On departing Tunis we took our first Loauge, which is the Tunisian name for eight or nine passenger minibuses that ply the roads between cities and towns all over the country.
Our Louage took us to the town of Teboursouk. Which is really kind of in the middle of nowhere, except that it's the nearest settlement to the old Roman town of Dougga. The Louage drivers and local taxi folk pretty much know that any foreigner taking a loage out to Teboursouk is going to Dougga, so it all runs pretty smoothly. Even though the taxi guy didn't speak English or French, the Louage driver translated for us and arranged for our trip out to Dougga and for the driver to come pick us up again after 2.5 hours. It was a mite pricey, but we knew to expect this (both in specific terms, as in we'd read how much the taxi drivers insist on for a trip to Dougga, and in general terms, as in you know you're going to overpay for your ride when you're in the town nearest a major tourism destination and there are only two taxis in town). And in any case, “a mite pricey,” in Tunisia is NZD12.50 for an 8km taxi ride, then getting picked up and taken back again 2.5 hours later. So no complaints.
Anyhow, enough about logistics and money. I'll just dive right in and say that Dougga is absolutely amazing. It's one of the most spectacular classical era sites I've ever been to, and this includes Ephesus, Baalbek, Pompeii, pre-Syrian-civil war Palmyra and Rome itself. It was only a medium sized town in Roman times, but it's incredibly intact. And you can just wander around the site pretty much as you like. There were maybe a total of forty other tourists on site while we were there, but there's just so much to see (and so many walls still standing) that it mostly felt like we were exploring all on our own. There were temples, markets, rutted streets, baths, pre-Roman Numidian tombs, even storm sewer manholes in the streets still fully intact! I'll let photos do most of the remaining description. But suffice it to say that I'm happy we didn't visit Carthage after Dougga.
From Dougga we headed on to the small city of El Kef. El Kef is one of those places that illustrates my contention that you really don't have to go that far off the main tourist trail to for other tourists to more or less vanish. El Kef is one of Lonely Planet's highlights of Northern Tunisia and in the two nights we spent there we saw one other foreigner.
The highlights that are featured in the guidebook are the Ottoman Kasbah (castle) atop a hill above town and the Medina immediately beneath it. The Kasbah looked pretty cool from afar, but there wasn't much to do inside beyond walking once around the ramparts (maybe fifteen-twenty minutes?)
But all the way up from Tunis (El Kef is at the easternmost end of the Atlas Mountains and is about 600m ASL) we'd been admiring the wide, incredibly green (especially for a country most people think of primarily as desert) valleys and the fields packed full of red poppies, yellow daisies and purple something or others. So we decided to spend the rest of our full day in Kef walking out along a small road that departed town behind the Kasbah and (according to OpenStreetMaps) eventually petered out into a four wheel drive track.
What a glorious walk it was! Admittedly, the breeze, blue skies and warm air were such that pretty much anything would have been lovely. But we wandered up to a small village, joined a large group of Tunisian housewives on tour looking out over a rugged river gorge, and then carried on up and up until the road tipped over the edge of a steep ridge from where you could see out over the fertile valleys and protruding rocky peaks for dozens of kilometres in every direction. I climbed up to the ridgetop to the left of the road and was rewarded with still better views, and with a sky full of crows that I'd apparently startled out of their resting/observing spot.
One other highlight of El Kef was the strawberries that we ended up eating 1.5kg of over the course of our stay. They ranged from tasting good to really good and cost a mere NZD1.30 a kilo!
From El Kef we took another Louage to the holy city of Kairouan. Holy, as it was the first city (and mosque) founded by the Umayyads when they brought Islam to Tunisia in 670AD.
Kairouan was a weird mix of peaceful and slightly irritating tourism-busy. Peaceful was almost all of the city. This included the lovely Hotel Tunisia where we got a NZD22.50/night double room complete with breakfast and bathtub!). And the coffee houses on the main square just outside the medina where we sat and sipped on both espressos and super sweet, super strong mint tea. And almost all of the medina, which, painted blue and white looked a lot like the Kasbah of Rabat, but somewhat newer and possibly even prettier (it was also appeared as Cairo in Raiders of the Lost Ark). Even one of the city's significant attractions, the huge Aghlabid cisterns (the larger of which is a reservoir 128m in diameter) was just filled with couples walking around holding hands or families having picnics.
The two places that were not entirely peaceful and hassle-free were the main street of the Medina near the old governor's house and the grand mosque. At the former, it seemed like every second person who spoke to you wanted to take you to the governor's house. We managed to shake them all off and make out way there unaided, whereupon we were greeted by someone we'd already met out on the streets. He showed us inside and made sure the caretakers knew that it was he who had brought us there. See, the governor's house is now the biggest carpet shop in a city that's famous for old-time-religion and carpets, and it very much appears that whoever drags you in gets a cut on whatever sales are made once you're there. The carpet salesmen gave us a little tour, probing for info on how much money we had and whether we seemed likely sales-marks while we looked around. And immediately upon completion, when it became apparent that the answers to these two things were “little” and “no,” they said “thanks for visiting, the exit's that way!”
There wasn't quite so much hard sell at the grand mosque (home of arguably the oldest still-standing minaret in the world). In fact I actually rather liked the carpet salesman who invited us up to the roof of his shop for a look out across the courtyard of the mosque. He bade us take lots of photos, and then was happy to show us a few carpets, even when we'd made it crystal clear we wouldn't be buying one right from the start. “If you change your mind that's good, if not then maybe next time In sha'Allah” he said happily. This low pressure kind of pitch works very well on me and I ensured him (entirely truthfully) that in the unlikely event we decided we did want a carpet he'd be getting our business.
Our one dinner in Kairouan was our first solo (without Anis ordering for us) restaurant meal in Tunisia, and it was a goody. Chick pea and veggie stew for Sarah, whole grilled fish for me, with Salad Mechouia (mixed mashed roasted vegetables), chips, green salad and lots of fresh bread on the side.
Our other culinary experience was the date and sesame sweets that we bought a big box of as we headed to the bus station. They seemed like the sort of thing that would give you cavities the moment you looked at them, but they were actually just lightly sweet, with nice little crunchy bits inside and were surprisingly more-ish (even for Sarah who always says that dates taste like glue stick).
After one night in Kairouan we continued our journey south through Tunisia's inland towns and cities, taking a louage to Gabes, about halfway down the country's length and as close as we'd get to the coast until we started back north again.
In Gabes we weren't really sure how to take the next step of our journey. The louages to our destination, Matmata, left from a different station than the one we'd arrived at, one whose location we weren't really sure of. Plus the wind was picking up and the sky was starting to turn the colour of an ugly old bruise, suggesting a storm of who knew what severity might be on the way.
So we made the decision to stop and have a late lunch while we saw which way the wind blew, which had the added bonus of giving us a natural person to ask about where to find onward transport. One English speaking guy greeted us and, when we told him we were planning on having lunch, recommended one specific bus-stop restaurant. Good recommendation as it turned out! We ate delicious spicy chicken couscous, and a plate of
haricots blancs in red pepper sauce. Both dishes were delicious, either could reasonably have fed two people, and they cost a grand total of three bucks! Plus the proprietor was a very friendly old man who, after we'd finished our food, and after a few raindrops had fallen and the sky had begun to clear, told us that the louages to Matmata were “oh, about a kilometres that way, but there's a bus at 15:00 that leaves from right over there.”
We thanked him and paid and wandered over to the bus station. And struggled a bit. One person said “oh, yeah, 15:00 bus to Matmata, right outside”. Then outside others had no idea what he'd been talking about. Others still said “no, not til 15:30!” All the while this went on as watched big scrums appear around the doors of intercity buses as they pulled into the station, with a couple of dozen people scrambling for what seemed like a half dozen seats, while passengers disembarking yelled at them to “let us off the bloody bus!”
Eventually one guy sitting in the driver's seat of a bus parked around the corner said something to the effect of “yup, this is the bus, I leave in thirty minutes”. He even let us climb on before he pulled round the corner to start the (thankfully much less chaotic) boarding process. So it had proved a bit of a mission, but forty minutes drive south into the desert and there we were, in Matmata. In new Matmata. Unfortunately, many towns in Tunisia have both old and new incarnations. And in the case of Matmata, new Matmata is about twenty kilometres north of old Matmata, which was our destination. It wasn't immediately clear how we'd cover this last twenty k, other than a few vague suggestions we received to “go wait over there”...
I think I'll pause here and leave us on a bit of a cliffhanger, not so much for dramatic effect, as because what we got up to in Matmata is really cool, and I want to begin the next entry with it.
Until then!
No comments:
Post a Comment