We’ll be staying in the general area around Tataouine for Day Two, so not as harsh as getting down to this part of Tunisia from Sousse yesterday.

Chenini

Chenini is technically another hilltop Ksar, like Ksar Hadada from Day One and Ksar Ouled Soltane (our next stop). It served the same function as the other Ksars: protected storage for grains and goods, housing for those who couldn’t nomad. But its scale makes it feel like something else entirely. It’s also measurably more ancient, with its oldest structures dating to the 12th century.

While the other Ksars we visited were on hilltops, Chenini is legitimately on a mountaintop. A very windy mountaintop. The locals were keeping an eye on me, to make sure a gust of wind didn’t send me plummeting to a rocky doom.

It’s hard to underestimate the impact of Chenini’s scale. It’s not unlike El Jem, in the way that it overwhelms your sense of time and place. If it’s not clear from the photos below, the structures ring both sides of a valley. This place is huge!

The streets and alleys in the interior of the structure are just as amazing as the exterior.

The Ksars, and Chenini in particular, remind me of nothing so much as the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde. It’s like cactus and euphorbia, in a way. For a given set of environmental inputs, there are a limited number of morphological outputs, no matter the distance between biomes (Nevelow’s Law). There are only so many ways to solve a problem.

High up on the mountain, the vistas are incredible.

Chenini also has a lovely mosque, Mosquée de Sept Dormants, the Mosque of the Seven Sleepers.

There were several artisan’s shops in the town. We are so overloaded with the things we’ve picked up in Tunisia, let alone what we’re still hauling around from Morocco, we just don’t need another thing. All we have room for is jewelry and tattoos. But these shops are one of the only sources of income in the village, and they’re still recovering from the pandemic’s body blow. Enjoying their hospitality without spending money is immoral.

Thankfully, Chenini’s only connection to Star Wars is the name. One of Tatooine’s moons is called Chenini, but you’d never know it, as the town itself is blissfully free of any branding.

Ksar Ouled Soltane

Built in the 15th century, Ksar Ouled Soltane has much in common with Ksar Hadada, which we visited on Day One. Although similar, they’re different enough to make the trip worthwhile.

This is also another Star Wars location, serving as the slave quarters in Mos Espa in Phantom Menace.

Aïn Charchara Reliefs Lunaires

This was Mohamed digging deep. While we were in Chenini he’d contacted a colleague who suggested this location. Mohamed had never been, but that was the spirit of this trip in a nutshell. Why not?

While there were occasional signs on the road pointing the way, there were no signs indicating that you’d arrived. We knew we were there when Google Maps said we were. Alarmingly, Maps showed the location as being in the middle of a lake (which you can see in the map above). As a general rule, we found that Maps couldn’t tell a dry lake bed from an actual lake.

Aïn Charchara is referred to as a moonscape, so the vibe is as weird and otherworldly as you’d expect. Also, it’s kind of a Shetland Oddity. It’s hard to tell scale from the photos and video, but most of the structures are no more than 12-18 inches tall.

The chemistry and geology of this place must be fascinating, but we were unable to locate any information about it. The dark blue stone sits almost like a shell around the sandstone, like it was some kind of geologic bubble. But all we can do is make shit up. Which we’re always delighted to do.

Still, this was well worth the side trip, even given the several times Mohamed got lost. And not only were we the only people at the site, I’m not sure we even saw another car pass on the road while we were there. This was literally the middle of nowhere. Or at least the middle of a dry lake.

Roadside

Which takes us back to Tataouine for the evening, to set off for the deep desert in the morning. But not before another look at the spectacular roadside views.

Day Three

Ksar Metameur

Also known as Om Ettamr, this tiny little abandoned Ksar was one of our favorite stops. Not for the structure, but for its lone inhabitant. As we parked outside and walked into the Ksar’s courtyard, we were preceded by an elderly Berber woman.

Just outside Médenine, this was the smallest Ksar we visited, but it boasts an exceptionally large courtyard. It’s relatively recent, having been built in the 18th century. Not that you can tell. Building techniques amongst the Berber haven’t changed in centuries.

Toujane

In a trip defined by highlights, the visit to Toujane stood out. Set into a mountainous hillside pass, with the Ksar built both into the mountain and in the shallow valley below, Toujane was more occupied than most of the Ksars we’d visited.

We’d told Mohamed we really wanted to visit a Berber weaver, but he said it was unlikely. Our experience in Oaxaca was that villages specialized in particular crafts, and people worked in double duty studios/showrooms. Mohamed explained that weaving was done exclusively in people’s homes, and that the output made its way to market through less than direct routes.

We pulled over on the main road separating the hillside from the valley, and stopped in front of Dar Touati (Touati’s House), a rug seller representing all of the households in the town. We spoke to the proprietor, Touati Touati (for real), and he offered to take us to his home to meet his mother. Jackpot! Dreams fulfilled.

We made a few stops on the way to his home.

But the payoff was, unsurprisingly, Touati’s home and his mother, a weaver with 45 years of experience. She was gracious and welcoming, and came out to her workroom to demonstrate her methods.

One of the many amazing things about Touati’s mother is that her operation was completely vertical. She raised the sheep, sheared their wool, spun it into yarn, dyed it using natural dyes, and wove the rug. Even the operation we witnessed in Oaxaca fell a step short of fully vertical, buying their wool from local shepherds.

Here she is carding the wool…

Spinning it…

And weaving.

Our commitment to not buying any more carpets obviously wasn’t going to last the day. Leaving without carpets from Toujane would have been wrong for us and wrong for them. They had more carpets than money, and we had more money than carpets. We’d have to do what we could to restore the balance.

As much as we’d have loved the carpet we saw at Touati’s house, we just couldn’t imagine getting a rug that size home. The two we bought in Kairouan we had shipped to Chicago. So we compromised and bought small carpets. Two small carpets. We’ll probably use them as gifts when we return. Unless we can squeeze them into our new apartment.

Even though we didn’t buy a carpet directly from Touati’s mother, money that goes into the village ultimately benefits the entire village. It’s a small community, and any income ultimately gets spread around.

Sadly, we said goodbye, to Touati, his mother, and an amazing experience in Toujane.

Berber Barlanglakások

This is an occupied dwelling, and a perfect example of troglodyte housing. God, I hate using that word, but it’s the technically correct term for cave dwellings, which is what these are. Carved out of the mountains, they provide protection from both summer heat and winter winds.

We were basically being invited into their home, where we were offered, as is apparently tradition, hot tea, fresh bread, and fresh olive oil. Just a notch below the quality provided by our new best friend in Ksar Metameur. Aren’t we snobs?

Tamezret

A modest, and modestly occupied, Ksar, on the way to our final stop of the day, Ksar Ghilane.

Ksar Ghilane

On the way to Ksar Ghilane, we made the transition from stone desert to sand desert. We also pulled over so Mohamed and I could push a stalled car. We wanted adventure, we got adventure.

Mohamed described the desert as looking like a leopard from the sky. A tan field with dark oases spotting the landscape. As we drove, drifts of sand like snow threatened to reclaim the road.

One of Mohamed’s ways of anchoring us to the history of the Sahara was to repeat, “Imagine it without roads.” On the one hand, that was easy, as I was constantly asking myself, “Who put a road here? What were they thinking?” On the other hand, that question forced a reassessment of everything we were seeing. Having toured the Ksars and troglodyte dwellings and seeing how hard it was to carve a life out of the desert, traversing those vast spaces without roads seemed incomprehensible. I would just curl into a fetal Berber ball and give up.

We’d seen plenty of oases from the car, but Ksar Ghilane would be the first one we visited. In my stunted Arabian Nights imagination, an oasis had a little pool from which camels and people could drink and a few palm trees. We were utterly unprepared for the vast greenitude of a real desert oasis.

Ksar Ghilane wasn’t the same kind of Ksar we’d previously visited. Rather than a structure, it was a series of tent encampments, of varying degrees of luxury, spread about and centered on the spring. We stayed in a comparatively modest camp, the Sahara Lounge.

First stop after loading into our tent (and leaving anything unnecessary in the locked car): the spring.

We swam. We swam in a natural hot spring in a Saharan oasis. I’m sure it’s possible to be happier. But maybe not.

We’d certainly try to find out, as next came exploring the dunes.

We weren’t expecting the sand to be so fine. We thought sand was sand, beach sand, Sahara sand… All the same. We got schooled. This shit is practically liquid.

I’d like to say the evening was completed by an epic Saharan sunset, but one more treat awaited us.

That treat: a very civilized dinner. Fronted by a very tribal baking experience of baking bread in the dirt.

The ritual of the bread baking was pretty wild in its own right, encompassing chanting and drums, but I was completely unprepared for the result. Eating freshly baked bread wasn’t in my personal list of Things That Could Be Life Changing, but I know better now. That was unquestionably life changing bread.

Here’s some of the action, courtesy Mohamed.

And that tucks us into our tent, to recharge for another day of adventure.