Travel Writing | Pant Hoot | Online Travel Magazine

There is a scene in the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, where the hero has to write graffiti one hundred times on an ancient sandstone castle wall.  In real life that wall is the outside of the Hammamet Medina.  In fact the whole country is one big film set and as you travel around you encounter many sights strangely familiar.  The country is the most stable and westernised place in the region and basically any movie requiring desert scenes gets shot in Tunisia. From Star Wars to The English Patient, from Gladiator to Lawrence of Arabia, Tunisia’s diverse landscape and architecture has provided the backdrop for tonnes of celluloid.

Ramadan ended with a bang literally.  An explosion from a cannon shot rang out signalling the setting of the sun and the end of the daily fast, prompting a few nervous looks and clenched sphincters from tourist newbies unaware of the custom.  Calls to prayer rang out from the Minaret within the Hammamet Medina as we watched modern day Sinbad’s preparing their fishing boats on the beach.  Slowly the town came to life around the cafes. Reclining on ornate cushions drinking espresso and smoking flavoured tobacco through sheesh pipes, watching the world go by. 

We awoke the next morning with Ramadan over and the country in the midst of the Eid-el-Fitr holidays. The public busses still seemed to be running so we took a ride up the coast to Nabeul a town famous for its ceramics and close enough to Hammamet to grab a cab should the bus service unexpectedly cease as we had been warned could happen at this time of year.  Here most of the stores were open and we wandered around the streets pottering around the pottery. Ceramics are a huge industry in Tunisia with everything from shop walls to graves covered in small painted tiles.  We left weighed down with exotic dinner sets you would pay a small fortune for back home.

The holidays ended with a festival as the streets came alive with locals dressed in their finest clobber.  Kids ran amuck trying out their new toys.  Restaurants, previously empty save for tourists during the day, filled to brimming.  We explored the back streets and came across artisan shops where we could buy quality leather goods for a fraction of the inflated medina prices and rest tongues sore from haggling.

Dawn found us on a bus heading south.  Our early morning arrival in El Jem had caught the market stall keepers still setting up and we were able to negotiate our way through to the town’s main tourist attraction with only a few half hearted spiels and pitches. The ancient coliseum of Thysdrus towers over the village of El Jem, which is about an hours drive to the south from Hammamet.  Smaller than the more famous arena in Rome it is however much more complete with the arena floor, some terracing and even seats still intact.  It is not hard to imagine bloody duels taking place before you as you nibble on a bag of dates, sip your vino and whinge about the queues at the lavatorium. 

As the bus continued south the weather got hotter. We skirted the city of Sfax, a metropolis of around a million, and kept going for hours along the highway, the main drag towards Libya and ultimately Egypt. We were fortunate with the weather. A cold front had blown through the country. Whilst this had meant less than ideal beach weather at Hammamet, it made the temperature more bearable as we entered the Sahara. As we stepped from our air conditioned coach at Matmata for a meal break our guide informed us that the previous Tuesday the temperature in this region had hit 57 degrees Celcius!  No wonder all the locals in town lived under ground. 

At Douz the Saharan sand sea begins.  The dunes roll in and through irresistibly.  Banana fronds and branches are woven into crude fences to delay the encroaching sand whilst stone ruins protrude here and there highlighting the fickle nature of desert life. We arrived shortly before dusk and dressed in traditional Berber outfits, aside from Cassie who preferred her own brand of desert chic, we found ourselves part of a camel train riding into the sunset. Mustafa and Abdul our camels griped to each other like old men on a porch.

My camel lurched to its feet and I hung on like a rodeo rider.  Zidane, our camel wrangler, whacked Mustafa’s bum and laughed as he lurched off into the dunes.

“See you in Algeria.” He shouts after me.

The other camels fall into line, behind mine, and plod along a familiar path, towards an oasis shimmering in the distance. The sand is fine like talcum. It gets into every orifice. The orange scarves we are issued with are not just for decoration as they keep at bay both the sting of the late afternoon sun and the windblown grains from thousands of kilometres of desert dunes.  
As you head south Tunisia tapers to a point with the vast wastelands of Libya and Algeria on either side.  This is the land of the desert tribes and the legends of the French Foreign Legion. Where the Berber, the Bedouin and the Tuareg still make their homes and you can close your eyes and imagine yourself in a remake of Beu Gest or some other classic of French cinema. It seems the end of the earth, that is, of course, until Cassie’s mobile phone rings and drags everyone back to the Twenty First Century.

“No sorry I can’t come in to work this evening. I’m on a camel in the middle of the Sahara!”

Sunrise the next morning finds us parked on the side of the road in the middle of the Chott El Jerid, a vast dry inland sea that stretches for hundreds of kilometres.  We watch the desolate Atlas Mountains ahead of us change from deep purple to pink as the burnt orange sun appears over the flat white plains of salt. It is beautiful and eerie and if it wasn’t for the half dozen other tourist busses parked similarly along the road, you could easily imagine yourself being on the moon. 

Tozeur is an oasis town.  “The biggest oh-ay-sis in Tun-eee-sia,” according to our tour guide, famous for dates and bananas.  We bounce through the orchards in a horse and carriage, our driver racing his mates with a fag hanging out the corner of his mouth Andy Capp style. We stop at the gates to a date farm. The touts descend from nowhere pushing bags of fruit like smack.
“Don’t buy from them. Buy inside. These guys just the pick up scraps off the ground.” Our guide warns.

It is getting hot.  We had transferred to four-wheel drive jeeps and we are heading towards the Atlas Mountains that extend through Algeria all the way to Morocco.  Now we were part of a queue parked on the side of the road waiting.  Most of the time the rivers in this part of Tunisia are bone dry, however overnight there had been a big storm hundreds of miles further down the range in Algeria. Three people had died and the waters from that storm had formed a torrent that flowed downstream to us and washed out the road. The cops were not letting anyone through.

The solution was to go bush bashing. With the mountains off the to do list the drivers tested their Paris to Dakar skills in the desert sands. Bouncing, sliding, knuckles white on door handles.  Amazing fun and sheer terror in equal doses. Then after about half an hour we burst over a dune and we were back in Hollywood once more.

George Lucas obviously made up half his story for Star Wars on the fly as he was filming in Tunisia.  There are after all towns named Tatouinne, Chewbacca, (Chebica), and Jedi. I am sure that if you looked hard enough you could also find a Ben Kenobi somewhere.  On one side of the dune where we were parked is a custom built set for the Mos Eisley spaceport where Luke Skywalker met Han Solo in the original film.  On the other side was a rotting set used in Gladiator.  I charged my light sabre and went in search of Obi Wan. 

Kairouan is the fourth holiest city in Islam, after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. Located in central Tunisia it was our final stop off point on the way back to Hammamet.  Being a Friday the grand mosque was packed and off limits for tourists and we were left to explore the grounds dominated by an ancient cemetery full of white washed tombstones.  Outside the gates merchants were selling Saffron and other exotic spices by the bag full from sidewalk drums. The speakers in the minaret burst forth with announcements, the mosques doors opened spilling the faithful onto the streets, storm clouds gathered and the spice and cooking scents filled the air.  We drank deep and watched intrigued.      

The essence of the country is summed up in Tunis. Here you can wander around the ruins of the grand city of Carthage from an ancient time when the land was a super power to rival Rome.  So much so that they fought for hundreds of years to destroy it and then rebuilt it in their image.  The Bardo Museum contains the greatest collection of Roman mosaics in the world.  Floor tiles elevated to high art displayed grandly on gallery walls, however the most undersold elements of the buildings are the opulent ceilings from the days that it was a sultans palace.

In the suburbs Sid Bou Said stands as the architectural representation of the Tunisian colour swatch. Grand whitewashed buildings fronted by blue doors, architraves and windows cover the hillside. Across the country these colours are represented everywhere. Whether it be the crockery on sale one every street corner, or simply the pristine white sand framing the warm blue Mediterranean waters. In Sidi Bou Said they are elevated to art form. 

In a week we had dined on the finest Tunisia had to offer taking in glorious beach vistas and sunsets from fine restaurants within Medina towers. We sipped the local brew and played guessing games as to the forensic origin of the lamb stews dished up with the couscous in desert roadhouses.  Our packs were filled with exotic treasures some extorted and others astutely negotiated.  As our plane headed north across the Mediterranean the moon rose above the clouds. With each passing day it revealed more and more as it phased towards full illumination. Back in Hammamet a stable of flying carpets stirred in their stalls.

Funky Cole Medinas - Tunisia 2008
Jedi Sand Castles - Tunisia 2008