It was in 2004. I had been in Tunis, working to get a visa so I could go to Libya with some Tunisians. My visa was issued, after numerous bureaucratic delays, on the day the travel embargo was lifted.
I landed in Tripoli later that morning. On arrival, I was detained for a while as the various personnel in the immigration arrival hall took turns examining my passport. They had never before seen a standard, non-diplomatic U.S. passport.
Our Golfplan team was working with a Tunisian businessman who wanted to start developing tourist golf facilities in Libya, as I'd been doing since 1973 in Tunisia. The idea was to build a compact nine- or 18-hole course that would replace the British-inspired Tripoli Golf Club. We were going to turn the club's rolling, all-sand site into green grass. The location was near the Great Man-Made River, which pipes in water from the southern part of the country, so irrigation wasn't going to be a problem.
We did a master plan, but the project never went anywhere. Our Tunisian client got bogged down by trust issues, mostly involving money and transparency, with his prospective Libyan partner, and the deal died.
I ended up making two visits to Libya. On the second one, I showed our concept to one of Colonel Gaddafi's sons, the one who ran the nation's telecommunications industry and its national soccer team. I can't remember his name. My memory isn't what it once was.
What I remember about Libya are beautiful Roman and Carthaginian seaside ruins, many barely uncovered out of the sand. Libya, in fact, has an amazing Mediterranean seafront -- no bad coastal development, like you find in Egypt around Alexandria or overbuilt Sharm el-Sheikh. Some areas around Benghazi remind me of Tabarka, in northern Tunisia -- pine trees, cork oak, sandy areas, mountain settings.
In Tripoli, it was nice to see old English and Italian architecture, and still surviving Roman ruins. The port was one of the few along the Mediterranean that didn't have container facilities. Alcohol was available if you knew someone in the diplomatic corps.
Gaddafi had become wealthy from oil income, but the rewards hadn't trickled down to the average citizen. Donkey and camel were the main sources of protein. As is common in the Third World, preventive maintenance was not a known activity. All was dingy, dirty, boring.
Since there was little public greenery, it was easy to understand the plain, all-green flag of Libya. Most Libyans can only view sand and sea. At least their flag shows the color of nature.
Leadership change in Libya is long overdue. Libya needs tourism to help create jobs and provide hope to the nation's young people. I believe golf tourism in Libya could surpass that of Tunisia, where the seven Golfplan-designed resort courses were generating -- until the world recession and, more lately, the Jasmine Revolution -- 10 percent of the nation's foreign exchange earnings.
I'm writing to you from India, from a town called Mechuka in the very primitive northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. Mechuka is in a beautiful valley, 6,500 feet high, surrounded by 20,000-foot, snow-capped Himalayan peaks and ridges. Tibet is 30 miles to the north.
To get here, I made a 14-hour drive over two days, on roads that, for the last seven hours, were one lane or so wide. Slow going. There's no electricity after eight o'clock, and the only way to get hot water is to warm up a pot on a wood stove. On my last visit, in November, we carried pails of water up to our rooms at the guest house so we could flush the toilets.
All in all, though, this is a nice place for natural, Scottish-style golf -- fescues, cattle to mow the roughs and fairways. But there's a slight problem with access.
Cheers!
Ron Fream
Ron Fream is the founder of GolfPlan, a Santa Rosa, California-based design firm. He's designed about 75 new courses, including one for the Sultan of Brunei, and he currently has projects in Mongolia, Uganda, and other countries. He lives in Malaysia.
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