The Great Pyramids and the not so great Sphinx
After Libya, we went to Egypt by walking across the Libya – Egypt border. Gebriel could only take us as far as the first Egyptian border police stop and we were told that just one taxi ride would take us from the Egypt border to Alexandria which was over 500km away. We definitely did not expect the 10+ police stops and the 1km walk to reach the border custom officers. At every stop we were asked the same questions, ‘passports?’, ‘Japanese?’, ‘Is she your sister or friend?’, ‘Where are you going in Egypt?’, and we were then passed around from officer to officer, sometimes a group of up to 6 officers all at once who just want to say hi and converse with us in broken English. Eug had to say ‘wife’ a few times and my “birthday present ring” became very handy. An hour and a half later, we were surprised we actually got through to Egypt! And with the help of the nice custom officer, we found out we needed three shared taxi rides to get to Alexandria. The first shared taxi took us to a small town called Saloum (not in Lonely Planet). Then two other kind locals helped us to find the second shared taxi from Saloum to Matruh (again, not in Lonely Planet). In Matruh, one of them also helped us find the third shared taxi and negotiated a deal for us to go to Alexnadria. While waiting for another 5 passengers to fill up the taxi, he treated us to Egyptian tea and sandwiches. The only meal we ate that day was breakfast at 8am and this was already around 6pm, the sandwiches were a life saver. His English was not so good, but he definitely went out of his way to make sure we were ok. His final sentence stuck with us, it was “I Egyptian, you China, all same, all people”. After hearing about how Egypt has tourist scammers everywhere, we couldn’t believe our luck and we were very thankful.
There wasn’t much in Alexandria to see, which totally suited us fine since we needed a break from the 9 full day tour in Libya. We enjoyed our complete freedom and took it slow.
After the crappy hotels we stayed at in Libya, Eug was nice enough to book the Radisson Blu hotel in Alexandria. Needless to say, I was ecstatic just to stay in a cockroach free room with running water that was not brown. But the hotel was more than I could ask for. It was a great relief to be able to sleep in a bed with clean sheets without having to use our sleeping bag liner, and it had wifi too! Some of the other simple pleasures we had here were: Seeing Starbucks for the first time since Spain, and finding familiar brands of facial products which I desperately needed. We also checked out Midan Ramla and Midan Saad Zaghloul and chilled at Delicies, a coffee shop that had a cool retro tearoom ambience.
We trained from Alexandria to Cairo a couple days later. Eug had been to Cairo before and told me about the craziness of the city. But our luck stuck with us and our hotel ended up being on an island called Zamalek where most of the embassies are just across the bridge from the busy city centre. It was actually pleasant to walk around the area and we found some nice coffee shops and restaurants too. We decided to stay for an extra day in Cairo before going to Giza to see the pyramids so we asked to stay another night and the hotel agreed. However, the next day our room was given away due to a big tour group booking. That was annoying, but our hotel ended up moving us to a more expensive 5 star hotel without charging us extra, and they gave us a Nile view room too! The one night we stayed in Giza (only a few kms out from downtown Cairo but we thought we’d stay by the pyramids for one night), we got upgraded to the club lounge floor at Le Meridien with a pyramid view as well. We were both wondering ‘What’s going on?!’, we must’ve done something right. I love Egypt!
Giza has three main pyramids and a few smaller ones known as the Queen’s pyramids (bummer for the queens), and the sphinx. The pyramids are incredible to see with your own eyes no matter how many times you’ve seen them in pictures or on TV. You just can’t help but stare in awe and wonder how they were built. The Great Pyramid Khufu is humongous. It’s the oldest and the largest of the Giza pyramids. The Pyramid of Khafre seemed taller than Khufu but only because it stands on higher ground. You could still see a bit of the leftover limestone on the very tip of the pyramid. The smallest pyramid (Menkaure) was built with limestone and granite. It does not sit in line with the first two. Eug explained that his previous guide told him it was done on purpose to be in line with Orion’s Belt. Then there’s the Great Sphinx of Giza which was quite disappointing. Those who’ve seen it would know what I mean. It looks big in pictures, but in real life it’s puny in comparison! But we had a few fun shots with the sphinx, you can see the pictures on flickr (click the 2nd last icon underneath the profile on the right).
We are having a great time in Egypt so far. Most people are friendly and helpful. We’ve had many ‘welcome to Egypt’ greetings just from random strangers on the street. There were tons of taxi drivers honking at us to see if we wanted rides, but most just smiled and waved goodbye once we motioned ‘no thanks’. And the rich history itself leaves you in wonder and admiration. You have to come and see for yourself if you haven’t already.
The curse of oil
A couple of years ago I read a book called “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. It was about globalisation and its effects on everyone. In it, there was an interesting chapter called The Curse of Oil. To sum it up, he stated that many countries with oil (especially in the Middle East) just depend on that one exhaustible resource for their countries’ wealth. Much to Di’s delight, he used her home country of Taiwan as an example of what happens when you don’t have rich natural resources to sell to others. For those who don’t know, Taiwan is a small rocky island off the coast of China with about 20 million inhabitants and barely any natural resources. It also gets blasted by typhoons and earthquakes on a regular basis. I know, it sounds awesome. However, they have amassed the 4th largest financial reserves in the world. How? Through tapping its best resource, its people. Much of Taiwan’s exports and wealth are a result of the creativity and entrepreneurship of its citizens, not the products of a mine, oil well, or forest. Countries like Singapore and Korea are similarly succeeding.
Now when I read the book, I hadn’t been to an oil rich Middle Eastern state but I could relate the chapter to my home province of Alberta, Canada. Alberta has the highest high school drop-out rate in Canada because kids are lured to decent paying manual jobs in the oil and gas industry or the service industry that supports it. Call me presumptuous, but I personally believe it’s hard to nurture creativity and inventiveness when you’ve only made it to grade 10. I’m not saying it can’t happen, but the chances of a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs emerging from those circumstances is extremely slim.
So now back to Libya, a country that has enormous oil reserves for a population of about 5 million Libyan citizens. I just want to first state that all the information I obtained here was from people I talked to and not some fact-based research report so if I’m wrong I apologize. Gaddafi, Libya’s leader for the past 40 years, has taken the money from oil and provided free housing if needed, free education, and huge subsidies on food and petrol. I am totally serious when I say that water is more expensive than gas here. It costs about 5 Canadian/US dollars to fill up your tank. In addition, he gives each Libyan a significant monthly allowance, and more with each child you have. When you leave a hospital after giving birth, the hospital actually pays you so you can buy diapers and such. The people don’t get enough money to buy Ferraris or anything, but on the whole everyone lives comfortably and no one lives in poverty. As a result, there is no homelessness, and no one is hungry. To us, this may sound pretty awesome, but there are significant negatives as well. Firstly, most Libyans don’t really work that much. A few hours here, a few hours there, but they’re not really that productive in an economic or contributory sense. Most manual or service jobs go to poor immigrants from Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, and Sub Saharan Africa who don’t get monthly government stipends. It’s an interesting sight to see a lot of these people sitting by the roads everyday with tools for work, hoping a Libyan picks them up to do a job. Now the part I think is awesome is the free education, including university. But I’ve been told that the new generation doesn’t really enrol. They don’t see a good education to secure a decent paying job as a necessity, as a house and money is provided for you if you want. They unfortunately don’t see education for the sake of learning and enlightenment as worth it either (but I don’t think the teenagers here are unique in that respect compared to the rest of the world). The result has been declining university enrolment. There is not enough incentive to become super rich because the chance of you succeeding is really hard unless you are in cahoots with corrupt officials. Thus people just basically hang out all day. As an environment, it is intellectually stifling. A lot of the corporate and white collar jobs are filled by expats from European and American companies. Increasingly the Koreans and the Chinese are coming too. There were tons of them in Tripoli and a lot came to talk to us thinking we were there working as well. They all get their piece of the pie and obviously return home.
Environmentally this has also produced disastrous results. What do you think happens when gas is cheaper than water? People are as wasteful with it as we are with water in Canada. Fuel efficiency is not something anyone cares about, and the emissions from vehicles are pretty disgusting. Recycling is definitely not part of the program here, and all you see on the roads, parks and beaches are endless piles of bottles, litter and debris.
When I asked people what would happen when the oil ran out, they basically implied that it wouldn’t. Or if it did it would be way in the future. When I asked how far, they motioned really far and said maybe 50 years as if that was thousands of years away. We drove over bridges where no water was flowing underneath, and again when I asked when the last time they saw water there was, they also said a long long time ago (which turned out to be about 30 years). I think this poor concept of time and planning will lead to devastating, irreversible results for its people unless something changes. Some older people who knew Libya when there was no oil were hoping the oil would run out today so that it would propel their children towards achievement and their country towards development (like in Taiwan). The youth I talked to however, seemed uninterested.
When you can’t unlock the creativity, inventiveness, and potential of your people it’s a shame. Some say Gaddafi likes this so he can stay in power, and I really have no comment on that. No country in the world has been able to inspire all of its citizens to reach their potential, but the difference between here and others I’ve been to is obvious. You can tell that Tunisia and Morocco are trying significantly harder to improve other industries (especially tourism) as they have no oil. This short term wealth creating an undiversified economy and an untrained/unlearned population will in all likeliness end poorly for Libya when the oil runs out.
As an outsider it’s easy to blame Libya’s problems on its leadership and the individual choices of its people. But as a global citizen, you can’t help but feel more than partially responsible for what’s happened in this part of the world due to our addiction to oil. For the sake of the little kids we met here at the generous people’s houses, I hope change and improvement will come. Because if the curse comes to fruition, it really will affect them and their children the most.
Libya – Amazing ruins, a legendary oasis, but most of all, generous and friendly people
So we’ve spent the last 9 days in Libya, and it’s been quite an experience. We visited the Roman ruins of Sabratha and Leptis Magna, and the Greek/Roman ruins of Cyrene. These ruins put the ones we saw in Morocco and Tunisia to shame, especially Leptis Magna. The best part was that there was virtually no one apart from us at any of these sites. We also visited Ghadames, an Oasis town in southern Libya, close to the Algerian and Tunisian border. It too was pretty awesome, and unlike the old cities of the other North Africa countries, this one was uninhabited. People moved out about 20 years ago to the newly built government homes just outside the old city gates. Access to running water and electricity tend to be pretty good motivators to move. However they’ve maintained the old city quite nicely, and as a result we enjoyed a quiet guided walk through its streets. Again, we were basically the only tourists. You may ask why all these great tourist attractions are devoid of visitors; well the answer is Libya’s ruler Colonel Gaddaffi, and I’ll elaborate more on this in my next post. I was told by Libyans that he is not a fan of large amounts of tourists and thus makes it hard for them to get here. As I’ve said before, you need a visa and when you arrive you need to be part of an organized tour (and they are not cheap at all considering the country is not expensive). He had an argument with the Swiss a few months ago and decided to close the border to all Europeans for 3 months, just like that. However, by keeping tourists out he hasn’t jaded the population with the almighty tourist dollar which turned out to be awesome for us.
Goodbye Tunisia, Hello Libya
This picture is of our final sunrise in the Sahara, those are old Roman ruins on the right, and this portion of the desert as you can see is quite grassy.
On our last night in Tunisia we were dropped off at the border town of Ben Guerdane. This is a sizable city, but it’s not in any guide books as basically no tourists come here. Being about 30 kms from the Libyan border it was the best place to stay the night before meeting our agent the next morning at the Libyan border. To travel to Libya by law you need to be with a tourist agency, so we agreed to meet ours at the border as we did not want to fly from Tunis to Tripoli. After checking in, we decided to take a walk around our hotel to look for a small cafe to eat dinner at. We had 20 dinars on us, and we needed 12 for the pre-organized taxi ride to the border. I wanted to keep 3 dinars or so in case we needed to phone at the border, which left us with 5 dinars (about 3 bucks) for lunch and dinner. It was pointless to get more money since the minimum exchange or withdrawal amount would have left us with way too much and since it’s a closed currency we wouldn’t be able to exchange it back. We were thinking we could eat at like 4pm to merge the 2 meals into one. Once we got on the main street where some restaurants with outdoor patios are, everyone started to stare. There were at least 50 men (since there are no women that are at these outdoor cafes) sitting there looking at us in silence. I swear if there was a DJ spinning the music would have ground to a halt. If one guy had his mouth so wide open in shock that his cigarette fell out, I would not have been surprised. So feeling slightly uncomfortable we walked around the block and decided to go into this really small shop with baguettes on the counter. When we walked in the lone teenage boy (about 16 years old) manning the stall looked obviously surprised. As this was not a tourist town, the small menu on the wall was only in Arabic. We pointed to the baguette indicating we wanted that but basically no communication was possible. He ran out to grab a friendly older guy in a suit on the street who could speak French, and he relayed to us that this stall served egg sandwiches and OJ. We ordered the sandwich and the boy started to pan fry an egg as the older guy shook our hands and said goodbye. The sandwich consisted of a French baguette, an egg, some olives, and a spicy harissa paste. When we tried to pay, the boy refused! I kept trying to give him our money but he kept waving no and wouldn’t accept it, just like the OJ vendor in the non-tourist town of Gabes. With the money we saved we were able to buy a pack of cookies and some water…sweet! We ate the sandwich on the roof of our hotel watching the sunset, knowing we couldn’t have had a better final meal in Tunisia thanks to the generous kid.
The next morning we were dropped off at the border. There was a palpable sense of tension in the air here as people were trying to get through. Luckily, there were 44 Dutch people also trying to cross when we were. They had about 15 different orange painted cars/trucks with company stickers all over (big companies like Pringles had sponsored some of the cars). We had a bit of trouble getting through due to a Visa mishap with the tour company, and they had trouble getting through since there were so many of them and their guide had a ton of paperwork to do. So basically we just hung out at the border with this group for about an hour. Their trip was extremely cool; they were taking 90 days to drive from Amsterdam to South Africa for the World Cup! It was pretty amazing how they could get so many people together to do this. Some took time off school (they looked like college freshmen), some had unpaid work leave (big age range here), and some looked downright retired (as in they looked 65). What they all had in common was that they were “crazy” (their own words). Supposedly 2 years earlier a few of them drove to Beijing for the Olympics and had an awesome time, so this time they organized a trip for the World Cup. Di and I were thinking that maybe we’d try planning something like that for the Sochi winter Olympics since the Vancouver ones were so awesome. Anyone want to start recruiting sponsors?
Anyways we finally made it through the border and now we’re here in Libya for the next 9 days. Wish us luck!
The Sahara
We booked a last minute Sahara desert tour for 7 days from Gabes since we visited most of the places we wanted to see in Tunisia. We started in Matmata, a town of 1000 people. It is famous for the underground troglodyte homes where most tourists stay overnight before heading further south towards the desert. Our room resembled a small cave with 2 single mattresses side by side. And you could not stand upright in the cave. It was surprisingly warm in the evening and cool during the day. There was a shared bathroom and shower about 20 feet away, and deeper down into the dwelling, there were more cave rooms, some large enough to serve as kitchen and dining room.
After spending a night in the cave, we went to Ksar Ghilane, an oasis in the midst of the Sahara desert. Here is where most tour companies take herds of buffet eating tourists for a brief swim in a small hot spring and an hour long camel ride before they return to their all-inclusive resort. There were a few independent travelers who rented 4WD’s on their own and stayed overnight at the campgrounds to enjoy the view of the sand dunes before making their way back. And then of course there was us, the only ones to head deep into the Sahara desert for the next three days. The campground had tons of tourists, and it was by chance that we met Isabelle’s friends from France in the huge dining room and we ended up having a great dinner with them. The tents were military style with beds in them and were quite comfortable and warm.
The next day we were greeted by a young Arab boy named Ahmed and 2 camels. Ahmed was our guide and the camels were our transportation. I must admit, it was a bit scary getting on and off a camel for the first time. They are quite tall so they must be sitting down for you to climb onto their back. When they stand, their back legs go up first, then their front legs. You feel like you are on the top of a very steep slide facing forward first, then suddenly the slide switches direction and you feel like you are going to fall backwards.
We started trekking into the desert with Ahmed taking the lead, then me and my camel, and then Eugene and his camel (which sucked for Eug because according to him, my camel was constantly farting and dumping). My butt hurt like hell for the first half hour, but when I realized we were surrounded by nothing else but the desert, it didn’t hurt anymore. The desert was not at all scary, but calm and inviting. Ahmed and our camels fit in so well, I began to feel like we belonged too.
For dinner (no lunch was provided) Ahmed collected some dry wood, started a fire, took out a very old black pot (the handle actually fell off on the second night), filled it with water, and sat the pot on 3 rocks. He told us to take a walk and come back in about an hour. That was when we learned to trace our own tracks. It’s easy to get lost when everywhere looks the same (for me at least). We caught an amazing sunset and found our way back to Ahmed. His cooking produced a big bowl of macaroni mixed with 5 small carrot slices, 5 small potato chunks, and 5 small green beans. He gave us one spoon each and kept one for himself and we all ate from the big bowl. Our dinner was finished in 5 minutes. For breakfast he mixed some dough in a bowl and seriously just buried the flattened dough it in the sand. He then lit a big fire on the sand and that baked the bread which he called “pain de sable” or bread of the sand. And yeah, it was bread of the sand alright. When he uncovered it after the fire died he lifted it out, took a big stick and banged on it a couple times to get rid of ash and sand. That was our breakfast. Can you say yum?! To be honest the bread tasted pretty good, once you got past the constant crunching sound of sand as you brought your teeth together to chew.
Ahmed asked if he could sing after dinner. After we said please, go ahead, he turned the big bowl into a drum and started singing away. He wasn’t a very good singer but whatever he was singing and drumming seemed to fit. Suddenly there were countless stars in the sky and the air grew cold. He then took out two sleeping bags and laid them on the sand. When Eug asked about the tent, he gave us an empty stare and shook his head to say ‘no tent’. Say whaaaa?! Though very warm in the day, the desert is damn cold at night, and with just a sleeping bag I was freezing.
We were hungry and cold at night like this for the rest of the trip, but Ahmed was super nice and did the best he could with limited resources (it was our tour coordinator who over promised and under delivered), and the desert was undoubtedly beautiful. Ahmed’s 3 friends even joined us around the fire for the last night and each took turns singing and drumming. We found out later that their job was to take the camels out at night to graze and bring them back the next morning in time for the tourists to ride. That’s why they showed up late at night out of nowhere just to hang out and later sleep. The songs these teenage boys were singing were about family, mothers, the desert, and camels. Yeah, camels. I guess that’s the equivalent of guys singing about their cars back home (e.g. “Rollin in my 5.0 with my rag-top down so my hair can blow”, Eug had to use Vanilla Ice as his example). They were having a good time singing, drumming and laughing though, and as a result so did we.
The Sahara was not exactly as we thought it would be. The sand was the finest I have ever seen, almost like powdered sugar. There were plant-less dunes, but there was also lots of vegetation. Occasionally we would run into an old Berber well, or Roman outpost ruins. When the wind blew, the sound was beautifully eerie as it matched the weightless sand flowing over the dunes in ghostlike wisps. We tried about a million times to capture this “breathing desert” in a picture but failed. Other things we anticipated about the Sahara exceeded our expectations, most notably the sunset, the sunrise, and the constellations when mixed with the powerful serenity of the desert. When commenting on the Sahara, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of Eug’s favourite book The Little Prince once said “If at first it is merely emptiness and silence, that is because it does not open itself to transient lovers.” Though 3 days may seem transient to him, it was enough for us to reap the many rewards the Sahara had generously given to us.
Luke…I am your father
We found a guest house online in Gabes where we thought we would stay for the night, so we emailed the owner asking about availability. It was full, but fortunately for us she invited us to her home! Her name is Isabelle and she is from France and she has been living in Gabes for over 25 years now. Her husband was a dentist and her daughter was in dental school as well so they took us to see his clinic. Even though we only stayed with her and her family for one night, their hospitality made us feel like we were part of the family too. She took us around town, and made us an amazing dinner and breakfast. She also introduced us to a guide (unfortunately she didn’t really know him, and she couldn’t take us since she had other guests from Canada arriving in a couple of days) so we signed on with him to go to the Sahara. We didn’t really have another choice and I’ll write more about that later. Gabes is not a pretty place, instead of tourism they chose to promote industry, and its coast line is dotted with chemical factories that emit very visible travesties of all sorts, but Isabelle and her family really made our stay here for one night enjoyable.
On another note, we travelled to Gabes by local transport known as louage. How it works is you go to the louage station, where a bunch of vans are headed for different destinations. You pick yours and get in the van. The driver waits until all 8 seats fill up, and then he leaves for said destination. We never waited more than 15 minutes for our van to fill, and it was cheap and efficient. Not a bad system at all. When we arrived at the Gabes station, we went to the juice stand to have a glass of OJ while waiting for Isabelle. The owner made us a great glass of fresh juice while asking us our origin, and as we left he decided to give us 2 free oranges. We tried to pay him but he would not accept it which was a nice first experience in this town.
Anyways, for those Star Wars fans out there (ahem…Edwin Ho Chi Poon who’s married to Amy and has the biggest Star Wars toy collection ever) Tunisia is the place to visit. Unbeknownst to us, a lot of the movies were filmed here. The original inhabitants here were Berbers (I say original, but they still live here, just in more modern digs now) and they built very interesting homes. In Matmata, where we stayed for the first night of our desert tour, they built what’s called Troglodyte homes. They basically dug underground caves connected by tunnels and courtyards and lived there. We stayed in one for the night, and it was actually pretty cosy and warm. Anyways, back to Star Wars, one of these underground dwellings, now a hotel, was used in 4 of the films. It was where Luke and his uncle dined in the first Star Wars, and it was also used in the newer 3 films. Then there are the Ksar, these Berber houses where long barrel like rooms were stacked on each other (the above picture is a good example). In all of the movies they were used as slave quarters. There’s a town here called Tataouine, and George Lucas liked the name so he adopted it for one of the planets. In one scene Luke contemplates life looking at two moons over a lake, and that lake is a huge salt-lake (when we saw it there was basically no water and just piles of white salt all over, but at certain times of the year it fills with water and is supposed to be a pretty amazing site) named Chott El-Jerid. And you remember those pointy hooded robes that the Jedi like Obi Wan wore? Well the Berbers all over North Africa wear them all the time. There is a lot more than what I’ve listed here, and there are guide books for the Star Wars tourist out here. Believe me the Tunisians are milking it, as every sight has tacky banners indicating what was filmed there, and small souvenir shops clustered around all the spots. I guess George Lucas didn’t have as vivid an imagination as I thought, he just saw the things he liked here and put them in his movies. Too bad the Berbers didn’t break into light sabre fights as we were sipping our mint tea, smoking our sheesha, and watching them walk by. That woulda been outta this world, outta this world!
We’ve entered the all-inclusive twilight zone
Since Tunisia is on the Mediterranean, there are a lot of towns on its coast. Instead of moving from town to town, we decided to just pick one between Tunis and the Sahara and stay for a few days. The one that seemed in the books to be the most charming and off the beaten path was Mahdia so we made it our next destination. We checked online for hotels before leaving and found one on expedia that looked to be a pretty good deal, rated as a 5-star and it included breakfast and dinner for 60 something bucks a night. Too good to be true? Well, sort-of. A common town layout in Tunisia is to have the town proper and a Zone Touristique (zone for tourists if you can’t figure that one out) a few kilometres out. These zones house mammoth hotel complexes where a huge amount of Europeans (mostly German, French and Italian with a few Brits) arrive on weekly charter flights for their all-inclusive Mediterranean fix, not unlike our version of Mexican or Cuban resorts. Our hotel ended up being situated in the heart of this zone. We took the train from Tunis and arrived at the hotel by taxi, where we were greeted by a security guard at the gate pretty much asking us what the hell we were doing there. He was very surprised when I told him we had a reservation, I guess not many patrons in the Mahdia Zone Touristique have backpacks or look like us.
So again, 5 star out here is slightly different than 5 star at home (I don’t think torn bedsheets or carpets would really justify a 5 star rating) but for the price we really couldn’t complain. This massive hotel was actually extremely busy so I had relatively high hopes. After checking in we were herded into the buffet dining room for dinner and I realized that everyone had hotel bracelets on except us. That meant we were at an all-inclusive resort. Yay. There were a few very young couples there (they looked like they were 18 and this was their first girlfriend/boyfriend trip), and there were a few young families, but the overwhelming demographic was the retiree. Think Magda in “There’s something about Mary”, but add 100 pounds and an equally over-tanned, white haired, largely overweight husband. Every day we sat at the same table to eat and we would think that these people could not get any more tanned, but sure enough the next day they were a darker shade of reddish/brown. Di just wanted to tell all these people to “Lighten UP!” (Get It? That joke works on 3 levels, it applies to their weight, their complexion, and how serious they looked when they were eating their mountain of food…That’s exactly how she explained her joke to me) There were 6 massive counters of food at the buffet, and only one pot each meal that was a “Tunisian specialty”. Since we were on half board, our drinks and lunch weren’t included, but evidently we were the only ones in that category. Wine was definitely flowing at lunch and dinner, and alcohol of all sorts was flowing at other times for everyone else.
All our neighbours at dinner didn’t speak much English, and we weren’t partaking in drunken German karaoke, so I can’t say that we really met anyone there. We did however do the hour walk to the little town centre of Mahdia each day to relax, and that was quiet and very pleasant. There was a free shuttle for the all-inclusive customers to go into town but it never left its parking spot due to lack of interest. The town was basically tourist free and had a very laid-back atmosphere. Our next destination was to be Douz on the edge of the Sahara, so we booked an excursion with the resort to get us down there, without planning on returning like the rest do. However, ours was the 3 day excursion and the night before we were to leave we were told it was cancelled because we were the only 2 that signed up…out of all the people in Mahdia! There are a lot of all-inclusives in the tourist zone in case you were wondering and the lone excursion tour company picks people up from every resort before departing. I guess leaving your buffet for 3 days wasn’t very popular. So that’s left us in a bind, and in a mad dash to figure out how to get to the Sahara we’ve decided to go to Gabes first and figure it out from there. I don’t know how people can do this for a full week, just looking at the buffet one more time would make me nauseous.
No one can resist Taylor Swift
In the Tunis train station waiting for the train to Mahdia, Eug and I were both in a ‘ugh but what can you do’ mood after getting ripped off by yet another taxi driver. We were at the station quite a bit earlier so we took turns going to the washroom. As I was walking out of the washroom, I saw Eug smiling and talking to a girl. I almost pulled another TWC (for those who don’t know, TWC stands for Taiwanese Crazy) with my cut-throat gesture but I quickly broke into a smile realizing he was talking to a very cute little girl.
When Eug went to the washroom, the girl was not shy with me as she was with Eug. She said quite a few words to me which I could not understand, and then she tried to lift my 11kg backpack, which she succeeded in doing. I clapped my hands to say job well done. Then I asked her how old she was, and started counting numbers in French when she didn’t seem to understand me. She put out 4 fingers and said she was four. Then I pointed to her sister who was holding on to her mom. She put out 2 fingers. When Eug came back, she pointed at Eug’s iPhone headset. Eug said ‘musique’ and offered it to her. Once she put it against her ear, she became mute and frozen. Of course Eug had Taylor Swift on and this 4 year old was completely mesmerized for a good 5 minutes. Good job Eug!
Eug told me while she was listening to ‘Tear Drops on My Guitar’ (which was kid friendly in case her mom asked) that when I was in the washroom earlier, she was playing with her hair and asked him something that he didn’t understand at first. But then her mom pointed to her hair and said that it’s the same. So the girl was saying that Eug has the same colour hair as her too! She’s absolutely right. So far, we’ve felt that we stood out due to everyone’s stares, it’s very nice to know someone’s looking out for similarities.
She must’ve liked Taylor Swift a lot because after she came back to her normal self, she grabbed her sister’s pony tail for attention and shoved the other ear piece to her sister. Her sister didn’t seem to know what to do and dropped it. She then took both earpieces and went back to giving 110% of her attention to Taylor Swift. It wasn’t until her mom literally grabbed her to head to their train, that she smiled and gave Eug back the headset. She then gave each of us a sweet kiss on the cheek to say bye and hurried off with her mom and sister.
Kids are amazing. She left us all warm and fuzzy and we forgot about the taxi driver.
I like to help the elderly
Di and I went to the Bardo museum yesterday in Tunis. It houses the world’s finest collection of mosaics taken from Roman ruins in Tunisia, including the one shown in the picture. That is one of the poet Virgil holding a copy of his Aeneid, with the muses Clio (History) and Melpomene (tragedy) on either side. Unfortunately, the museum is undergoing renovations and expansion, which means we didn’t get see half of the collection. That was too bad because what they had I really enjoyed. So instead of spending a few hours there, we were done in about 90 mins. As we left I decided to hit the bathroom. While doing my thing at the urinal I heard someone exit the stall behind me and walk right into the next stall. Then he laughed and walked out and said to me in French that he thought that was the exit. He was probably about 80 and couldn’t have been more than 5 foot 2. I was still at the urinal but I told him in French where the exit was and I motioned my head to the only large open door leading outside. You have to understand that this was comical to me because the bathroom was tiny, 2 stalls and 2 urinals. I obviously didn’t laugh though because, well, he was super old. So he shuffled out the open door, but then immediately decided to come back in. I was just finishing up but he wanted to then know why I was able to speak French! I told him I studied it in school as I was zipping up my fly, and he responded enthusiastically by telling me he thought that was great. As I moved 2 steps over to the sink to wash my hands, he shuffled backwards but continued talking to me. He apologized for not being able to speak Chinese and asked me if I had been to France. He basically followed me out the bathroom and back into the lobby excitedly asking about my life story. Not only did I show him the bathroom exit, I was also a French-speaking (albeit poorly) Chinese guy, and I re-united him his tour group (by pointing to the 30 other people with matching red buttons in the parking lot 15 feet in front of us). I think I made his day.
What the…is that a camel outside our window?
We’ve now landed in Tunis in the country of Tunisia, the 4th of our journey. Tunis is on the Mediterranean on the North African side, so we’ve decided to have some relaxation on the ocean for the next few days before we head into the Sahara. The above picture is from our balcony, and yes, that’s a camel! I always pictured them surrounded by oceans of sand being ridden on by turbaned Arabs or Berbers, not aimlessly wandering in lush greenery 100 ft from the Mediterranean. While watching it I was grasping how ugly a camel really is. It doesn’t have the graceful power of a horse, or the elegance of a giraffe. It’s just goofy and clumsy looking!
Anyways Tunis is a pretty nice city, and far more modern than those we saw in Morocco. Its main boulevard, Avenue Habib Bourghiba really looks like the Tunisian Champs-Elysees. Di and I had a fantastic lunch in one of the cafes there, and if we weren’t surrounded by Tunisians we could have easily been in Paris. The decor and menus are straight out of a Parisian cafe, and all the waiters speak French to you. Given that a lot of these North African countries were French protectorates (ahem colonies), French is far more useful than English here.
Yesterday we spent the better part of the morning in the ruins of Carthage, one of the great cities of the ancient Mediterranean world. For those who are into Greek/Roman mythology or history, Carthage has an amazing life-story. Virgil’s Aeneid tells the tragic love story of Elissa (Queen Dido) of Carthage and King Aeneas of Rome. Hannibal, who some argue was the greatest military commander in history, lived here. He almost brought the Roman Empire to its knees, and he ruled Italy for about 15 years. Anyways I’ll briefly summarize the cities’ history here: The Phoenicians founded it and built a great city, but eventually lost it to the Romans. They in turn razed it, and eventually built another gorgeous replacement that was one of their Empire’s 3 most important. The Vandals then came and trashed it and rebuilt it as their capitol for their short-lived kingdom. Briefly after the Byzantines took over, but shortly after that the Muslims came to rule. They governed from Tunis however, and left Carthage to agriculture, and today the remains are in Tunis’s nicest suburb (30 mins from the city). So for today’s visitor, you get to see the ruins of 4 destroyed cities spread out over a couple square kilometres, with modern day mansions and villas in between the sites. I admit my imagination is not vivid enough to create images of grand ancient cities over the ruins which are not much more than a few broken columns and some really old bricks. The mounds of bricks are huge, I’ll give them that, but they’re still just big brick mounds. It doesn’t help either when they’re surrounded by boatloads of Mediterranean cruise patrons, and there are hundreds of them.
So after Carthage Di and I went to check out Sidi Bou Said (only 10 minutes away), pretty much a Tunisian Santorini. The buildings of this little cliff-top village are all white with bright blue window grills. Its architecture is Spanish Muslim and really quite pretty, and the streets are narrow and romantic as you stroll through them over-looking the azure ocean. It’s all picturesque until 8 tour buses arrive, like clockwork, every 15 minutes from the cruise ships. So ya, we didn’t stay long here either unfortunately due to the crowds, because on a quiet day I’m sure it’s extremely beautiful.
So now we’re back at the hotel, and as I look out the window the camel’s gone. Who knows what I’ll see out there tomorrow? I’m hoping a liger.
fromwonderintowonder 
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