Subsequent trips – Tunisia, May 2011

This trip to Tunisia was my 4th and Amanda’s 2nd. We’d chosen all-inclusive as it was meant to be just a mini 1-week chilling holiday as a preliminary to the big one later this year, but in truth sitting around and chilling doesn’t really accord with either mine or Amanda’s way. A friend once said ‘I thought about inviting you on my all-inclusive holiday to XXX, but I knew you’d probably last about 1 morning before donning a rucksack and then meeting me again at the airport on the last day’! Plus, all-inclusive means you want to get your money’s worth and a plate of food that even a walking dustbin like me would consider a good helping if I was paying for it in a normal restaurant becomes just one of 2 or 3!! Ditto for the drinks, although I didn’t really cane that one. Half-board, B&B or s/c is enough IMO.
The El Mouradi Club Kantaoui hotel was OK, although some of the English people we saw on the first night made me wonder if we’d stumbled into a Jeremy Kyle semi-final. The staff were nice and I feel a bit tight that they remained nice despite us not giving much of a tip and even that on the last night. Food was pretty much mediocre, with occasional flashes of excellence eg the Tunisian-themed night. It was more or less the same thing every day with differences only at the edges. By far the best night was the Tunisian-themed one and the main criticism of this hotel was that it wasn’t publicized. If we had known it was coming, we wouldn’t have eaten at lunchtime that day and then wouldn’t have felt like bursting having tried all the Tunisian dishes, knowing we wouldn’t get another chance!
As befits the seasoned, industrious sightseers and globetrotters that Amanda and I are (!) we did plenty of looking around, although it was probably misguided to go to 2 of the same places we’d been to before (Tunis and Kairouan). First was a walk along the beach to Port El Kantaoui Marina.

Tunisia May 11 – Port El Kantaoui

Then Sousse a couple of times.

If the ‘never go back to the place where you were happy’ Russian proverb had been happily proved wrong for my 2nd and 3rd trips to Tunisia, it was not exactly proved right this time, but I sensed cracks appearing in paradise. I’d had this image of Tunisia as being this angelic place where tourists would never get ripped off or mugged and a couple of things happened that changed my view a bit. But if other visitors to Tunisia are now more on their guard in busy places as a result of this then I will not have wasted my time in writing this.

In Sousse, there is a busy bus stop near the main entrance to the Medina (just outside Place Des Martyrs, if anyone planning on going to Tunisia is reading this) where all the buses, taxis and louages (shared taxis that ply a set route) stop to pick up / drop people off. We were looking for a louage back to the hotel but the trouble is these things have the destination written in Arabic. So we were reduced to asking them if they were going to Port El Kantaoui when they stopped and I was beginning to get a bit hacked off at the way they kept saying ‘non’ without any attempt to point us in the right direction. From previous trips to Tunisia, I was accustomed to people being a bit more helpful than that. We must have looked disorientated, for when we did find the right louage Amanda and I started walking towards it through a knot of people, Amanda behind me. One of them blocked my path and took a split-second longer than usual to move when I said ‘excuse-moi, monsieur’. He said ‘pardon monsieur’, moved and just then Amanda yelped. I spun around and she reckoned she’d felt a hand snaking into her handbag, so had made a loud noise to create a distraction. It wasn’t obvious who the owner of the hand was, so we got into the louage. As soon as it pulled away, a voice behind us said in English ‘check your bags’. We did so and luckily there was nothing gone. The English speaker was a criminal defence lawyer, who had witnessed 3 men trying to pickpocket us. Indeed, when Amanda had made that noise 1 had said to the other in Arabic ‘hurry up’. But his next remark brought me down to earth with a bump – ‘I saw them doing it, but couldn’t say anything at the time as I was afraid they’d knife me.’

He reckons crime against the person has spiked since the revolution. I had always felt safe in Tunisia, a much more heavily-policed country than the UK. As he had been Minister Of The Interior before becoming President, the police had been Ben Ali’s power base (responsible for eg for making sure businesses all displayed plenty of Ben Ali pictures and posters) and enforcing the myriad other petty rules and regulations that governed the lives of Tunisians. Mohamed Bouazizi immolating himself in protest at such petty regulations was, after all, the catalyst for the revolution in the first place – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12241082

Now, with Ben Ali’s passing, the police are far less of a feared and ubiquitous institution than they used to be.

Another, admittedly minor but still disappointing, happening in Sousse was on the last day when we were wandering through the Medina. I am accustomed to batting aside the entreaties of shopkeepers to come and look at their shops aka hassle. Wandering through markets in Arab countries is almost like going around a museum when you step too close to a motion sensor and it clicks, only the sensor is at the front of the shop and the click activates the shopkeeper’s mouth. Anyway, the heavens had opened and we were just in the process of taking sanctuary in a covered fruit and veg market when a barber came out of his shop nearby and started commenting on my hair (!) I’d been thinking about a haircut anyway but the way the barber talked and pointed at the bits that could do with a little trim around the base for just 2 dinars it was almost like he cast a spell.

Once in, off we went and got chatting about my previous trips to Tunisia. Turned out he was from Le Kef and we swapped notes about that and the nearby Hammam Mellegue and Jugurtha’s Table and before I knew it, almost as if by accident he was busily snipping away at the rest of my head and giving me a shampoo. I was going to give him more than 2 dinars anyway, but sure enough, when the time came to pay it was suddenly 10 dinars. After discussion, it was whittled down to 5 but, as is often the case it’s nicer to give of your own free will than to meet a demand and the overall feeling was one of being ‘had’. Plus, the unspoken question of what would have happened if neither of us had wanted to budge on the price.

Yes these are pretty mild and yes they could happen anywhere. But I haven’t been accustomed to having to be on my guard to that extent in Tunisia. Shame.

Anyway, here’s pics of Sousse Medina. As you can imagine, the title picture of the album is NOT one I’d have seen on any previous trip to Tunisia!

Tunisia May 11 – Sousse Medina

Unfortunately in superficially quite westernised Tunisia these days kids and teenagers dance to the same disgusting ‘rap’ music as they do elsewhere!

The only place apart from Sousse that we hadn’t been to before was Mahdia. It’s about 60 kms away from Sousse, reached rather incongruously by riding through rubbish-strewn villages and countryside in a modern Korean-built tram that wouldn’t look out of place in the centre of Seoul or Tokyo.

Lovely and highly photogenic place, with amazing colour contrasts. I haven’t been to Santorini in Greece, but am told it’s similar. Was surprised to see carpet weaving going on here….I thought Kairouan was the place for that-

Check out the title picture of the album – Amanda had stopped to look at the menu, and then I spied the ‘couple’ sitting at the table. The woman glared when she saw the camera, but I couldn’t really miss it, could I? She SAYS that the plate of food in front of the dog WASN’T for the dog, but we didn’t see anyone else joining her!!

Tunisia May 11 – Mahdia

Some of the time we did spend back at the hotel. One evening there was some touristy entertainment. Belly dancing, traditional dancing, a man with 12 flower pots balanced on his head and a bit of quite funny audience participation for the last few minutes:-

We took the train to Tunis for a day trip. Being the closet trainspotter that I am, I took advantage of the design of this French train –

Going back to Tunis was probably unnecessary, but we did it anyway. And it was interesting to see a few little changes, such as the army presence. Apols for jerky footage, but I’d probably have got in trouble if they’d seen me –

While wandering along in Tunis, we saw a man coming out of a doorway and loading baguettes onto a cart. I took a couple of still shots, then drew closer for a look inside. As if reminding me of what I like about Tunisia, one of the bakers gestured me to come inside and film. The bit of bread he gave me, still almost too warm to hold, was DELICIOUS!

He asked me if I was a journalist. Disappointingly, I had to say no.

Tunis people leaving mosque. No particular agenda or significance, just that we happened to be there on a Friday and got these ‘real people’ shots when passing a mosque just as prayers had finished-

Pics of Tunis. The title page of the album refers to the pivotal role that Facebook played in this revolution. One person we spoke to was saying how Ben Ali had been hoist by his own petard in this, for it had been he who had pushed the internet in Tunisia, believing it to be a force for modernization. But he hadn’t reckoned on the fact that, instead of being happy facebooking and twittering whilst clubbing, listening to music and drinking, the youth would instead use the internet to organize against him. They’d tried blocking Tunisian facebook access but people had discovered how to link to servers outside Tunisia and the genie was out of the bottle.

The one of the young lad (Tunis Medina (55)) was someone who’d been murdered by the security forces at a demonstration in January 2011. The picture was outside his school and his schoolmates told us what had happened.

Tunisia May 11 – Tunis Medina

As you can see, it was also kitten season in Tunisia. Made your narrator feel quite broody 

Also in Tunis Medina, we were passing the Musee De La Ville when the heavens opened. So we stopped inside for some shelter. Couldn’t believe our luck when we were ushered into this Magnum Photos exhibition of the revolution :- http://www.magnumphotos.com/Catalogue/Patrick-Zachmann/2011/TUNISIA-NN1107822.html

Further use of the driver’s eye view of the track on the way back

An American comedian named WC Fields used to enjoy being rude about Philadelphia eg ‘Last week I went to Philadelphia. It was closed.’ This is what Kairouan felt like when we were there and this was definitely a place we’d have been better off swapping for somewhere we hadn’t been to before. Hammamet or Nabeul would have done just fine. But, it was photogenic enough. My personal favourite in this batch is Kairouan (11).jpg – the cat’s tail poking out the top of the litter bin. I suppose I could have flipped the lid on it like that woman in Nottingham, but settled for taking the pic and then creeping up quietly and watching while it glanced up, saw me and leapt out like a feline jack-in-the-box.

Tunisia May 11 – Kairouan

And that leads to the political side of Tunisia in the light of recent events. The language barrier meant we couldn’t find out as much by chatting to people in the street as we could if we had been French or Arabic-speaking. But the feeling was of optimism for the future even while there seemingly wasn’t much knowledge of what the future entailed.

Certainly there was relief that Ben Ali was gone, but the real hatred seemed to be reserved for his wife Leila Trabelsi, a semi-literate heavy-drinking hairdresser from the wrong side of the tracks who used her friendship with Ben Ali’s brother to get introduced to him. Imelda Marcos, one person called her. Also a snapshot of how a dictator can use the media to keep a lid on things – every Tunisian of working age contributed a couple of % of their to a scheme called 2626 aka the solidarity fund. This fund was supposedly to eradicate poverty and, Tunisians were told, was a great success, with impressive year-on-year decreases in the numbers of people living in poverty. Imagine their surprise when it came out after the revolution, when censorship was lifted, that the numbers of people living in poverty hadn’t diminished at all. The Solidarity fund hadn’t been spent on poverty eradication at all – rather the Trabelsis had been diverting the money into Swiss bank accounts.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/tunisia/8261982/Tunisian-President-Zine-el-Abidine-Ben-Ali-and-his-familys-Mafia-rule.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/07/wikileaks-tunisia-first-lady

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/18/leila-trabelsi-tunisia-lady-macbeth

As can be imagined, there weren’t many other tourists where we went – Kairouan being the most noticeable. Interestingly, people were telling me that the Tunisian revolution didn’t have much effect on tourism, but that the Libya thing had a much larger one. Kind of makes sense I suppose.