On the back of doing a 6-month part time teaching course alongside my full time job at the start of 2009 I decided to treat myself to a long-awaited trip to Tunisia which had been my dream ticket for a long time. I had enquired about flights before but they were always too expensive but on this occasion I decided to just bite the bullet and splash the cash.

Having done multiple overseas trips in the preceding years, this was my one and only foreign vacation in 2009 and it cost a whopping 300,000 yen! The main fascination with this north African country was to do with a certain sci-fi movie being filmed there. I will write a separate post detailing my Star Wars experience in Tunisia but there will inevitably be some crossover here as it was a major part of my trip. This post though will focus mainly on all the other stuff such as getting around the country, accommodation, alcohol, food, sights, breakdowns, weddings and intense pain!

The Lonely Planet guidebook was pretty much my one & only source of info for this trip!

Day 1: Rome (Italy) – Tunis – Tozeur

As soon as I arrived in Tunis on August 8th I took a taxi straight to the bus station and bought a ticket to Tozeur for 23 dinars (about £10 at that time!) which was just about to leave and the near-450 kilometre journey would take seven hours. When the bus arrived 40 minutes late I rushed on to get a decent seat at the back as I knew many were broken! The poor guy in front of me didn’t even have a backrest on his!

Prior to the trip I had anticipated a challenging survival-type holiday and just as I was thinking that it was going to be plain sailing the bus broke down. What followed was a wait of two hours by the road in a heat of over 40 degrees celsius in the middle of nowhere until a replacement bus arrived.

Despite the language barrier (most people can’t speak English) I managed to provide some time-killing entertainment by setting up a simple tin-can target for a stone throwing contest with a few fellow passengers. We were still five hours from Tozeur when the next bus arrived but that wasn’t the end of our troubles as that also broke down about an hour away from our destination!

Thankfully the wait for bus #3 was only about 40 minutes, and so having left Tunis at 11:40 am, we finally arrived in southern Tunisia just after 9:00 pm! I found a nearby hostel to check into for a couple of nights and then went looking for a beer completely forgetting the fact that I was in a Muslim country where alcohol is not consumed! Eventually I got word that it was sold at a nearby hotel so went there to celebrate my birthday alone in the lobby with a local beer. It was indeed a memorable birthday albeit not for such good reasons! More details here

Day 2: Tozeur

This was a day of visiting the many Star Wars locales in the area. One of them was  Camelhead Rock which previously featured in ‘The English Patient‘ (1996).

We actually saw some real camels in the wild on that day when the temperature outside reached an incredible 45 degrees celsius!

That wasn’t the end of the camel theme for the day either as later that day I sampled some camel steak at a restaurant run by two nice chatty guys.

I then wandered round through a huge oasis and around the town looking at the architecture and brickwork which the area is famed for. The day finsished the same as the previous one; back at a hotel bar but this time I was with an Italian guy I’d met earlier that day. More details here

Day 3: Tozeur – Matmata

After the unreliability of the buses on my birthday I thought it safer to move around by louage (long distance shared taxi vans) from then on. I was fortunate to be the last one to want one from Tozeur to Gabes on the east coast which meant that we left instantly at 7:00 am. Two more shorter distance rides took me to Matmata where I checked into the Hotel Sidi Driss which doubled up as Luke Skywalker’s home in the original 1977 Star Wars movie.

The town is a very small place with less than a 1000 inhabitants and I walked round the place taking in the Berber museum which was basically just a simple underground home similar to the one I was staying at but with a camel outside!

Matmata has its own Hollywood-type sign so I climbed up a hill to see that up close!

I went to a nearby hotel at night to have a swim in their pool and later witnessed a wedding which was very interesting. Lots of clapping and noise as a crowd of people paraded through the streets with the bride kept undercover on a camel as is tradition for these events which can last for up to seven days!

I even got a free couscous (Tunisia’s national dish) meal later that night at one of the town’s two restaurants. It may not look too appetising but it was tasty and really filling.

All was going well but then I started to suffer absolute chronic toothache while drinking with a couple of guys which was just unbearable. It turned out to be a very problematic wisdom tooth which was pulled out a month later to great relief! A nose-bleed at 3:30 am woke me up the following morning which all added up to it not being the most pleasant of nights but staying in such an iconic “hotel” was all worth it for me. More details here

Day 4: Matmata – Gabes – Tataouine – The Ksour – Medenine – Gabes

Leaving Matmata behind, I luckily caught an overly-packed 7.30 am bus to Gabes where I checked into a hotel and then went straight out again to the louage station to go down to Tataouine. While waiting for the taxi to fill-up with people, a french guy I’d met the day before came along and once we’d got to Tataouine we were prepared to go our separate ways. Before he left I asked him if he could do me a favour and help me instruct a taxi driver on what I wanted to do. This somehow eventually led to us both taking a taxi onto a couple of Ksars (fortified granaries) together which was a huge bonus for me as I had a travel companion for a bit in a country where it’s fair to say I hadn’t had too much conversation due to my French not stretching too farbeyond the basics!

We had been expecting some sign of civilisation before we reached our first sightseeing spot but it just popped up out of nowhere and moments later we were walking into the beautifully coloured Ksar Ouled Soltane which was stunning. Apart from a few artists selling their paintings (I bought one), it was deserted with no surrounding fences or entry charge. We were therefore free to explore the structures as we wanted to view the surrounding area which was nice as the Ksar is on the top of a hill.

Ksar Hadeda was next which was sadly crumbling away at that time but I think it has been improved since then. Had we not already peaked with the previous ksar, this would’ve been an impressive sight too.

Medinine was where we went our separate ways but not until we’d visited our third and final ksar in Medenine which was also a bit run-down.

Whilst he went back to Tatouine, I took an hour louage ride to Gabes for the night. More details here

Day 5: Gabes – Djerba – Gabes – Sousse

I just missed a louage to the island of Djerba at 5:30 am and then had to wait over an hour for the following one to fill up. The cost of the taxi included the ferry crossing, and culminated at the north of the island from where I then hired a driver to take me round the places I wanted to visit. This island is a very popular destination for tourists who frequent the eastern side of the island and its beautiful beaches so my driver must have thought I was a right oddity for wanting to see three old run-down buildings on the west coast! After that I returned to Gabes and then took another louage to do the 280 kilometre ride to Sousse for the night. More details here

Day 6: Sousse – El Jem – Sousse – Monastir – Sousse – Tunis

The reason for the early starts to all of these days is because the louage situation can get quiet later in the afternoons so one doesn’t want to be waiting around too long for the car to reach capacity. It was therefore another early start on my final full day as I was at the station by 5:45 am waiting for the shared taxi to fill-up but it unfortunately took 90 minutes to happen. I still got to El Jem by 8:00 am though to visit the hugely impressive amphitheatre whilst it was fairly empty. Not for long though as a load of German tour buses arrived soon after. More details here

A louage back to Sousse was followed by a fairly instant louage down to Monastir to visit the Ribat that appeared in ‘Monty Python’s Life Of Brian‘ (1979). The (fairly) unique thing about this place is that it’s right on the beach with the tower offering great views of it. I went for a quick swim in the sea which was so refreshing given the temperature, and it was also interesting to see Muslims in such a non-religious situation.

I then took another louage up to the capital city Tunis which I didn’t spend any time in on my arrival into the country. Having often been the only guest at my hotels in the south I hadn’t really anticipated the budget hotels being full but the first three I tried were. Eventually I ended up at the ironically named Hotel de la Tranquillite which was under £3 for the night and was a basic prison cell sweatbox! Still, it did the job of providing somewhere for me to lie down at the end of the day and that was basically the end of my first trip to the African continent. There was just enough time for a quick look around Tunis but it was too late to visit any of the major attractions in the area.

This was definitely not my hotel!

Overall, travelling in southern Tunisia was quite an eye-opener in terms of not being able to use hardly any English for the first time in my life. My French skills are fairly basic so I can’t imagine how difficult it would be for someone who doesn’t speak any French at all. I may have seen and done the majority of what I could realistically do due to some excessive travel days but it was quite a lonely trip in some ways without too many people to converse with and share experiences and so on. Thankfully, I can now share my story with you dear reader!

Click here to read TF Flashback: 4 Nights In Rome On My First Italian Encounter (2009)’

Click here to read ‘TF Top 10…….Longest Bus & Train Journeys I Can Remember Doing!’

Click here to read ‘Dining Out: L’Azure (Tunisian)’

Click here to read ‘I Did A Presentation At An English Club In Tokyo’