Tunisia: February 2013

Last week, Thursday was a local holiday so Kaylee used one of her personal days on Friday so that we could take a 4 night trip to Southern Tunisia. We flew out of Tunis Wednesday night after school and arrived in Djerba in time for dinner. Djerba is known for its resorts and beaches, but we arrived late and after picking up our car we left the island early the next morning. Our mission was sand, just not sand beaches, real sand...Saharan sand! We drove south of the island and then headed north west through Medinine towards Toujane, a small hill town. Turning around, we headed back south Towards Tatouine (Starwars fans will recognize the name of the town for which Luke Skywalker's home planet is named. Much of his home planet was filmed in Southern Tunisia.) Out side of Tatouine we explored Ksar Oueld Sultane, Chenini, and Douiret. I can not do them justice other than to say that each was a independent hilltop civilization built on and in some of the tallest "mountains" in the area. We we spent our second night in a Troglodyte hotel in Douiret. The room consisted of an anti chamber that lead to a "bedroom" literally carved back into the rock. It was a really cool place to stay and impressively dark when the electricity providing power for the one cave light did not work in the morning.

The second morning we headed north through fairly small towns before turning west to cross what would be some of the loneliest roads of our trip. There was a 20 kilometer stretch of gravel road, with intermittent patches of loose sand that threatened to strand us, during which we saw only two other cars and a lone sheep herder. Regaining pavement, we headed south into the real desert towards Ksar Ghilane, a remote desert oasis about 150 kilometers from anything. Along the unendingly straight road there were a number of free roaming camels. We see a fair number of camels around Tunis, but they don't get any less strange the more you see. When we reached Ksar Ghilane there was no one to be found, not one person. It took a good 15 minutes to pick our way through the sandy roads before we found one of the Tourist campgrounds that we had planned to stay at. Fortunately, the door of the campground office was open and happy to have us as their only customers in a facility set up for at least one hundred. With in half an hour we were settled in to our 250 square foot permanent structure tent, changed, and headed out on ATV's with a guide to explore the dunes. Real dunes. Saharan Dunes! I wish we could have taken pictures while we were out on the quads but the wind was howling and blowing the powder fine sand everywhere. It was an awesome experience none the less. Some of the dunes were as big as a small two story house. It was also really cool to be outside of the oasis and be able to look back and see it surrounded by nothing but sand as far as we could see. We spent the rest of the evening exploring the oasis on foot and headed to bed early in an attempt (that didn't work) to escape the cold desert night. Cold by Tunisian standards anyway.

We got up early the next morning and with the wind much less active than the day before we ventured out on foot with our cameras in tow. Most of the dune pictures below are from this morning outing. After breakfast we headed north leaving the desert proper behind. Our path took us through Douz, which is well know as the northern entrance to the Sahara. Many multi day desert excursions begin and end in Douz. From there we headed north and west across the salt lake, Chott El Jerid. Completely flat and dry the trip across the lake is 60 straight kilometers. We stopped half way across to get out and walk on the moonscape. The ground was completely covered in a hard layer of salt, in most areas at least 2 inches thick. I haven't really seen anything else like it in person before. Continuing on we landed in Tozeur where we would fly back to Tunis from the following morning. We made it to Tozeur much earlier than expected and we still had a few hours on our car rental so we headed north to check out the mountain oases of Chebika and Tamerza. We pushed our exploration to the limit and made it back to Tozeur with six minutes to spare before the car rental closed for the night. The final morning we explored the area near our hotel on foot before heading to the airport to fly home. It was an amazing trip which we hope to repeat before we leave this beautiful country for good. The pictures do not sufficiently convey the experience, but come much closer than anything I write ever could.

Aside-

On our way out of Tozeur we came across an interesting piece of geopolitical history. On the tarmac at the Tozeur airport there are two 1970's Boeing 747's (those are the big ones, with two passenger decks) that did not appear to have been flown in many years (at least we hoped not, because they had barely any paint and all of the wheels were flat). I also remembered that I saw two very similar planes in the same location on the satellite view of the Tozeur airport when I was planning for the trip. Back at our place in Tunis, I checked Google earth again and using its historic view I could see that the planes hadn't moved since at least 2003. This piqued my curiosity because each of those planes are were worth close to $50 million originally, a significant chunk of change in this country. Doing some research I learned that Saddam Hussein had sent them here to protect them during the first Gulf War. The plans haven't moved in over 20 years! There is an ongoing controversy as to who has a legal right to the planes, the new Iraqi Airways or Kuwaiti Airlines. I believe the debate was recently resolved, but Tunisia is now preventing their release until someone pays for the 20 years of back storage fees. This is an interesting country we live in.