During the time GG was in Canada LE decided to see some more of Tunisia and in early July she booked a 7 day camel trekking excursion in the northern Sahara desert. It would be her, a cook, a guide/camel handler and two camels. The camels would carry the luggage, food and water, LE and the others would be walking in the sand. The caveat was that the desert temperatures had to be 35 C or less. As mid August approached and daytime temperatures on the coast were reaching 47 C she began to worry. Several email responses from the trekking agency kept repeating that they were hopeful temperatures would decrease - it was NEVER this hot in September. Finally on August 27 LE wrote another email and made the decision to pull out, but would they return the deposit? NO. Instead they offered another trip, this one a drive through southern Tunisia with an overnight camel trip as one of the attractions.
On August 30 LE took a bus from the Tunisia capital of Tunis to the southern island of Djerba, an 8 hour trip. Thank goodness the bus had AC. The driving tour did not start until September 4 so she got to know Houmt Souk (a small city on Djerba) very well. Not a lot to say about the place, it had a lovely fort by the ocean but other than that it was very ordinary with a lot of tacky tourist articles to buy, the same things we had seen in other places we visited.
LE was collected on Sunday morning, September 4, by a car with the driver/guide. We would be together until September 10 eating at the same table and staying in the same places, it was a strain on both of us. The main meal was lunch, this was the same with variations; a salad for starters, then a deep fried pastry filled with meat, vegetables or eggs, then a large bowl of Couscous, followed by melon for dessert. Dinner was usually pizza, almost always covered with a can of tuna and a handful of frites. On September 7 the guide started to cough a lot, he blamed it on the car's AC, LE thought it was COVID. From that point on she wore a mask while driving and, if it was COVID, the mask did it's job.
The trip involved a lot of driving and the guide kept saying he was exhausted after a 250 km day. The roads were in good shape, there was little to no other traffic, and LE did not have the heart to tell him that in Canada we might drive more than 800 km in a day to reach a destination. From Djerba we drove west to an area of the indigenous Berber inhabitants. The Berbers have lived in Tunisia for more than 4,000 years and their fortified villages were built on mountain tops or in underground caves to defend themselves from invaders. Now almost all of the ancient villages are uninhabited, the present day Berbers live in modern houses, but the original villages have become tourist attractions. We visited the hilltop villages of Chennini, Ksar Beni Barka, and Ksar El Mourbatin,and the troglodyte village of Matmata (Luke Skywalker's home in one of the Star wars movies). We also drove into the desert near the city of Tozeur to see the movie set from the first Star Wars movie, this set is popular with younger tourists but it was near sunset and all the other visitors were on the dunes waiting to capture the perfect Instagram moment. LE was visiting Luke Skywalker's world by herself.
Southern Tunisia has a lot of date palms, and a corresponding number of oases. Before this trip LE thought of an oases as a little cluster of trees in a vast expanse of sand, but the date oases are man made. A spring, often boiling hot water, emerges in one location and is channeled great distances to irrigate an immense area, then the date palms are planted. Tunisia represents 50% of the global population of Deglet Nour dates, the queen of dates, and the country is also the number one exporter by value. But there are also smaller, natural oases where the spring bubbles up from a geologic structure creating a stream or a pool and date palms and other vegetation grow at the water's edge. LE saw one of these natural oases in Midas Canyon in the Atlas Mountains, on the border with Algeria. She had no idea the trip would take her close to this border, the government agency "Travel Canada" has issued guidelines that Canadians should not travel here, but it was probably the second best day of the trip. The rock formations were incredible, more than awesome, something not to be forgotten, a geologist's dream destination. Two days later she visited another unbelievable geologic feature: Djebel Tebaga. The outcrops here mark the separation zone of the single continent Pangea into the Gondwana and Eurasion plates and are the only marine upper Permian outcrops of this scale in Africa. Not many people get to see that. And then there were the dinosaur footprints - nothing else to say.
The best day of the trip was the overnight camel excursion. LE went on a 1 km trek into the Sahara with a guide/cook/camel handler and two camels: the white female drama queen and a goofy, brown male. We left at 1700 when it was a tolerable 34 C and walked to a bivouac spot where we spread out our bed rolls under the stars, collected sticks for a fire, and ate a delicious meal of pasta stew from a shared plate. Dessert was dates - what else? During the night we experienced a minor sandstorm and woke up to find everything, including ourselves covered in six cm of sand. All of our footsteps from the evening before were gone, it was a brand new world. After a pot of black coffee, more dates and some bread we walked 1 km back, creating a new path.
Many other things were seen and done but these are the highlights, a trip to remember for many years to come.
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