Below is a diary of the trip to the south. In my opinion, it covers the equivalent to the required papers which I have left to write for the cultures class to get the best grade available. This excerpt along with the rest of my writings will be refined and compacted into some form of a book or other such document for sale at your local bookstore at some point in the future. As always with my works, everything is copyright by me and can’t be reproduced without my permission.
November 16, 2004
I finally pulled into Djerba and into the hotel at about 9pm. I was in transit for a helluva long time. The plane to Djerba was a turboprop which was crazy cool flying.
In the Djerba airport, I found a taxiphone and started dialing people in the group. I first tried Karim with no results. Next was Giovanna. I found out that she had stayed home with some gastrointestinal distress. I told her she should catch up with us via louage further south. Next I tried calling all the rest of the group but none of them answered their cellphones. Finally, I went out to the taxi stand and caught a taxi in to Houmt Souq and to the Hotel Erriadh. It cost me about eight dinar including tip for the taxi driver. He gave me good service and I was happy so he deserved the tip.
To get to the hotel from where the taxi dropped me off, I had to walk about 100 meters through the outside section of the old medina. The streets were bumpy and it was dark. I managed to get to the hotel without incident and checked in. The hotel clerk didn’t speak any English. I got a two person room on the second floor. It was around 9pm. I spent the next hour exploring the hotel, an old funduk, and observing the medina from the roof of the hotel. It was very pretty at night. In the inner courtyard there were several large plants growing up to the third level. One plant was a local form of ivy which climbed up all the way to the third story. When I walked past it on the second story, a whole mess of birds flew out from the leaves. I had startled them and they flew like none other.
At about five minutes before ten, I came down to the hotel lobby to sit and see if Karim would call me. I never was able to get ahold of him over the telephone. Right on the dot at 10pm, Karim called the hotel. The front desk worker, which didn’t speak any English, thought I was crazy to sit there without any reason, and even more crazy when Karim called me. He told me that he was on the ferry with the students and would be there in about an hour and a half. I said I’d see him either that night or the next morning. After that, I went to bed and took some melatonin. Taking melatonin assures that I’ll sleep well and acclimate to the time zone, but it also assures that I’ll be dead to the world for about eight hours.
Somewhere around 1130 or so I vaguely remember waking up to let Lucas in the room.
November 17, 2004
I woke up to my new wristwatch alarm. It was a gift from my mom. I think it’ll be very handy in the coming days and months. I got a shower, and was about to head downstairs for an early breakfast when Lucas rolled over and told me that Karim changed breakfast time to later since they got in late the night before. So instead of going to breakfast, I went ahead and combined the two partially full huge duffle bags into one monstrously huge duffle bag. It weighed about 37 kilos when I finished.
Finally, I went downstairs to eat some breakfast. Typical breakfasts in Tunisian hotels consist of coffee, French bread, some jam, and butter. This was a very typical Tunisian breakfast. I found out at breakfast that three of the people that did come on the trip became sick while they were traveling south the day before. Jeff, Joey, and Melinda figured they must have gotten some bad harrisa somewhere. They were pretty miserable and weren’t able to keep food down or in. Due to that, Karim delayed our departure from the hotel. He gave us free time to wander around the medina in Houmt Souq. Lucas and I wandered out and around the medina checking out the various shops and sights. Finally, around 1030 or 11am, we all congregated at the hotel and the well among us got on the bus to go visit the Jewish synagogue in the town of Erriadh. This is the synagogue which was bombed several years by al quada. Something like 19 German tourists died on their tour bus. Needless to say, security was tight, well for Tunisia anyway.
The interior of the synagogue was reminiscent of a similar synagogue I visited in Egypt a number of years ago. This one postdates the Egyptian one by several thousand years, but it seems that the styles stayed the same. To enter the prayer hall and inner sanctum, we had to don skull caps and scarves to assure our heads were covered. Also, our shoes came off at the door. It was pretty funny to see a bunch of fat old French tourists wearing skull caps.
Skull caps now off, we headed back to the hotel on the bus. We loaded all of the luggage onto the bus, quite a feat, all the sick people, quite another feat, and then the well people. As we got off from the hotel on Djerba very late, Karim started planning what we would be able to see that day and what we’d have to skip. He decided we should stop off at Guellala, a village which is famous for its pottery. We went into one of the typical pottery shops which are buried underground. One of the proprietors showed us how a typical coffee cup is made and then tried to sell us pottery. I didn’t buy anything but I did get a few nice pictures.
From there, we drove south to the causeway off the island which dates back to roman times. It along with the ferry at the other end of the island are the only two access routes to Djerba. Back on the mainland, we drove west and south toward Medenine and then turned severely south to hit up Tatouine. At Tatouine, we stopped at a hotel to leave the sick people behind so we could go down a bumpy road to Chenini, an old berber village set high in the mountains. It was a very pretty place, made all the more pretty by the sunset which was in full swing upon our arrival. I ran around with Anne to see the various sights of the village and climb the mountain to the top of the village where the granaries were once located. Like many of the traditional villages in Tunisia, this one has been largely depopulated due to the construction of Chenini Nouvelle. There were still a fair number of inhabitants living in this one however. We saw several groups of women walking about in red and white checkered scarves, evidently traditional to this particular village or area. A teenage boy followed Anne and I around to try and get a bit of money from us by selling us some sort of crystal. We didn’t take the bait.
Anne and I got into trouble a bit for being late to the bus because we wanted to continue exploring. It’s hard to leave such interesting places!
Back at Tatouine, we rounded up the sick people and got them back on the bus. Directly across from the hotel we stopped at, there is a life-sized replica of a dinosaur high up on a hill. I have a good picture of it in the daylight. It looks rather out of place in Tunisia. On the way out of Tatouine, we stopped at the “welcome to Tatouine” sign and got a few pictures. It always makes great conversation to stand next to a sign which has been heavily referenced in starwars.
From Tatouine, we headed north, back to Medenine and then west toward Matmata. Somewhere around Toujane, we took a wrong turn and ended up on a wild ride through the countryside on a one lane paved track which descended rapidly down the mountains. If it had been daylight, I think most of the group would have been quite frightened by the sheer dropoffs on the right side of the bus. That road popped us out in Matmata Nouvelle. It took us probably an extra hour to get to the StarWars Hotel because of this detour.
When we arrived at the StarWars hotel, we found Giovanna waiting for us in the lobby. She had taken a louage south from Tunis and was picked up at the station by one of the hotel workers. She was still rather sick but seemed to be doing better than she had during my trip to LA. In the hotel, there was a drunken man that tried to hustle us. It was rather pathetic. Karim tried to get him to go away but finally got him to go outside and sit out of the way.
The hotel itself is actually situated underground in a series of pits and caves dug out of the soil and clay. One of the pits was used extensively as the starwars set in several of the films. It includes Luke’s home in episode 4, the bar scene in episode 4, and several other scenes as well. Our rooms were a few pits away. Each room had five guys or five girls in it. Our room was very stinky because of all of the sick people. We left our stuff in the rooms and went back to the bus to go into town and find some food. The sick people stayed behind. The only place in town we found open had the hustler there waiting for us. Karim kicked him out unceremoniously and we ordered our food. It was decent but not all that tasty. After dinner, we went up the street to purchase some supplies for the sickies. I went with Heather down the street to buy some cigarettes. Also of interest was when several of us laid down in the middle of the busiest intersection in town for about five minutes. There aren’t many people out at about 10pm or 11pm at night!
Back at the hotel, we were instructed to be up around 730 or 8am to have breakfast and get packed. We watched some short video clips and part of blazing saddles on Mike’s and my laptop. Speaking of Mike, he was invited to come along with us by Karim as a reward for getting the network back into shape at school. He’s pretty cool to hang out with. Too bad he’s headed for the northeast of France in December and then on to Russia in June. Maybe I’ll catch up with him some day.
Finally, we fell asleep in our underground hotel rooms. It was a very long day and the next day promises to be even longer.
November 18, 2004
This morning, I woke up to an incredibly smelly room. I was pretty much the first up of the students, not counting the ones who had been running to the bathroom all night long. I went to the communal bathrooms and got a shower in a shower stall whose door wouldn’t close properly. I had to prop it closed with my foot during the shower. I also got most of the hot water in the hotel during my shower. It appears that their hot water heater isn’t the fastest in the world to heat water.
After my shower, I got Jeff out of bed and took him to the StarWars area of the hotel where we took some pictures. It’s pretty interesting but rather dilapidated. Unfortunately, the bar scene area was closed and locked. Evidently the guy with the key spends the winters in Tunis.
We took breakfast in one of the rooms off of the main starwars complex. It was typical Tunisian breakfast fair. Bread, coffee, jam, butter. Our sick people still weren’t feeling the best.
Back on the bus, we headed west to the berber village of Tamezret to check out a berber museum and walk around the town. The town was very picturesque, set on the top of a particularly high hill in the middle of a sea of such hills. It took us a while to find the museum as there was a good deal of wandering involved. We finally located it and viewed the sights inside. The two highlights for me were the tunnel connecting the house to the next house over for defensive purposes and the chimney system which vented the smoke down at the bottom of the hill, also for defensive purposes. These berber villages have long been designed and built to keep as low of a profile as possible so invading peoples can’t find the locals. In fact, the only way that the berbers were defeated by the French was when a local collaborator told the French to attack right after a rain storm. When the French attacked, they found that none of the Berber’s rifles would fire due to their extreme age. Old flintlock rifles just don’t cut it in rainstorms.
After the museum, we headed back to the only cafe in town where we had some tea. I took a bottle of fanta. Back on the bus, our next destination was Gabes, Karim’s hometown.
The drive between Matmata and Gabes was entirely uneventful, aside from the ever present secret police who were trailing us in their non-descript unmarked car.
Pulling into Gabes, it appeared to be an unremarkable and very dusty town. We approached from the desert and didn’t enter the oasis but instead went right into the new section of town. We made our first stop at the hotel where we dropped our luggage and made a quick pitstop. The sick people were, for the most part, feeling better. Jeff still was a bit nervous in the service though.
Again back to the bus. We headed out to the oasis of Chenini, same name as the berber village in the south but much different. This is Karim’s old stomping grounds. We visited his family’s patch of oasis and saw where his family live. In the Hamdy gardens, we sat down at a large table with a whole bunch of people from all over Gabes, including two reporters, the local secret police, his older brother who runs Hamdy Brothers (the rock crushing business), and many other people, to a lunch consisting of a roast lamb and many different Tunisian dishes. It was very good. Anne had a bit of a problem here when the lamb came out. As she’s a vegan back home, she got rather ill from seeing it and had to leave the table. I don’t feel all that bad for her though as it’s entirely mental conditioning to produce such reactions. When I saw it, all I could think was “delicious!”
Present in the oasis was the typical three tiered agricultural system. We picked some pomegranates and wandered around the paths. At one point, Karim took us over to his birthplace, quite literally, a hole in the side of the hill. Karim was born about 52 years ago in a cave up the hill from his family’s oasis. He lived there surrounded by his relations in other caves nearby until he was about seven years old and they moved into an above ground structure.
After lunch and the cave visit, we headed over to several different NGO’s to check out their work in the oasis. One recycles agricultural waste to make it into compost. Another keeps a large stock of traditional plants to make seed stock for the oasis and help maintain biodiversity. I got a phone call from my mom when we were at the recycler’s which made me miss everything that they were saying. It was rather annoying, but I had to talk to my mom about some various things dealing with our upcoming Libya excursion.
Next stop was for tea at a nice caf� set in the oasis. I got to see the roman aqueduct where the bus got a little too close and personal with the stonework. That’s where we bent the ladder on the bus’s roof. It still is intact enough to use though. It happened when the bus went through Gabes before I met up with the group. I guess our driver, Mongi, decided to gun it rather than drive all the way around. Good thing the bus itself wasn’t too tall! This time, we took the long way around.
Our next stop was at the local university where we were introduced to everyone and paraded around the facilities. We stopped in several different classrooms to say hello and check out the situation. It was pretty neat. Of course, by this point, it was also night time.
From there, we headed back to the hotel where Karim and Laura pointed out some places where we could get food and turned us loose. Several of us went across the street to eat at a pizza joint. The people there weren’t too interested in helping us out but we managed to get some food. After that, we tried going to the publinet to use the internet but it was already closed. Instead, we went back to the hotel where we found a cake given to us by the hotel staff (and also the local secret police to help keep us at the hotel so they could go home to sleep). Heather wanted to go out drinking but the secret police, now referred to as the Scoobies so as not to tip them off when we were talking about them, desperately wanted to go home and didn’t want to follow her to a bar. They found Karim and took Karim, Heather, and Mike to a closed booze shop where they forced the owner to come, open the shop, and sell them a bunch of alcohol. Heather bought five bottles of wine and mike bought a 24 pack of beer. I think there was also some beer purchased by Heather.
Back at the hotel, once we were done with the cake, Heather, Lucas, Mike, Kellen, and Anne went into Anne, Heather, and Kellen’s room. I also was dragged in with my laptop (I was typing up the Los Angeles portion of my journal at the time) to join in the festivities. As I don’t drink, I sat and watched the fun. Very quickly, all five bottles were disposed of. That’s one bottle per person! Then the beer came out. Everyone got very sloshed with the exception of me. I looked on in amazement as Lucas suddenly made perfect sense and turned into a true genus under the effects of alcohol. Mike stayed about the same, Anne started getting frisky, Heather got turned on, and Kellen became obsessive compulsive about symmetry. It was all rather entertaining. I think I took one or two pictures of the event.
Finally, around one or two in the morning, us three guys went back to our bedroom to get some sleep. At that point, Mike had a deep conversation with me about what both of us want to do in the next few years. It was very interesting. Mike’s plans include learning Russian in the north of France and then moving to Russia for grad school for a year before he goes to law school at Cornell where there’s a dual enrollment program for international law with a university in France. It all sounds very exciting. I think I might go visit him in Russia next year if he’s still there. His command of the French language is quite remarkable. I hope I have as good of Arabic as he has French by the end of the year but I fear I won’t.
Later, we learned that Kellen and either Heather or Anne went out to the other boys room where Kellen mooned Jeff and Joey. Jeff said it was rather traumatic. I think the girls probably finally passed out around 3am.
November 19, 2004
I woke this morning to a cool courtyard surrounded by hotel rooms. Mike and Lucas were a bit hungover. So were the girls. We had breakfast in the small dining room. After breakfast and before we headed to the central market for a bit of shopping, Jeff got a visit from the doctor who gave him two shots in the butt of antibiotic. He wasn’t doing so hot still. Joey, Giovanna, and Melinda were doing better.
Before we went out to the central market, Giovanna and I ran across the street to the Publinet to check email and whatnot. It was my first chance to check it since Los Angeles. Good thing too. I had a couple important emails.
Next up, the central market. Mike and I wandered around for a while, not really wanting to buy anything. We wandered all over into the residential sections of town. Finally, we went back to the bus where we ran into one of Karim’s old TA’s from back in the early 90’s. Karim was very happy to see him. It’s truly a small world!
Back at the hotel, we loaded up all of our crap, checked out, and headed west toward El Hamma. En route, we stopped at a carpet coop where we bought some carpets. I bought a pretty little green and white one. It’ll go well in my house some day.
In El Hamma, we stopped at a local hamam to see the interior where they use natural hot water from the ground. It was interesting although a bit strange to walk into the middle of an operational hamam with people inside and not be bathing. Mike said he’d take me to the one he goes to in Tunis in a Sunday or two. I said I’d take him up on the offer.
Next stop was a factory under construction that Karim and his brother own. It will crush lime to a fine powder for use in cosmetics and other such things in Europe. It was an interesting stop. As its water supply taps from the same aquifer as El Hamma, the well on the site also has very hot water.
On from El Hamma, we drove down to Douz where we stopped at the hotel where Karim and Laura went on their honeymoon and then went around the corner to take a camel ride into the beginning of the Grand Erg Oriental. We rode camels into the sand dunes as the blood red sun sunk low over the oasis in the west. It was very beautiful and picturesque. We stopped for about 20 minutes out about a kilometer or two from the bus to take pictures and take a break. Several men on horses ridiculously dressed as the people supposedly used to dress in the area came up to try and hustle us for rides on their horses and breakneck speeds across the desert. They really started bothering us, especially after Giovanna started negotiating with one for a ride before Karim suggested she didn’t take a ride. Several tourists have been groped by these guys during the ride. Out of nowhere, here comes a big truck with four secret police. A big argument ensued between the horsemen, Karim, and the secret police. The police drove the horsemen off with threats of arrest as they had done that morning with one of the horsemen’s compatriots who groped a western tourist. The camel drivers have a syndicate which helps regulate who takes tourists out into the desert when and how much the rates are. The horsemen have no such agreements.
We finally returned to the bus as night fell across the sands.
Our next stop was the souk at Douz for a bit of nighttime shopping. I went and bought two head scarves for my personal use while in the desert. I got a tan and a black one. One was for four dinar and the other for five. I should have gotten them a bit cheaper but I wasn’t able to and I knew I wouldn’t see them anywhere else for that little at first blush.
I went into a jewelry shop with Kellen and we almost were left behind by the bus. It seems that I’m always the one to get drug around and used as the male safety.
Back on the bus, we went into Douz and found a restaurant to eat at. Dinner was decent but again it wasn’t that tasty. It seems the south has poor food quality. From dinner, we struck out west toward Tozeur via Chott El Jerid.
The Chotts of Tunisia are large inland salt flats, once large shallow lakes, now dried up. Periodically, they fill with water from winter rains. This night was one of those periods. It had rained in the desert a few days earlier and the whole chott was full of water. The road across is 94 kilometers long with only one building the whole way at a wide spot in the road where an enterprising Tunisian set up a roadside stand to sell pieces of desert rose to tourists. It was maybe 10pm when we stopped. We could see the lights of Tozeur far off in the distance, but other than that, there weren’t any lights to be seen to the right or the left. The chott is truly massive.
We pulled into our hotel in Tozeur around 11pm or so. Joey and I had a room on the second (first) floor, the rest of the guys had a room down the hall, and all the girls were upstairs in rooms that were off the roof. Joey and I went to sleep fairly quickly. It was a good thing we had extra blankets in the room as it was rather cold that night. Joey let me take the larger of the two beds.
November 20, 2004
I woke up around 7 this morning, got a shower, packed most of my stuff, and went downstairs for breakfast. There was an Australian woman downstairs eating alone. Soon she was inundated by American college students! After a while, she left. I think she felt a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of English speakers.
Giovanna and I went outside before the rest of the group was done eating and wandered around the zone touristique. We went by one shop that had a fennic fox tied up on the front stoop. I got a picture and Giovanna went in for a closer look. She used to have six of those foxes at her home in Oregon. They were imported from Egypt. She gave them up a number of years ago though. I think maybe that happened when she got divorced.
We walked back to the hotel and finished getting packed. Finally, it was time to get on with the day. We all went downstairs expecting to take the bus to a museum but instead found three horse carriages waiting to take us to the oasis. We piled in, I sitting up front with one of the drivers, and took off to the oasis. The horses either didn’t have any shoes on or else had very worn shoes that have no grip on asphalt because our horse kept sliding and slipping on the down-hills, at one point even falling on its knees! Once we got onto the soft loam of the oasis, our horse performed much better.
In the Tozeur oasis, we saw the typical three tiered oasis agricultural system. The bottom layer has the vegetables, grains, henna, and other low growing plants. The mid level has trees such as the pomegranate, apple, banana, and other such fruit trees. The top layer is comprised of the date tree. We stopped at one area where the dates were being harvested. They were lower quality dates so the men weren’t being too careful with them. Instead of handing each bunch down carefully from the treetop to the ground, they were tossing them down onto a big blue tarp! We stood around and watched as the guy in the tree made quick work of the fruit, all the while singing. We tried a few of the dates that they had picked. They weren’t the best in the world but were still palatable. The guy up in the tree sang a nice song while he worked. No doubt it was a song about how stupid tourists will watch anything if you tell them it’s important. On the way back to the horse carriages, Anne and Melinda wandered off down another oasis trail. I followed them down to make sure no one gave them problems. There were a lot of local guys standing around that I didn’t like the looks of. Finally, the girls turned around and so did I. We went back to our horse carriages and continued on our way.
Next stop, after a bit of photographic fun with some Japanese tourists, was at the monument to Ibn Chabbat, the engineer who in the 1200’s devised and built the irrigation and cultivation system still in place in the oasis today. Considering the oasis has an estimated 200,000 palms covering ten square kilometers, he was pretty successful.
Beyond the monument, we ran into the tomb of Abou El Kacem Chebbi, the national poet of Tunisia. He died in 1934, having only been alive since 1909. Karim said he died of TB or something similar. We went in, took some photos of the tomb, Karim recited some poetry to us, and we left. It was a nice monument to the most famous poet of Tunisia.
Back in our horse drawn carriages, we went down the way a bit further to a large hotel where we were disgorged onto the street. Mongi was there waiting with the bus. Before we got back on the bus, Karim gave us 45 minutes or an hour to wander around in the market. I took off with a few of the girls and Mike to find an ATM then I struck out on my own, as they were not doing anything interesting. I located the local covered produce and meat market. It was interesting walking through and seeing the heads of camels, goats, cows, sheep, and other unlucky animals. I would have taken pictures but I figured that wouldn’t have been the best course of action. Back in the bus, we headed back to the hotel to pick up our luggage. I grabbed mine and threw it in the bus.
Later, we found out that Giovanna and a couple other people went down the street to say hi to the fox again. This time, however, Giovanna managed to try and cuddle the fox and was nipped at. She lost a layer or two of skin from her thumb and got licked by the fox. This sent her into a rabies panic. Before she left the USA, she had the vaccine for rabies, giving her 72 hours instead of the standard 24 hours to seek out treatment. Good thing, because we didn’t search out a doctor for her until we got back to Tunis.
Next stop after the hotel was the mountain oasis of Chebika. Its palmeraie spills out of a canyon from the western mountains. The oasis is visible for miles as everything else around is completely flat. On our approach to the oasis across a large and very flat scrubland, we encountered a large camel herd watering at a low spot next to the road where recent rains provided a pool of water. I got some pictures. While I was out of the bus photographing, I looked down at the ground and noticed quite a site! The whole place was littered with the dead and dieing bodies of locust! Recently, the whole area had been inundated with the locust swarms which had been fomenting south of Tunisia in such places as Mali and Niger. It’s good to see that the insects were quite dead or on their way to being dead. Having such things in the wild can only spell trouble for local agriculture.
The town of Chebika is a typical nouvelle settlement. The old town, higher up the mountain, has been abandoned for about 50 years, since near the time of independence. We arrived and walked up the gorge toward the source of the water which supplies the palmeraie with its water. Mike and I ran ahead and up a steep slope to see the view over the desert to the south. We went back down to the bus, thinking everyone was about to leave, only to find out from Mongi that they in fact were back up in the oasis! We climbed back up to our vantage point via a different route to find the rest of the students just leaving the top. I found a geode, some crystal, and a few fossils on the way up. I also found out that I’m a bit out of shape.
Just before we rolled out of Chebika, we pulled off at a brand new women’s cooperative NGO. Karim heard about it from someone and decided it required a visit. We went inside to find them producing their first ever batch of date jam. Some of the students bought some of the date jam for xmas presents and whatnot. I tried some but decided I didn’t want to lug any of that stuff around for the next six months. It sounds like Karim will probably try to get involved with this cooperative to make sure that they are successful. Also, the product is tasty!
Beyond Chebika is the oasis of Tamerza. To get there, the bus had to surmount the western mountains of Tunisia’s south. That amounted to a bunch of windy roads with great views over the desert. We pulled into town about an hour before sunset, parked the bus, and walked down to the cascades of Tamerza, where the oasis water supply cascades over a waterfall and several enterprising locals have set up tea and gift shops. We drank some tea and sat and watched the sun set from the canyon. Karim bought Laura a new necklace and bracelet from one of the vendors. She looked very pleased and he was practically beaming.
We walked back to the bus, piled on, and headed north toward Gafsa. On the drive, we got to see the sun set again and we also went within three kilometers of the Algerian border. We tried to get Karim to go to Algeria with us but he wouldn’t hear of it. I guess maybe another time.
Onward we drove into the night. Our destination was Sbeitla. Somewhere near Gafsa, we drove through and under some large phosphate mining and processing equipment. According to one of my travel guides, the phosphate reserves in the country are close to running out. That’ll spell trouble for the country in a big way! Tunisia won’t be left with hardly anything of value to export aside from tourism and sand.
On our arrival in Sbeitla, we checked into the hotel directly adjacent to the ruins. I roomed with Lucas. Once we had our stuff in the rooms, we went downstairs to the dining hall for food. There was an overabundance of scoobies in this town. Even the waiter seemed to be one! The waiter, in fact, had rather crazy hair. It was long and kind of stuck out in all directions. It’s not something you commonly see on Tunisian men. After dinner, we retired to our rooms. Joey came over to mine and Lucas wandered off. Joey and I watched most of Dr Strangelove until about midnight when we poked our heads out the door and saw one of the girls wandering by partially drunk. She insisted we go to Anne and Melinda’s room to see the festivities in progress. On our arrival, we found Anne, Heather, Kellen, Melinda, Lucas, and Mike all in various stages of inebriation. Things had wound down a bit because they had nearly run out of booze. Mike went off to find some more. We sat around and waited. Anne also went with Mike. After a while, Heather wandered out to find more booze as well. Finally, I went out to see what was going on. Anne and Heather were downstairs talking to the night hotel dude in front of his tiny space heater. This hotel didn’t really have any heating to speak of and on the plains near Sbeitla, it gets very cold and very windy at night. I was bundled up in many layers as was everyone else. A while longer, and I wandered back upstairs, went to the roof for some photos of the area, and then back down to the party.
Mike finally came back, having been taken to another hotel where he hung out with very drunk Tunisians until another guy came that bought a bunch of beer for Mike from the market. All of this happened on a little motor scooter. Mike would have been completely frozen were it not for the warming and numbing effects of the alcohol. I found out at about this point that the guy that Mike went with was somewhat of a pervert as he had groped Heathers breast downstairs after Mike and I and everyone else had gone back upstairs. Heather had thought it important to drink some alcohol in front of the guys that brought it back as a gesture of thanks. She gets even more bizarre ideas when she is drunk than when she is sober! Anyhow there was enough other groping that night in the hotel room to make it of little consequence. Back to drinking, Joey and I made sure that everyone got very very sloshed. It ended up being something like 40 or so beers consumed by five or six people. Kellen and Melinda tagged out of drinking at about the same time that Joey and I came in so they don’t really count.
Earlier in the evening when Joey and I first came in, Heather tried to liberate us from our clothing. Good thing Joey and I had our full mental faculties available because it took a bit of work to keep most of our clothing on. Anne was a rather belligerent drunk who kept throwing things and looking mischievous. Lucas got smart again and Mike was his normal self. Kellen didn’t seem too affected but she didn’t have that much. Melinda was trying to sleep on one of the beds while everyone kept falling over her. Mike and Anne wrestled for quite a while. It was all very entertaining. Finally, around 3 or 4am, we all went to sleep.
November 21, 2004
It was hard waking up this morning. I rolled out of bed and hit the shower. It was warm enough but it did little good with waking me up. After the standard fare for breakfast, we got on the bus, leaving our luggage in the rooms, and headed for the roman ruins at Sbeitla. They’re spread out over a huge area with various points of interest scattered about. The forum is of particular interest as well as the baths complex. We wandered around for a couple of hours and then went back to the bus. The lighting wasn’t the best for photos as the sun was rather harsh. We went back to the hotel, grabbed our bags, and rode off into the midday light. Next stop, Kariouan and the Grand Mosque which we had to skip on our previous visit.
Along the way, we pulled off at a series of roadside stands to purchase some fruit and macaroons. Lucas bought five dinar worth which is the equivalent of several kilos. He’s nuts! On the bus again, we headed to the center of Kariouan where we met up with two people who Karim has brought over a couple of times from Corvallis now to work on IT projects. I can’t remember their names but I think one runs the PEAK internet service in Corvallis. We all went to the great mosque, took some photos, and then headed to the other side of the medina for some lunch at a nice restaurant. After that, back in the bus and back to Tunis. We were lucky enough to get curbside drop-off as we had tons of luggage. Well okay, just me. Back in our place, Lucas and I did a few things and went to bed. For me, it had been ten solid days of travel including three continents and a near circumnavigation of the planet! Also all of the late nights in Los Angeles and on the trip didn’t help me any.
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