March - May 2007

Tunisia

Approaching Monastir on sunrise, it looked a modern town from the white concrete hotels and buildings. In contrast, a large stone fort, called a Ribat, towered above the beach, appearing like a giant sand castle, from its bucket like shapes and yellow sand colour.

A coast guard launch and zodiac came out to identify us and I hurriedly hoisted the yellow 'Q' flag to show I was entering Tunisia from another country. As they were buzzing around Weatherly and questioning Cristi, I embarrassingly lost the tail of the rope and the Q flag was stuck up in the spreaders. The zodiac lead us in to the marina to complete formalities.

After docking and hosing down Weatherly, we went to explore the town. Now I understood the reason for the scrutinous reception we had from the coast guard. The president was arriving in Monastir. Huge posters were stuck on every wall and even the Ribat. Flags were waved, a children's choir sang at the mausoleum and colourful ribbons were draped from rotundas at the entrance. Most of the streets were cordoned off and stationed by multitudes of armed police. Then a large bunch of balloons were let fly. The president must be a popular guy.

I booked in to Monastir marina for a month, using it as a base to explore the town and nearby cities of El Jem and Sousse. The old walled city (called a medina) was interesting to wander through. Small cafes served coffee and mint tea, there were steam bath-houses (called hammans), small shops selling wares, bike repairs and carpets etc. We visited the Ribat, which was a fort built by Muslims for defence against raiding Christians from Sicily in the Middle Ages. It also served religious purposes and contained many small rooms for people to live in and study the Koran.

To visit El Jem, a town with an impressive Roman amphitheatre and museum of mosaics, we were told it was quickest to catch a louage, a shared taxi for 8 people. They leave when full, but as we were the first aboard, it took a full hour in the heat before we were able to leave.

We enjoyed a lunch of Tunisian salad, some bread with a hot dip called harissa, and lamb cous cous. The cafe was in prime position right in front of the Roman amphitheatre, which looks about the same size and construction as the Colosseum in Rome. We entered it after lunch and explored the corridors and highest floors for a good view of the arena, then went below the arena floor to see where the lions and gladiators were caged before the shows.

The museum had some great Roman mosaics and I was surprised to learn that the town was once a rich city with villas and nobility. It seems in the middle of nothing today, but in its day, the region was once a breadbasket for the Roman Empire.

I planned out a 9 day trip to the south of Tunisia to see the Berber dwellings near Matmata. My guide book promise a hotel in a converted Ksar, named Haddada, where some bar scenes from the movie Star Wars was filmed. We were shown around by a sleazy security man and took a few pictures of the Ksar rooms. It was once used as a granary in a circular fortress shape, and later housed Berber people, one of the original peoples of Tunisia.

The next day near Matmata, we saw another type of Berber dwelling, a pit home similar to that lived in by Luke Skywalker's parents (from Star Wars). The old lady, who occupied it, wore traditional Berber clothes, with silver clasps holding her colourful shawl around her.

Next stop was Douz, right on the edge of the Sahara, and renowned for camel safaris. I booked a camel trip through a tout named Salime, from the hotel El Medina. The hotel was very nice, as advised by a yachtie we'd met in Monastir. Unfortunately, the camel trip was way overpriced and overstated. The cameleer lived in a poor, backward town called Sabria. The hotel tout promised a nice, early start just after breakfast, but the formalities to register with the police and delays by the cameleer meant we started our trek at 1pm, in the hottest part of the day. His wife was preparing a fake christening for the next day, and wanted us to buy gifts for the newborn baby who was oddly bandaged up with cords, so tightly that her feet looked white and hair sweating. The stew of sheep's innards boiled in a cannibal's pot looked completely unappetising to Cristi and me, but we politely ate a few spoonfuls of the vile broth, before I asked to be underway.

Finally, we mounted our camels, and the cameleer, Ali, lead the way, walking ahead of us in what appeared to be carpet-slippers. Just out of town he took these off and walked the rest of the time bare foot.

Ali pulled the camels down for a rest stop, making clicking sounds. The camels bellowed in harsh complaint, but complied, folding their knees suddenly, so that you lurch forward, nearly getting thrown off.

He tied corners of a rug to a low shrub and weighed the other ends down with bags of sand to make a very effective shade for us. It was nice to eat some oranges, and lie in the shade on other rugs with a light breeze cooling us. Ali made us some hobs (bread) from a bag of flour, salt and water and cooked it in the coals of a campfire in the sand. It was far more palatable than the earlier meal we were presented with, and filled a gap in our hungry stomachs.

Having a bad start with Ali, I tried making up by polite conversation. He was a man of few words but I was curious about his life in the desert.

I told him how I sailed to Tunisia from Australia and use a GPS to navigate my boat. Then asked how he is able to cross a desert for up to a week or so without instruments. He looked at me thoughtfully and by way of explanation, tapped his head slowly 3 times. I'm not sure if it meant he has a GPS implanted in his brain or that I am crazy, but it seemed no further talking was necessary.
'Do you use the sun, or recognise features of the landscape, passed down from father to son?' I persisted. Tap, tap, tap.

On we went with our camels in the hot afternoon sun, the soft dunes slowly changing colour - rose coloured in the sunshine and to a purple hue in the shadows. It was peaceful walking in the Sahara. So quiet. Just the soft squelch of the sand from the camels footsteps, and the occassional clicking noise from Ali to guide the camels on. No other sounds could be heard. The sand also seemed very pure to me. No rubbish or signs of humanity. The wind sweeps the sand along, covering yesterday's footprints and tracks. The quietness, purity of the fine sand, forming into dunes and shadows reminded me of being in a fresh snowfield.

We stopped for the night and I helped Ali collect firewood. He made the fire and sat and stared at it for an hour or so, till it started getting windy and dark. 'Should we set the tent'? I ventured. He chose a stony patch in the middle of the open wind. I scouted around and found a better position in the lee of a small sand dune, and we repitched the tent there out of the wind a little.

After a rough meal consisting of cous cous, hobs, a lot of sand, zucchini, baked beans and tomatoes which Cristi found inedible, it started to rain. Rain in the Sahara ? It seemed totally incongruous to me, but there it was, and Ali had no tent for himself, just a few dusty old blankets he wrapped over him.

Oddly, Ali didn't seem in a great mood in the morning. He prepared a hurried breakfast of tea and hobs with sachets of jam, and we packed up camp. Thinking it was going to be a long day I was happy to leave early for a good walk in the desert.

We passed a Bedouin lady in outside her wide, black tent. She wore traditional Berber shawl with silver clasps and looked weatherbeaten. Ali talked and laughed with her and I took a few pictures.

Then we walked on to see a Marabout, a small rounded temple built by Sufi's as a place for worship in the desert. It was half engulfed by a drifting sand dune, but I was able to crawl inside to see a box in the centre of the room, possibly a tomb or altar.

After talking on his mobile phone, Ali gave us the option to have lunch at his house or in the desert. Remembering the unsavoury dish of sheep innards in the cannibal pot, or sandy hobs (bread), it was a grim culinary choice. But I paid a lot to have our time on camels in the Sahara, so he made campfire on some sandy dunes with grass tussocks in view of his village on the horizon.

We arrived back in Sabria, his village in the late afternoon, and were greeted uncivilly by Ali's wife, and had our shoes tossed in the dirt unceremoniously. I wonder why? Maybe he was expected back for lunch and we had offended their courtesy. Whatever. We hadn't really received the proper deal I had paid for, but it was a memorable, peculiar and sometimes funny experience and a highlight of Tunisia for me.

Douz was an interesting town for the sand which sweeps over the roads, and the central square with a nice coffee bar overlooking the markets below. We caught a louage and then connected to a large bus (after much waiting around) to Tozeur. We had to cross a 'chott', a large salt flat, below sea level, but devoid of any moisture because of the baking sun. Either side of the raised highway were strange cafes featuring joke 'mirages' of painted fishing boats, camels and palm trees to attract customers.

Tozeur is more touristy than the other southern Tunisian cities, but is an interesting city. We hired bicycles to explore, because it is flat and spread out. There are fantastic geometric brickwork on many old buildings in the medina, grand hotels and government buildings (which are not allowed to photograph).

The town is a desert oasis, containing a life supporting spring. The inhabitants, over many centuries, started a complex system of irrigation, growing date palms for shade, then fruits, flowers and gardens, and turned it into a relative paradise, compared to the barren desert scape just outside the perimeters of the town.

We visited a fantastic museum on the full history of Tunisia, with a lot of information and nice displays, from each section of the country's colourful past - prehistoric age, Berbers, Ottomans, Punic wars with Rome, Hannibal's attack with elephants, Roman Empire, Vandals, Arabs, Beys, French, Independence...

We also saw a tacky and tatty exhibition of the 'Arabian Nights' in a separate section, but it was almost laughable how poor the models and sound effects were.

After Tozeur we ventured out to the far west side of the country near the border with Algeria, and stayed in the sleepy village of Tamerza. Incongruous with the basic standard of living in the desert town, a modern, articulated school bus pulled up, and we jumped on amongst a rabble of school kids all chattering and questioning me. It was going to the town of Mides where the 'English Patient' was filmed in spectacular rocky gorges. It started raining really heavily when we were there and my new umbrella blew inside out after 20 minutes of use. As a consolation, the gorge was very beautiful in the rain and I took some really great photos of the waterfalls cascading off high cliffs.

The return trip to Monastir took us on a spectacular train ride down slanted grassy steppe country then following another spectacular gorge, where a tourist train called the 'Red Lizard' costs passengers 10 times the fare we paid to ride the same section of track. It was more exciting too on our rickety carriage, as the electric door mechanism had long been defunct, and the doors suddenly slid open on each rounding of the bends in the narrow gorge.

After returning from the southern desert trip, we sailed north to Kelibia, a small fishing port. I anchored under the lee of the huge cliffs at Cape Bon peninsula and trekked up the hills to a remote lighthouse the next day to chati to the lighthousekeepers who were sitting in the cool shade of the arches. There was a donkey tethered to a rock on the side of a cliff and seemed a bit nervous about its position, but was happy to chew some grass when offered. I saw thermal pools marked on the chart, but the water was still very chilly when I jumped in. When I tried to heave up the anchor, it had well and truly got lodged around rocks and crevices in 8m water, just a bit too deep for me to duck dive and clear it. Luckily a local diver came to help (for a reward) and we were away after several hours of mucking around.

We visited a picturesque, cliff top town called Sidi Bou Said. The doors were ornate and together with the windows and balconies were painted blue and looked beautiful in contrast to dazzling white walls, and brilliant purple bouganvillea. We enjoyed a mint tea at a charming and popular tea house overlooking the coast. Some teas are made with roasted pine nuts at the bottom, but this was refreshing too and enjoyable sharing the view with local families and couples sitting around on cushions and booths.

At another peaceful anchorage on a deserted beach some idiot fishermen cast their nets close to the back of Weatherly at night. The stern and propeller became seriously fouled in the nets, and I nearly got hypothermia cutting the nets free the next morning for an hour in cold water.

We sailed to the friendly and down to earth town of Bizerte were I had a new anchor bay cap made up as well as the chain ratchet teeth built up. They had sustained damage when trying to leave the anchorage near ancient Carthage one evening, in a strengthening wind.

We took a train to the capital city, Tunis and found it to be modern with an impressive preserved palace/museum, mosques, tea houses and a labyrinthal market area selling cheap hand-made silverware and clothing.

Finally, we departed Sidi Bou Said, after a lot of trouble obtaining visa extensions, running between various offices and finding stamps. Tunisia has a very messy and confusing process for visa extensions and none of the officials in 5 port offices I stopped at, usually a taxi ride or long walk from the port, had consistent or accurate information.

The motor sail across to Favignana and Trapani in Sicily was fairly uneventful, with flat seas and light breezes.