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This year I decided I would continue exploring North Africa, after spending two and a half weeks in Egypt last year, I was interested to see how the cultures changed across the north of this continent. I had six weeks off work and flights booked to Tunis, in Tunisia and then on to Casablanca in Morocco. I had done some research before leaving home, so I had a fairly good idea of what there was to see and do in both of these countries. That was about as far as the planning went for this trip. I had in the back of my mind a route around both countries and a rough timescale as to how long it would take. Nothing was carved in stone and everything was liable to change at a moments notice. My plans were flexible.
The flight to Tunis was rather uneventful, which is the way I think flights should be. It still took the best part of the day to get there from London, flying with Air France via Paris. It was early October, the weather in London was now very autumnal, and so it was a shock to the system when I stepped out of the airport in Tunis and into the hot, humid evening. Immediately sweat began to pour from my skin and I could feel my t-shirt turn clammy on my back, trapped between my hot body and rather heavy backpack. As on previous trips overseas, I had no accommodation booked in the city, so it was a race against time to get into the city centre and to find a room in a hotel within my budget.
While doing my pre-departure research at home, I had read through my Lonely Planet guidebook to Tunisia and in particular paid attention to Tunis, memorizing the city centre map and making a short list of suitable hotels. I had settled on the Bristol Hotel as my guidebook said it was a popular choice among travellers and single rooms were only five dinars.
The clock was ticking in the back of my head. It was just after nine in the evening and I found myself running the gauntlet of the taxi drivers outside the arrivals hall. The guidebook listed the taxi fare from the airport to the city centre as not more than five dinars. When the first taxi driver I asked quoted a price of 30D I just laughed and carried on down the line. After asking a couple of other drivers and only managing to get the price down to 20D, I began to get frustrated. I was determined that I would not be ripped off in my first hour in the country. Another taxi driver approached me touting for business. After negotiating in broken English and French, we settled on a fare of 5D, which seemed to me at the time a bargain.
As we walked over to another taxi rank I asked the driver why his taxi was 5D and all these other taxis were trying to charge me up to 30D. He explained that this was a shared taxi, those others were private cars. Of course the private cars were a lot smarter than the rather battered Fiat I was now loading my backpack into. There was already one other passenger waiting in the back of the taxi, a local man on his way home. I climbed into the front of the car and we left, headed down the highway for the fairly short ride into the city. You can get a good first impression of a country travelling from the airport by taxi. Tunisia appeared a fairly well organised and ordered society, much more than I thought before arriving. There were quite a few new cars on the roads; people weren't driving like lunatics, as they do in Cairo if any of you have taken that taxi ride. It was dark and cars had headlights that were working and also being used. Most of the cars seemed in good repair with only a few dents and scratches. It was a sedate taxi ride into the city centre unlike the white-knuckle rides I have often experienced at the hands of airport taxi drivers.
The driver asked me which hotel I wanted to go to. I told him the Bristol Hotel. There was a blank look on his face. He began talking to the other passenger in Arabic and from what I could gather, was asking him if he knew where the Bristol Hotel was.
We drove west down Avenue Habib Bourguiba and it was becoming apparent that neither the other passenger nor my driver had ever heard of the Bristol Hotel. We crossed over some tram tracks and looking at my map I could pin point where I was; there are only two tramlines running north, south in the city. When we reached the Place de l'Independance, at the end of the avenue, I asked the driver to drop me off, as it was becoming apparent that he had no idea where the hotel was. He pulled over on Rue de Hollande just south of Place de l'Independance. I figured that it would be far quicker to walk to the hotel than wait for the driver to find it, especially as I now knew where I was. It was only a short walk across two blocks to the hotel, which was down an alley off Avenue de Carthage. After checking into my rather cell-like room on the third floor, with views of three decaying concrete walls surrounding me, I went out to the Restaurant Carcassonne for a late dinner. I returned a short time later, as I was exhausted from spending the day travelling and spent an uncomfortable night asleep, sweating in the humid night air.
I awoke the next morning with the satisfaction of knowing that I was in a new and foreign city, despite the incommodious room I found myself sitting in. I had no real daily plans or timetable to stick to except for my flights that I had already booked. This first morning I went out to explore Tunis, to familiarise myself with my new surroundings in North Africa.
There are two distinct halves to Tunis, the old Medina and the Ville Nouvelle. My hotel was situated in the heart of the Ville Nouvelle. The French constructed this part of the city during the colonial period from 1881 to 1956. Before the French arrived the Ville Nouvelle was part of Lake Tunis. They drained it and laid out the new city in a grid pattern, with wide tree lined boulevards, giving the city a very European feel. The main street is Avenue Habib Bourguiba, which runs east, west from Lake Tunis to Place de l'Independance. This street is where many of the large banks, international hotels and cinemas, as well as sidewalk cafes, the most famous and popular one being the Café de Paris, are situated. Following this avenue west past the Place de l'Independance leads you into Avenue de France which continues for a couple of hundred metres to Bab Bhar, the main gate into the medina
The Arabs built the first medina around the end of the 7th century AD. Until the French arrived this was the focus of the cities activity with a population of around 100,000 people, compared to the population of the medina today of about 15,000. As you walk through the Bab Bhar you step into another world, away from the 1920's spacious colonial architecture and into the medieval past. The buildings engulf you as you make your way along the narrow alleyways and through the souqs. There are two main roads from Bab Bhar west through the medina, Rue Jemaa Zitouna and Rue de la Kasbah. Rue Jemaa Zitouna is the tourist supermarket, selling everything you can imagine from t-shirts and stuffed camels, to brassware and pottery, while Rue de la Kasbah is very much the local market selling mostly clothes, fabrics, shoes and household items. The medina south of Rue de la Kasbah is very well preserved, while some areas to the north had been demolished during the period before the Second World War, to make way for cars and to remove slum dwellings. Today conservation is the buzzword, and the medina has been listed as a UN World Heritage Site since 1981.
I went for a walking tour along Rue Jemaa Zitouna, dodging the over zealous shop keepers, trying to sell me tacky souvenirs I didn't need. I emerged at the Zitouna Mosque in the centre of the medina. This mosque was built in the 9th century, replacing the original mosque built on this site when the city was founded in 698 AD. Being a non-Muslim I couldn't go inside the building, but my guidebook told me that the central pray hall is supported by two hundred Roman columns salvaged from the ruins of Carthage. I am sure it must be an impressive sight. I emerged at the other side of the medina at the Place du Governement and from there walked in a loop through the south of the medina, along covered souqs, and through a maze of dusty alleyways back to Bab Bhar and the Ville Nouvelle.
I sat down on a bench under a tree on Avenue Habib Bourguiba to decide what to do. The Bardo museum was closed on Mondays and the thought of spending another hot and uncomfortable night at the Bristol Hotel was not the most inspiring. I would be coming back to Tunis twice more on this trip and I didn't want to waste too many days here at the start of my journey. Also, I had not met any other travellers so far, either at my hotel or on my walk around the city. There were plenty of package tourists and cruise ship passengers though, wandering around the medina, buying up souvenirs and getting lost. I was eager to get out of the city and begin my journey around the country. I returned to the Bristol Hotel to collect my backpack and to check out. I walked down to the train station at Place Barcelona stopping on the way to buy a kilo of bananas at a market stall. I bought a first class ticket to Jendouba, about a three-hour train ride west of Tunis, a distance of around 150km.
The train departed almost on time at one-o-clock that afternoon and wound its way through the suburbs of Tunis. The train was comfortable and efficient, although rather crowded. Once out of the city the track followed the Oued Medjerda along the valley between the Kroumirie Mountains to the north and the Tebersouk Mountains to the south. This area is the main agricultural region of the country. The valley floor and surrounding hillsides were all bare and brown, the fields freshly ploughed ready for the winters crop of wheat. Despite large areas of the country being desert nearly 50% of the land is cultivated, but this is still not enough to feed the population and about 40% of food is imported.
I decided my destination for the day would be the small mountain town of Ain Draham in the Kroumirie Mountains about 40km north of Jendouba. I wanted to visit the nearby ruins of the Roman town of Bulla Regia and thought the mountain atmosphere would be more pleasant than that of Jendouba, situated on the hot and dusty valley floor. I dozed on the train as it rambled its way west past fields and olive groves and the many small towns and villages, until we arrived in Jendouba in the middle of the afternoon. Jendouba is an ordinary town and is a regional centre and transport hub. It owes its existence to the surrounding wheat industry rather than any major tourist attraction.
To complete the final leg of my journey to Ain Draham I needed to find a louage. A louage is a shared taxi and is a popular form of transport in the developing world. The taxis don't run to a timetable but when they are full of passengers they depart, you just pay for a seat, which is generally a fixed fare. Finding your way around Jendouba is quite simple as there is only one main street, Avenue Hedi Chaker. The train station was on this street and the louage station was also at the western end of this street, near a big roundabout. I walked out of the station and turned right and carried on until I found the roundabout, which I did after about five minutes. There were many louages parked on various vacant lots on the roads leading onto the roundabout. As Ain Draham is north of Jendouba I decided to take the road north of the roundabout and ask there for my destination. I was soon lead by the hand to a waiting louage where I didn't have to wait long for the remaining passengers to arrive. Louages are licensed to carry six passengers and it appeared that the drivers were sticking to this law, which made a pleasant change from other countries I had visited where ten people in a shared taxi was common. Within about twenty minutes of arriving in Jendouba I was leaving.
The road went straight north out of the town. On the way we passed the junction to Bulla Regia, which I planned to return to the following day. The road began to twist its way up the hillside into the Kroumirie Mountains. The surrounding countryside became greener and greener as we journeyed further up into the mountains until the fields gave way to forests. The Cork Oak is the dominant tree here and cover all the hillsides. Their trunks bare the scars of the local cork industry that is based in the coastal town of Tabarka that exports tonnes of cork from the surrounding forests each year. It took about half an hour to get to Ain Draham, which is situated to the west of Jebel Biri (1014m), the highest peak in the Kroumirie Mountains. The town had some unique architecture for Tunisia, with the houses having steep red-tiled roofs, as this was the only place in the country to receive regular winter snowfalls. During the colonial period the surrounding forests were popular with hunters who built their hunting lodges here. Unfortunately this pastime cost the lives of Tunisia's last leopards and lions.
I was dropped off at the bottom of the town and had only written directions from my guidebook and a poor knowledge of French to find the Maison des Jeunes where I planned to spend the next couple of nights. Eventually I worked out my bearings and found the hostel at the top of the hill and checked in. The place seemed fairly empty, even though the dormitory block I was in, looked as though it could sleep about a hundred people. My room was quite spacious with an en-suite shower-room, complete with drains that smelt. Outside the building was a bench, so I sat down that evening to watch the sun set behind the mountains in Algeria, the border being only about 10km away. I was also hoping to meet other travellers who might be staying there that night, but I didn't see anyone and concluded that I was the only guest that night. In the evening I wandered down the road to find a restaurant. Only one looked welcoming, but then they only had two items on the menu, chicken or beef. I opted for the beef, which came grilled with fries and a salad, and so began my evening routine, which I would repeat on many nights of this trip. By the time I left the restaurant the town was dead and so was the hostel. I sat in the communal room where the staff were watching television and spent an hour reading. Conversation was limited to 'Bonjour' and 'Ca va?' about the limit of my French. I retired to my room at eight to listen to the news from the BBC World Service on my short wave radio. After the news was Bookshelf, a fifteen-minute programme reading from a book. I tuned in to part four of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin, an adaptation in twenty-two parts.
The next morning I awoke early after a far more comfortable nights sleep in the cooler mountain air and after breakfast walked back into town to find a louage going to Jendouba which could drop me off at the turn off to Bulla Regia. The ruins are about 3km from the turn off. The hot and humid weather of the past couple of days had now gone so I decided it would be pleasant to walk to the ruins along this quiet tree lined road.
The Romans first gained control of what is now Tunisia, after the Third Punic War in 149BC. The Romans laid siege to Carthage for three years before finally over-running the city and razing it to the ground in 146BC. The Romans didn't show much interest in this new territory, now the Roman Province of Africa Pronconsularis and left it in control of the Numidians who established a kingdom stretching from the west of Algeria to Libya. In 44BC the Roman emperor Augustus re-established the city of Carthage and regained complete control of the province from the Numidian Kings. Agriculture became the major industry, especially along the Medjerda Valley, where wheat was the dominant crop, much as it still is today. The first settlement to be established at Bulla Regia was during the 5th century BC, but it was not until the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, under Roman rule, that the town grew rich on the income from wheat and reached its peak of prosperity. The town was finally abandoned in the 7th century AD after the Arab invasion.
Bulla Regia is also unique as the place where the Romans built underground to escape from the heat and was why I had chosen to visit these ruins rather than those of other Roman towns along the Medjerda Valley and surrounding plains.
As you entered the site you passed the water cisterns to the left. After walking about 50m you reached one of the main streets in the town. Turning right you walked past the Memmian Baths, the largest above ground buildings still standing on the site. This road took you along to the theatre. It was not a very large theatre, with only about sixteen tiers of seats, but it had a marvellously well-preserved mosaic of a bear on the stage. North of here is the market, the Forum and Temple of Apollo. The wealthy quarter, where the underground houses are, was a couple of hundred metres north west of the Forum. This is the main feature of this site.
Seven villas have been excavated so far and all are built around the same plan with various levels of refinement. From above ground the villas would of looked like any other Roman house, a one level dwelling built around a courtyard. This central courtyard was open to the sky and was excavated to create a second floor of rooms underground. A narrow staircase, cut into the rock, lead from the corner of the courtyard to approximately five metres below ground. It was an impressive sight to be standing in the subterranean colonnaded courtyard with the rooms leading off on all sides. The area within the columns, supporting the ground above, formed a shallow pool, which would of gathered rainwater. In one corner of this pool a drain lead to a pipe that disappeared under the floor. I presume this fed a water cistern for the house. It made a change to be able to stand in the rooms of a Roman house, complete with ceilings and mosaic floors, rather than standing in ruins with walls only reaching up to your waist. It really gave you an idea as to what life living here would have been like. Some of the finer mosaics in the houses had been removed to the Bardo museum, leaving unsightly blank spaces in the floor, but enough had been left in situ to make them the highlight of my visit to Bulla Regia. Looking at mosaics in a museum is one thing but to see them in place, in the original rooms they were laid in, is really quite something else.
After visiting the small museum across the road from the entrance and also stopping at the café for a cup of tea I made my way back to Ain Draham. I walked again the 3km back to the main road, picking up a couple of followers from the village school I passed, who pestered me for the rest of my walk. I decided it would be easier to return to Jendouba to find a louage, as all the cars passing me were already full with passengers and the drivers were sticking to their six passenger limit. I managed to hitch a ride from the junction back to Jendouba within about ten minutes, leaving behind the two irksome schoolboys. By late afternoon I was back at the hostel in Ain Draham and found myself repeating last nights routine again. I was once more the only paying guest. I decided that the following morning I would continue my journey on to Le Kef about 100km south of where I was now.
Again I took a louage back into Jendouba; you can see why this place is a transport hub, and found another car on the road leading west from the roundabout, which was going to Le Kef. In Arabic Le Kef means 'The Rock', which is a very suitable name, as the town is perched on a rocky spur on the southern side of Jebel Dyr (1084m), an isolated peak rising above the surrounding plains. The Kasbah is the dominant feature of the town, which sits at an altitude of 800m. Due to its strategic position people have lived here since prehistoric times, the first known town, called Sicca, was founded here in about 500BC by Carthage. Since then every invading army, new kingdom or empire has come to this town. Not many tourists venture out to this far west, as there is no one major tourist attraction here. This was part of the appeal for me, to see a Tunisian town unspoilt by the trappings of the modern mass tourism industry.
I arrived at the louage station, next door to the bus station, on Avenue Mongi Slim. From here it was about a twenty-minute walk up a steep hill to the medina and to the Hotel El-Medina on Rue Farhat Hached where I checked in for a night. I was put in a room at the back of the hotel, away from the noise of the main street, with stunning views looking down the hill across the newer suburbs of the town and the plains stretching off into the distance. I spent an hour or so dozing in my room before picking myself up and going out to find some lunch and to explore the medina and markets. I was on the hunt for some bananas which I hadn't seen since I left Tunis three days ago. I scoured the local market but there wasn't a banana in sight. I walked around the labyrinth of streets in the medina that afternoon and finally ended up at the gates of the Kasbah. There was a small square outside the gates, so I found a quite spot and sat down on a wall overlooking the town. It wasn't long until the local people found me sitting there. Every now and then someone would come pass, stop and say bonjour, practice their French on me and then there very limited English. In return I practiced my inadequate Arabic, which brought a good response. After an hour or so there was a hardcore group of two students sitting with me on the wall enjoying the views. The peace was broken when three people walked up into the square and up to the Kasbah gates with a small entourage of school children. I overheard them speaking English. I had at last found the other elusive travellers in Tunisia.
Danielle was from Paris, Manfred from Berlin and Shaun from New Zealand. Manfred was in the country for two weeks. He had started his journey in Monastir after catching a cheap charter flight from Germany. He was travelling in an anti-clockwise direction around the country, the same as me. He had met Danielle, who had just flown in from France and Shaun who had arrived by ferry from Sicily, at the International Youth Hostel in Tunis. I now had a chance to catch up on the travelling gossip on Tunisia. They hadn't seen any other people travelling independently around the country either. In fact we were the only three travellers Manfred had met since arriving in Monastir four days ago. So it wasn't only me who was wondering where all the other travellers were.
Tunisia is not a major travellers destination as it is landlocked between Libya and Algeria. It's only very recently that westerners have again managed to cross through Libya from Egypt and into Tunisia. It is not easy though with all the red tape surrounding the application for Libyan visas and I think it will be a while before this route through North Africa becomes really popular. The majority of travellers come to Tunisia while touring around Europe and stay for either one or two weeks, using the weekly ferry service from Sicily that arrives in Tunis on Sunday night. There are plenty of tourists here though, sunning themselves at the beach resorts along the east coast, but today we were the only four foreigners in Le Kef.
We knocked on the door of the Kasbah and the guardian let us in and showed us around. His tour was rather quick and really just involved a walk through the courtyards and up to the ramparts. We thanked him and gave him a small tip before leaving. Opposite the Kasbah entrance are two mosques, the great mosque, which is now disused and the mosque of Sidi Boumakhlouf. Mystery surrounds the origins of the Great Mosque. It is built to a plan of a cross, much like your average church in England. It is thought to have been either a monastery or other public building, built by the Byzantines in the 6th century, before being converted into a mosque after the Arab invasion. It is a shame that this historic building is now lying disused and neglected. A little further up an alleyway from the Great Mosque is the entrance to the Mosque of Sidi Boumakhlouf. Just inside the entrance the Imam was sitting on a small wooden stool reading a Koran. He probably looked older than he really was huddled in the corner wrapped in his robes. We greeted him in Arabic and asked in gestures and broken Arabic if we could look around the Mosque's enclosure. He welcomed us in and showed us to a door at the base of the minaret, which he unlocked, and allowed us to climb to the top. After all by travels over the years in the Arab world, this was only the second time I'd managed to climb to the top of a minaret. The only other time was back in 1992 while I was in the Golan Heights in the Israeli Occupied Territories when I climbed an abandoned, war damaged mosque in a deserted Syrian village. On leaving we thanked him and gave him some baksheesh.
Danielle, Manfred and Shaun were staying at the other budget hotel in town, the Hotel de la Source, by the town spring a couple of hundred metres down the road from where I was staying. They had the best hotel room in the town, the 'family room'. My guidebook describes this room's incredibly ornate stucco ceiling as the owners pride and joy. On our way to dinner that night I stopped by to appreciate it for myself. It was more like a room from a sultan's palace. Over dinner we discussed our various plans and finally agreed to travel together the next day, south to the desert oasis town of Tozeur.
It was about 350km from Le Kef to Tozeur and would take the best part of the day to get there. We made an early start and walked back down to the bus station on avenue Mongi Slim. We would have to do this journey in three stages, stopping at Kasserine and Gafsa on the way to change buses. None of the buses were packed and they weren't too uncomfortable. As we headed further south we left the fertile plains of the north behind and entered a semi arid zone, before reaching the sandy and rocky desert after Gafsa. Cactuses were growing everywhere, especially through the semi arid zone. These cactus were prickly pears, also known as Barbary figs and were being farmed commercially. I had seen their orangey red fruit, about the size of a small pear, for sale at the markets, the bus stations and alongside the road. In every town old men were pushing wheelbarrow loads of these fruits to the market or to their makeshift roadside stalls. They must be one of the world's worst fruits to pick; they aren't called prickly pears for nothing.
All over the country, in every town, political posters and national flags were being put up on the side of buildings, streetlights and walls. Most of them were of the current president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Between Manfred, and myself we had worked out pretty much what was going on. It was election time. Both the Presidential and Parliamentary elections were due to be held on the 24th October and campaigning began on 10th October. Under new electoral reforms for the parliamentary elections the opposition were now guaranteed twenty percent of the 182 seats in the national assembly. In the presidential election, opposition candidates were allowed to stand for the first time. Standing against the incumbent president from the ruling Rassemblement Constitutionel Democratique Party were two moderate opposition leaders, Mohamed Beljah Amor, of the Popular Unity Party, and Abderrahmane Tlili, of the Unionist Democratic Union. Since President Ben Ali seized power in 1987, he had contested two elections in 1989 and 1994. In both of these elections he was the only candidate. This year's radical departure from the previous years winning formula was due to pressure from the Western world to be seen to be holding fair and democratic elections.
Tunisia's first president since gaining independence from France in 1956 was Habib Bourguiba. He was one of the most pro-Western Arab leaders, who rejected militant Islam and religious extremists. He emancipated Tunisian women and gave them the right to vote as well as outlawing the practice of polygamy and scrapping the veil. Under his leadership he modernised the country and brought it into the 20th century, encouraging growth in industry and tourism, founded on the countries newly found oil wealth. In 1975 he was elected president for life. It was the country's worsening economic difficulties during the mid-1980's and a long running dispute with the main trade unions that saw his decline in popularity. The end came in 1987 when a group from the Islamic Tendency Movement where put on trial for a series of bombings at hotels in Sousse and Monastir, which injured twelve tourists. It was a strange affair, as responsibility for the bombings had been claimed by the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad organisation. Habib Bourguiba demanded the death sentence for the members of the Islamic Tendency Movement. The then, prime minister, Zine El Abdine Ben Ali, fearing a popular revolution if these death sentences were carried out, seized power on the 7th November 1987. A team of doctors arranged by Ben Ali, declared the 83 year old president unfit for office and he was moved into retirement in a palace just outside Monastir. The date of 7th November 1987 is now ingrained on the nations consciousness, on the name of streets in most major towns and also on the back of the new five-dinar banknote.
To get an overview of the important political figures and the key dates in Tunisia's history, just grab a street map of Tunis and go for a drive. You could travel into the city on Boulevard du 9th Avril 1938 or Avenue 15th Octobre 1961 before reaching Place du 7th Novembre 1987 and driving down Avenue Habib Bourguiba or Avenue Hedi Chaker or Avenue Farhat Hached. Hedi Chaker and Farhat Hached, whose names appear on street signs all over the country, were trade union leaders and key players in the independence movement.
Our bus connections worked well today. As we arrived in Kasserine, population 30,000, a rather dreary eastern regional centre and transport hub, a bus to Gafsa was ready to leave in fifteen minutes. Most people find that fifteen minutes is enough time to spend in Kasserine, but I'm sure that if you were determined you could amuse yourself here for maybe half a day or so. Gafsa, about twice the size of Kasserine, was pretty much the same despite it's rather more colourful history. There is an oasis at Gafsa that became an important staging post for the camel caravans travelling across the Sahara and on to the coast during the Numidian kingdoms. The Romans captured this town in 107BC and the town continued in its importance. Today you would be hard pushed to see evidence that the Romans were here, except for the twin Roman Pools and a couple of mosaics in the small town museum. We had about an hour to wait here for a connecting bus to Tozeur, enough time to sit down at a café outside the bus station entrance for a cup of mint tea while being covered in dust from the passing traffic.
We arrived in Tozeur late in the afternoon. Even though we had arrived at an oasis town in the southern desert, sandwiched between the giant salt lake of Chott el-Jerid and its smaller cousin to the north, Chott el-Gharsa, it felt like we had returned to civilisation after our excursion through the north and east of the country. As we walked down the main street (yes you've guessed it) Avenue Habib Bourguiba, we had to dodge the crowds and the shopkeepers as well as the donkeys meandering between the traffic. Most of the crowds were tourists and the shopkeepers, souvenir sellers. It was a bit of a shock after the last few days to suddenly see so many tourists around. I thought that they would be all at the beach resorts along the west coast until it dawned on me that we were in the midst of 'the optional two day desert excursion.' We checked into the Residence Warda on the south side of town on Avenue Abdulkacem Chebbi, a slightly up-market establishment still within our budget, especially as there were four of us now and we could share rooms. One good thing a large influx of tourists does to a town is improve the standard of hotels and restaurants, although this probably does not do much for the domestic market by pricing most hotels out of reach of the locals. That night I enjoyed my most pleasurable meal I had had since leaving Tunis, the national dish couscous with meat. Still, as in most Tunisian towns (except the resorts along the coast) as night drew in the town went to sleep except for a few cafés. We sat on the roof of the hotel watching what life was still awake go by and I introduced my new travelling companions to the adventures of the Bennet family in Pride and Prejudice on the BBC World Service. (And they thought I was joking when I said Pride and Prejudice is on in five minutes.)
Civilisation at this oasis dates back to 8000BC. Touzeurs most affluent times were during the 14th to 19th centuries AD, when it was a major staging post along the trans-Saharan camel caravan route. Today the town's main attractions are the palmerie, the second largest in the country after Douz; the town's old quarter with its narrow alleyways and distinctive brick architecture and the towns overall location in the desert. The brick architecture is enjoying a renaissance; the people have discovered that their ancestors did get something right. These bricks, made out of local materials, provide far better insulation against the heat of the summer and the cool of the winter nights than modern concrete breezeblocks. The bricks are used imaginatively to create intricate relief patterns in the walls, especially around the old quarter and also in new buildings being built in the main part of town.
The next day we decided to go and explore the palmerie which covers an area of just over 10sq km. The best and most relaxing way to do this is by bicycle and there just happened to be a bicycle hire shop next door to our hotel. We hired a bike each for the day and headed off down the road. There is one tarred road, which loops through the palmerie from one side of town to the other. Off this road tracks and paths crisscross through the 200,000 odd palm trees. This is a classic example of how tiered oasis agriculture works. The most dominant palm is the date palm, which provides the canopy. Below this grew banana palms, though not on a full-scale commercial basis; further down grew pomegranate bushes and vegetables were being cultivated on the ground. All of this is irrigated by a complex system of canals designed by the mathematician Ibn Chabbat in the 13th century AD, that distribute 60 million litres of water, produced from more than 200 springs each day. We had arrived in Tozeur at the start of the annual date harvest. A large proportion of the harvest is exported to Europe in time for the Christmas season. The pomegranates were also fruiting and wherever we went that day we were offered bags of freshly picked dates or pomegranates picked from the bush. Harvesting the dates is quite a challenge; each bunch weighs between 10 and 15 kilos. One man shins up the trunk of the palm and cuts the bunches from the crown of the palm; the other workers stand on the ground and catch the bunches in a large outstretched sheet. We spent a large part of the day out in the palmerie relaxing in the cool shade of the trees, enjoying the peace and the lushness of the vegetation, which was such a contrast from the town only a couple of kilometres away.
That evening Danielle and I went to the Dar Charait Museum, a fairly long walk west along Avenue Abdulkacem Chebbi. This is the second must see museum in Tunisia, after the Bardo in Tunis. It catered well for tourists and was open until mid-night each night. The museums main attractions are the rooms around a central courtyard that are reproductions of traditional scenes from Tunisian life. They include a hamman, a Bedouin tent, a kitchen, a palace room and more. Also in the museum is a fine collection of antiques and pottery. The building itself was fascinating, with beautiful examples of traditional wall tiles.
The next day it was a split decision whether to go to Douz, or to spend another day in Tozeur. In the end Danielle decided to stay, as she wanted to do some tours around the area, of other oases and springs. Manfred, Shaun and I walked back up to the bus station to catch a bus to Douz. The next bus wasn't leaving for over an hour, so we opted to travel by louage. Douz is approximately 110km south west of Tozeur on the opposite side of the Chott el-Jerid. The journey took us along a causeway that stretches 50km across the salt lake and through one of the most bizarre landscapes in the country. The salt lake covers an area of 5000 sq km, most of it spreading out south to the horizon. As far as you could see there was nothing, it felt like you were on an alien planet except for the souvenir stalls dotted by the side of the road every few kilometres. We had to change louages at Kebili, about two thirds of the way to Douz. A sand dune lines the road from Kebili to Douz, threatening to engulf it in places. It felt like we were heading out into a desert. Whereas the desert around Tozeur was mostly rocky here it was sand and more sand. In fact we were on the edge of the Great Eastern Erg, one of the Sahara's two great sand seas that stretch almost 500km southwest into Algeria.
Douz has a population almost half that of Tozeur, but with a palmerie of twice the size, with approximately 400,000 palms. The town also receives its fair share of the package tourist trade, attracted here to the sand dunes of the Sahara that surround this oasis. We checked into the friendly Hotel 20th Mars on Rue 20th Mars (I'm afraid I don't know what role the date of 20th March plays in the Tunisian national psyche.) The hotel was a pleasant place to stay, with the rooms arranged around a peaceful courtyard that was kept very clean; although I tried to ignore the dead scorpion I found in the dustbin outside our door. Shaun was suffering from a dose of food poisoning and spent the day at the hotel, while Manfred and I went for a walk through the palmerie and to the much-fabled Great Dune on the edge of town. Even though the palmerie here is larger than at Tozeur, there was not quite the same quality to it. Many of the palms looked either uncared for or were dead, their black stumps left standing in the ground. Overall it looked like a bad winter storm had hit the place. It was a longer walk than we expected to get to the Great Dune, about 4km. Along the road at the edge of the palmerie, in the Zone Touristique where all the resort class hotels are, the only traffic passing us were coaches. When we reached the dunes we could smell the camels before we saw them. Camel touts were running around everywhere, hustling tourists, their beasts wandering around in the coach park. We stopped to take in the scene. Whole groups of fifty or more tourists were dressing up in matching Bedouin smocks and headscarves and mounting camels before being lead out into the dunes. We dodged the touts as we were not in the market for a camel today and continued our search for the Great Dune. No sand dune around here could honestly claim a name like 'Great', as they were all fairly small bumps. We decided the Great one must be the highest and set about climbing it, which took about two minutes. From our vantage point we could see the yellow/gold sand dunes undulating off into the distance and the tourists on their one-hour trek following a well-trodden path in a loop around us. It wasn't quite the Saharan desert scene you would expect, but with a chain of resort class hotels built on the doorstep it was inevitable that this natural landscape would be over exploited.
That evening I found an Internet café just around the corner from our hotel. It was the first place in the country I'd found where I could send email; the technology hasn't caught on quite as much as in other places. It made a welcome change to the evenings predictable routine. The following day we decided to leave town and travel to the Ksour district in the south east of the country.
Our first louage the next morning took us all the way to Gabes, a modern industrial town set on the coast by an oasis and palmerie. We chose not to stay as we had had our fill of palmeries over the last few days. It was here that we said goodbye to Shaun. He took a louage north to Sfax, as he had to be back in Tunis in a couple of days to catch the return ferry to Sicily. Manfred and I had settled on travelling together for the rest of this trip and waited for a louage to take us to the southern town of Tataouine in the heart of the Ksour district. In one corner of the louage station were a small group of rather battered looking taxis, their bodywork scarred and covered in a thick layer of dust. These were the Libyan taxis plying the route to Tripoli. Passengers looked few and far between and the drivers were huddled together sitting on boxes boiling a kettle to make tea. They looked as though they could be waiting a while in their corner of the parking lot.
A Ksar is a Berber fortress. The Berbers are the indigenous people of this land, whose culture has survived the many invasions through history from the Phoenicians and Romans to the Ottomans and French. The Ksour were originally designed as grain stores with many rooms, called ghorfas built in a distinctive arched style, sometimes as many as four storeys high with precariously narrow and steep stairs leading up the outside of the building. They were usually built on the highest point in a village and each family had a room where they stored their grain. The low humidity of this arid region, together with the insulating effect of the stonewalls, meant that the grain could be stored for years without spoiling. During the Arab invasion these grain stores were modified and used as defensive positions as they occupied some very strategic sites overlooking the surrounding villages and land.
We arrived in the small modern town of Tataouine in the mid-afternoon and checked into the Hotel Medina, an ugly concrete structure on Avenue Habib Mestaoui. The Ksour are dotted around the villages in the region. Our main problem would be getting to them, as we did not have our own transport, which is the recommended way to get to see these places. We were left with a couple of main choices. Firstly we could go to the Ksour at Chenini, which had a fairly regular early morning camionette service. We eventually decided against Chenini as it was also the top Ksour on the package tour trail and we wanted to get away from the crowds and hawkers. So, we opted to go to Douiret the next day where the transport was described in our guidebook as, 'a hit and miss affair' and where there was a camping ground listed, which also had a dorm room.
We were feeling disappointed that some of the countries most interesting sites and towns had been hijacked by the mass tourism market and turned into nothing more than a theme park, with all the paraphernalia that goes with it. It was this reason that we bypassed Matmata on our journey down here from Douz. Matmata is a settlement of about 1000 troglodytes whose pit houses featured in Star Wars. We heard of hostilities there between the tourists and local youths. Some residents are so fed up with having people peering into their lives, literally, that they have put barbed wire up around the pits of their underground homes. We chose not to be a part of it and came straight here to Tataouine.
In the late afternoon we went for a walk to Ksar Megabla, which is situated a couple of kilometres from the town centre, on a hillside overlooking the town. The Ksar is now deserted and in a serious state of disrepair, so we had to be careful while looking around. It was very tranquil, sitting on top of the Ksar in the late afternoon sun, away from the hustle of the town, watching the sun slowly set behind the mountains. The peace was only broken by a herd of goats walking by, followed by some children from the local village. On our walk back to the hotel we stopped to talk to some men who were sitting outside a government building covered in election posters of President Ben Ali. Manfred asked them who they thought would win the presidential election. Ben Ali of course, was the reply. We asked why everyone seemed to be backing Ben Ali; one of the stranger answers was that people would vote for him because he is the president. We also heard rumours that, of the other presidential candidates, one was Ben Ali's cousin and the other was already a government minister who was asked to stand for the election by Ben Ali. I don't think these rumours were true though.
The following morning we checked out of the hotel and went in search of some transport to Douiret. It was market day today and the town was bustling with people who had come into town from the surrounding villages. Down a crowded street from the main market square, many mini-buses and trucks were waiting to take their shoppers home. We found one going to Douiret and climbed aboard with the villagers and their weekly shopping from the market. Douiret is 22km from Tataouine. We were dropped off at the turn off to Nouvelle Douiret and walked the remaining 1.5km to the site of the old village. The first thing to catch your eye as you approach Douiret is the whitewashed mosque sitting on the hillside, standing out like a beacon from the other stone buildings. The village was abandoned in the 1960's after the government built the settlement of Nouvelle Douiret, just down the road, equipped with electricity and running water. The old village wraps itself around a steep hillside with the Ksar perched perilously on top. Many of the buildings are now dilapidated, including the impressive Ksar. We climbed our way up to the Ksar, which, at the time of our visit, was undergoing some much-needed renovation. I think the work was a case of making the building safe, rather than restoring it to its former glory. We couldn't find a way into the building because of collapsed walls blocking our way, so we climbed outside to a position where we could sit down and look at the village directly below us with the valley snaking off into the distance.
Our plan to stay in the dorm room at the campsite had backfired. The campsite was deserted and all locked up. One of the locals working on the Ksar told us that it had been closed for many months now. We asked if he knew of any alternative places to stay in the nearby new village. He said there was no hotel there, but we could always go and speak to one of the village elders to ask permission to stay at some ones house. We decided that if we could find some transport, we would try to get back to Tataouine that afternoon and if there was enough time, take a bus or louage from there to the island of Jerba, 90km to the north. In the car park at the bottom of the village we met two retired French couples, who were touring around the country in their RV's. Manfred explained to them our predicament and they kindly offered us a lift back into Tataouine, but not until we had sat down for lunch with them. Thanks to the lift we arrived back in town far earlier than we had anticipated and had plenty of time to find a louage to take us north to the island of Jerba. We felt it was time we stopped in a town for a few days to relax and unwind after our journey around the east and south of the country.
Our journey took us across the 7km causeway, originally built by the Romans, linking the 500sq km island with the mainland. We continued north, passing endless olive groves on the way, to the main island town of Houmt Souq, on the northern shore. The youth hostel in this town had been recommended to us as the best hostel in the country, so we decided to stay. We found the hostel, an old converted funduq, in the centre of the town, a compact maze of narrow roads and alleyways. A funduq is an old lodging house used during the Ottoman period to house merchants and their camels while they were travelling in the camel caravans. They are built on two floors around an open courtyard. On the ground floor the animals were stabled and the merchants rested in the rooms on the first floor. We had a room on the first floor with an arched ceiling and a small window at the back of the room under which was a ledge with two mattresses on it. The room was very basic, but comfortable. The courtyard downstairs, which still had a working well, was a very relaxing place to sit and relax under one of the shady trees. It was the best place I found to stay in Tunisia and was glad that we would be spending the next few days here doing nothing.
On one day we went along to the zone touristique, a strip of hotels that line the east coast of the island, where all the good beaches are. This is where you'll find your Club Med. We spent the day lounging on the beach, which is not something I find myself doing that often while on holiday. It couldn't have been too different from sitting on Weymouth beach; except it wasn't raining and instead of donkey rides for the kids you had camel rides. By mid-afternoon the novelty began to wear off so we went to a café alongside a hotel to have a couple of beers, the first beer of this trip, before hitchhiking back to Hount Souq in the evening. Another day we went to look around the 13th century fort on the coast just outside of the town centre. There used to be a macabre monument, The Tower of Skulls, alongside the fort. The victims were the Spaniards who were massacred when the Turks invaded in 1560 and placed their skulls in a monument as a warning to others. The tower stood until 1848 when it was dismantled and replaced with a far more politically correct monument. One place on the island we didn't visit, which I now wished I had, was the El-Ghriba Synagogue. There used to be a large Jewish population on the island, until the formation of the state of Israel when the majority of them emigrated during the 1950's and 1960's, so that today only a few hundred remain. Since my return from Tunisia I have seen photos of the synagogue and wish now that I hadn't spent that afternoon sitting in a café by the fishing port drinking tea and had motivated myself instead to get on a bus. While staying in Houmt Souq I reviewed my travel itinerary and decided to alter my flight from Tunis to Casablanca so that I would be leaving a couple of days earlier than originally planned. I felt that I had seen enough of this country and was eager to get to Morocco.
We left Jerba and travelled up the east coast to Sfax, as the following afternoon Manfred had to be back in Monastir to catch his afternoon flight back to Berlin. This time we took the ferry back to the mainland from Ajim to Jorf, about a ten-minute sailing and continued back to Gabes. The Libyans were still camped in their corner of the louage station, sitting around drinking tea or sleeping stretched out in their cars waiting for a passenger. We stopped in Gabes only long enough to find transport for the second stage of our journey north to Sfax. Sfax, the second largest city in Tunisia, is a fairly major industrial town with a large port which most of the phosphates mined at Gafsa are exported through. The Arabs founded the city in the 8th century AD and the city walls were erected just over 100 years later, which still stand today surrounding the exceptionally well-preserved medina which was also used as a location to film the Cairo scenes of The English Patient. The package tourism industry, which is rampant along this stretch of Mediterranean coast, mostly ignores Sfax. There are no major attractions or beaches here, but the medina is enough reason to stop here for a night. It is still a fully functional medina full of markets and workshops. Down one street you will find all the cobblers busy manufacturing and repairing all types of shoes and boots. Along another street you find the tailors and fabric merchants. In a covered souq, the jewellery shops, their windows glistening with gold and silver. If you follow your nose you soon find the fish market and all the other food markets, fruit, vegetables, meat, spices etc. Along the main street through the medina, Rue Mongi Slim, you find the consumer shops, selling everything from electrical and household goods to music cassettes, clothes and shoes. As with most medinas the streets were narrow and crowded, only wide enough to get a donkey and cart down.
One problem that we found with Sfax is the lack of acceptable cheap hotels. Yes there were plenty of cheap hotels, but not many that are recommended. Our guidebook listed most as places to avoid. We settled on the Hotel Medina on Rue Mongi Slim, which I think you could describe as the best of the worst. It was ideally situated in the centre of the medina, but that was about all it had going for itself. We had one of those rooms that I hate, no window opening to the outside world. Yes we had a window but it opened to the hallway. There was no fresh air, the room smelled of stale cigarette smoke, it was stuffy and my mattress sagged in the middle so that which ever way you tried to lay you always ended up on your back in the middle. As night fell things got worse. The shower off the hallway outside our room became blocked. As the owner attempted to unblock it all he seemed to do was bring more brown, stinking water up from the drains. During the night the bedbugs dined in style. We were awake well before our alarms went off at six in the morning; in fact by the time our alarms did go off we had packed our bags, checked out and were on our way to the train station. I hadn't been so happy to check out of a hotel at six in the morning for a long time.
This morning Manfred and I said goodbye and went our own separate ways. He took a train to Sousse in order to get back to Monastir to catch his afternoon flight and I walked down to the louage station to find a car going to El-Jem. I had a busy schedule arranged for today. I would be returning to Tunis tonight, but stopping in El-Jem on the way to see the Roman coloseum, which dominates the town and is described as the most outstanding Roman monument in Africa. I found a car going to El-Jem fairly quickly amongst the early morning chaos at the louage station. The only problem was that no one else seemed to want to go there too. Only two other passengers arrived during the next hour and the possibility of any more was looking unlikely. The driver offered to get going now if we paid for the empty seats. I asked to wait a bit longer, but still no more passengers turned up so we agreed to the higher fare to get going straight away. This is standard practice with shared taxis, if you are in a hurry or want more space so that you are comfortable on a long journey you can pay for the extra seats. What is not standard practice is what this driver did next. Along the road between Sfax and El-Jem he picked up and dropped off about half a dozen other passengers. Remember between the two other original passengers and myself we had paid for all the seats for the journey. So, upon our arrival in El-Jem an argument ensued, when the driver didn't refund us the extra money he made on the trip. After gesticulating and arguing for five minutes I gave up, cursed him and walked away. I left my pack at the left luggage office at the train station before wandering down the road to the coloseum.
The coloseum can be seen from miles away and completely dominates the small town of El-Jem. Such a huge building, which measures 138m long, 114m wide by 30m high, looks out of place here. It is estimated that the seating capacity was 30,000 on three tiers of seats. It was originally built around 230AD, although the precise facts have been lost in time; the Roman Emperor Gordian is thought to have built it, as this was his birthplace and he wanted a fitting tribute. This would explain its location, which also lacked the raw materials to build such a large structure; the stone had to be hauled in from quarries 30km away near Salakta on the coast and water had to travel 15km through underground aqueducts from hills to the northwest. It has been well preserved and restored in places, despite being used as a defensive position during rebellions and invasions over the years. The worst damage happened during the 17th century when a large hole was blasted in the western wall, this was again enlarged in 1850 during another rebellion, but thankfully this was the last major damage done to the building. It is now listed as a UN World Heritage site.
I found the tunnels underneath the arena the most intriguing. This is where the animals, gladiators and other victims were kept before being hauled out into the arena to meet their fate. It was a dark and dusty place with only a few rays of sun piercing the gloom through vents in the arena floor. I spent a couple of hours nosing around the place, climbing up the grand stairways to the top tier of seats to enjoy the view looking down on the arena. I had plenty of time as my train to Tunis wasn't due to leave until 14.00, so I also walked to the small museum which houses some impressive mosaics discovered in and around the town. The entrance fee to the museum was included with the ticket to the coloseum, so I wanted to get my monies worth. During Roman times this town, then called Thysdrus, was a wealthy but small place. It became a transport hub with the major Roman roads from the coast converging here and continuing to the towns in the interior. The town prospered on the trade passing along these routes. Hence some fine villas were built in the town, their floors now carefully laid out in the small town museum and the Bardo museum in Tunis. Even after spending plenty of time in the coloseum and museum, I still arrived back at the train station with an hour and a half to spare before my train was due to depart for Tunis. I grabbed some snacks from a local shop, retrieved my pack and found a shady spot on the platform to sit and wait.
The weather today looked like it would finally break, after mostly unbroken sunshine since my arrival in Tunis nearly two weeks ago. One clue was the sudden appearance of umbrella salesmen on the streets of town. All morning cloud had been building up to the north of town. While I waited the skies to the north became greyer and greyer. By two o clock there was no sign of any train, or either at two-thirty or three. The only thing to pass down the tracks past the station was a herd a goats, stopping briefly on their way to nibble at the weeds growing between the sleepers. By now quite a crowd had gathered waiting for this elusive train, including a few tourists who had ventured down here from their hotels in Sousse. Finally, just after four, over two hours late we could see the train in the distance slowly crawl along the tracks through the town. With the train running this late it was packed but I managed to find a spare seat and room to stow my pack, before settling back and watching the scenery go by. It wasn't long before the first drops of rain began to streak across the windows as we winded our way north into a fierce thunderstorm. The water ran off the baked dry earth in sheets, filling the wadis, which had been dry all summer, with brown floodwater. Evening arrived prematurely with this storm and by the time it had passed it was dark. I dozed off for the rest of the journey back to Tunis.
On my arrival back in Tunis I felt something was not right and made my first stop at the toilets at the top of the platform to be greeted by a dose of diarrhoea. It wasn't too bad and I felt I'd manage to walk to the youth hostel in the centre of the medina, which I had now learnt, after my trip around the country, to be the best budget accommodation option in the city. The building the hostel now occupies was originally the Dar Saida Ajoula palace, built 150 years ago. As you can imagine it still had that feeling of aging grandeur, with beautifully tiled walls and ornate plasterwork; this place was a different world from the Bristol Hotel, a hundred times better for half the price! The manager and his wife lived in the hostel and were very welcoming and for a small fee cooked all the guests' dinner in the evening. Unfortunately the annual Tunis marathon took place the next day on Saturday. Because of this the youth hostel was fully booked, so I had to find alternative accommodation for Saturday night. My flight to Casablanca, Morocco was not until Monday morning. Vowing never to stay at the Bristol Hotel again I opted (unwisely in hindsight) to stay at the other recommended cheapie in the city, the Hotel Cirta. My stomach was still not feeling a hundred per cent so I spent Saturday in my hotel room resting. I had a small balcony overlooking Rue Charles de Gaulle where I sat listening to the radio and reading a book between my visits to the toilet at the end of the corridor. It wasn't until the evening that I discovered that the hotel didn't have a shower.
The next morning I checked out and walked back to the youth hostel, dropped off my pack and then took a taxi to the Bardo museum, which is about 4km west of the city centre in the suburb of Le Bardo. The Bardo museum was one of the main reasons I chose to visit Tunisia, after reading an article about the mosaics on display here in the weekend papers. I wasn't disappointed after spending a few hours wandering around the three floors of the museum. The museum has the finest display of Roman mosaics any where in the world, the highlight being the depiction of the poet Virgil. It is worth coming out to the museum just to see the building itself, another former palace, the Bardo Palace built towards the end of the 17th century on a site first built on during the 13th century. It was converted into a museum in 1888. The gardens were very peaceful, an oasis of calm away from the chaotic traffic outside. In the afternoon I found a bench under a shady tree and spent an hour or two sleeping before taking a taxi back to the medina.
Walking back through the crowds in the medina I saw some chaos up ahead as someone with a large motorbike, laden down with luggage, was trying to walk the bike up the narrow alleyway. A family pushing bicycles, including a trailer to carry one of their kids in, followed close behind making their way to the youth hostel through the throngs of people along Rue Jemaa Zitouna. The weekly ferry looked as though it had arrived on time this evening. I stopped at a small café for a cup of tea before returning to the hostel. When I walked through the door I found the hallway packed with bicycles and also the motorbike. The family on the bicycles were Dutch and the guy on the motorbike was an American who had been working in Italy. He was between jobs and decided on the spur of the moment to take the ferry from Sicily. A couple from Alaska had also arrived today and were trying to acclimatise themselves after leaving the first winter snows behind only a day ago. There were also a few other travellers who had returned to Tunis waiting for either the ferry or, like me, a flight from the airport. There was an Australian, he was flying to Cairo tomorrow and had been in Tunisia for a month. There was one Japanese lad who had travelled from Egypt through Libya and was on his way to tour around Europe. Tonight was a busy night at the hostel.
That evening the hostel manager and his wife made us all dinner. We spent the rest of the evening talking about our experiences travelling around Tunisia and offering the new arrivals advice on places to go, places to avoid, where to stay and hotels to steer clear of. Someone else had already stayed at the Bristol Hotel last night because the hostel was full and agreed with my thoughts on the place. This is what I hoped to find on the evening I arrived in Tunisia, a hotel with a group of travellers parting with useful information on where they had been. It was a shame that it had happened at the wrong end of my trip. I solved the mystery of my bout of diarrhoea that evening as well. The Australian traveller was also suffering and he blamed a pastry he had eaten that morning. I remembered that while waiting for the train in El-Jem I had also bought some pastries to snack on from a local shop. When I asked him to describe this pastry he had eaten he came up with an exact description of the pastry I had snacked on in El-Jem.
The next morning we all set off in our own directions, the Japanese lad went off to the port to catch the ferry to Sicily, the Australian caught a flight to Cairo, the Alaskans headed west to El Kef, the Dutch south along the east coast and the American biker went straight down to the deserts around Tozeur. Meanwhile I made an early start for the airport to catch my flight to Casablanca that departed at 08.35. I walked through the unusually quite medina, treading carefully so as not to slip on the highly polished paving slabs which had been washed down overnight. I emerged at the Bab Bhar from where it didn't take long to flag down a taxi. The taxi was metered and the fare to the airport came to 2.8D, proving my negotiating skills on the night I arrived, just over a fortnight ago, to be found wanting.
It was nearly four weeks later when I returned to Tunis on my way home from Morocco. I was just stopping in the city for two nights over the weekend. I arrived on Friday afternoon and left again on a flight back to London via Paris on Sunday morning. I walked to the youth hostel, but it was full with a party of school children. When I left last time the manager did say he thought that he would be fully booked this weekend. Knowing what the other cheap alternatives were like in the city, I thought it was worth the walk into the medina to check, just in case. As I was at the end of this six-week journey I decided that my last two nights would be spent in the relative comfort of a middle range hotel. So I checked into the Hotel Salammbo on Rue de Grece for 14D per night. I was still recovering from an illness I picked up in Morocco during the last week and needed to relax in comfortable surroundings.
While I had been travelling around Morocco the Presidential and Parliamentary elections took place on 24th October. The results were as expected with President Ben Ali winning with 99.44% of the votes cast on a turnout of approximately 90%. Meanwhile the ruling Constitutional Democratic Party won 148 out of the 182 parliamentary seats. The opposition parties won 34 seats; the 20% guaranteed to them under the new electoral reforms. In interviews after the election the two other presidential candidates admitted that their participation in this democratic process had been largely symbolic. Mohamed Beljah Amor of the Popular Unity Party was quoted saying that he, 'wanted to break the mould of single candidate elections, but regretted the absence of democratic debate.' Abderrahmen Tlili of the Unionist Democratic Union said that he had wanted to, 'contribute to the maturity of the democratic process' and that he was not a candidate 'against Ben Ali, but with him.' It appears that the incumbent president had managed to reinvent his winning formula.
On the Saturday I was left in a predicament. England was due to play Scotland in the first leg of the Euro 2000 qualifying clash at Wembley and I was sitting in a hotel in Africa. Technology has not caught on much in Tunisia not even in Tunis. I could not find a satellite TV in any of the cafes, bars or hotels in the city centre. I even wandered down to the British Council Library and the Embassy, but they couldn't (or wouldn't) help me. It wasn't a complete disaster though, as I still had my short-wave radio and at four I tuned into the BBC World Service to listen to the live commentary while sitting on the balcony of my hotel room.
Tunisia had felt like a European Mediterranean country rather than a North African Arab country. I think the colonial layout of many of the 'new' cities add to this impression. I found it an easy country to travel around. The transport generally worked, taxis and buses seemed well maintained; the only delay I experienced was the train ride from El-Jem. Travelling by road you didn't feel that your life was in the hands of Allah, as drivers obeyed the road rules and even speed limits. You could debate the pros and cons of the modern mass tourism industry for hours, but it was one thing it was difficult to avoid while travelling, except in the far west of the country. I was disappointed that many of the more interesting and cultural places in the country had sold out to the tourism industry and were little more than theme parks. For me the highlights of the trip were Bulla Regia, with its unique Roman architecture, the Bardo museum in Tunis, wandering around the medinas of Sfax and Tunis and staying at the youth hostel in Hount Souq, which was the best accommodation I found in the country.
On Sunday morning I made an early start returning back to the airport as the sun rose for another full days travelling back to London and home. I was at last on the final leg of this journey.
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