After a lovely day in Tripoli spent exploring the medina and souks we headed south towards Algeria ignoring both the FCO and parents advice in the process. We stopped en route to visit 2 kasrs at Nalut and overnighted in a small town near Ghadmes where a child kindly lobbed a stone onto our roof breaking one of the solar panels. A roll of selloptape later and it was working fine! Ghadames has to be the highlight of our trip so far, we explored the underground town sunk beneath the Oasis and went dune riding in a 4x4 which would have failed an MOT years ago. We had sand bread and tea with the Toureg and sat on the dines and watched the sun set over Algeria. We had been invited to round the evening off with traditional music and dancing laid on for a French minister and US diplomat but when we turned up we found it had been cancelled because they were too tired!

A 780 km drive back in a day to Tripoli and 2 stops to see a stunning abandoned hill top village at Termeisa and an underground berber house at Gharyan is too much and arriving in the dark on party night was a bit stressful to say the least and yet another occasion we really regretted not smuggling a bottle or two through customs! We were rewarded with another day in Tripoli to wander around which was lovely. Our next stop was the quite astonishing Leptis Magna. This fabulous Roman city is breathtaking with literally 100's of columns still standing, some of the best preserved baths we've ever seen and a port, theatre market place and much more. The guides say if you only see one thing in Libya it must be this and 5 hours of walking later and 3rd degree sun burn on a cloudy day says they're right. Taffy: our grey water tanks are now stinking again and it looks like Jon will have to do some repairs again.