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!