Judging by the comments on the coach, today's visit to Leptis Magna was not just a dream come true for me. "I've been wanting to come for so many years," one passenger told me later. "Fabulous."
That one word just about sums up Leptis Magna, in the city of Al Khums, about 15 minutes by coach from where Minerva tied up this morning for our second stop in Libya on this Ancient Wonders cruise with Swan Hellenic.
Today there was no messing about with the Libyan authorities and we were off the ship within 30 minutes of the scheduled time and on site before 9.30am, which gave us a whole morning to do justice to the place.
It's an enormous site, founded by Phoenicians, once ruled from Carthage and finally Roman (that's the very abbreviated version, by the way, because I got very lost somewhere in the 4th century BC).
It became a colony of Rome in 109AD but really shot to prominence in 193, when Lucius Septimius Severus, who came from Leptis, became Emperor of Rome, and set about turning his home town into a city to rival any other along the North African coast.
What's so amazing about this place is how much has survived the centuries and attacks, first by the Vandals and then by the Berbers.
Our visit started at the baths, where there are the usual hot, cold and tepid rooms, all once covered head to toe in marble and heated by the fuel produced from the residue of olive oil manufacture, according to our guide Ziad, and what must be the most public public loo in the world, with seating for 70 people.
In front of the toilets there is a channel with clean water for washing - except just how clean it was after 70 people had been using it is anyone guess.
From there we walked through the sports ground, past the Nymphaeum, where once there was a fountain (water, nymphs, geddit?), into the colonnaded street, once lined with covered shops, and then into the Forum - a huge area measuring 60 metres by 100 metres and in Roman times with two storeys.
We also visited the Severan Basilica, the harbour (experts reckon it was only just finished when the 365AD earthquake hit so was actually never used), the market and the spectacular theatre. This is me in the plebs' seats!
Apparently the 1957 film Legend of the Lost, starring Sophia Loren and John Wayne, was filmed in Leptis Magna and gives a good picture of what it looked like before all the statues were removed for safe keeping. I suggest Blockbuster dusts off its copies as there'll be a rush on when we all get home next week.
What was almost as interesting as the ruins was the number of locals milling around the site. There were teenagers hanging out and what seemed like hundreds of school kids, all smiles and laughing, who were definitely more interested in trying out their English on us than learning too much about the history.
I was also enthralled by the immaculately-dressed traffic cops stationed at the busy junctions between the ship and Leptis Magna. At one junction, he had our coach and two cars to cope with. On leaving the site, I noticed three cars had been halted to allow us to pull out.
A tough job but someone has to do it!
Jane Archer
