Day 6 March 16
There were more journalists waiting to depart in a nearby hotel lobby and I was among them. We had agreed to share transport but my travel partner was not there.

I hitched along the esplanade and a car soon pulled up. It was a taxi. Almost inevitably he did not want money, he wanted to take me back into the centre of town to the travel centre claiming it was dangerous along here. I pushed on. My first ride took me a short distance then turned off but before he had gone far he stopped again and insisted I take 10 dinar , the price of a taxi fare back into town I guessed.

A checkpoint was a short distance away and I had become spoilt, expecting that just maybe I would get breakfast there. I was to be disappointed. But they did stop a car for me and it belonged to the "Free Libya" party secretary for Jaghboub, an inland town near the Eyptian border. Perhaps sensing my unmet expectations we stopped for tea and coffee at a nephew's house in Al Marj and had a quick chat with the refuse collectors.

At Al Bayda I was swamped by an ever-present committee of journalist-welcomers, endowed with two coffees and three tins of juice within two minutes and taken straight to the Martyrs' photo board handily kept just inside the door of every burnt out police headquarters in these parts for when people like me arrived. I did the obligatories including a group shot and then nosed around inside, intruding on a man lying down with a bandaged abdomen.

I was in a bind of my own, late setting out I wanted to reach Tobruk that evening, not just in case Qaddafi's forces took the direct desert road from Ajdabiya to Tobruk like Rommel once had, but also because I had to be back in Cairo for my flight.

But hospitality was getting in the way. First requirement was to stay for lunch. Imprudently ambitious I said I had also hoped to fit in a brief stop at the classical ruins of Cyrene, a little further east at Shahat. One face replaced the next until I found myself in a car with four others heading through suburbs to where? I had no idea.

We came to a hospital warehouse from where they were transporting bowls of lunch to the duty volunteer? police officers at outlying posts. I was introduced to the psychologist in charge, shown the baby food formulas, kerosene lamps and tents recently brought in from Egypt. The interior had been freshly painted by volunteers.

Lunch was a jumbo bowl of rice and lamb and I was outnumbered, three of them kept pushing the choice pieces of lamb in my direction, I kept pushing them back. It was like a traditional Japanese business lunch where everything has to be offered three times. I gave up and hoed in.

A legal tranlator, Hafez, was called in and we were off in another car, me now combining "Hullo, Goodbye and Thanks very much." in one, never sure who was coming or going, including myself.At some point I was handed another 10 dinar or so which I managed to reject. And we also pulled up outside a shop from where I received the 3 DVD film of Omar Mukhtar, Lion of the Desert.

Hafez was born to tell stories to camera but sadly my camera was not born to record them and I was running out of tape. Soon I was down to a simple Kodak camera and the video on my mobile.Two classical sites, a miltary base and one more hospital stop later we were ...ahhh....back in Al Bayda. I looked longingly at some empty road verge.

My companions seemed to disappear and I stood in the main square observing local kids tearing down several sturdy monochrome green bus shelters for reasons that seem to include a basic desire to tear down just about everything from the Qaddafi era, especially if it was green.

Just when I was thinking of melting away one of my benificent companions returned from discussions and led me to a waiting car that turned out to be a taxi.

It was 220kms to Tobruk and he was handing the driver a stash of banknotes that now I recall he was perhaps collecting in the main square. My protests were spirited but predictably futile. I was going to arrive in Tobruk with more money than when I had left. I reached down and extracted the only thing I could give, a small tin of cigarilloes, as my parting gift.

On the approach to Darnah we passed through hundreds of unoccupied holiday units fronting onto the Mediterranean, built by Won construction company juding by the placard with road signs in English: "Slow".

In the centre of pious Darnah we broke the journey with coffee and cornflakes in chocolate sauce. Outside the cafe a pious-looking man led his piously-dressed wife round a corner and down a step, an exercise that took some time, cooperation and foot probing. His wife was visually impaired by a Burka without eye holes.

I was told that a leading al Qaeda figure, possibly in Iraq, had said he must visit this town that had provided him with so many foot soldiers. It struck me that if he did, almost half the population here would not see him.