Tunisia Road Trip, Partie Trois: To The Desert & Beyond! Day One…
Our new best friend, Mohamed from Nabeul, picked us up at 7:00 AM to start our trip to the Sahara.
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.
This and the next photo are of the corridor running the length of the arena. The roof had originally been wood, and allowed ventilation to reach the performers in what was effectively the backstage. 
A ventilation grill on the arena floor. 
This is where animals were lifted to the arena. The stone footings in the front anchored the pulleys. When the animals were released, the cage returned below and its roof became the arena floor. 
Ample lower level passage for the many performers and workers who enabled the spectacle above. 
The stub of the marble that sheathed the arena. The best seats were just above those walls, closest to the action, and the marble was a smooth surface that kept the animals from snacking on the most powerful attendees.
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.
A scene from the Colosseum. The afore referenced face eating is on the lower left, while the central image is of the animal cage that gets raised up to the arena. For the face eating. 
I asked Mohamed if this was the devil, based on the skin tone, but nope. It’s a slave. A highly regarded slave, it would seem. 
This is why there are more mosaic pictures. Because they continue to amaze. 
Geese and dolphins. Of course. 
I keep talking about how weird it is to walk on the mosaics, and I sense your skepticism. There’s my actual foot on the actual mosaic floor Now shut up. 
The shading on all of this work is incredible. 
Dionysus riding a lion, with a great big jug of wine. Because that’s what you do when you’re the god of ritual madness. 
These are the only examples of the dark background that we’ve seen. The pale ground is much more common. 
The museum grounds.
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.
Roadside camel stop. 
Before we hit the Sahara proper we were stunned by the orchards, stretching to the horizon line. Olive trees : northern Tunisia as corn and soy : Nebraska (worst SAT question ever). 
Green, green, green. 
A not entirely abandoned Ksar. There seem to be at least some residents in all of them.
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!
Wow, wow, wow!
I didn’t understand about face eating leopards: now I do!
Dot feeding a baby camel: so sweet!
And the Berber villages and landscapes? I’m speechless!
Dude, the Sahara tour left us speechless, too. Not wordless. I think I wrote more about the Sahara than any other place we’ve been. But an absolute life changing week. I’m so glad we were able to share it.
It’s a lot of Roman mosaics. That’s fine. My favorite is the modern one about the restaurant that serves, apparently, pain au chocolat, croissants, pizza, and baguettes.
I love your descriptions of the foods. Wikipedia explains that flatbreads were invented well before the Roman empires, and the first known example of the word “pizza” dates from the 8th century AD.
Of course, they didn’t have tomatoes until about 1200 years later. Thanks for the astounding photos and stories! — Ray Bruman
Always a pleasure to provide you entertainment. I’m looking forward to Bash, where we can discuss at length.