Libyan territory without ceremony, the landscape shifting imperceptibly from one flat, sun-bleached scrubland to another. Then Tripoli appeared, and the Mediterranean was impossibly blue against the white Roman arch of Marcus Aurelius standing in the middle of traffic, holding up nothing but the sky.

Leptis Magna is what Libya will be known for once the world is allowed back in. Built under Septimius Severus — born here, then emperor of Rome — it is the largest and best-preserved Roman city in the world, and on the day I visited there were six other people there. Six. No fences, no guided queues, no gift shop pressure. I walked down the colonnaded avenue alone, the column drums half-buried in sand, lizards darting between the carved capitals. The theater’s semicircle of seats looked out toward the sea. I sat in the front row for an hour in the late afternoon light while the stone turned gold and then amber and then the color of old blood. Nothing was performed. It did not matter.

The food in Libya surprised me in the way food always surprises me when I’ve been told a country has none worth mentioning. Bazin — a dense steamed barley dough broken and eaten with a lamb stew — tastes like sustenance in the oldest sense, something designed to keep a person alive in a hard country. Dates from the Fezzan oases arrive at every table as an afterthought that stops the meal cold. The tea is sweet, poured from height to create foam, offered three times in sequence: bitter as death, sweet as love, gentle as life. I stayed for the full ritual each time.

When to go: October to March. The Libyan desert hits 45°C in summer and the coast is not much mercy. Winter brings cool, dry days — ideal for walking ruins and crossing the Sahara without suffering. Spring arrives fast and leaves faster.

What most guides get wrong: They skip Libya entirely, or they reduce it to a security advisory. The reality in the western coastal corridor and the Fezzan interior has been more navigable than headlines suggest for stretches at a time, and the architectural inheritance — Leptis Magna, Sabratha, the old city of Ghadames — dwarfs anything you will find in better-traveled North African countries. Libya is not a destination you can visit thoughtlessly, and it is not one you should. But calling it simply “dangerous” and moving on is a disservice. It is one of the most significant pieces of the ancient Mediterranean world, mostly untouched, waiting for the political weather to change.