This latest adventure started with a full day layover in Amsterdam. I wasn’t thinking much about it until the day before when I realized that it is the perfect timing for the tulip fields. A long walk on a sunny day was a sure jet-lag buster.
I arrived in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, close to midnight and made my way to the guesthouse where RockyB was waiting. That’s right… this trip is Rock-Awn 6.0!!! Our guesthouse guy looked at me and told me I looked sporty, then proceeded to lead me up this crazy spiral staircase to our room. After a good sleep and no water in the morning (water restriction due to a countrywide drought), we headed out for day 1 of exploring.
The medina (old city) of Tunis is a Unesco World Heritage site and it was fun to explore the tiny pathways and eclectic shops.
We spent the afternoon in the town of Sidi Boussaïd which has ocean views and classic blue and white buildings.
This morning we felt ready to ‘dial up our adventure’ and try to figure out the Louage system, which is Tunisia’s version of mini-buses. We amazingly happened to wander our way to what seemed to be a Louage hangout. A very helpful Tunisian guy wrote down our instructions in Arabic and flagged down a cab to take us a very long way to the correct station. On the way RockyB used Google translate pictures to try to read what he had written and it said something about dying or crawling or something. I’m choosing to believe he had poor penmanship.
At the Louage station there was some commotion with a few drivers (maybe fighting over us?) and then we were off. It took about 90 minutes and another cab ride to get to El Dougga, which is ’the best preserved Roman small town in North Africa’.
We were celebrating our travel prowess while exploring the ruins. It was not until we got back to the closest town that we found out that the public transportation to Tunis stops running at 4:00. We cleared our heads with a delicious sandwich from a street vendor, where we held out a handful of change and he picked through to find the correct amount. This has occurred a few times because we haven’t figured out the coins yet.
With full tummies we felt ready to make a plan. Armed with Google translate, we chose a person to ask for help and immediately a kind man took charge. Our hero marched over to a taxi and a mini-bus and bartered for a quite reasonable price to get back to Tunis. He even included two Tunisian women he found who were heading part of the way to sweeten the deal. Like a mother hen he settled us both into the front seat of the mini-bus and waived us away.
On the ride home it was fitting that there was a rainbow, with the pot of gold landing in the direction of Tunis.
Undeterred by our travel mistakes, we opted to try our hand at public transport again to get to our guesthouse. Again a lovely man stopped and ‘hunt and peck’ typed into our translation app how to get where we needed to be.
Our assessment of Tunisian people has been very positive. They seem to be genuinely helpful and sincere, even despite our apparent stupidity with currency and language. I also have to give a shout out to Tunisian food.
Looks like Rock-Awn is doing what we do best… having great adventures that sometimes end up with even better stories.
OMG! You guys are adventurous 😬🥰!
I was tracking you travel back into town earlier with find my phone. No Rox and I don’t have trust issues, quite the opposite! Can’t wait to see what else you find in Tunisia.