lumière des étoiles

where the white people at?
2006-08-01 4:44 p.m.

We're in Mahdia now, beautiful, breezy, Mediterranian Mahdia. It's a welcome respite from last weeks intense desert travelling through the Southern Sahara. We tore through Douz after Tozeur, finding ourselves at touristy oasis stops like Ksar Ghilane and obscure Berber villages like Toujane. The days have been exhausting both physically and emotionally. Steve has been very patient with my on- again, off-again reconciliation with my decision not to do everything humanly possible to return for my uncle don's funeral last week.

Obviously, as I wrote last time, that choice was difficult, but it seemed fitting somehow that instead of waiting in Madrid's or Paris' airport, hoping for a standby seat on a NY-bound plane, I was in the Sahara the night before my uncle's funeral, writing his initials - also my father's - in the sand, wathcing the dry wind sweep the letters away as the sun went down, turning everything pink and orange. That moment, coupled with some very reassuring emails from nicole, my brother, and my sister-in -law, make this week easier than the last in terms of how I feel about all that transpired and this frustrating timing. To borrow an Arabic phrase: Malesh? What can be done? This is all out of my control, much like most of life itself.

Here in Madhia, its holiday-maker central; plenty of Euros sunning themselves and hanging out of cafes and restaurant windows or browsing the souks and flirting shamelessly. A great scene - wish friends were here to see it - but it's also a bit of culture shock. To be honest, Mahdia feels more like Spain, Greece, or Italy than North Africa. But don't worry too much, as we're adjusting quite well to lying on the beach and swimming in the Mediterranean. I feel a bit spoiled indeed.

Prior to being in Mahdia, we could count on two hands how many other Western tourists we'd seen, which was both a bane and a boon. On one hand, it felt like Ghana or Zambia all over again - a staunch lack of tourist places, only small hotels and local restaurants EVERYONE eats at; no pizza, burgers, satellites, super-mega markets, english language speakers, or whatever else bore the stamp of westernization. Tunisian hospitality and extensive curiosity and kindness were pervasive; we were often stopped on the street or invited for mint tea in places like Le Kef and Tozeur by total strangers, and helped tremendously by people when lost in places like Kebili and Gabes or Gafsa.

We loved the isolation all the way to Tozeur, but suddenly found it frustrating that there weren't more tourists around to split the outrageous costs of hiring 4WDs for excursions into the desert. Three or four travel agencies we visited in Tozeur suggested we wait around for a few days to see if other solo travelers showed up, but it seemed that the throngs of white faces we would see on some afternoons would tear through the town and then mysteriously disappear, leaving only us again, the only other guest at the Hotel Esalem (who was Spanish and travling by himself), the French guy who was biking -yes biking- through Tunisia, and the shop keepers who had grown so used to us over four days that they didnt bother asking us to buy curios any longer and usually settled for conversation. Those other tourists, we later found out from a nice french lady who ran a travel agency at the end of Rue Habib Bourgiba, that most people who we did see were day trippers on package tours. At least I think that's what she said.

We did hire a car by ourselves to take us to some mountain villages around Tozeur one day, and enjoyed things on other days like sneaking into the hotel Oasis to swim the day it was 112°, and long bike rides through the cool, shady Palmerie when the temp was a much cooler 95° (85° inside the Palmerie!).

We figured we'd try our luck at a shared trek out into the desert again when we got to Douz, another desert hub, and as fate or kismet or travelers' seredipity would have it, we literally stumbled upon an Italian couple who needed partners for a desert adventure. Roberta and Claudio also spoke of finding solo travel both interesting and difficult in Tunisia, since most tourists are bused down on package tours from Hammamet or Carthage resorts, everything pre-arranged. Like me, they were beginning to wonder if it was worth going the solo route - most likely when, again like us, they were crammed in the back of stuffy louages packed with locals as gloriously large and spacious tour buses or new 4x4s flew by, windows rolled up indicating air-con comfort, white faces peeking out to gape at the dusty hippe travelers. But then we found each other, and they'd found driver/guide Mahmoud - and what a character, holy crap; with his ne'er do well 4x4, disaffection for air-con ('it makes me sick', he told me in french; we rode most of the Douz-Ksar Ghilane road without air-con), and interesting sense of estimations of time and distance. Mahmoud was a steal indeed, as we had him for a few days at our beck and call (like us, Roberta and Claudio wanted to go to less visited Ksours that were a bit out of the way and get into the deeper southern Sahara despite the heat) for around 500 dinars total, split between us.

I was reminding myself of this that fateful day when, because of Mahmoud's short cuts THROUGH the sand, I'd smacked my head again on the low ceiling of the car. As I could see convoys of package tour 4x4s zipping down the road in the distance, I began to wonder if indeed I was too old for this crap. How much more could it have been to do things that way? I wondered. But then I wear these experiences like a 3rd world country merit badge, and recalled a beautiful line from a book I've been reading, Daniel Glick's Monkey Dancing, about his off-the-beaten-track travels with his two young children: 'Money tends to insulate American and European tourists from the places we visit, and it actually felt good to me that we hadn't been whisked away in an air-conditioned van and reached our destination without being exposed to the rhythm of this pulsating scene.' The desert indeed has its own rhythm -and its lack of rhythm, or relative stillness, is perhaps the most interesting, healing, and affirming experience it can offer. We'd stopped at a few middle of nowhere outposts to bring or take supplies to people in the desert, and both their obscurity and existence were mind bending. Can't imagine having missed that. So the five of us went on for a few days, me working as the translator for the group, which at times became remniscent of an I Love Lucy skit since my French is so bad and Claudio's English is so limited and Mahmoud spoke only French and Arabic, and some how found our way all the way to Matmata, hanging together for another night in a Troglodyte hotel.

A few days now in Mahdia, and we've seen a tourist turn-over here too. That market has it's own rhythm as well, and the lingerers get to watch it all unfold. We're staying in the actual medina, away from the zone touristiqe (beautiful but too expensive for us). Though we'd parted ways days ago, guess who we ran into within a few hours of being in Mahdia? Roberta and Claudio. We've been having a hell of a time with them, continuing our conversations about travel, W vs Burlesconi, and purchasing homes around NYC vs around Rome. We also ran into that other lone Spanish traveler (name escapes me, sorry) from our hotel in Tozeur, but he was off for Italy the next day. Small country, if you can withstand the heat enough to bore under the surface of it all.

xoxo