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.