This is the camel lot.

It started with an attempt to get Dorothy on a camel. Which was, in a technical sense, successful. She got on a camel. But then got right off. The pressure required to manage her position atop the beast was more than her recently reconstructed hips could handle. So down she came.

I didn’t catch Dorothy getting down, but this is what it looks like when a camel kneels. Are they jointed like kangaroos? Or Erector Sets?

My turn. It wasn’t easy, but at least I’m sporting all my original joints. For now.

The camel driver was seriously fucking with me. First, he put me on the tallest camel. Which I suppose might not have been intentional. But then he kept trying to scoot me up so I was sitting halfway up the hump, rather than in the actual saddle behind the hump. There was no way to stay in that spot without sliding back down to the saddle. It’s not like I had to be in a specific position to reach the stirrups, as there weren’t any stirrups. I think he was just bored.

When we set out the driver held the leads for three of the camels, with the rear pair tethered to two of the front camels. Because the front camels were being managed from just one spot, they tended to bunch up, with absolutely no regard for crushing our legs or feet. I was the middle camel, so I was getting it from both sides.

Since I was managing the whole sitting thing so well, he rewarded me by handing me the lead for one of the other two front camels, so there would be more room for them to space themselves. Because I was clearly in complete control, and ready to manage an extra camel.

On my return I held up the lead and shouted out to Dorothy and Mohamed that I’d been promoted to Assistant Camel Driver. Mohamed named me on the spot. Thenceforth I was Ali, the Camel Boy. Like a cowboy, but without the cows. I was proud to have earned my stripes.

And he really did call me Ali for the rest of the trip.

The camel ride could have been just a tourist thing, like the ATVs screaming across the desert. Which we didn’t do, because they’re both stupid and evil. But all I could think of while I struggled to stay afloat on my desert life raft was Mohamed’s admonition to “Imagine this without roads.”

That shifted everything. I couldn’t treat this like it was a Disneyland ride. At that moment I was no different than a Berber nomad, skill level excepted, using the only tool available to survive the desert. Without the camel, there are no desert nomads, no Berbers. The camels aren’t a convenience, they are a lifeline. “Imagine this without roads.” I did, and was fully present for a dance with the past.

Douz, La Porta del Sahara

Douz, built along a huge oasis, is known as the Gateway to the Sahara. Because of its gateway. To the Sahara.

Douz also boasts the El Mouradi Hotel, a ridiculous luxury hotel in the middle of the Sahara.

Qibili

Another oasis-based town (I’m sensing a pattern), Qibili was notable to us for providing a lunch stop, and for it’s exceptionally silly public art.

Zaouiet el Anes

As amazing as the sights we’ve seen so far, Zaouiet el Anes is singular in its otherworldliness. In theory, it’s a cooling tower for a hot spring, reducing the water temperature so it’s safe for irrigation. In practice, it’s a steaming hellscape, a post-apocalyptic Blade Runner outtake in the middle of the Sahara. These are not mutually exclusive options. It can be, and is, both. And like nothing else I’ve ever seen.

Which does not even approximate the structure’s overwhelming strangeness. This may not either, but it gets measurably closer than still photos ever could.

Adding to the overall weirdness was the isolation. We were in the middle of the desert and completely alone with this… thing. So, of course, a busload of Japanese tourists pulled up. Time to head out. Past an enormous oasis. Because why not an oasis? The desert is quickly teaching us that nothing makes sense, so we should just stop worrying about trivial matters, like logic, or cause and effect.

Chott el Djerid

On our way to Tozeur for the night, we went through Chott el Djerid, a dry salt lake, like the Bonneville Flats. Of course, it appears on Google Maps as a real lake. Maps was pretty convinced we were drowning.

Day Five

Our final day of adventure. But there’s still plenty to see. Today’s focus is on oases. Sweet.

Tozeur

Before we head out, there’s Tozeur itself. We took a walk through the Old City, which was, of course, charming. But what really stood out was the local building design, which features three dimensional decorative brickwork. We’ve seen a little bit of this in surrounding towns, but I suspect that it’s leakage from Tozeur, which is ground zero for this motif. It’s a delight to see such specific vernacular design.

Since we lost a full month of street food to Ramadan, we haven’t had much to say about the local cuisine. But we’re making up for lost time.

Lunch in Tozeur featured Tunisia’s national dish, Brik. It’s paper-thin crepe dough turnover, filled with egg and potato and flash deep-fried, and it’s every bit as good as that description makes it sound. It’s served with harissa and fries, like everything in Tunisia.

Chebika Oasis

Chebika sits at the foot of a mountain range, in what had been an ancient ocean. It’s a fossil rich environment, and the locals that dot the mountain path sell fossils, minerals, and shark’s teeth they’ve collected locally.

The spring that drives the oasis is accessible through a pass in the mountains. It’s a lovely, modest hike, that features more vendors than is strictly speaking desirable. There’s a bunch of them, and there’s no way to buy something from each of them. Plus, rocks are just about the worst thing we could try to bring back. It’s way easier, for us, at least, to exceed airline weight limits than volume limits. All that Nabeul pottery.

One of the things a true oasis does is enable three level agriculture: Dates at the top; a middle layer of shade tolerant crops that live under the palm canopies, such as olives, almonds, figs, apricots…; and the bottom level, garden vegetables that thrive in the rich soil. This arrangement has nourished the Berbers for centuries, and is only possible with a substantial source of water. Chebika is every inch a working oasis.

Here, apricots and pomegranates nestle under a palm.

I’m sure there’s something learned to say about the geology of Chebika’s mountains. But I have no idea what it might be. What I do know is that the range of geologic morphologies is off the charts. It looks like a mountain range went binge drinking on spring break and threw up its lunch.

In addition to the minerals and fossils found here, Chebika is also a major source of Desert Roses, gypsum crystals which present in complex fan shapes. Although to be fair, just about every location in Tunisia seems to be a major source of Desert Roses.

Tamaghza el Gdima

The spring at Tamaghza el Gdima starts in the Saharan Atlas Mountains and flows downhill to fuel the oasis that sits on the plain. Like Chebika, it’s astonishing to see the volume of water at play in these oases. It seems inexhaustible. Perhaps it is.

Naftah

Naftah is a Star Wars set. It served as the city of Mos Espa, wee Anakin’s home town. It’s inspired by the local structures, but it’s 100% phony. It’s also still there, and doesn’t seem to be owned by anyone, so it’s populated by folks trying to make a buck. Which is fine. It’s not like the desert is awash in job opportunities.

The second you get out of the car someone’s offering you something. In my case, it was a fox kit. It took an effort to avoid having it thrust into my hands. I declined for two reasons. First, I had no idea how much holding a fox kit would cost. I’m completely pro sharing the wealth, but I don’t much care to write a blank check. Second, I wasn’t entirely sure what it was. At first I thought it was just a kitten with bizarrely large ears, but I couldn’t resolve it into an actual creature I recognized, so I avoided it. Dorothy explained that it was a fox. I’d probably have paid a reasonable amount for a picture of me holding a fox kit. Too late.

The point of this location was not the set itself, but the setting. It had been created in a particularly scenic chunk of desert, no surprise, so we took advantage and wandered loose. It was an appealing site, to me, at least, in no small part because of the height of the dunes. The dunes at Ksar Ghilane were modest, maybe six feet tall tops. The dunes in Naftah easily towered above twenty feet. So tall that when I stood atop a ridge and thought I’d walk down the side, I looked over the edge and reconsidered. Too steep, too far. Better to follow the ridge until it gradually lowered of its own accord.

I walked back from my Desert Rock Junket on the ridge of a dune which started to give way under my weight. So I ran. I ran at the top of a collapsing dune to outpace its disintegration and avoid tumbling in a sand avalanche to the bottom. I’m not generally a fan of forms of entertainment whose primary benefit is that you survived them (looking at you, roller coasters). But damn. That was some Indiana Jones shit. The grandkids will never believe it.

You know that thing in Dune, where you have to train yourself to walk the desert in a random rhythm, so as not to summon a sandworm? Well, there is no fucking way to walk on sand dunes in a regular rhythm. How can you keep a steady gait when what you’re walking on is constantly moving beneath your feet? I call bullshit.

Day Six

Leaving Tozeur to race back to Kairouan, we’re traversing the desert for the final time, with some noticeable regret. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ll miss the desert. Although, to be fair, we know it in neither summer nor winter. I might miss it less if we’d visited in a more extreme season.

We watched some tourist videos when we first discussed visiting the Maghreb, and when they got to the desert my knee-jerk response was, “That looks foreboding and unappealing.” Which, to my modest credit, was immediately followed by, “But it’s sure to be an adventure. If we’re going to be that close, why would we intentionally miss the desert?”

Which response fell well short of comprehending what an incredibly rich experience the Sahara offered. The best way I can describe it is that the desert was somehow both completely empty and incredibly full at the same time. Completely empty in the sense that there are seemingly boundless vistas with nothing but sand and rock. But incredibly full in the sense that life is still deeply embedded in that environment. Ksars and springs and camels and oases and agriculture and people squeezing a life out of the desert the same way they have for century on century. Including people so successfully hidden that you don’t even know they’re there. There’s a reason neither the Romans nor any successor colonists ever conquered the Berbers.

So let’s say goodbye to the lush desolation of the Sahara one last time.

Day Six is just a straight shot to Kairouan, so we can get a louage back to Tunis at a reasonable hour. The closest we came to sightseeing was stopping for lunch in Kairouan and picking up fresh makrout for our adorable landlady. Makrout is a date and nut cookie common across the Maghreb, but Kairouan’s version is renowned throughout Tunisia. It’s a perfect Thank You gift.

And that’s it. Mohamed helps us get our louage tickets and slips the driver a bill, when he thinks we’re not looking, to make sure he sees us into a cab and doesn’t just slow down to five in Tunis and roll us out. I’m pretty confident we could have managed a cab without help, but the gesture is touching nonetheless. We made it through the desert together, and Mohamed just wants to make sure Ali and his faithful companion arrive home safely. Which, both exhausted and exhilarated, we do.

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.

Basically, she’d claimed Ksar Metameur as her own. She lived right outside the entrance, and came out whenever she heard a car pull up. She offered us hot tea with her fresh baked bread and home-pressed olive oil. All of which was delicious.

She’d commandeered one of the dwellings as a gift shop. We didn’t need anything, but we were outmaneuvered. She was entirely too adorable for any other outcome.

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.

As a retired professional tour guide, Mohamed was an incredibly knowledgeable resource to have at our disposal. He was also a witty and engaging companion, which was an especially good thing, as we’d be spending close to every waking hour with him over the next six days.

Having a personal guide also beat all hollow the only other alternative, which would have been a packaged tour. Ick. But it came at no small cost. We spent in six days about half of our normal monthly budget (while we were still paying for our housing in Tunis during the entire three week road trip). But damn, was it worth it. About 1,200 miles through the Sahara, touring historic Berber villages, stopping at oases, and even engaging in some unexpectedly entertaining Star Wars tourism. Let’s begin. First stop on the way to the Sahara: ruins.

El Jem

Built in 238 AD, the Colosseum in El Jem is the second largest Roman colosseum, after Rome’s, of course. The colosseum at El Jem seated 35,000 vs. Rome’s 50,000 capacity, although it was slightly larger than the Carthage amphitheater, which seated about 30,000. The Carthage site is pretty ruined, though, with none of the seating intact. There’s just the arena, which makes the space feel very small compared to El Jem, even though they weren’t all that different in scale. The Baths of Antoninus in Carthage take up more square footage, but in terms of mindblowingly epic, El Jem’s verticality trumps the Baths’ horizontality.

Unlike Rome, with the Colosseum right in town, you have to want to go to El Jem. Lots of people do, of course, but it’s still comparatively deserted. Not having to dodge crowds and rub shoulders was a delight.

As much as the ruins of Carthage were like a time travel machine, forcibly pulling you into a distant past, there was something about the scale of El Jem that made that past incredibly present. Standing on the floor of the arena, you could close your eyes and see the crowds, hear the lions, feel the heat. It was an almost hallucinatory effect.

You can see openings in the arena wall in the picture above, twelve in total. Mohamed said that the whole gladiator-to-the-death thing wasn’t a thing. It would be like rooting for Patrick Mahomes’ death. They were stars. So while they did get injured and die, that wasn’t the actual point. The doors held helpers who would rescue injured gladiators and pull them off the arena for treatment.

The mosaic to the right, from the El Jem Museum (wait for it… more mosaics!), shows a rescuer trying to pull a gladiator out from under a leopard. Or it depicts prey being kept from escaping its predator. We know they practiced damnationes ad bestias as a form of capital punishment, so this could just be the ritual eating-the-face-of-the-condemned. Who can really know?

The view from the outside was no less stunning.

One of the most fascinating things about El Jem is how very intact everything was below the arena floor. It was amazing to have access to the operational elements, the functional guts of the colosseum.

There are still hints of the luxurious trappings, especially in the seating reserved for toffs and high rollers.

As fascinating as the facts are, El Jem’s grandeur speaks for itself. I’ll shut up. Briefly.

I’ve been jonesing for a mosaic since we got here, and I finally indulged at a vendor just outside the Colosseum. This is the same design we saw in a piece at the Sousse museum, protection from the Evil Eye.

Per Mohamed, although I couldn’t dig up any corroborating information, a smaller amphitheater predated the Colosseum.

El Jem Museum

I know, I know. First the mosaics in the Roman Villas. Then the Bardo Museum. Then the museum in Sousse. And now this.

I’m sorry. It’s a lot of Roman mosaics.

But damn.

But, like all the other museums, it wasn’t just mosaics. The artifacts that really stood out were notable for the delicacy of execution.

Matmata – Sidi Driss Hotel

Here’s our first Berber village. And also our first experience in a Star Wars filming location. Which, once I got over myself (“I’m only interested in the authentic Tunisia. I don’t need to tour movie sets”), was actually pretty amusing.

In fact, the Star Wars sets pretty much are the authentic Tunisia. We visited one location that had been built for the movie, but they mostly just used existing structures. The Matmata site, which is now the Sidi Driss hotel, was used for Luke Skywalker’s home on Tatooine.

While the above ground portions of the structure were built to replace below ground housing that had flooded in 1969, the Berbers rebuilt most of the structures below ground, as was their habit. Disturbingly, that style of building is referred to as troglodyte housing.

Ksar Hadada

Ksar (plural Ksour) is the term for the fortified Berber villages common across the Maghreb, which tended to be built on hilltops for defense. The nomadic lifestyle was rough, and a Ksar served as a home base for housing guards, to secure the granaries and storage, and those not up to nomadding (pregnant women, children, the elderly…). Ksar Hadada dates back to the 15th century.

Ksar Hadada was also a Star Wars location, serving as Mos Espa in Phantom Menace, Anakin’s hometown. And like Sidi Driss in Matmata, parts of it have been restored for a hotel. You can get all sniffy about the Star Wars tourism if you like, but it’s the economic lifeblood for many of these small sites.

Roadside Attractions

The view from the car on this trip is amazing. We took a few photos through the window, but we often stopped to get out and properly capture whatever breathtaking vista presented itself. The landscape reminded us of nothing so much as the Southwest, a surreal mix of austere and majestic.

With camels.

Tataouine

We close the day in Tataouine, where we’ll stay two nights. Right next door to our hotel is a shuttered themed playground. What’s the theme? Don’t be dense.

In posting about this trip, I’d thought to rearrange our stops instead of sticking to chronological order. A post on Ksars, a post on oases, a post on the Sahara… But I think it’s more interesting to be able to follow along with us and feel the rhythm of the adventure. Coming up: Day Two!