Tunisia almost at an end

When we last saw our intrepid trio of tenacious travelers, they were heading south into the hills and valleys of the Tunisian mountains after a week of lounging on the beaches along the Northern coast.

Let's check back in with them.

Since the last post they've made a loop of the Tunisian interior.

First was a southern leg from Tabarka to Le Kef, via the ancient Roman town of Bulla Regia. This was one long day of travel, but well worth it, both in the scenery of the ride, and the site of Bulla Regia. Heading south out of Tabarka, the road gradually rises from the seaside to some impressive hills and mountains. There were moments along the twisting and turning two lane road that it seemed our bus was just perched on the precipice, inches from toubling down the steep slopes. But the views were great and the small towns and villages seemed very picturesque, it's an area I would like to spend some time exploring in the future perhaps.

The bus dropped us off on the main road, at the turn for the Bulla Regia site, about 3km distance. We hiked in with our big packs, leaving them at the museum desk to check out the underground villas in the town. The roman town here has houses build underground to stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter and quite a few of them were very well preserved and you can just wander on in. Many great mosaics were left intact as well. The most impressive villa open had many underground rooms centered on an open-air atrium complete with a fountain.

From here we moved onto El Kef (Le Kef), having to hike up hill to get from the bus station to the town's center, based around the Kasbah (castle) perched on the top of the hill. El Kef has been a defensive point in Tunisia for millenia, for punic, carthaginian, roman, namibian, and islamic civilizations. It is a nice, laid back mountain top place with great views out over the surrounding rolling farm lands.

After two nights here, we were set to move on. The plan was to hit the Roman town of Haidra and the hill fort of Jugurtha, south of El Kef, but on route our bus broke down for a couple hours and we missed our morning window to find transit out to these remote areas so we decided to continue on and she the Roman town of Sbeitla just outside of Kesserine, an interior transit hub for Tunisia and an area much easier to navigate through.

Turned out to be a good choice since Sbeitla was a great site in it's own, complete with some great towering temples. Three of them were built right next to the town's forum, one each to Jupiter, Minervana, and Juno and they're the highlight of what's left of the place, but it's also home to a great theatre and the scale of the city from one side to the other gives you a sense of the size some of these towns could be. It's a good half a kilometer from one side to the other and just packed with streets, houses, a market area, the forum, baths, amphitheater, theater, all your good ol' roman trappings of a town. And this wasn't even that big of a place. I would have loved to see it during it's hey-day.

From here, we were on to Kairouan, one of the seven holy cities of Islam and home to the oldest mosque in North Africa. The city has a great medina and of course more mosques and mosoleums to holy Muslims than you can shake a stick at.

We were here for the last couple of days of Ramadan, so we got to enjoy the Medina's night life as it came to the end. We had many cups of tea, ate good sandwiches and played a lot of hearts. It was almost sad to say goodbye, but the time was right to move on again, this time to Sousse.

Sousse. What can I say about Sousse? Don't go here. It's a tourist trap, artificial atmosphere place with way too many euro-trash vacationers in their gaudy clothing (or what only sometimes partially passes as clothing). What a striking difference to Kairouan, a real tunisian (and islamic) town we loved. We ended up staying two nights in Souse, just because we didn't realize how bad it was till it was too late. Oh well, live, travel, and learn.

So we hoped the train back to Tunis and rolled in here Tuesday night. We went straight to make the ferry reservations and it's a good thing too, because we found that all the ferries were booked solid for two weeks, meaning a scramble for a new itinerary and course of action. We settled on a flight direct from Tunis to Barcelona. That unfortunately means cutting out Sicily and the South of France, but it does mean we get to spend an entire three weeks in Spain, giving us the time to make our way leisurely about. I'll just have to hit Sicily and the South some other time.... still on the to-travel list. We fly out on sunday.

So for the next couple of days, we'll be killing time in Tunis. We visited the Bardo yesterday. The Bardo is Tunisia's biggest museum and home to some great mosaics from it's roman archeological sites. Spend a good deal of time picture taking and wandering the rooms. Unfortunately a lot of the place was closed down for work.

The beach was our target today. And it probably will be tomorrow as well. And Saturday. Unfortunately the cyber cafe here isn't letting me do much to upload photos, I'll try again later, but for now, there's only a couple new ones to see at my picasa album.

Will catch you all up again later from Spain. Bi'salama!