Libya

Libya holds some of the best-preserved Roman ruins on earth - Leptis Magna, Sabratha, Cyrene - sites of staggering scale that most of the world has never heard of, largely because the country around them has been difficult to reach. The Sahara here runs north almost to the coast, and the Fezzan in the southwest contains rock art tens of thousands of years old, painted when this desert was a lake. Libya is a country whose history vastly exceeds its current circumstances, and that gap, eventually, will close.

Our guide is being written from the ground up, with the time this place deserves.

We are still gathering the notes that make a guide worth keeping: Roman site access, desert crossing routes, Tripoli's old city and the conditions on the ground that any honest guide must account for before it goes to print.