flickering pictures

June 22

So we landed in Tunis around 10am, surrounded by French, German and Italian vacationers. The very few clothes they were wearing were all Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, and I got the distinct feeling they were headed straight for one of Tunisia’s many coastal resort towns, which was just fine with us.

We’re just 80km from Sicily, and many Tunisians complain mildly about the tourist influx (we later saw signs forbidding tourists from entering some residential neighbourhoods). This place, though, is magnificent — Tunisians in jaw-dropping traditional robes mingle freely with Euro-minded local women whose clothes make your jaw drop for entirely different reasons… After overpaying only slightly for our taxi from the airport, we drop our bags at the hotel and R falls asleep pretty much immediately, jet-lagged and exhausted. Little kid that I am though, I head out to give her an hour’s nap and explore Tunis’s Ville Nouvelle on my own.

I wander around in more-or-less concentric circles around the hotel, and I’m in love with the place already — if France had colonized a desert Cuba, this is what I imagine it would have been like. I’m also pleasantly surprised to find that, even though I’m obviously a tourist, people leave me pretty much alone — despite my white skin, the tourist-trap vendors are less voracious with their sales pitches than in other countries, and a polite “no” or “la, shukran” generally suffices. Also really nice: when someone doesn’t know how to give you directions to where you want to go, it seems like they tell you so — unlike in India, where people seem to just make up directions to save face, often leading you in exactly the wrong direction.

Tunisia’s official language is Arabic, but most people speak French, and English will do in most tourist hot spots. I try hard to sound French (as opposed to Québecois) so that people have at least an outside chance of having some idea what I’m talking about.

The streets of the old town — the city centre before the French built the Ville Nouvelle — look like they’re about to cave in, but this is a beautiful state of disrepair — buildings painted white, grilles and doorframes painted brilliant blue, and a crushing mass of cars, trucks and people going about their business in a crazy maze of winding one-lane streets.

When P’s flight arrives, our band of merry travellers is complete, and we all head out to gorge ourselves on jejj (rotisserie chicken) — 7 dinars (about $6.50) gets you a whole (slightly earthy-tasting) chicken, a rock-hard French baguette, an aluminum foil ball of sketchy-looking salad, and a handful of very yummy zaitoun (olives). Roasted chicken, by the way, is also called “farouj” — my first Arabic word and the namesake of our cat.

June 23

Next day, we get up bright and early, and after a light breakfast of strong Turkish coffee, baguettes and jam (they really like French bread here) we’re on our way to Sidi Bou Said, a quaint hillside town that’s even more blue and white than Tunis, on the way to a real gem (for me at least): the remains of the once-mighty Carthaginian Empire, that at its height controlled much of North Africa, all of Iberia, and a good chunk of Italy, and was probably the single biggest unified threat that Rome ever saw. Though the Romans ultimately won, it really could have gone either way.

At any rate, the ruins are hauntingly glorious. I’m surprised to find out that most of them aren’t actually Carthaginian — apparently the Carthaginians’ cities were razed to the ground by the Romans, whose own buildings were then razed and replaced by those of the Vandals later on. What’s left is a mishmash of styles and architecture — columns, mosaics and fallen-down walls that draw on one or another of these peoples’ styles, and that apparently prove quite a conundrum for modern-day excavators. The result is that only a few genuine Carthaginian sites remain — one of which is the Tophet, where priests sacrificed children to Baal 2,000 years ago in hopes of obtaining good crops or military success from the heavens.

June 24-26

More on these days later — it’s going on midnight, and we’ve got a 4 1/2-hour ride to the centre of the Tunisian Sahara tomorrow morning. Suffice it to say for now that they were very good days, and that we’re in Tozeur, an oasis town 7 hours south of Tunis, far from the coast, the tourists and the skimpy D&G tops. This is a whole other world, and one I’ll leave tomorrow before I can even start to know it. But we’re on a schedule here, even if we have no concrete plans except for a ticket from Tunis to Beirut on July 6. The next sunset I see will be in the middle of the Sahara — and if I can keep my eyes open, the next sunrise too.

BTW, I’ve got no software to crop photos with, no flash or FTP to upload them with on this ancient computer, and no way to get them onto this site in any meaningful way at the moment, so you guys will just have to wait a bit for pictures, or you can check out a tiny smattering of them on Facebook. Also, sorry for any typos — I’m rushing to get all this written and get to bed, and besides, I do enough proofreading at my day-job!

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