(Sydney – Singapore – Tunisia – Morocco)
Good evening from Morocco, and from a computer screen in French, and where I am typing left-handed on a keyboard which is in Arabic, but arranged for Francophones, so “qwerty” is “DFGHJK”!!! Thre will be typos, so just reqd on,,,
Following check in at Kingsford Smith (“You’re going where??? We don’t get much call for that destination…”), 27 hours of travel got me to Tunis with Qantas from Sydney – heated to beyond hospital levels for some reason and with a similar standard of food – then Air France from Singapore. It was at this stage of the flights that all semblance of calm organization fell apart as the usually superbly organized Singaporeans lost the plot with the just-introduced security checks for liquids on flights.
It was a 45 minute queue at the entrance to the gate lounge of the sort that causes everyone to either become ill-tempered (one semi-drunk and very angry Brit) or new best friends (the rest of us). My queue partners from WA and Taree ended up in the same row of seats on the flight to Paris. No-one goes hungry on Air France, but many in other rows wasted their fine cheeses and wines into sick bags during the 40 minutes of turbulence over the Caucuses.
Charles De Galle Airport remains a bit of a shocker: grumpy French concrete monumentalism which is dysfunctional and badly signposted at best. For some reason, after being security-checked and eyeballed by a pasty member of the gendarmerie you find yourself waiting for a bus in a dark and freezing passageway as the sun blearily rises, talking to a lady from Nowra about how she is going to see an 80 year old retired herbalist in Lyon, to see if he can cure her Parkinsons.
Then THREE buses arrive at once, naturally.
Twenty minutes of crawling between terminals and giving way to planes, and another set of gendarmes and bleak corridors awaits, then the search, then the X rays of baggage, then the spectacular new gate lounge for North African and other “French Territories” flights.
The bus-to-the-plane was a normal city commuter bus. Destination: TUNIS. Route: AF1984. Along with French businessmen and travelers, the odd smattering of travelers in Berber dress, and announcements in Arabic and French gave the fires sense of what was to come.
So we flew directly over Avignon and Marseilles following the Rhone Valley to the Mediterranee circling over huge desalination plants and miles of white flat-topped houses along neat palm lined streets and squares to land at CARTHAGE: yep, the Tunis airport is plonked right next to the ancient city.
Tunisia has in the recent past hosted the PLO. It is hardly a friend of George Bush’s America, so friends of “our great and powerful ally” like Australians cannot apply for a visa until they land. In spite of the best efforts of Wonderful-Barry-the-Travel-Agent, it wasn’t until I’d landed that the process of visa application became clearish to me, and also to the Tunisian officials whose currency isn’t convertible until you arrive.
So I queue – somewhat sleepless and disoriented – then front Immigration with forms and mugshots in hand, just in case – then I get eyeballed – then I get sent back to a-counter-around-the-corner-where-I-hadn’t-seen-it then I get asked for 10,000 Dinars for a visa. But I don’t have Dinars because you can’t buy them Tunisian Dinars before you land and the bank is on the other side of Immigration and how will I get there and I don’t know and you cannot get a visa without Dinars and I cannot get Dinars until I get into the country and we’ll have to work out what to do and I will give you a note to go through Immigration and so I go through Immigration and get patted-down by a large uniformed official while my hand luggage is X-rayed and I find a bank counter and we don’t change travellers’ cheques so you will have to pay cash and thank you Monsieur for the US Dollars and I go back through security and don’t get patted down and X-rayed this time and get through Immigration to the hidden counter to find an electronically generated visa with my passport photo in exchange for my note then I go back through Immigration and get patted down by an even larger official while my hand luggage is X-rayed yet again and then find my pack sitting sadly alone on the carousel and then wait for the booked transfer which didn’t arrive until the tourist office official made a series of phone calls to the hotel and the tour company to bully them into coming to get me.
Even I have enough French language to understand: “He is standing here in front of me, now is someone coming to collect him?”.
Everything else in Tunisia was great. As an introduction to North Africa it is far more gentle than Cairo or Casablanca – possibly due to the large numbers of people in uniforms in a nation where the President won the last election with a vote of 99.9% of the vote in his favour. Or possibly not.
The “main drag” of the city is a broad boulevard surrounded by French colonial architecture: art nouveau and art deco buildings in varying stages of upkeep and shabbiness. The cafes appear to be Parisian - at first – until you realize that few women frequent them, and then only in the company of men. Any passing female who is not in conservative Moslem dress is peered/leered atby up to 150 pairs of eyes… And the men unconsciously hold each other’s hands or forearms and backs and necks, habitually touching their special friends… but to take this any further is an imprisonable offence, so we will move on.
It’s easy to get around Tunis on the “metro” which is really light rail – bought-off-the-shelf from Germany – but with big boom gates across the tracks at every street stop to allow trams to enter while people without tickets are kept out. There are few maps on display, and the destination indicators on the trams stopped working long ago, so it’s a case of: hope-the-route-number-is-correct-and-hope-your-map-from-the-internet-is-right-and-climb-on-protecting-pockets-backpack-camera-and-gonads-from-pickpockets-and-hope-for-the-best!
Carthage is 15 minutes out of town – you get off with the local school kids at “Carthage Hannibal” station. You are amongst miles of Roman ruins built upon the foundations of the civilization that the Romans destroyed: Punic Wars anyone? Nothing prepares you for the sight of nearly-intact Roman mosaics on site amongst the ruins of Roman villas with pristine sea views to the ancient port. Nothing prepares you either for the Bardo Museum, which is itself a great introduction to Islamic architecture.
Further up the line from Carthage is the fading and shabbyish 1930’s French art deco beach resort of Masa Plage where a reflective Menu Touriste late lunch of brik, salade and crème caramel was unfortunately interrupted by a small car spinning out of controle and collecting the gutter: but not the diners. Less shabby – and also less real – is the restored town of Sidi Bou Said. It is white buildings clinging to a cliff, north of the walled Presidential Palace inhabited by Mr 99.9 Percent under very obvious armed guard. The bougainvillia in Sidi Bou Said is astounding. The buildings are interesting. The thousands of tourists dumped by tour coaches for a ten minute walk are very scary indeed.
Again, nothing can prepare you for the clash of cultures with Package Eurotrash Tourism if you head down the coast from Tunis. I took the train – using very broken French to secure a first cass ticket to Sousse – travelling west along the coastline to areas of fortresses, medinas and thousand-year-old coastal defences. A bit like the Tunis “metro”, the coastal train had the stuffing falling out of itsseats, venetian blinds that were down and stayed stubbornly down as any handle that was supplied with the carriage had been removed. The local train beyond Sousse was even more decrepit as railings and handles and windows were loose or gone and the wall panels were held in place by passengers’ shoulders, hands and backs… It seems that in Tunisia, you buy new, then maintenance becomes as a bit of an afterthought. This seems to apply to buildings and road vehicles as well. It was about this time that I decided that NOT flying Tunis Air had been a wise choice.
My biggest compliment in Tunis: in Place Barcelone I was asked in French for directions and the time. I replied in my shocker French and was then told: “Sorry… But you LOOK Tunisian!”
To look Tunisian is a very interesting blend of African tribes, Ronman, Arab, Ottoman and French. If you want to see multiculturalism of the future, look to the faces of Tunis.
South of Sousse ia an international airport on an island in a salt lake. Along the eastern side of the airport, separated by salt water, a road, rail line and security fence, is a string of increasingly grotesque package-deal hotels served by charter flights from Europe. Like a hundred bad “Carry On” movies, these high rises accommodate people straight off the planes, then back on to them again at the end of the ‘package”. They do not even need to set foot in “real” Tunisia at all. The odour of drizzling suntan oil and frying flesh from the lobster bodies must be overwhelming on the security-fenced and guarded beaches.
After enjoying the sights of the medina, fortress and of police arresting tacxi drivers in Monastir, I travelled back to Sousse city for the first of many tagine meals, in a caff overlooking the beach. The sea wall was populated by a few family groups. Most women were very conservatively dressed. The long and narrow beach was occupied by local boys in shorts running in and out of the water, and only one European couple. They were both well past the first fresh bloom of youth. The best description of them would be “sunburned and corpulent”: he in a G string, and she in a string bikini… personifying everything that conservative locals would see as immodest, tasteless; culturally insensitive.
They may have a point.
Escaping the Euro Hotel Fodder, I wandered the fortress and mosque then caught the even more shabby “Gran Confort Classe” train back to tunis, contemplating what Royal Air Maroc may have to offer me on tonight’s flight to Casablanca.
I’ll let you know.
