I’ve still a few boxes to tick on my travels
May 1945. A young 24-year-old stands on an African beach with his friend, taking in the view. And also trying to come to terms with the fact that it’s over, and he has survived. It will still be some time before he sees home again but now, at least, he knows that he will be going back and that his young wife will be waiting for him.
It was May 8 – 72 years ago – when Victory in Europe was celebrated, the announcement of the German surrender officially noted the night before. The 24-year-old on the beach that May afternoon was my father. The beach in question was in Tripoli. And for the rest of his life, which only ended in August 2015 when he was 94 years old, my father still talked about that day. How he and his RAF colleague had been spat at by a waitress in a little cafe, how she had called them ‘bastardi inglesi’ (Libya being an Italian colony) and had refused to serve them.
How he’d picked up a small shell on that Tripoli beach and carried it home to Co Derry, keeping it for the remaining 70 years of his life as a reminder, a kind of talisman.
I’d ask to see it occasionally as a child and he’d produce it, going on to tell me stories about his war in the North African desert as a dispatch rider, referencing places that sounded so exotic to my childish ears, with names like Tripoli and Cyrenaica and Benghazi. He taught me to count to 10 in Arabic and he gave me, I believe, a lifelong grá for the Middle East and North Africa.
A fascination that has taken me over the years to Israel and Morocco, to Egypt, to Jordan, to the West Bank, and further east still, to the likes of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
But, with plans thwarted for different reasons on two occasions, sadly, I have never made it to Tripoli. And now, with the ongoing conflict in that part of the world, it’s not exactly prime travelling territory.
Yet I’ve been thinking about the Libyan capital this past week because of the VE anniversary. My husband and I were set to visit about nine years ago as guests of one particular tour operator. Then the dates were changed at the last minute and when we realised that the new itinerary would have us in the desert and visiting the magnificent Leptis Magna archaeological site when the mercury was likely to be north of 50 degrees, we made our excuses and put the trip on the long finger.
Travel is a funny old business. Yes, of course it’s the places you get to visit that stay with you, the memorable moments and experiences. The sights, the beauty of the landscape, the people, those ‘wow’ moments you know you will remember all your life.
But the travel engine, the thing that feeds the travel bug, is actually the thought of the places you desperately want to see – but haven’t yet. They are the places that energise me, that keep me on Google until the early hours, that have me buying guidebooks for places, not that I am about to visit, but which, one day, I just might. And Tripoli, which I promised my father I would get to one day, is one of those spots.
Beirut is another, and a place I intend to visit within the year. God knows, it’s taken me long enough. For I first became intrigued by Beirut back in 1983, three years before Brian Keenan was kidnapped and the Lebanese city became so prominent on the Irish radar. I was in Istanbul for the first time, staying in a hotel in the old city. The hotel was crazy busy, full of elegant Arab women (Iranian and Iraqi) swathed in black from head to toe – my first real encounter with Muslim culture.
‘Normally they would be in Beirut,’ the concierge told me when I quizzed him about the guests. But the war in Lebanon had put paid to that. ‘Beirut,’ I asked. ‘What’s it like?’ ‘Probably the most beautiful city in the Arab world,’ he said. And I decided then and there that when the war ended and the dust settled I would go.
Thirty-four years, I reckon, is long enough to wait.