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.