a tunisian roadtrip I

Having failed to receive our Iranian visas and recognizing that it was winter in most of the Middle East, we did some serious re-thinking of where to go from Bahrain. Originally, we had planned to travel overland from Pakistan to Iran, Turkey and from there to Syria, Lebannon, Jordan, Egypt and across North Africa to Morocco.

We also confirmed that overland travel in North Africa was going to be unlikely across the Egypt/Libya and Libya/Tunisia borders and impossible across the Tunisia/Algeria and Algeria/Morocco borders. Libya and Algeria also require that we book tours in advance in order to get visas. In a nutshell: visiting all of these countries would necessitate a whole series of flights and special (read: expensive) arrangements to make it happen.

So, we decided to cut our losses and head for the warmest places on our list for the worst of winter, forget about Algeria and Morocco for the moment, and work our way back towards Turkey in time for spring.

Enter Tunisia. We arrived in Tunis on the 26th of December. Other than the taxi driver who totally ripped us off on the ride from the airport, our first impressions of Tunisia were very positive. Crisp, clear weather, clean streets complete with treed boulevards, sidewalk cafes and a distinctly European feel. Bring on zee cafe and chocolate croissants!

Keep in mind that other than a 5 day visit to the mall-and-highway-land of Bahrain, we had spent the previous three months in India, Nepal and Pakistan. Places that I would place firmly on the 'developing world' list. Having had our fill of hectic, crowded cities, garbage filled streets, animals everywhere, all-day all-night people yelling dogs barking horns blaring, horrible air quality and bad bellies, we suddenly land in a place where you can drink the tap water? Rather miraculous.

I had been ill in Pakistan, rallied a bit in Bahrain over Christmas and then I was feeling rough again as we flew to Tunisia. After three blessedly peaceful sleeps in our quaintly francais hotel in Tunis, I turned to Matt with a big smile and said, "I feel good. I mean, I feel okay, healthy, not sick. I haven't felt this good in a long time! I had forgotten."

The majority of Tunisians are Muslim Arabic and speak Arabic, but most of them also speak French. Our French being quite a lot better than our Arabic, Matt and I were dragging out our best school French several times a day with pretty funny results at times. Try speaking broken French to someone speaking back in rapid Arabic-accented French. Yikes!

It was a nice break for me anyway. My French being a bit stronger than Matt's, it was my turn to take a more active role in asking and answering questions, getting directions and having chats with the locals. Something Matt had done the majority of for much of the trip, being the man and all.

Tunis struck us as a tolerant, pleasant city. Decent air quality, tolerable traffic and many pedestrian-only areas. Many women did not wear headscarves. It looked and felt a lot like a small city in southern Italy.

The availability of wine, however, proved to be very un-European. Wine, beer and crazily-overpriced liquor is sold at the regular supermarket...sometimes. The aisle housing booze was frequently blocked or covered up on what appeared to be totally random days. Not that we were drinking particularly much, but it became a bit of a game to check that aisle each time we were in the supermarket and tried to surmise what was special about that day.

Apparently unemployment is high in Tunisia which would begin to explain the multitudes of men hanging around drinking tea or coffee or just standing on the street in their black jackets and jeans smoking and staring, staring and smoking. So much smoke that we were getting lung-fuls of it just walking down the street.

Like many cultures we have witnessed on this trip, men and women don't really hang out in public together (except to clog up the corridors of the grocery store with the entire extended family all shopping together of course), so tea and coffee houses are these smokey, male-only dens. Don't really know what the women do, but I suspect many of them are at home holding down the fort.

After eating out a couple of times, we quickly realised that our food bill was going to go up considerably if we kept it up. The occasional take-away chicken shwarma or tuna crepe was okay, but mostly we self-catered. Fortunately, our hotel was near a cheap grocery store and a spectacular, covered market complete with fruit and veggies, fish, meat, olives, cheeses and breads. Our main meals became bagette with cheese and veggies, oranges, yoghurt, olives and occasionally canned fish. Sounds dull, you say? Trust me, a nice change from curry!

On one further food note, it is impossible to travel to Tunisia without running into the distinctly red, bitter yet hot and spicy harissa. Made of crushed dried chillies, garlic, salt and caraway seeds, harissa deserves special mention mostly because I've never run into it anywhere else in my travels and it's impossible to get a meal in a restaurant in Tunisia that does not start with slices of bagette served with a dollop of harissa and maybe another of mayonaise in a dish of olive oil. It's a bit of an aquired taste for sure, but a Tunisian essential.

We spent the first couple of days site-seeing around Tunis while trying to make arrangements to travel through Libya to Egypt. We saw the Carthaginian ruins just northeast of Tunis. The Cathaginians were a branch of the seafairing Phonecians (based in modern Lebanon) trounced into extinction in 146 BC by the Romans after a series of punic wars involving the infamous Hannibal. Wandered the busy souq (market) and saw the Bardo museum. The Bardo, housed in an Ottoman palace, has a huge selection of mosaics, statues, jewelry and other artifacts from Carthaginian, Punic and Roman sites all over Tunisia.

Libyan tour companies are notorious for ignoring messages and, indeed, most of them ignored ours. It soon became clear that the only way to get Libyan visas in the sort of timeframe we were interested in was to organise a costly (400 Euros per day - are you serious?), custom, 4-star tour, something we were not willing to do at that time. Instead, we decided to "do" Tunisia in style and fly back out of Tunis to Cairo when we were done. Libya would have to wait for another journey.

With our trusty rented Fiat, we charged out of Tunis on a sunny New Years Eve morning and immediately hit gorgeous green, rolling countryside. During the reign of the Roman Empire, Tunisia produced 60% of Rome's wheat supply. To this day wheat products, such as bread and couscous, are staples.

What a treat having a car was for us! Having stuck to publics buses and trains for the first three months of our trip, we thoroughly enjoyed the independence of having our own wheels. It allowed us to change plans on the fly and get to the many remote sites easily. Tunisia is also so small that we were rarely more than a couple of hours from our next destination.

We found impressive, squeeky sand beaches immediately north of Tunis, went for a walk along the cliffs and picnicked on the beach. Later that afternoon we landed in the seaside city of Bizerte and attempted in vain to find a hotel among confusing one-way streets. We started asking people on the street and eventually, one middle-aged guy hopped into our car with us and with an air of authority directed us a few blocks to a budget hotel where he got out and with thanks, we parted ways.

Our pleasure in finding a budget hotel was quickly dimmed by the loud rally--complete with screeching speeches and music too loud for the speakers--that was just ramping up across the street in support of the plight of the stateless Palestinians.

Sufficiently motivated to get out of our noisy, freezing hotel room and being New Years Eve, we thought we had best get our hands on a bottle of wine. We wandered the pedestrian-packed streets of Bizerte and managed to find out that we could purchase wine from the Monoprix (the big supermarket chain in Tunisia). Well, there were two Monoprix in town: one selling wine and one not. We found the one without wine easily and were having troubles finding the other when we bumped into the same guy that had shown us to the hotel earlier.

We explained in French that we were looking for wine and he nodded knowingly, taking us under his wing once again. As we followed him down the street, this man was constantly being greeted enthusiastically by numerous other men, embracing and kissing him in a subordinate kind of way. We both took a closer look at this man in his long coat, shiney shoes and lightly gelled hair. Who was this guy? The mafia boss of Bizerte? Our fairy Godfather?

Quite uneventfully, he escorted us to the liquor counter of the correct Monoprix, accepted our thanks and with a Bonne nouvelle anne disappeared back into the crowd.

We did not meet many other tourists while we were in Tunisia. I think the dead of winter is, quite understandably, a quiet time of year. But apparently it is very popular with Europeans as a warm-season beach holiday place. So much so that locals passing us would nearly always say "Francais?" and then "Italia?" working their way down a list of European countries. And when we finally said we were Canadian, the ones in the tourist business would nearly always say, "Ah, Quebec?"

Scattered all over the country is an impressive collection of Roman ruins. There are so many that we had to start being selective about which ones to visit. At Bulla Regia, we decended into cavernous underground summer homes where wealthy Romans would retreat to during the heat. One complete with an underground fountain in the courtyard, others with gorgeous mosaics still decorating the dining room floors.

Dougga is a huge hillside site complete with Roman baths, capitol building, theatre, temples and acres of houses and Roman roadways. We spent a finger-numbing cold morning at the ruins of a once prosperous olive-growing Roman town, the stunning Sufetula.

We hiked up the flat-topped Jugurtha's Table, a mesa used as a base by the Numidian king Jugurtha during his campaign against the Romans from 112-105 BC. A rainstorm approached as we wandered around and gazed over at Algeria.

The area near the Algerian border is rife with Garde Nationale checkpoints. We were stopped frequently and asked our nationality, where we were going and where we were coming from. It seems security is tight. Though why the Garde soldiers were bothering us and not stopping the steady stream of men riding east on suspiciously jerry-can laden motorbikes (hmm, cheap fuel in Algeria you think?) is anyone's guess. Deals must have been made!

Though the weather was mostly sunny and pleasant, the nights were cold. Only two hotels we stayed at had any attempt at heating. Fortunately a few more had hot water. There were a few cold, early nights where there was nothing to do but layer on all our thermals, fleece and hats, crawl between freezing sheets, pile on the blankets and hope that sleep would come soon.

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