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Has anyone seen a white toyota land cruiser with Tunisian tags? |
Part II: the Desert
Note: spelling of locations and names varies a lot depending on the scheme used in transliterating from the Arabic. So if something is spelled differently on your map than here, neither are necesarrily incorrect.
As I approached the turn, the many glinting objects coming at me in the distance slowly turned into the windshields of at least a dozen tourist-filled white toyota land cruisers. We were all headed for the same place. After not having seen a European for three days, I was entering a world where the only Tunisians that I would see, were those working the tourists over.
You may not be able to tell from the picture, but other than my motorcycle right there in the middle, every other vehicle in the lot is a white toyota land cruiser. There wasn't a single vehicle in the lot fifteen minutes ago, and in another fifteen the lot will be emtpy again, and I will be alone with the three Tunisian shop owners. I did this for about an hour or two, leaving ten minutes after the tourist hordes so that I could see the places in peace, but quickly catching up to them and following them to the next location. That way I was sure to see the most, in the most logical order, and still maintain some sort of control over my trip.
After the first stop at an oasis with a date farm and a waterfall tucked into a neat crevasse, I followed the hordes in their Land Cruiser tours to an abandoned village. It was made of unfired mud, and melted in the sixties when hit by a massive rainfall. Erosion and weather control measures don't really exist because of the lack of rain. In the sixties, there was a massive rainfall, something between 20 and 30 inches in a month that destroyed this entire village. Only the m... shrine had been rebuilt.
Arabic signs with French transliteration into the latin alphabet, but not always consistently. Sometimes a town name would be one thing coming in, one thing leaving and a third on the map. Once you get used to the spelling, it wasn't too bad. The posters in the back (except for the coca-cola ones) are all for President Ben Ali's election which was in two weeks. He only had one competitor in the elections and had asked him to run to keep the perception of fairness. Ben Ali won of course. I heard a lot of varied opinions about him, but only from tourists. No Tunisian would dare say anything negative about him in Tunisia. It is a police state and still practices torture (according to the Amnesty International 1999 report on torture), with police everywhere you go.
My first camel sightings. All camels supposedly belong to someone. They roam free without tags, collars or markings that I could see, but somehow the farmers (or whatever you call them, camel-masters?) all just know which belong to whom.
Touzuer Brick design. Someone told me that it kept the houses cooler because of the extra shade, but I don't buy that.
Looking across the great eastern sand sea from Ksar-Ghilane. 90km of soft sand beyond is Douz, but just a couple of kilometers up is an old Roman fort on the xxx line, the southern defensive line of the Roman Empire. But I don't get there for another week or so.
No text written yet. I need some assistants!
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