“The guidebook I researched last winter was never published, put on hold when the Arab Spring surged into Libya that February. I was writing a guidebook to a country that no longer exists; a country where busloads of Italian tourists gathered around hotel buffets; where billboards advertised the Qaddafi brand—forty-one years, they sang, the leader’s face peering down at the cars on the highways like that of a god who thought he created them. The guidebook I researched was a guidebook to the past.”
In Libya to write for Lonely Planet, Kate Grace Thomas ended up in the midst of a revolution, reporting on war rather than honey. She offers an account of that experience here.
(Via Bookslut)
