The afternoon of my last full day in Tunisia, I went to a very small place called Korbous on the Cap Bon peninsula. The whole region is only 30km from Tunis, so it was just a half-day trip. I first went to Soliman by louage, then took a smaller taxi to Korbous. As you maybe can tell from the photo, Korbous is squeezed between some cliffs and the Gulf of Tunisia. The drive out was very nice because I was the only passenger in the newish VW Golf taxi and we zipped down the hills on a few kilometers of winding road into town.

I ate a fish for lunch at a restaurant that overlooked the town -- basically just what you see here. The menu promised choices of pizza or steak but "of course" those were not available. No problem I guess. This was a common occurence at restaurants outside of the high season.

That night I was back in Tunis and on a mission to find a souvenir. Naturally I didn't want any of the tourist crap they sell everywhere: baskets, jewellery, leather, pottery, carpets, pipes, beaten copper plates, gypsum rocks, blah! Instead, I wanted something authentic. I was running around trying to obtain one of the propaganda portraits of president Ben Ali that hang in every shop, business, train and bus station in the country. 'Not sure if you would find his likeness in private homes, because I got the sense that most Tunisians don't really like their president too much. Now, at least in America EVENTUALLY someone new gets elected. The photo that accompanies this article about Tunisia's pretend-democracy might give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

I was hesitant to just steal one of these posters off the wall of some public place for fear of being arrested as a political instigator. I set out by inquiring at shops on the street. I'd point at their local image of the president and ask where they got it. Given how many copies I'd seen around, I thought they would just be available for free at some nearby party headquarters. Unfortunately, people either didn't know, thought I wanted to buy their portrait, or gave me directions that didn't lead anywhere. Soon I was joined on my quest by some Tunisian guys who started a conversation with me on the street. We walked around for about half an hour trying to find a source for the poster but weren't doing much better than I was alone. Eventually however we ended up at a frame and photo center in the medina. The guy wanted 15D for the poster with frame! This was outrageous since I didn't want a frame, only the image, but he wouldn't sell it alone. I was in a bad bargaining position since I clearly didn't want to leave the country early tomorrow morning without a poster. I ended up buying the framed version for 13D, and had him remove the image from the frame so I could roll it up and take it in my bag. One of my companions was pretty happy to take home the now empty frame for free.

By the way, my new friends were called DJ Dzou and Sharon. We walked out of the medina to Cafe Paris to have a drink. As usual, I paid for our beers, just to be nice. First off, these guys are still trying to understand why I like their president so much. This took a while to explain but eventually Dzou understood that it was not admiration but basically a joke. They thought this was pretty funny. Next they started telling me about their sex, drugs and techno music lifestyle. I won't get into the details but they were extensive and suggested the existence of a kind of Tunisian woman that I hadn't met on my trip. True or not, this was all pretty entertaining.

Dzou wanted to go back to his 'office' to burn me a CD of his music but there was a bit of an incident as we got up to leave. Sharon had ordered two more beers after my complementary drink, and evidently he expected me to pay for those too! Unbelievable!

And that concludes the trip because the next morning I flew home! In conclusion, ... ?

I left Taberka on Monday and headed south, into the green hills that I'd been looking up at for the last few days. At Jendouba I got the usual sandwich for lunch (tuna, olives, hot sauce/paste, deep fried egg) and hired a taxi to take me to the Bulla Regia ruins. I told the driver to pick me up in an hour, because that's about what my appetite for ruins runs at. The Bulla Regia ruins are interesting because it an underground version of the classical Roman city. It's just cooler down there I guess. To the left you can see a photo of me chilling in the House of Amphitrite. The floor I'm standing on has the best mosiac of the whole site. I flipped through the LP in search of where to go next. I decided to take another louage further south to Le Kef, a small city on a hill, and take in some views. Unfortunately, the weather was hot and hazy when I got there, but I started walking up to the Kasbah from the louage station anyway. You could really tell this city was pretty backwater because kids would should out "Give me 1 dinar/pen/candy!" This never happened in Taberka, Jerba or Tunis where people on the street either ignored you or wanted to have a real conversation. Up in the heights of the city, you could look down at the surrounding country but the visibility wasn't great because of the haze. I think I found the city's last remaining door through the walls, called Bab Ghedive. Stepping through it, you leave Le Kef and the scene dramatically changes to the countryside. Outside the city walls there were some cool cliffs and a really old cemetery. I warded off some angry dogs here with rocks. Picking up a few rocks for dog defense before entering a town is a trick I learned in Morocco. I didn't see much else to do in Le Kef, so I stepped back into town and took the cheapest small-town taxi ever back down to the station, and waited for a louage back to Tunis. That night I had another good dinner experience on Rue de Marseille. The first night it was Chez Nous, but this night I chose Al Mazar. With wine, my typical dinner of salad, bread with hot red paste, olives, and a tomato and meat stew was about $10. I stayed that night in the Auberge de Jeunesse in the medina. Now there was only one more day left until home! 

Here's some things I did in Taberka over the last few days *besides* walking around on the beach:

• Walked up to the island fort that overlooks the city. It was closed but the "guard" poked his head out of a portal 10m overhead and offered to let me in. The fort was littered with pieces of the set from a film that was recently shot there. I guess the idea was to make the place look less ruined and more contemporary for a movie called (allegedly) "The Last Legion." It wasn't easy to tell what was actually part of the fort and what was fake! I tried not to lean on any exterior walls just in case they were made of plaster. On the way out, the friendly guard reminded me how I had agreed to pay him a little bribe for the behind-the-scenes tour. Apparently our "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" deal got lost in translation.
• Hacked at some balls at the Hotel Royal Golf driving range. I went with my Tunisian friend Wael because I thought it would be a novel experience. I'm a bit worried that they hire people to collect the balls because no automatic collection machine was in sight. It was weird to see all the distances marked in meters rather than yards.
• Went for a dive. Very cool, except there was no instruction and no independence. Basically they suited me up, threw me in the water, and had a guy steer me around 5m below the surface for 30D. First, I had to get used to the idea of not holding my breath but instead calmly breathing through the regulator. Also, the guy scolded me whenever I would use my arms to swim. We would "communicate" using hand signals not established in advance. Now for the good parts: There were a ton of fish down there, including the almost glowing multicoloured ones you see on the discovery channel. The rocks were covered in bright orange ... something. It was also cool to look up at the waves crashing against the rocks while floating motionless underneath.
• Hit the discotheque Saturday night. Outside of summer, these places only open if there are enough guests at the attached hotel. (At night we would walk by huge 5 star hotels, that were completely dark and empty) The music was a mix of Arabic, English and other. The patrons were French, Czech and Italian tourists, plus Tunisian men. Also let me note that the idea of a public smoking ban has not yet reached Tunisia. It reminded me of the bad old days in Seattle/Waterloo/Winnipeg.

In the morning, I walked to the downtown British Airways office as indicated on the LP map. It didn't exist. A guy from a nearby business gave me the new address way out by the airport. I scrounged around in my bag for change for the cab fare out there because I didn't want to change any more money if I would be leaving the next day.

BA was a no-go. The reps would not touch my ticket because it was just too damn cheap. No changes were possible at any price. For the rest of the day I entertained some wild schemes like buying a new one way ticket to London, spending the next week there, checking-in to the TUN-LGW flight remotely on the BA website so the onward segments of my flight wouldn't get cancelled, then catching only the return leg across the Atlantic. Several people in combination talked me out of this -- still not sure if it could work. I was so close to doing it, but the BA.com website makes you pay for your Internet ticket purchase over the phone and the office had closed by the time I called.

OK so I was pretty bummed about the situation and spend a whole day moping around Tunis centre-ville. I felt like I had seen the whole country and wanted to do something new. That night I met a Canadian at the hostel who had just arrived by taxi from Algeria. He told me about the country he visited towards the Algerian border -- green and hilly instead of flat and desert-like. The next day I got on the train to Taberka hoping for something different.

Tunis medina pedestrian traffic tip: don't take Rue de la Kasbah to and from l'Auberge de Jeunesse at rush hour. Instead try Rue Zarkoun which runs parallel but a little to the north. Despite being less direct, it's way faster because it isn't clogged with people!

I didn't stay long in Douz. The next day I got some photos of me and the dunes then grabbed a louage to Tozeur. The road to Tozeur is a 100km+ causeway across an enormous salt lake (Chokh). Of course there was no water except for a few salt saturated puddles beside the road. The drive there was a sight in itself.

All I did in Tozeur was fend off touts and check out the views from Belvedere rock park. Here's a photo until I post my own. Not sure whose head that is supposed to be (JFK?), but I climbed up there and the sculpture is not stone but just plaster attached to the rock and is hollow on the inside. Someone punched a hole in it and now its full of garbage I think there's some animals living in there. Maybe this is what LP means when they say of Belvedere: "Recent development takes away from the natural beauty."

Basically at this point I had decided I'd seen enough. I wanted to head back to Tunis and change my flight so as to spend the remainder of my time as a stop-over in London (my return flight goes through there). The first step was to get on a louage to Gafsa.

Three twenty-something Tunisian girls arrived to join our louage, all made-up, wearing jeans and sporting pink mobile phones. They kept giving me looks and giggling like crazy. Unsolicited, two of them gave me their phone numbers, passed on slips of paper through a male friend of theirs. When our last passenger arrived, an old woman who didn't want to sit next to me, I ended up moving to the double front seat with one of the girls. Immediately she started with the BFF talk (in French of course): What personality traits do you look for in others? What are your dreams? Are you in love? etc. In her notebook, she showed be a handwritten list of her best qualities (in pink ink) and a similar list requirements for her future husband. All this itself was ridiculous and over-the-top but the final flourish was when she proposed that I pay the louage fare for her and her friends!

In Gafsa it was already pretty late in the day so there weren't many passengers for a louage to Tunis. I met a cool guy Stephane from Cote d'Ivoire who was working in Tunisia at a bank. He was telling me how poorly Tunisians speak French and how it was difficult working in this country because he didn't know Arabic. It was weird how Tunisians treated both him like a foreigner (like me), like for example spontaneously saying "Bienvenue a Tunisie!" even though he lived in Tunis. He didn't seem to appreciate this. Tunisia is not a multi-cultural place so non-arabs are obviously from elsewhere.

Finally, after waiting almost four hours we had enough passengers to leave. I had thought about buying the empty places so we could go earlier but decided against it because it seemed like bad form. This also got me thinking about the economics of the business. Does it ever make sense to make the trip even without a full complement of paying passengers?

It got dark as we drove and was midnight by the time we approached Tunis. The driver took a few wrong turns as dropping people off in the suburbs would take him off the main highway. When this happened, everyone but me and Stephane would immediately shot corrective directions at the driver in Arabic, which would usually prompt a u-turn.

Back in Tunis I was super tired and had a headache from breathing the exhaust that wafted into the passenger compartment over the five hour drive. I grabbed a taxi and asked the driver to suggest a cheap hotel since the hostel was already closed at that late hour. Lo and behold we pulled up at the Hotel Olympic, the very same hotel the airport taxi hustler brought me to on my very first late night arrival. Instead of driving away, the taxi driver came into the hotel with me even though I was carrying my own bags. Gee, I wonder if they have a taxi kick-back program going? Fine. I was going to sleep.

After Jerba, I headed west via a series of louages to Matmata, famous for its underground homes built into the earth to escape the heat. One especially famous underground complex is the one that played Luke Skywalker's uncle's Tataouine homestead in the movie Star Wars (La Guerre des Etoiles, locally). Today it has become the Sidi Driss hotel. Upon arriving in the hot and deserted Matmata that afternooon I headed straight for it. The hotel is a series of large open pits in the ground, each maybe 5m deep. The pits are connected by tunnels and the guest rooms, restaurant and bar are dug into the pit walls. I checked in and ate lunch off the pit where the Star Wars scene was filmed. The pit area was baked in sun, but the cave-like rooms were really nice and cool! The hotel itself was neat but the movie artifacts were unimpressive. All that was left of the Star Wars set was a decaying rubber lining around some doorways and a space-ish looking gearbox on the pit wall. This was all fine, until the hoards of tourists arrived. The parking lot became clogged with their tour busses and 4x4s. Wave after wave arrived and filled the pits with glamour sunglasses, digital video cameras, bathroom lineups and Italian, Spanish and English. This was all unbearable and it was still early enough in the day to get out, so I walked back to the louage station and left town. I had to backtrack to Gabes to find a louage that would take me onward to Douz. Douz is the desert trekking center of Tunisia. On the way, no less than two authentic Berber desert nomads gave me the pre-sale pitch for an excursion. Even funnier were their warnings about the non-Berber would-be guides who would surely approach me in Douz. They were not to be trusted! Should something go wrong out in the wilderness, they wouldn't know what to do (what with their unknown heritage)! Since I won't know how to distinguish Berber from non-Berber, it would be safer just to book with them. The dunes at Douz were pretty cool, but I wasn't planning on making a desert expedition. More novel to me was the vast palm tree forest (palmerie) beside the dunes. There's a campground among the 1/2 million trees, but I think its mostly an agricultural operation. I walked through the palmerie for a few kms towards the zone touristique. On the way, I chatted with a local student in the stands of the deserted fair grounds on the edge of the dunes. The douz dunes are much smaller than the Moroccan ones I visited two years ago. Here they looked like a big wavy ocean of sand with a few palm trees, whereas the Merzouga dunes where huge mountains of sand. However, neither is considered part of the "true sahara." In fact they both are just isolated pockets of sand, separate from the Grand Ergs of the Sahara. But these dunes are much closer to civilization and tourists, and in pictures you can't tell the difference. It was getting dark on the zone touristique strip, so I wandered into the Sahara Douz hotel. (This is like locating an "Airport Hilton" 100kms from the airport, or an "Oceanview Holiday Inn" 100kms inland) I was pretty proud to negotiate the rate of this three star with pool and buffet down to 56D. Ate dinner, watched some arabic game show in the common area, and went to bed. BTW. With so many louage trips today, I made 3 louage BFFs! Definition: someone you meet in the shared taxi and chat with casually for a bit who suddenly asks for your home address and mobile number so you be best friends forever and help them immigrate to Canada.

I'm writing retrospectively now. Sunday I decided to engage some transport to better check out the island. The bicycle rental place in town was closed (I waited around for a while hoping it would open) so I grabbed a taxi to the "Zone Touristique" where operating hours might be more enlightened. The zone touristique is a long, very-spread out strip of dozens and dozens of big hotels located on the north shore. Opposite from them are various local restaurants and business set-up to serve those guests who leave the beach and wander out the front gate. My driver took me to a place that rented out motor-scooters so I got one for 30D. The rental guy gave me a helmet, insurance card and some brief instructions: "Have you ever done this before?" "Don't ever touch the front brake" "Accelerate very slowly." After a bit of practice driving around the dirt parking lot I felt ready to get on the road. It took a while to really get the feel for driving because your center of gravity is way different than on a bicycle. After that, driving was really fun! The speedometer on my bike didn't work, but as I was almost keeping pace with cars in some speed zones, I estimate the scooter could go up to 60km/h. Also the gas gauge stopped working half way through, but the rental guy said you couldn't burn a full tank in the five hour rental period. So I spent the afternoon tooling around Jerba on this thing. I went to the eastern-most beach, the marina back near Hoummt Souq, stopped for lunch, and finally visited the island's casino! Only the slots were open during the day, and the place was completely void of gamblers. You can only gamble in foreign currency (probably because the off-shore operators have no use for Dinars) and I left the place $5 poorer. After returning the bike at five, I took another taxi back to the Auberge de Jeunesse, ate Cousse Cousse Royal for dinner and went to bed.

Hmm Internet access is pretty sparse here, and when you find it, it's very slow and is delivered through a tiny 14" CRT. After my last post, I took the train from Tunis to Sousse, stayed overnight there. Sousse had a nice beach, and while the sun was hot, the wind was cold. The most interesting thing the LP indicated as nearby was the Roman colleseum at El Jem, the next city on the railway south. The train is the ideal means of transport here: clean, fast, on-time, cheap and pretty empty. But that makes this a bit too easy, doesn't it? Instead, I tried to get to El Jem by louage, which is a shared taxi. In Morocco, they have the same thing only it's called a "taxi collective." You arrive at the depot, which is just really just a parking lot, where half a dozen guys each stand around shouting the name of each of the available destinations. The guy shouting your intended destination leads you to the appropriate 20 year old Mercades sedan. You jump in and wait for more people who want to share the ride with you to arrive. When enough people cram into the vehicle (this can take awhile for unpopular destinations) the driver turns on the engine, indicating it's almost time to go. You pay the driver your share of the fare upon arrival. But that's Morocco. Here, they actually have a louage station with a gate, roof and waiting area. And paid-in-advance tickets printed by computer! And you travel in new Mazda or Toyota minivans! So I woke up really early, grabbed a stall sandwich for breakfast, and took a taxi to the louage station. I waited an hour in a minivan for El Jem watching happy Tunisians drive out of the station for other destinations, and not one other person interested in El Jem arrived. This was a waste of time -- obviously only tourists want to go to the colloseum and they just drive there in their giant tour busses! Decided at that point to get back on the train. That's what I did and arrived in El Jem at about 10AM. The colloseum was pretty cool and it kept me interested for a couple hours until it was time to move on. I grabbed lunch and went to the El Jem louage station to try again. This time it was no problem getting a ride to the next town, Sfax. I was the seventh and last person in the minibus and so we promptly left. By the way, the fare is about 3D per hundred kilometers. Highway driving in Tunisia is pretty typical. There's not too much traffic, but we spend half the time driving in the passing lane, staring down an oncoming vehicle. No problem. An hour later, Sfax, seemed pretty generic, urban and crappy, plus I was enjoying my book, so I didn't even leave the louage station and instead got in another minibus to the island Jerba. The drive was along the coast so you could almost always see the blue strip of the Med. sea to the left of the highway. This part of the country is very flat. It's a half desert half green landscape. After three hours driving, the road comes to an end at the water. You cross the water to Jerba by ferry. There are two docks and four boats running concurrently so it didn't take long for our minibus to advance to the front of the queue of traffic. Finally, in the island's main town, I found the Auberge de Jeunesse and payed by 6D for the night.

Hello from Tunisia! I'm on vacation here (and elsewhere?) for the next two weeks. Nothing super exciting has happened yet -- just the usual planes, hostels, and walking around so far. I flew from Seattle to London a day or so ago, and finally arrived here in Tunis pretty late. The price of arriving in a new place after dark is that the transportation and hotel options are less obvious. I just let the first taxi guy at the airport take me to his "preferred" (kickback) hotel. In the light of the next day you realize that the cab fare and hotel cost 3x what they should, but I guess its no big deal. My sleep schedule is a little screwed up. I basically slept through the previous day in Gatwick airport so that first night I was up late watching TV. On the French channel they were playing a translated version of that "Cheaters" show. Woke up super early the next morning and got the heck out of my 37D/day hotel ($1=1.35D). It just isn't worth it to have your own TV and bathroom. For some reason, developing countries make me very cheap. I sat around in the main square and chatted with a Tunisian named Omar about unemployment, how to get a work visa for Canada, and new car prices. Next I got on the commuter TGM train to Sidi Bou Said which is a blue and white suburb on a hill that has good views of the sea and the coast. Not much was going on there so I headed back a couple stops to Carthage and walked along the water. At noon, I had a chicken club sandwich in a "Fast Food" restaurant (that is apparently something to be proud of here) that was furnished like a lounge. The fries were certified "McCain" brand by the menu. There is a museum and ruins in Carthage that cost 7D to bore me so I headed back to Tunis via the train to find a new place to stay. Ventured into the Medina in search of the Auberge de Jeunesse. It's a pretty nice place and costs only 7D per night including bread and coffee for breakfast. After checking in I napped away the afternoon. Had dinner and beers last night with two English archeology students and my Swiss roommate who wants to bike around the country. Today I need to figure out what my plans are for the next weeks.