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Published: February 1st 2007
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One of the sad, hopeless inevitabilities of tourism around a place like Tozeur - where the SUV caravans, improbably white for all the dirt they churn up, wear grooves into the road between the most popular sights - is that everyone leaves with more or less the exact same pictures as the last guy. We dutifully plod from one “panoramic view” to the next, the very word “panorama” having apparently trumped “Coca-Cola” as the Arab world’s favorite English syllables. There are viewing stands conveniently set up beside the gorges and mud-brick medinas, overlooking the
Grande Cascade near Tamerza - which, as we’ll soon learn, has about as much right to the title “
grande” as I have to the title “mullah.” Between stops we cycle through the snapshots we’ve taken, comparing them to the same pics in the guidebook, which invariably have better lighting.
It’s a long afternoon, much of it spent in our SUV, piloted by a cheerless guide who doesn’t loosen up until we’ve slipped a few extra tens his way. We drive through barren flats of hard-packed mud, over dusty plains covered in gnarls of scrub brush, the power lines racing along beside us. Bill’s managed
to work an extra side-trip into the deal, though my suspicions have been raised about just how sweet this so-called “deal” is. It’s not until long after the negotiations have been settled, the money forked over to the smiling girl in the agency, that we begin to swap stories about our travels. And only then, like some war-time atrocity long buried by the sands of time and denial, is the horrible truth revealed.
FACT: Having come to Tunisia on a whim, Bill’s barely managed to work out the exchange rate, let alone dealt with the complex bargaining tactics of your average Tunisian.
FACT: After getting duped into a joy-ride by a wily cab driver in Tunis, Bill let the guy convince him that the agreed-upon price was in euros, not in dinars.
FACT: That’s about 1.7 dinars to the euro, FYI.
FACT: Every story Bill shares involves, at some point, him getting a royal reaming from the locals, the lesson he’s carried away from all this being that “it’s all about having a story to tell,” and not the ever more appropriate, “oh shit, maybe I should hold onto my wallet this time around.”
FACT:
This is the guy - bless his poor, gullible heart - that’s done the negotiating for us.
It’s only as the hours begin to pile up - the sun dipping further and further in the sky, the distant salt pans of Chott el-Jerid gleaming like quicksilver - do I begin to suspect we’re getting our money’s worth. We cross paths with other tours that, late in the day, are slinking back to Tozeur like a wounded army, but we press on: to the strange rock formations of Ong Jemal, then to an abandoned
Star Wars set nearby, where a brazen bunch of kids are rattling cheap necklaces against the windows before we’ve even come to a stop. Bill shows a strange, frightful fascination for the place. He wants me to snap a picture of him next to the “air devaporizer,” which sounds like a cry for help, no matter how you slice it. Later, near the small town of Nefta, he’ll lead us to the remains of the Skywalker house from the original
Star Wars flick. He’d been out to visit it the day before, setting up his tri-pod to recreate the opening sequence of the movie, when
a young Mark Hamill stares into a twin sunset, wistfully searching for a trace of his doomed career on the horizon. A day later Bill attempts to recreate the shot again, frustrated by the movement of the clouds, and probably frustrated - if we’re being honest here - by a good many other things as well.
We’ve squeezed close to seven hours into our half-day trip before heading home. It is, by any measure, a good day. In an improbable fit of inspiration, our driver pops the soundtrack to
Grease into the cassette deck. As we barrel through this stark landscape of immense emptiness, beside the shelf of mountains that rise along the Algerian border, where the layers of sediment have piled in broad, colorful bands, and the distant
palmeraies spread their leafy umbrella over the desert dust, it’s then that those timeless words ring with a special truth: “Greased lightnin’, go greased lightnin’.” Suddenly Danny and Sandy and irrepressible Rizzo are there beside us, their pedal pushers and hot rods and leather jackets bearing witness to a cultural osmosis of Saharan proportions. In the backseat the Japanese couple is dozing, and Bill looks forlornly out the window, into
a dark world of lament. The next day he’ll visit the site again - after we’ve parted, shaking hands in the brisk, business-like manner of Americans abroad - trying to capture the perfect lighting for a sunset that never happened, on a planet that never was.
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