Kiwi Adventure Language Tours

Military checkpoints were not always such a bad thing, sometimes you can also have breakfast there. As regards Tobruk it was the only place where I could find breakfast. The drawback was that the checkpoint in question was well out of town on the way to Ajdabiya and Bengazhi.

There were no buses to the front line and anyway those going went in utes that could be turned into "technicals" by mounting a heavy machine gun on the back, which didn't leave much room for hitchhikers like me. I gave it a shot anyhow as accompanying combatants with my camcorder was like candy to kids for a documentary maker.

My first ride was with a natural born comic who entertained me with a satirical ditty on Qaddafi's connection with a donkey while kissing an A4 sheet featuring Omar Mukhtar and driving. Omar was the guy splashed across many Free Libya flags and about as popular at Padro Pio in the south of Italy. He was so popular that even Qaddafi carried his photo chained around his neck when he visited Berlusconi in 2009.

Making his point in-your-face Qaddafi style Omar was chained in the photo after having been captured by Italian forces shortly before being hanged by them in 1931. They made a film about him in 1981, banned in Italy and not screened there until Qaddafi's 2009 visit when he also dragged along Omar's not-so-young son. Qaddafi's visit with his all-female "virgin" lipstick-wearing bodyguards followed a promise by Berlusconi of US$5 Billion compensation for Italy's occupation of Libya, 1911 - 43.

Omar, was the ideal candidate for Libyan revolutionary(past and present) icon, as being long dead he could not object to how or by whom he was iconized. And he was a hero to all Libyans...no mean thing when the outcome of civil war is never too certain.
Admittedly, my delightful driver did not impart this information to me as his English seemed limited to Donkey and my Arabic phrase book was still ear-marked to the section on ordering breakfast.

The menu for breakfast at the checkpoint was fixed in any case, bread roll and soft cheese. While chewing on this I roamed through the small checkpoint building with uncompromising burnt-black interior. The vegetables and supplies stacked inside were fresh however and the tea was brewing outside.

Checkpoint Tobruk: Fresh supplies

Meanwhile the citizen-militia outside did their car stopping and asked motorists if by the way they wouldn't like to take me with them to Benghazi. One soon showed interest, unfortunately it was before the tea was ready. Clearly not the instantly trusting sort he wanted to see my passport and I wanted to see his ID. In the end he got to see my passport and I got a ride. As we left the next shift of 6-8 checkpoint men clad in camouflage blue uniforms, perhaps donated by the Qatari government, arrived on the back of a small truck. Each filed past with a simple handshake graciously sparing me from another round of Arabic name-learning.

Hany's new SUV confirmed the 31-year old's claim to be well off. His business card said Shell sub-supplier. He said he had taken his family to Egypt. He was at pains to say he was a self-made man, presumably because in a country where much of the private sector had been wiped out and where wealth went to those who vouched for Qaddafi he could easily have been taken for a Qaddafi loyalist. His refrain that he was only telling the truth and giving the facts was easy to believe but I also recalled Saif al-Islam Qaddafi's televised hate speech in which he presented himself as the honest man.

As we passed through one of Libya's few lush spots, the Green Mountains, Jebel Akhdar, a mountain plateau with valleys, Hany explained that Japanese had offered to buy the whole of this region for 3 Billion(I presume $US) to establish resorts. Qaddafi had declined, possibly because he had his own mountain hideaway up there, which I later visit.

Hany didn't want to be filmed because, he said, he was not presentable after a tough few days that had included confrontations with corrupt anti-Qaddafi border guards and Egyptian and Libyan smugglers of war loot. I filmed instead many miles of desert road and dashboard, doing only one fast pan near journey's end to capture the main wall of now empty Benghazi criminal and inadvertently capturing Hany in the shot. Something the alert businessman immediately noted.

Hany drove me to a decent hotel and was about to pay for me. I mounted my own protest. I was tired of looking at my wad of 10 dinar notes, each illustrated with Omar Mukhtar's face. Hany came later to my hotel after a much needed sleep, looking fresh and dapper, and ready at his own insistence to face the camera to present himself.

Later, on my own in Benghazi's insurrectionist hub, the teeming seafront Freedom square, I learnt that an Al Jazeera camera man had just been shot on the road I had travelled along a few hours previously.

Main seaside square Benghazi

Among the caricatures in the Benghazi's seafront square a 14.5mm heavy machine gun casing taped to a poster with a Qaddafi government phone number written above. Some people here in Benghazi had, it was explained to me, been receiving threatening phone calls from pro-Qaddafi elements. As Nicholas Pelham in the New York Review of Books had noted "Some speak of a lurking paw of the colonel." Pelham also later wrote that when on 21 March the Colonel's lurking paw took a swipe as pro-Qaddafi tanks were heading into town, one of the those artists, "Qais al-Hilal, [was]shot in the neck after finishing one of his trademark Abu Shafshufas, fuzzy-wuzzy caricatures of Qaddafi."

Not far away a boy was struggling with a large poster demonizing Qaddafi. In the forehead of the effigy was a hole for another 14.5mm shell casing which the boy was trying to wedge into place. Such casings are not so easy to hold into place on thin placards but finally another boy packed the hole with paper and they were ready for the cameras. I hoped he was not the same boy allegedly set upon by a man as he was heading home through the streets of Benghazi. The man, I was told, later appeared at the same hospital treating the boy, for attention to the injuries he must have sustained when residents intervened. The assailant was spotted by the boy.