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Published: March 17th 2009
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As our roadtrip continued further south and again near the Algerian border, the scenery became increasingly mountainous and dry.
The towns of Mides and Tamerza are located in a particularly hilly area complete with some senic dry canyons. One of which was used for scenes in
The English Patient. An abandoned walled mud town near Tamerza provided a scenic foreground for a palmeraie and rough mountains.
Aptly named, palmeraies are the palm groves or oases found in the desert typically fed by underground springs. Locals manage these groves and grow fruit and vegetables in the forgiving shade of taller palms. The desert towns of Tozeur and Douz both have huge palmeraies. We pulled over and had lunch one sunny day in the shade of a palmeraie with a date palm on one side and a pomegranate tree on the other.
I think we ate crusty bagette, spreadable cheese and some combination of tomates, carrots, oranges and dates almost every day for lunch. Every little town had at least one shop selling most of these items, so we always bought bread fresh.
Cafe has nearly replaced the traditional North African heavily sweetened mint tea as the national drink.
Coffee is either of the Turkish variety, espresso or cafe au lait in the French style.
A typical dinner is a tomato-based couscous stew with some kind of combination of lamb, chicken and veggies. After crusty bagette with
harissa, olive oil and olives of course.
We spent one night in Tozeur and rose the next day to drive across a huge dry salt lake called Chott el-Jerid.
The southwest corner of Tunisia is a piece of the Sahara Desert. We drove down an extremely straight stretch of road to the Ksar Ghilane oasis, a funny little community that has one
raison d'etre: tourism. We were told that 50 years ago Ksar Ghilane did not exist, but an underground spring was struck during oil exploration, releasing the flow of water from an underground aquifer to the surface. Since then a large grove of tamarisk trees has grown up around the springs.
There is a series of camps where tourists can sleep in tents, eat Berber food, soak in the hot springs and sample the Berber lifestyle. Berbers are the native North Africans that lived in the region long before the Arabs invaded in the 7th century AD.
One can also enjoy a ride on a horse, camel or ATV. Plenty of Europeans were tearing up the desert in rented four wheel drive jeeps.
We wandered across a red sand piece of the Sahara to a nearby Roman fort and back. Looked easy enough but walking in loose sand even for a couple of kilometres is surprisingly hard work.
Southern Tunisia is a hotbed of
Star Wars scenery. We slept underground in a classic pit hotel in Matmata. Just like Luke's uncle's farm. And think of the bar scene in the first, orginal Star Wars movie--we were there! Along with
Star Wars, Monty Python's
Life of Brian and more scenes from
The English Patient were shot in the area.
Once a fairly common building method in the area, pit homes stay cool in the summer and warm in winter. They begin with a two-storey deep, circular pit dug near the side of a hill. This becomes the courtyard. Rooms and hallways branch off from the courtyard. Larger pit homes such as our hotel have two or more courtyards connected by underground hallways. The main entrance is usually at the end of a tunnel leading
open spaces
a salt lake, chott el jerid, covers an area of 500 sq km out to an oversized door in the side of the hill.
Our room was a windowless, low-ceilinged cave that was surprisingly cosy and cheerful with a coat of white paint. So, yes cute, but maybe not such a smart place to be during a power failure. The advantage of these underground dwellings is to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
And who can forget the ghorfas and hill town ruins around Tatouine (aka Luke Skywalker's home planet)? The ghorfas are the long, barrel-vaulted buildings with little doorways where the orginal Berber people once stored their grain and valubles. The villagers would seal up the ghorfas with pest-resistant palm doors and the grain would keep for ages in the dry, desert climate. The abandoned hill towns against blue skies just begged to be photographed.
You don't have to look hard to see where much of the inspiration for some of the creatures, sounds and costumes came from for those first
Star Wars movies. Some of those funny beasts sure move like camels and if you've ever heard a camel shriek, you could easily mistake it for a wookie. The local men also have a
distinct preference for wearing these woolly, ankle length, hooded cloaks just like any proper Jedi.
Turning north again we visited a partially restored Roman colosseum plonked rather unexpectedly in the middle of a small town called El Jem. With an estimated seating capacity for over 30,000 people, this colosseum was the third largest in the Roman Empire.
Hoping for some nice walks on the beach we headed to the charming seaside town of Hammamet, we had a couple of nice mornings but were later pummelled with rain and wind on the scenic Cap Bon peninsula. Undaunted, we managed to check out Kerkouane, said to be the world's best preserved Punic settlement. Highlights were the scatter-patterned mosaic floors and small, red bathtubs. Unlike the Romans, the Phoenicians bathed at home.
We also got drenched upon our return to Tunis as the rain fell sideways and streets ran like rivers during a lightning storm the day before we left. Only 150 kilometres away from Sicily, this is winter in the most northern part of Africa.
Coming soon: our Egyptian adventure.
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