Ain Draham

Up to Ain Draham. We visited the carpet co-op and ate lunch at the bombing boar hotel. We also stopped the car a couple of times in the cork forest. At one place, where we stopped to buy some souvenirs along the side of the road, we took on a young girl for about a kilometer. Her dad had sold us some wooden figures and asked if we could give her a ride to school. She didn’t speak modern standard Arabic so I couldn’t really talk to her very well. She seemed a bit startled by being put in a car with a bunch of foreigners to get a ride to school!

Cork forests.

The line where the mountain meets the sky is also the line between Tunisia and Algeria. At one point, we were just down the hill from it.

About two kilometers out of the cork forest on the road to Bulla Regia, we passed this guy carrying a bunch of sticks. There were several other of these people walking along the side of the road for a couple of kilometers. Fuel sources are scarce outside the forests.

Moving on from Tabarka, we wound our way up into the northwestern mountains of Tunisia. Known as the Kroumirie Mountains, its one of the few areas in Tunisia to get significant rainfall and, occasionally, snow! We stopped off at Ain Draham, the mountain station of Tunisia. The town sits at about 1000 meters nestled at the top of the pass on the road between Tabarka and Jendouba. Between Ain Draham and Tabarka, the road winds its way within about 500 meters of the border with Algeria. In Ain Draham, you can gaze across the valley to Algeria.

The entire region is filled with cork forests. We spied several trees that had been freshly harvested. To harvest the cork bark off of a cork tree, one makes a circular cut at the top and bottom of the trunk and one slit all the way down the length of the tree. Be sure to be careful not to cut all the way through the bark, as the inner layers transport nutrients up and down the trunk. I’m told that a cork tree can be harvested once every ten years or so.

In Ain Draham, our main goal was to see the women’s carpet cooperative that one of our guide books talked about. After some hiking around, we finally found it. The place mainly handles traditional Berber carpets with a few more modern designs. In the end, I bought a carpet and a bunch of carpet squares. Giovanna bought two carpets, some carpet squares, some knitted sweaters and gloves and hats and whatnot, and maybe a few other things. Heather bought some carpet squares and some knitted goods. We packaged all of the carpets together into a huge roll that just barely fit into a burlap feed sack. I lashed the roll under my backpack. Since we were taking louages everywhere, we had to be mobile. Looking back on it, we were rather insane. Those carpets must have weighed 20 kilos!