We jumped on the road heading toward Benni Kadech and blasted down the gravel road. It was a much less sandy road for the most part. We tootled along happily, not passing a single land rover or for that matter any other vehicle. We encountered several patches of sand which we easily traversed but finally came to one that did us in. This time there wasn’t any Tunisian military around to help us. Remembering my sand training from previous trips to the desert, I pulled out my leather gloves and started grabbing handfuls of a small shrub growing all over the desert. It was woody and made a good roadbed for the car to drive on. We made about 10 feet worth of track for the car to drive on to get up speed and get out of the sand. Marie jumped in the car and floored it while the other three of us pushed from behind. Once up on our roadbed, the car took off and shot through the remaining 100 feet of sand and to safety. That was the last real bad patch of sand we encountered.
Maybe another 30 minutes beyond our sand encounter we started smelling something like gasoline and felt an odd feeling from the rear left of the car. I got out and took a look under the car. The shock absorber was completely blown out, leaking fluid everywhere that smelled like gasoline. Good thing shock absorbers aren’t critical pieces of cars! We hopped back in and continued on toward the Tataouine district of the country.
The next morning Xiyun and I got up at about 530 to go out and watch the sun rise over the desert. It was still cloudy overhead but there wasn’t any evidence of a sandstorm underway. We thought that maybe we’d get lucky and see a good sunrise. We went out into the dunes a ways and settled in to watch it rise. By 7am it was obvious that no sun would rise that day so we headed back to the oasis. The sand was wet down about a half an inch but below that it was still powder-dry. Out to the west beyond the oasis it looked like the sand was still dry and it was definitely blowing. Before we reentered the oasis the sand already was almost dry. It was promising to be another sandstorm filled day. Back at the tent we found Marie and Maciej still sleeping in the tent. We roused them out of bed and went over to breakfast.
Just under the surface the sand was still dry as a bone.
The desert was starting to bloom from the rain.
Breakfast consisted of bread, margarine, jam, and coffee. It was decent but nothing to write home about. The bread was sandy, just like everything else in the oasis! After breakfast I headed over to the swank hotel with Marie to search out a telephone. She wanted to call her boyfriend in Morocco. She talks to him every night on the phone and texts several times a day. Ksar Ghilane obviously has zero portable service as it’s in the absolute middle of nowhere. There also aren’t any taxiphones. We found out that only the hotels have phones. The five star’s phone was down from the storm so Marie decided to head back over to our hotel to try and use their phone. I climbed up the tower at the nice hotel and took pictures looking out across the oasis toward the approaching sandstorm.
Our tent away from home.
Maciej and Xiyun climbed up the tower a while later and we took pictures of each other from the top. As I was taking pictures I saw the Italian film crew head out across the desert in their land rovers to a place about a kilometer out where they piled out and setup their equipment. Out across the desert came two horses, one being rode by a local man and the other by an Italian woman. No doubt she was some minor star in Italy and whatever they were shooting was some sort of love story. She had the white horse while the guy had a dark colored horse. It was all melodramatic. I decided I should check out what they were doing from a closer vantage point so I climbed down the tower and headed out into the desert to see what they were up to. I believe that I might now be in an Italian movie production or TV show of some sort!
Camel tracks.
Garbage in the sand.
Back in the oasis I went back to our tent to pack up my things. I found the other three waiting for me in the tent. They had decided that we’d strike out about an hour early and ditch our government friends. She had gotten some instructions from the hotel operator on another route that we could take rather than the pipeline road that would save us a lot of time. He said the road was a bit bumpier but would be okay for our car. We tore off down the tarmac out of Ksar Ghilane as the sandstorm swept over the oasis. It appeared that we were getting out of there at just the right time! It’s okay to be stuck in an oasis during a sand storm but it is absolutely no fun to be stuck out in the open in a broken-down car!
Just as we were getting into our car, a convoy of about 8 land rovers pulled up at the hotel with piles of tourists. The tourists all looked pretty shocked to see our Peugeot parked in amongst the land rovers. The rover drivers all looked pretty pissed! The day before we got the same response from the other land rovers that had been at the hotel for lunch and the ones that we had passed heading north toward Douz. In fact a few had tried to run us off the road but we didn’t give any ground and forced them to drive over some particularly crappy pieces of road as retribution. There’s a big interest in wanting to keep the mystique of Ksar Ghilane as an inaccessible place to all but land rovers and experienced guides. There we were in our Peugeot 206 ruining the mystique!
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.
