The water was wonderfully warm. We jumped in and swam and played around for an hour or so. I brought my camera along in its underwater dive case which I had been using ever since Douz to protect against sand. It also works well underwater!
We climbed out of the hot springs about 10 minutes before dinner and headed back over to the hotel where we threw some clothes on and went to dinner. There was more protein at dinner than any of us had eaten since we arrived in Tunisia! It was amazing just how much food was on our plates. I managed to finish all of mine but just barely. No one else at our table was able to do it. There was an Italian film crew and their Tunisian government minders sitting at the table next to us. Aside from us and the film crew, there wasn’t anyone else in the entire hotel. We really picked a fine weekend to come to the sands!
A frog outside our tent.
After dinner we were headed back to our tent when the government people came over and started talking to us. They were amazed we had gotten a Peugeot 206 down to Ksar Ghilane as no one else they had heard of had ever been able to do it before. We talked with them in Arabic for an hour or two getting information on road conditions and whatnot for the next day it was decided that we’d all convoy together up to the Douz-Matmata road. We went back to the tent, hopped in bed, and went to sleep. The sandstorm was picking up again outside. We were a bit worried that we might be in for 50 days of sand and be stuck at the oasis for the foreseeable future.
At about 1am, we were all woken up by a terrific rainstorm. It poured buckets for about a half hour before things finally settled down again. About five minutes into the rain there was a great flash and then a loud bang as the electrical system of the hotel shorted out. There isn’t any national power grid out in Ksar Ghilane. The few hotels all run their own generators to power things. Our hotel’s generator was tripped off by the rain. No doubt water got in somewhere at a badly sealed junction box. Actually, what am I saying? There weren’t any junction boxes! The wires were just strung between the trees and had a few pieces of tape over where they were spliced. It wasn’t too surprising that one storm took out the whole deal.