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The landscape has dried out. A hot wind sends sand skittering across the highway in waves, an uncanny mimic of the distant sea.
Occasionally, an optimist has constructed fences of dried palm fronds along the roadsides to hold back the Sahara, which every year encroaches further on Tunisia, greedy for fertile ground to feed its sinister growth.
Here, close to the Algerian border, I’m reminded that the Arabic word for desert is sahra – the simplest descriptor for the world’s largest hot desert, which spans North Africa.
At the heart of this nearly fortnight-long tour through Tunisia with Intrepid Travel are the desert and the salt plains, travelling through Berber and Bedouin territory, sleeping in caves and tents and oases, all bookended by Tunis and the sea.
To put little Tunisia into its geopolitical context, it’s halfway between Morocco and Egypt, on the North African coast.
Looking longitudinally, it suddenly appears so much more familiar – Tunis is just an hour’s flight from the islands of Malta, and flights and even a ferry connect it to the Sicilian capital, Palermo, across the Mediterranean Sea.
The beaches of Sousse, Hammamet and Djerba are no secret to hordes of sun-starved Europeans, led by the French, the last power to impose its rule over Tunisia until its independence in 1956.
But I am in the grip of a deep Saharan romance that has lasted decades, from when I first rode a camel into the dunes of eastern Morocco. It’s an enduring romance, and I realise on this journey that some of my happiest travels have been in deserts.
OF SALT FLATS, THE SAHARA AND SPINACH SOUP
The journey into Tunisia’s share of the Sahara is an epic worthy of an ode: the traveller turns their face south from Tunis, through the Maghreb’s holiest city, Kairouan, and across the salt plains of Chott el Jerid.
Here the landscape is hard and bright, shimmering with the unrequited promise of water. A building appears on the horizon.
It’s not a fata morgana, the complex mirages that haunt the chotts, as such salt lakes are known. It’s a small shop, with a stand of public toilets kindly described as primitive. Some wag added their own spelling and added an “i”, the name “Chiottes el Jerid” painted above the rough-looking bogs. The “ch” is pronounced “sh” – it’s a joke best said aloud.
Across the flat road, a stencilled sign advises it’s 150 kilometres to Algeria – today, Africa’s largest nation by size – and someone’s embedded a little sailing ship in the salt flat, adding a flag of Tunisia and a handpainted sign that reads “Titanic”. I am not the first to do a Kate Winslet impersonation at the helm. I will not be the last.
The road is mostly empty, save a little Isuzu ute, motoring valiantly under the weight of its passengers: four camels – otherworldly and unexpected – tucked into the tray, their brown or white heads raised, shaggy fringes flickering in the breeze.
Camels are also in the meat market and on the menu in the southerly oasis town of Tozeur. In the main souq (marketplace) a butcher holds up a skull for us. “The best meat is in the cheek,” he confirms. There are few takers from within the group for a photo with the camel’s skull.
Here, I have my first and last serving of the thick, green soup made from molokhiya, a gelatinous spinach that I know and cook in Egypt; a delicious, garlicky soup ladled over rice.
In Tunisia the molokhiya leaves are dried and ground into powder, creating a thick, green-black potion in which chunks of camel meat are suspended. Flashing its French colonial influence, the molokhiya is served with a crusty baguette.
Baguette or no, it tastes like henna. Bitter, slimy, unlovable, unrepeatable. My Intrepid guide Monta Cherni is a diplomat but I know, as a Tunisian, he’s a little miffed by my uncharacteristically near-untouched bowl. For me it is not Tunisia’s culinary high point; better, much better, food is to come.
The last stop before the Sahara, the Tozeur oasis was well settled even before the Romans set up camp here, in the second century AD, to protect the empire’s southernmost fringe.
Even then the lakes shielded little Tunisia from invasion. From the 16th century and into the Ottoman era, Cherni tells me, the little oasis flourished as a stopover for grateful caravans on the great trans-Saharan slave-trade routes from wealthy Timbuktu up to the Tunisian ports.
Today, pony taxis clip smartly between the cars in Tozeur town, the caleches ferrying women and bags of vegetables from the main souk. It’s a short walk into Tozeur’s 14th-century medina, or old town.
DATE NIGHT AT THE OASIS
“Stay together because if you get lost in here I won’t find you,” warns Cherni, as our group of 13 dives into the tangle of laneways that mark the centre of Tunisian cities, including Tunis’ seventh-century medina, beachside Sousse and holy Kairouan.
In an unstable world the labyrinthine medina was protection, he explains: why build grand boulevards that an invading army can simply ride into, 10 abreast, and conquer? Far better to evade, bamboozle, ambush and pick your enemies off in the slender alleys and dead ends.
The town is hemmed by date palm gardens, where we watch as sharecropper Mohamed shimmies barefoot up a date palm with astonishing speed.
He’s 60 years old, yet two months of each year Mohamed climbs 500 trees to pollinate the female palms, waving a sheath of powdery pollen in his wake. And with a million palm trees in the oasis, it’s no surprise when Cherni tells me the No.1 earner today is dates because Tozeur’s dates are Tunisia’s best.
Tonight we’re staying at Dar Horchani, a cluster of little villas built from palm trunks that creates its own village on the isthmus between Chott el Jerid and Chott Mejez Sfa. It does a fine run of rustic luxe, with rough-hewn timber beds and traditional woven hangings, and also serves the best food of the trip.
The spread tonight includes: a soup of lemon and sun-dried couscous (the latter is a Berber staple called m’hamsa); salads of vivid tomato; platters of sfa, a sweetened couscous with meat; and fruit from the oasis – bowls of fresh, sweet oranges and pomegranates, and dates for the connoisseur, from the well-loved deglet nour (the date of light) to the rare deglet bey (royal date).
Beyond the palm gardens, past the irrigation channels pouring out hot, artisanal water, past the failed golf course and the airport, the desert begins once again.
Here, on the edge of the Sahara, a field of dunes stretches toward the setting sun. Al Abyad (The White) and I lope across sand so fine it cloaks the camel the sun-creamed traveller.
My stay tonight is a tented camp two hours south-east of Tozeur, across the chott, through the township of Douz and into the desert. The bus disagrees with the fine sand and gently, stubbornly, bogs itself, refusing to move until it’s freed by the ever-patient Ali and the smiling staff of our Saharan camp.
I’ve gone traditional and chosen one of the old-school canvas tents as my room for the night. Stretcher beds are cloaked with heavy velour blankets ahead of the cold desert night; there are rugs thrown over the sandy floor, a little lamp and even a power board – the picturesque camp and the desert demand a fully charged camera.
As the sun sinks, Al Abyad’s soft feet splay across the sand until we reach a camp of blankets and sofas turned to the west. Through careful planning born of experience, beer and wine bought from the off-licence in Tozeur await, to toast the setting sun.
Widely regarded as the most liberal of the Islamic countries in North Africa and the Middle East, with long-standing laws on divorce, abortion, alimony and alcohol, Cherni describes Tunisians – particularly in the north – as “cultural Muslims”, a far cry from the conservative nations of the Arabian Gulf.
Tunisia is relatively nonchalant about alcohol, brewing its own Celtica beer and producing several wines, which swing from gut-rot to eminently quaffable.
Fire is, of course, the ancestor of television and, as night falls, the staff and all the camp’s guests are drawn like moths to the flame, faces hot-red while the cold desert night runs chill fingers down our spines.
“Winter is coming,” says Lassaad, a local Bedouin clad in the bright, indigo-blue uniform of the camp’s staff.
Surrounded by camels, dunes and saltbush scrub, a drumming band thumping out Saharan beats, a nasal flute calling over the top – did he actually quote Game of Thrones to me? And isn’t April spring in Tunisia?
“I love Jon Snow,” he says with a grin. And after a dinner of robust tagines, salads and hot bread, the band drums until late into the night, lit by firelight and the glitter of bright stars above, in a landscape that knows no snow.
A STARRING ROLE IN STAR WARS
The skies are getting bigger, and the stories wilder, the further south we travel. One afternoon we’re tearing through the desert in a small convoy of Toyota four-wheel-drives, skipping over the Eriguet Dunes for the thrill. The fleet pauses atop the biggest of them all, a magnificent drop to … a spaceport.
It is, of course, Mos Espa, the spaceport on the Outer Rim planet of Tatooine built in 1999 for the origin-story Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
The canny government set the proviso that Lucasfilm must leave the set intact afterwards and I watch as delighted geeks explore the domed houses, camel touts hot on their heels.
Here you can rent lightsabres and Jedi cloaks (if you didn’t bring your own) and re-enact the fight scenes.
It doesn’t need much imagination; creator George Lucas took plenty of inspiration from his surroundings.
The southern governorate of Tataouine gave the planet its name, the dark-brown Maghrebi burnous morphed into the Jedi’s cloak, the movie’s shady-smugglers vibe perhaps inspired by the brisk, shameless, cross-border petrol smuggling of Algerian and “unbelievably cheap” Libyan petrol into Tunisia.
The low, domed houses of Mos Espa are scattered across the desert plain, site of the wild podraces where little Anakin Skywalker shines in The Phantom Menace, additionally filmed in Sidi Bouhlel Canyon, now known simply as Star Wars Canyon.
That completely overrides the fact that Han Solo – sorry, Harrison Ford – was back here, duelling with Nazis over lost treasure in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or that Ralph Fiennes carried Kristin Scott Thomas, like a bride in billowing white, into one of the canyon’s caves that would become her tomb in The English Patient.
Preserved in the dry deserts for nearly 30 years, the little domed houses of Mos Espa are another liberal borrowing from Tunisia. In the movie they lead to the Skywalker homestead, dug under the hot earth. Just like our lunch stop in Matmata.
Unseen from afar, the house is a great circular well, sunken into the ground and excavated. Entered via a discreet door and tunnel, Hasna and her niece Ulfa lay a long table with desert flowers, awaiting our group.
It’s much cooler down here than up on the sunbaked surface, and while she works in her very cave-dug kitchen, Hasna tells me her father lived here until the country’s worst floods drove them out, in 1979. Unable to rebuild their subterranean homes, they’ve simply built houses above ground, next door.
As she chats, Hasna tidies her headscarf and reties the apron over her long skirts; the south is more religiously conservative than easy-going Tunis, with its rooftop bars and fast-food baguette chains.
She lays the table with tabouna bread cooked on the walls of a clay oven, local honey and olive oil, the classic Tunisian shakshuka-esque dish called ojja, a grilled vegetable salad and tabkha, a thick vegetable-and-brown-lentil soup. But regardless of the location, the Tunisian table is unfinished without spicy hot sauce harissa. Always harissa.
JEEPS, SHEEP AND HOT SPRINGS
It’s early morning and the sun is yet to warm the mesas that erupt from the plains of Tataouine. This is Amazigh or Berber country, the dry, mountainous landscape inhabited by the indigenous people of North Africa.
Carved into the hillsides, our stay tonight is a series of caves that once housed an entire village. Gite Douiret is run by the Talbi family, who’ve reclaimed their homes to share with us.
A thick wooden door leads into my room, where two bed platforms have been carved into the mountain, niches holding towels, extra blankets and lamps. It has no view, it is spartan, it is perfect.
The gite is also deceptively large; I count five low-ceilinged dining rooms in the warren, and meet walking groups and motorcyclists from Northern Europe drinking shots of coffee and nibbling warm pastries at sunrise. The gite is, simply, one of the most extraordinary places I have stayed.
From here we’ll take half-day hikes across the ridges of the Dahar Mountains to the 12th-century, utterly picturesque village of Chenini, see centuries-old olive presses still ready to roll, and visit 15th-century ksour, granaries used to store precious grain and foodstuffs, safe and hidden in cool, temperature-controlled caves.
Some have yielded to the harsh climate and are crumbling beautifully, others have been pimped up for films, at least one is now a hotel.
On the highways returning north toward Tunis we share the road with groups of heavily laden motorbikes, sawn-off utes, a convoy of Austrians in Jeeps, sheep, and minibuses of local sightseers.
They’re visiting hot springs, a shrine to a still-remembered local saint, a roadside cafe selling mint tea and makroudh, date-stuffed pastries. Occasionally we pass a police checkpoint, the local officers waving cheerily at passing friends.
Some places don’t have to try to be dramatic; they just are. El Jem, where we stop on our journey back to Tunis, is simply breathtaking. Built in the third century, the Roman amphitheatre could hold 35,000 spectators and is one of Tunisia’s eight UNESCO-listed cultural sites.
“It’s one of the gems of Tunisia,” says Cherni, and was apparently the first choice for the first Gladiator movie – it lost out to Malta and Morocco when the government put up too many bureaucratic hurdles.
Regardless, Russell Crowe breathes down my neck, and everyone here today is quoting “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius” as we walk the sandy floor – all the better to soak spilt blood. Yet another pearl of trivia wisdom from Cherni, the name “arena” is derived from the Latin word for sand.
The classical archways are magnificent, the holding pens below still evoke the fear humans and animals must have felt before they were hauled up into the arena.
Yet today, on a sunny spring day, it’s easy to get a tourist-free photo, compared with the crush at Rome’s Colosseum, which gets up to 25,000 visitors a day.
The traffic of Tunis and the light-filled, modern Bardo Museum, which adroitly retraces the country’s long past, are a shock to the senses, alert from our time in the quiet desert.
My skin is scoured smooth by the Sahara with sand so insidious it continues to pour from my shoes, my notebook, even my pyjamas, days later. I don’t want to leave the desert; it seems it won’t leave me, either.
FIVE MORE NORTH AFRICAN NATIONS TO VISIT (AND NOT TO VISIT)
MOROCCO
The most-visited country in Africa, with more than 17 million people holidaying there last year. They come to see the sands in the Sahara, enjoy the beaches, savour its delicious cuisine and wander its exotic, ancient walled medinas and souqs. This tourism behemoth shows no signs of slowing down. See visitmorocco.com
ALGERIA
Islamic architecture, Roman cities and the kasbah of Algiers are powerful lures to Africa’s largest country, which is enjoying a surge in visitors to a country not devoured by mass tourism. In the south the drawcards are timeless oasis towns amid the wind-blown dunes of the Sahara, and Neolithic petroglyphs. See visitalgeria.dz
EGYPT
The Pyramids of Giza, the (mostly open) Grand Egyptian Museum and a Nile cruise put Egypt high on everyone’s bucket list; even with the war on Gaza next door, nearly 16 million people visited last year, all keen to soak up its rich Pharaonic past, a record for one of the world’s first tourism destinations. See visitegypt.com
MAURITANIA
Slipping well under the tourism radar, adventurous travellers know this country for its three-kilometre-long iron ore freight trains – the world’s longest and heaviest. Tourism is undeveloped, though desert rats will love that 90 per cent of Mauritania is covered by the dramatic Sahara desert. See visitmauritania.com
LIBYA
History buffs know Libya has some of the world’s best-preserved Greek and Roman remains, including the jewel, Leptis Magna. Deeper into the country, Berber towns and rock art lure the most intrepid, and, of course, there is always the Sahara, although Libya has a red “do not travel” card on smartraveller.gov.au. See tourism.gov.ly
THE DETAILS
TOUR
Intrepid Travel’s 12-day Tunisia Expedition costs from $5350 a person, twin share, including accommodation, most meals and entry fees. See intrepidtravel.com
VISIT
Spring (March-May) and autumn (September-October) are the best time to explore southern Tunisia, out of the searing summer heat and the busy European holiday season (June-August).
VISA
Australian tourists do not require a visa to enter Tunisia when visiting for less than 90 days.
SECURITY
The Australian government’s Smart Traveller travel advisory website recommends that visitors to Tunisia exercise a high degree of caution. See smartraveller.gov.au
The writer was a guest of Intrepid Travel.
