My Covid Walk: 6. Benghazi

If, instead of walking the North London suburbs and parks day by day the past year I had set off south and a little east and kept walking (across the Mediterranean too) I could have reached . . . Benghazi.  My first speculative Covid Walk took me to potential danger in Mariupol (Here).  Benghazi, for all its Mediterranean breezes and sunshine, is a great deal less safe as my destination.  Let the UK Government explain . . .

The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) advise against all travel to Libya. This advice has been in place consistently since 2014. If you’re in Libya against this advice, you should seek to leave immediately by any practical means.

All travel to, from and within Libya is at the traveller’s risk. Local security situations are fragile and can quickly deteriorate into intense fighting and clashes without warning.

In August and September 2020 both Tripoli and Benghazi saw demonstrations against deteriorating living conditions and corruption. Pockets of violence were seen, with reports of civilians being shot and wounded.

Here, then, is the confirmation that travelling in one direction is not much use if it takes you to the wrong destination.  Atheist readers please consider.

Is it Covid-safe?

Benghazi is not the kind of place where this is the main issue - but that's not because its safer.

On the Plus Side:

Weather (but Lanzarote was good too!) - and fantastic history, now not easily discoverable on the ground in these disrupted times globally and locally.   In fact, if all went well, it is by far the most interesting place of my six walks so far.  

On the Minus Side:

Civil unrest erupting at times, guns that are used too much and general lack of security, especially for someone who's walked in from England.

Has it got a Football Team?

Several, who play in the Martyrs of February Stadium (Even the football stadium's name hints at troubled times!). Al-Ahly have been very successful in the Libyan Premier league.  However unsurprisingly the LPL has not successfully finished all its recent seasons - and not because of Covid-19.

Has it got a Baptist Church?

Probably not.  Unlikely to have an internet presence for obvious reasons.  I could visit the Coptic Orthodox or a leftover-from-Italian-colonial-days Catholic church.  Simon of Cyrene came from near here and in the early years of Christianity this was one of the most Christian areas on the planet so it represents quite a sad story.

Prospects out of Ten:

Two.  Just too dangerous right now - but it would be a great city to see if it was safe.

Disaster's Song

 November 22nd 1873.  A November night in the Atlantic gives us a great hymn from an awful family disaster couples with a deep faith.

 

 

James

James was invalided out of the Navy when he was struck ill in his 20s.  He was confined to home for nearly a decade.  Then one day he set off for Dover and the ferry to France.  He was expected home shortly but James had the travel bug and was away three years, travelling the length of France and on into Italy.  He swam in the Mediterranean, climbed the dome of St Peter’s in Rome and walked round the crater atop volcanic Mount Vesuvius.  On to the Rhine he went and then home.

A greater trip beckoned.  James was off to Russia and China!  Starting from London his ship became locked in collision with a coal barge on the Thames near Gravesend.  The captain was grateful James was aboard, for the ex Naval officer took the wheel and with the captain’s help extricated the ship from its distress.  The ship took him to St Petersburg where he began an epic journey across Russia into Siberia.  No railways, no cars - just a cart.  Added to these problems was the fact that he was alone and spoke no Russian.

The journey was a mixed success.  Having reached far into Siberia the Czar accused him of being a spy and this thwarted his plan to reach China.  Dressed in coats and layers of wolf skins he endured a sledge journey back  to Moscow in temperatures 50 degrees below freezing only to be deported to Poland.

Back in London his travel writings became best sellers and his journeys multiplied.  His travels were published in four large volumes and it was said that he had travelled more than the three next most travelled people put together!  He did eventually reach China, but not before he’d been to South America, Australia and India.  He almost always travelled alone which made his feats of walking 500 miles along the South African coast and hunting elephants in Ceylon all the more admirable.

Yet what really caught the eye of the public, the King and any number of his books’ readers was the almost unimaginable fact that James Holman, since leaving the Navy, had been completely and permanently blind.  A blind helmsman, a blind spy, a blind elephant hunter, a blind explorer and a blind travel writer!

To say that James Holman was amazing would be an epic understatement. 

I wonder.

We live in an age of amazing travel.  Never have so many people travelled so far physically or via technology.  And yet do we see the nature of things?  The user who can google a billion pieces of information but trace the hand of the Creator in none of them (when it is somehow in all of them) is travelling a remarkable journey. And travelling it blind.

Ghost Trains

The Baptist assembly started in London in the afternoon on Friday and this gave me the chance to travel on one of Britain's Ghost Trains.  There are only a few of us sad enough to know they exist and even fewer that ever get to travel on them - but then they are not really designed for travelling on.

The train mentioned in the linked article above is the return journey of the train I travelled on from Gerrards Cross into London Paddington.  To the uninitiated that sounds a normal enough pair of stations but in fact every other train from Gerrards Cross goes into London Marylebone.

After dutifully waiting  for more important other trains (and every other train is more important) the 10:44 sets off in the same manner as dozens of others toward London (except it has hardly any passengers).  At Ruislip it waits for ages for some more of the more important other trains before setting off onto what can only be described as a siding.  Trundling down a single track at a speed familiar to all London road users (but not train travellers) it passes selections of burgeoning weeds, crumbling viaducts, electricity substations, old trackbeds and the back of Central Line surface Underground stations with waiting passengers visibly wondering how that train gets over on that bit by the hedges.  It passes the back of factories.  At times it is joined by important-looking freight lines.  It wends its lonely way through parts of West London that forever blow the theory that London is a city crowded with buildings - there are literally acres of wasteland and this train traverses them all.

It never stops.  (This is simply because nothing else uses the line it is on.)  It also never really starts because the line is not kept in any order that allows any speed.  It feels like it is going further and further into nowhere.

Then.

Then one more green light and it passes the gleaming Heathrow Express train depot.  It kind of springs into life at more than 20 mph and soon is in the back end of bustling Paddington Station.

And off I climb and join the hoardes of people pouring in from Wales, the West Country and from via Heathrow all over the world -  people everywhere from everywhere going everywhere.  Have I really just arrived from one of the most irrelevant pieces of transport infrastructure in London?

If assembly is anything - whether on a Sunday or Churches meeting together - it is a little like that journey.  We feel quite alone.  We look at the wastelands.  We feel we are travelling nowhere with nobody.  And then - and then we are part of the people of God.

What a day it will be when from the world over the people of God gather from their journeys through the wastelands of poverty and persecution and pain.  Ghost Trains are strange things - as anything must be that takes you to Paddington Station and leaves you standing there thinking of the Throne of Jesus and his glory!