Tunisian Sahara

Africa » Tunisia
September 17th 2004

Published: September 17th 2004

Underground troglodyte dwellings

G'day!
Just back after spending sometime in the Saharan summer, in Tunisia and Algeria. Rickety bus rides, train rides, packed louages, 4WD driving with no maps, hitchhiking, cycling. Randomess in order was back, and then there were colourful carpets, carthagian ruins, roman towers, presidents poster pasted everywhere, stupendously beautiful mosques, vegetarian salads with fish, or beef, or pork, slyly buying beers, though beer cans are strewn all over the street, lovely beaches, houses with flat roofs, gorgeous sky, extreme sandstorms, one of which blew the car off, patterned veils, marked absence of women in any coffee shops, hukka and some 24 different flavours, masively large potatoes, boxes of icecreams, the mix of arabic and french in Tunisian language, hearing to Tezaab, Sholay and plenty of SRK's songs in the streets of Mahres, towns dead in the middle of the afternoon, driving in sahara with no compass and no maps and anyway all route markers were in arabic, camels rides amidst sand dunes, seriously huge ones, shifting sands, bizzarely undualting sand canyons, hidden and buried underground houses, starwars shooting sites (YES!), second largest saltpan, cycling on those streets, popularity of bollywood at every oasis, palmerias, millions of them that spring in between