I know, I know: in this column I'm inclined to give the impression that my idea of a decent holiday is threading my way along a jungle river in a canoe. This isn't true, of course. When I finish my stint here in Libya, covering the uprising, I shall head off with my wife and little son to a quiet hotel in the south of France for a few days. That's what I think of as a real break.
It'd be pretty quixotic of me to recommend Libya as the starting point for a good holiday, especially after it has been spread all over the world's press for weeks as a battleground. In the past I've argued that the best time to visit a country is immediately after a terrorist attack or a major political upheaval. But civil war is different. Wars take a long time to get over.
Even so, Libya has surprising attractions. I've never seen better Roman sites than Sabratha, 50 miles or so to the west of here, and Leptis Magna, 100 miles to the east. Tripoli, meaning the third city, is situated conveniently between them. The theatres, amphitheatres, streets and buildings are extraordinarily well preserved, and the dazzling blue Mediterranean lies behind, through the columns.
Best of all, there is never anyone else there: no tourists showing their ugly white legs, no irritating kids trying to sell you forged coins or maps of the country. In Sabratha and Leptis Magna, you have 2,000 years of history to yourself. I have always wanted to camp out for the night in one or other of the sites, but Libya has never been an easy place to escape the ever-present minders.
Leptis Magna is where one of the great pillars of the Roman Empire, Septimius Severus, was born, on 11 April 145 AD. He seized power in bloodthirsty fashion, but once he was emperor, he presented himself as a comfortable family man, with his wife Julia and his sons Caracalla and Geta gathered fondly round him. In fact his sons were a pretty gruesome pair, as the sons of dictators so often are, and Caracalla ended up killing Geta and blanking out his name from Septimius's monumental inscriptions.
Septimius had strong links with Britain. He rebuilt Hadrian's Wall and started the invasion of Scotland, but fell ill and died in York in 211. A statue of him used to stand on a plinth in Green Square, here in Tripoli, but on this visit, when I went to pay my respects to it, I found the plinth was empty. Presumably the statue has been moved to the remarkable museum of Roman Libya nearby, where my dear friend and cameraman Bob Prabhu was once arrested by the secret police for taking pictures.
The other reason I have resisted coming to Libya for a holiday has been the state of the hotels. In the delightful days when my wife Dee used to travel round with me as the inventor and producer of my television programme, embarrassingly called Simpson's World ('Always you are calling it your world,' an infuriated Muslim cleric once wrote to me from Cairo - 'the world is not yours, but God's'), we came to Tripoli and stayed in one of the Soviet-style hotels that used to flourish here. Some big international conference was on, and a lot of other journalists were staying there too.
One night there was dreadful screaming outside the front entrance: a camel was being slaughtered in honour of the press. Somehow, not many of us felt like eating when the huge joints of meat were put on the dining room table with a flourish a few hours later. As for the pool of blood, it stayed in front of the hotel steps for days.
But things have changed radically now. The hotel where I am staying with my colleagues, the Rixos Al Nasr, is a delight, as good as anywhere I have stayed except the top hotels of London, Paris, New York, and, of course, my favourite of all, Le Sirenuse in Positano. Owned by a Turkish company, the Rixos Al Nasr has been done up beautifully.
I tend to judge hotels by their bathrooms, and the Rixos has excellent showers with huge showerheads and superb baths, long and wide. When Winston Churchill was prime minister during WWII, his aides had to ensure that a bath of proper proportions with a good supply of scalding water awaited him wherever he went, from Tehran to Washington. America has always been puzzlingly backward in bath culture.
Not even the Rixos can provide good beer or a decent single malt whisky, because Libya has always been rigorously dry. But the food is reasonable and the service pleasant.
And there is another Libyan hotel that deserves an honourable mention. When I was reporting on the activities of the rebels in the east of the country, my team and I drove to the town of Ajdabiya, near the coast in the centre of the country. It had just rebelled against the government, and was silent and frightened.
But the Amal Africa hotel, government owned, though entirely empty, was still open for business: superbly clean and comfortable, with WiFi and reasonably good food under the circumstances. The manager had spent much of his career in hotels in Britain. 'Never am I thinking the BBC will be staying in my hotel here,' he said proudly, showing us to our rooms.
Little things make up your view of a country, as well as big ones. I will always have a real affection for Libya, as a result not just of Sabratha, Leptis Magna and Septimius Severus and all my trips here over the years, but also for the bathroom at the Rixos and the cleanliness and welcome of the Amal Africa. I'll definitely come back here for a holiday. But just for now I'm all Libya'd out. I'm heading to the south of France.
John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
