Tunisia

« The Sousse Ribat. Four galleries of photos from Tunisia; Black & White, Colour, Carthage and El Jem. The people of Tunisia were decidedly uninterested in being photographed and would hide their faces the moment they spotted a tourist from 100 paces away. Next time, I go dressed as a Jawa. »

Tunisia was the destination for our winter holiday this year which conjured a mixture of the exotic and the 'Star Wars' familiar in the imagination. We departed late on Christmas Eve on a plane that had the most cramped seating I've ever had the displeasure of sitting in and still have the bruises on my kneecaps to prove it. I drank 3 glasses of wine and chewed my fingernails to the quick to tamp down the swirling homicidal urges directed at the woman in the seat in front of me who kept bouncing the back of the seat not realising that the bumps she was feeling in her back were my knees.

Fortunately, the flight was only four hours long. At passport control, I watched a rather intimidating customs official linger over every person and I began to be quite nervous about being a Yank. I gave the man my papers and tried to do my best 'customs casual' hoping that there wouldn't be a squad of armed guards if I looked too tense. While waving about the folded receipt for my residence permit renewal application that he found in the back of passport, "What's this?!", he asked. I explained what it was and he then went through each and every stamp in my passport. Twice. A few other questions and he tired of toying with me and let me pass. A metal detector and two more passport checks awaited us. Jarkko half-jokingly said to some other Finns on the elevator in the hotel that he wouldn't be surprised if there was a passport check at the room door. Welcome to Tunisia....

We strolled into Sousse on Christmas morning in search of coffee and a general idea of the place we had flown into the night before. Sousse is very much a product for the consumption of the tourists who come there to visit but even with that in mind there were no McDonald's, no Pizza Huts, no porn, no giant new shopping malls. There were a lot of Santa and New Year decorations which were clearly part of the tourism package but otherwise there were few signs of American/European culture having found its way into Tunisia which was a refreshing change of pace. Our 4-star hotel room even lacked a TV, telephone and anything else electronic. It was paradise. We found a cafe and, after nearly two years of strong Finnish coffee, the Tunisian coffee I ordered 3 consecutive cups of was so good as to be sublime. I wanted to order a thermos of it to go and I fantasized about a coffee pipeline from the mediterranean to Finland.

The Sousse medina was like running a gauntlet at a an American vacuum salesman convention in Las Vegas. Primed for an international clientele, i.e. tourists, the shopkeepers would step into your path and attempt to get you to look at their touristy crap at low prices just for you. "Päivä! Päivä! Mitä kuuluu?" and "Raha on loppu?" was their mantra to the pale folks like us dressed in black unless they noticed my camera and then it was either "Wie gehts?" or something in Dutch. I must admit that I admired their polyglot approach to pitching their wares even if I wasn't so fond of their aggressive sales tactics. Touristy towns always attract grifters. On our last day, we experienced what I called a 'Tunisian mugging' delivered to us by an old man who caught us off guard by speaking very good English and offering to show us the way to the great mosque in the medina. A few scary alleyways later, I shook his hand, thanked him and it dawned on me that we had been had in the least clever manner possible. We gave him a few coins and wandered back into familiar territory somewhat relieved.

On the first evening in Sousse, we had a few drinks in the hotel pub with a congenial bartender who would show his approval or disapproval of drink choices and keep the flow of little plates of finger foods coming all evening. At some point, between the second and third indigenous cocktail concoction, a local businessman started chatting us up and extolled the wonders the tax-free status businesses enjoy for five years in Tunisia. I asked, of course, "What happens after five years?", and he laughed a little too heartily and said, "You change the name of the business." Apparently, Tunisians also enjoy a Mexican-style privilege where they are allowed to hop over to Italy as a source of cheap agricultural labour. The train to Tunis the following day was a tour moving through olive groves and piles and piles of rubbish. Hundreds of tissue paper thin plastic bags in white, black, pink and other colours lay on open fields catching the wind which looked like some post-modern crop ready for harvest. After so many kilometers of rubble, rubbish and olives, a giant superdome of a football stadium rises up out of the plain just outside Tunis which instantly tells you where the national priority lies. The Lonely Planet guidebook mentions, "Westerners are often shocked by the depressing amount of litter in the countryside; it's not unusual to see rubbish being thrown from cars or buses.", and continues to mention that forests and animals are all but gone as well as widespread pollution from heavy industries and water scarcity place Tunisia pretty low on the environmental health index. I think anyone, not just westerners, would be appalled by the rubbish covering the countryside. I have a few German sayings that my mother used to quote frequently that all basically say that you don't have to be rich to avoid living like a pig. It makes you incredulous that empires fought over this once prosperous and lush land that is now a giant landfill.

The Tunis medina was much larger, much more interesting and filled with local goods instead of the tourist crap and the pushy salesmen that went with it. It is not, not for the claustrophobic or those who like personal space in a crowd. One local man got Jarkko's attention and pointed from his eye to Jarkko's jacket pocket and let him know he should be mindful of pickpockets in the very tight crush of people. It was just a brochure for Carthage, but it was very nice of him to try and help the obviously 'not from around here' shoppers. I bought only one thing in Tunisia and that was an authentic fez. The local costume is a brown wool cape with pointy hood [think Jawa] and red wool fez sans tassel. I wanted to buy one fez with a tassel for the perl pod mullah, but the man refused saying that those were only for tourists. Uh...Yah. :)

After 8 years of Latin and Roman history, I was really excited about seeing Carthage, but having seen downtown Tunis before riding the local train out to the ruins I was already lowering my expectations. Carthage is reportedly an upscale suburb but they must not expect anyone to visit it on their own as there are few signs to the scattered sites, no maps, and no visitors office for information. A pile of garbage was sitting in front of a European embassy where several cats were picking through it casually. I suppose that 'upscale' simply means better a garbage selection for the local stray cats. The view of Tunis and the sea from Byrsa Hill was beautiful, but after the museum the rest of the ruins were a bit too shabby for me to bear. We headed back into Tunis to get some lunch and catch the train to Sousse and, while I was waiting in line at the tabac, I watched with some fascination a calligrapher decorating cards for people who wanted something special for their New Year greetings.

After the depressing state we found Carthage and since we couldn't make the trip to Dougga we decided to head for El Jem which the guidebook spoke very highly of for its colosseum that was third largest in the Roman empire. Getting there was half the fun since, aside from the twice daily train, the only way to get there was via louage. A louage is a shared ride where you go to the station, state your destination and expect to ride on the roof of the minibus because the guy with the goats needs more room and goats are more difficult to tie down. Most of the roads are 2-lane and crowded with slowly moving trucks so the louage drivers are constantly leapfrogging through traffic. After a few terrifying moments where I could count the moles on a truck drivers' face, I decided to stare out at the passing scenery until we reached El Jem. :) Drivers chat on their mobile, change the radio station, make change for passengers and pass slower traffic all at the same time. It was a very cool experience, a bit unsettling, but the view of the colosseum from the outskirts of town was enough to know that even walking there would have been worth the trip. El Jem, formerly known as Thysdrus, built its wealth by being a transport hub in the olive trade and became the most opulent city within the Roman empire by 238 AD. The city revolted, assassinated the tax collector and proclaimed the African proconsul Gordian as Emperor when Emperor Maximus attempted to apply a heavy tax and relocate that wealth to Rome. Furious, Maximus punished the city and it faded from the memory of time and would only be remembered much later through some references made by Catholic priests.

The food was very good, especially the couscous and the olives. Tunisian Celtia beer is a light pilsner that is surprisingly good as are some of the local wines that we got bombed on one evening when it was stormy outside and didn't want to leave the restaurant. The appetizers are divine and full of fresh vegetables that I've not seen in years, which I ate in spite of the brief thought of the fields filled with rubbish contaminating the food supply. Hey, pollution tastes yummy with enough chili and onion served with it. :)

Tunisia is a very interesting place and I'd recommend it to anyone who is willing to deal with the inconveniences of a country that hasn't quite made it to the 21st century or, more precisely, it has many of the bad parts of modernization without most of the good ones. If we decide to return sometime, we'll avoid the tourist compound, hire a local guide and head for some of the more out of the way places. Don't leave home without a good guidebook as you won't get very much information from the tourist bureaus or a reasonable supply of pocket tissue packs since toilet seats, hand soap and toilet paper are rare commodities in public toilets. Next year, we're going to go somewhere hot, sunny and more modern for our winter holiday. :)