africa-overland

Not got a huge say yet because we have only just got here. Except that the customs people had no idea what the Carnet was. I had to argue with them to get them to fill it in. All this stuff they say in the UK about it being compulsory makes you think it might be a money making scam! Anyway, it took about 90 minutes to get through and then we were turned out into Tunis at midnight, fun fun fun.
We decided to head down to Hammamet which is where we are now.
I know that I do not read a newspaper everday, but I do try to keep up to date with current affairs, but was any one else aware that there has been a prolonged and severe bombing campaign being conducted in northern Tunisia over the last few months. I might be wrong but that is what it looks like!! Some of the buildings are amazingly beautiful and some of them look like my attempts at DIY, it is a pretty bizarre mix here to say the least. Will write more soon.

5/08/06
I AM THE RAIN GOD!! It’s now raining in Northern Tunisia! I could make some serious money out of this, fixing the world’s drought problems.
Tunisia is a strange country; there are parts of it that are really beautiful and parts of it that are really run down. There is litter everywhere, probably something to do with the fact that there are no dustbins in this country. We are currently carrying a rather large collection of rubbish that we’d love to dispose of responsibly but are struggling to find where to do so. Obviously Tunisians have no such qualms, their country is their poubelle.

There are very few campsites in Tunisia, which is something that we were unaware of and therefore are having to stay in hotels are fair bit, which, although it’s not such a problem it isn’t really what we want to do. However, the upside of this is that we did find an interesting place Hotel Julius in El Jem. El Jem is a fly-blown desert town that has little to offer except the most amazing Coliseum that I’ve ever seen,

admittedly I haven’t seen many but this is pretty big. It totally dominates the town and was apparently built by Roman olive oil traders 2000 years ago. Not a lot of work has been done to the town since then it seems though. The hotel was very nice though and we have a local meal of lamb cutlets and Tunisian salad which as yet hasn’t resurfaced so I think we’ll be ok.

Unfortunately we chose the local music night, no girls allowed, we were banished to our room because of a) being infidel and b) because of Amy and the fact that she’s female! Well, what can I say about Arabic discos? They contain a lot of loud wailing screeching sounds, interspersed with huge bangers that I think support by theory that Tunisia is engaged in some unknown war, and lots of beeping of car horns. This continued into to wee hours and although travelling is all about experiences I don’t really want to repeat that one!

Camping on the beach in Jerba

View from the hotel in El Jem

06/08/06
So we move on, we’re now on the Ille D’Jerba, which is a tourist place that has lovely beaches and have finally managed to find somewhere to camp. The place is right on the beach and is exactly what were looking for. Or so we thought. Our luck with the music nights continue. We are camped on the other side of a bamboo fence to a small beach bar, good news you’d think. Well, it was until about 10pm when they set up the biggest sound system you’ve ever seen and then continued to play a bizarre mix of Clubbers Guide, Hip Hop, Reggae etc, pretty much all at the same time. It seems we have arrived on the night of the festival of the sea. Excellent, lets get stuck in and have some beers you’d think, this is something we tried to do but despite being camped closer to the bar than the dance floor was, we weren’t allowed to actually participate because we weren’t staying at the hotel that was sponsoring the event. Not a problem we’ll just go for a walk along the beach we thought, next thing we know we’re being rounded up by like cattle by blokes on horses and herded off the beach

Apparently the beach is also out of bounds, even though we’re camped on it. We can only stay on that bit. So we had to content ourselves with sitting about 4 feet away from the party waiting for it to finish before we could go to sleep. This wasn’t until about 2.30am. We’re moving on to the desert tomorrow to go and find some of the places that they filmed Star Wars, and hopefully some piece. We met some French overlanders at our campsite that have just done some pretty hardcore driving through the desert and got lots of useful tips from them, so things should be good.

8/08/06
We headed down towards the desert by driving on a raised causeway over 60km of salt plains. It was a weird landscape of flat barren white land, in which you could see for miles in every direction with some interesting signs warning you of rogue camels on the road!
When we reached Tataouine we quickly discovered that there is not a huge amount to the town and decided to head to some of the sights further south. We visited a place called Chenini where the people have dug their houses into the sandstone cliffs and rocks. You can quickly see why they used this area to film star wars. The landscape is almost lunar, with little vegetation lots of sand and rocks everywhere. It’s the strangest scenery I ever seen.
The next morning the land rover decided have a little fit on us and the alternator packed up. Slightly worrying as we were starting to head into the desert! After checking the belt and bearing I was at the end of my knowledge, all this took about 30 secs! All around us were these brand new Toyotas (don’t laugh Rees) so we asked where they get their vehicles serviced and found that all the garages are in Jerba, exactly where we’d been the day before, so we had to head back the 150km to Houmt Souk.
After driving around trying to find someone who’d look at the alternator and having no-one understand us (the French for alternator is alternator said in a French accent, now my accent is bloody good but they still didn’t understand me!) the only place that we could find to look at it was (again, don’t laugh Rees) was a Toyota garage! They fixed the problem in about 5 mins but the best thing was that we met a guy called Nejib who invited us back to stay at his house. So we ended up staying with about 40 member of his family in this massive house. It was a brilliant experience and what this trip is all about. They were really friendly and didn’t make any fuss over us, just invited us in and let us get on with it. Now I don't want to labour the point over the rain the god thing but it poured with rain the night we stayed at Nejib's house and it is the first time that he'd ever seen rain there in the summer, say no more.
We had our first night wild camping in Tunisia on the beach about 5km from the Libyan border in this really remote place, with the most beautiful view. There was no-one around until suddenly we were invaded by about 500 sheep and goats that wandered all over campsite eating all the vegetation (Rees would have been in Heaven! Revenge for laughing at the Toyota stuff). Anyway, onto Libya tomorrow.

Piczo