El-Gar Tour of the World

April 2010

Will the darkness never end? Well in fact it had, spring had sprung and Seasonally Affected Disorder was out of the way for another year. The Easter holidays are upon us and we are off to Tunisia. The RMT were on strike over poor pay and working conditions which was causing “traffic carnage” as the tabloids insisted on calling it. We were flying away on Air Tunisia and so avoiding any strike-induced mayhem. After our evening flight arrived at Tunis airport we tried to make our way to our hotel, which was supposed to be somewhere on the road to and past the suburb of Gammarth (which might as well have been the Road to Nowhere) that’s how it looked on Google Maps. No road name, and no directions, we were just relying on the satellite image to get us there. Well, it’s 11 at night so the pictorial view was hard to follow. After driving up and down the road a bit and having agreed that the road and buildings were, in fact, running out, I tried to phone the hotel to be told “Hotel is closed come back 8.“

Well, what you do when you arrive in a foreign country and find that your pre-arranged accommodation does not exist – you purse your lips a bit, shuffle around in your car seats and try not to be the first to complain. After that bit of nonsense is over you turn around and play Hotel Roulette. It was sufficiently late to say we’d take the first one that would let us through the gate. So after asking at a few places that looked a little out of our league, and turned us away, we found a basic but nice enough place that would let us book in for the night. I think it was opposite Karim Beach based on a photo I took out of our window. Unfortunately, that hotel is now permanently closed. With further examination of my photos, I think we stayed in the El Mouradhi Hotel based on the map. We decided to check out our booked hotel the next morning.

The man at reception was lovely: once we explained our predicament, he understood priorities and knew that getting to the bar before it shut was more important than completing the check-in papers, as they could of course wait. We kept hearing him tell people how “Soif” or thirsty we were and this all seemed good. We were indeed very soif as we had been travelling for 12 hours, so we were served some beer and water (the kitchen was of course closed) which we quaffed gratefully before retiring.

Comfortable room, good sleep and a nice basic French-style breakfast later, we set off to explore Gammarth and perhaps find our accommodation. The receptionist in our emergency hotel agreed to ring them up for us. Now last night, I thought the man on the phone said to come back at eight in the morning but as it turned out he could have meant in 8 days, 8 weeks or 8 months. The receptionist in the new hotel also told us that the hotel was closed… closed down.

Never mind, the sun is shining – I’ve got shades on and it’s warm enough for a sleeveless top! We are exploring the town and we will take a little drive down the coast to see what all the fuss is about.

As the hotel had saved our skins, I was a little reluctant to leave, but we decided to get back on our plan. We jumped in the car and set off for our next stop which was to drive through La Goulette a suburb of Tunis, we explored the town and checked into a second, slightly better hotel.

After inspecting the local town we drove to Carthage, revisiting the ruins and looking afresh at the attractions. We had visited here on one of our first holidays together 17 years earlier, back in 1993.

We spent the afternoon in and around Carthage, which was more or less as we’d left it all those years ago, before returning to La Goulette and our replacement hotel.

The following morning, we drove to the capital Tunis, where we spent an enjoyable day exploring. When we had been here before it was on a guided tour and we had about 2 hours to see everything, which included the Bardo museum, containing some spectacular Roman mosaics among many other attractions – we got 40 minutes there. That might be enough for some, but when I go to a museum I want to SEE the exhibits. Equally inadequate were the 40 minutes we were allocated to visit the souk. So this time we had determined to take our time and see everything we wanted to see at our own pace.

Tunis is an elegant city laid out on a grid and you can’t escape the French influence here. The architecture and the orientation of the streets are a dead giveaway. However, you don’t forget this is a ~Muslin country either. I found Tunis beautiful elegant and vibrant and was glad we had chosen to return. Writing this more than a decade after this trip, I’m curious what it is like today.

Shortly after our return from Tunisia, the so-called Sidi Bouzid Revolt (outsiders dubbed it the “Jasmine Revolution”) occurred in Tunisia. High unemployment, corruption and lack of political freedom among other things drove the population to revolt and brought about what some have called the only success of the “Arab Spring”. Whenever my mind turns to reminiscing about this trip, I wonder how Tunisia has changed, I wonder if we have time to fit in a return visit to this wonderful country.