By car and caravan to desert delights Times, 20/5/1997
After establishing itself among northern Tunisia's holiday resorts and Roman ruins, tourism is increasingly finding its way into the country's desert south - and setting off the usual alarums. Shampoo from zealously clean Germans is said to be defiling the hot springs of the oases. Zones touristiques (or international hotels en masse) have been unimaginatively tacked onto towns like Tozeur, palm date and poetry capital of the south, bringing comfortable accommodation to the region but perhaps doing less for the local colour. 'Tous les poetes?' as one mournful local remarked. 'In the hotel kitchens. Serving up cutlets where they once composed couplets.'.
The fact that I did stumble across a Tunisian poet, not in a kitchen but sitting amongst the ruins of old Tamerza, a village abandoned after being destroyed by a flash flood, suggested that tourism had not bluntened the country's atmospheric edge . 'La vie est un theatre,' the poet told me solemnly, 'et chacun a son role'. I don't know about that, but can tell you that Tunisia's south boasts a wealth of unspoilt outposts that are mostly within reach of a reasonably stout hire car, or at least a four-wheel drive.
The collage of epic landscapes on offer includes coastal olive groves, precipitous hill villages, date palm oases and the great dunescapes such as those surrounding Ksar Ghilane, a truly remote old fort afloat in the sand swells of the Sahara. From the fort's ramparts, we listened to the desert silence, grateful that we were beyond the long arm of Tunisia's trinketeers. We felt we could do without their stock-in-trade fossils, their crystallised desert stones known as sand roses and even their toy camels - miniature mementoes of the majestic if cantankerous beasts that had brought us to the fort while the wind ran a warm, artistic file across the graceful lines of the dunes.
At Tozeur, we dived into the town's little-visited fourteenth-century medina, a place of cool, deep shadows that fell across intricately decorated brickwork. At once, the zone touristique was forgotten as old men in the ubiquitous fez-cum-beret chechias sat in sunlit doorways, goats and sheep were glimpsed in family courtyards, and the old greniers loomed above us, where deglat en nour or 'fingers of light', as the grand cru Tunisian dates are called, were hung to ripen in a cooling breeze.
'Allah has given us the best dates in Tunisia,' explained Mohammed, a somewhat theatrical welder moonlighting as a guide, voicing a claim that we would hear in oasis villages all over the region. 'But he has also given us the palm tree, and the palm tree gives us more than just dates. It gives us life. We eat date honey and palm hearts. We make juice from dates, and laghmi alcohol from palm leaves. We use palm fibre to make straw hats, shoes and rope. We use the fronds for shade, and we burn the wood for cooking and to heat our hammams (Turkish baths). We use the wood to make gutters, beams, doors, chairs and tables. But we first we season it for maybe a year out on the Chott el Jerid.'
We crossed the Chott, a vast, mirage-infested salt flat immediately south of Tozeur, early one morning when the soft light turned it to cobalt. A thousand camels and their attendants, it is said, once perished in the endless ooze that lies beneath the Chott's thin salt crust when they erred from the path. Now a ruler-straight causeway carried us without incident to Douz, so-called Gateway to the Sahara.
At the town's justly renowned Souk des Animaux, old men were patting bovine flanks and peering among sets of camel's teeth. '700 dinar [£450],' a camel seller courted my casual inquiry. 'But a fine camel for the price.' Prices quoted were 350 dinar for a horse, 100 dinar for a sheep, 80 dinar for a young donkey, 60 dinar for a goat and 9 dinar for a handsome cockerel - but haggle. (For those not interested in livestock, the market also contained an excellent range of clothes, spices, saddles and rugs.)
In the office of Douz' Ecrivain public or town scribe, Ben Yahia Ali Azouz made me a cup of sweet mint tea, confirmed that 700 dinar was the going rate for a camel and told me something of his work. 'I write letters in French or Arabic for the town's many illiterates,' he explained. 'Letters of condolences, legal letters, applications for a visa or a job - or even perhaps to express respectful interest in another man's daughter. Little has really changed in Tunisia.'
That much was increasingly clear in the ubiquitous marabouts or shrines containing the sarcophagae of revered village saints; the still-used old ghorfas or granaries at Ksar Ouled Soltane where an elderly villager merely demanded our delight rather than our dinar as he showed us round; and the sound of drums leading us to a frenzied procession of menfolk following a proud if apprehensive young boy dressed in a chechia through a village to his circumcision.
One afternoon, we reached the hillside village of Douiret. The village, a young local called Hussein explained, had been abandoned when piped water and electricity was supplied to the valley below. As we peered into the mosque, examined the old clay olive jars and marvelled at the fish motifs signifying good fortune that decorated the weathered wooden doors, we wondered why everything seemed so beautifully maintained. 'This is still our village,' explained Hussein. 'This is where we return to bury our dead. This is where our daughters spend four days in complete darkness in preparation for their weddings.' So much then for the impact of trinket bazaars, zones touristiques and German shampoo.
ENDS
FACTBOX
Getting there: Tunis Air (0171 734 7644) and GB Airways (0181 897 4000) both fly thrice weekly Heathrow to Tunis with prices from £179 return. Tunis-Tozeur domestic flights, booked through Tunis Air, cost £57 return.
Accommodation: A good range of modern, keenly priced hotels such as the three-star Hotel Palmyre, Tozeur, and four star Tamerza Palace, Tamerza as well as basic desert accommodation such as at Camping Najar Chabaane, Ksar Ghilane.
Desert specialists include Wigmore Holidays (0171 486 4425) who can tailor-make to clients requirements. A typical week's package, including all flights, bed and breakfast, four-wheel drive vehicle and driver, costs £650.
The desert is pleasant in the spring and autumn although it can be chilly at night, and gets very hot in high summer.
Guide books: Rough Guide to Tunisia (£8.99)
The Tunisian National Tourist Office: 0171 224 5561
After establishing itself among northern Tunisia's holiday resorts and Roman ruins, tourism is increasingly finding its way into the country's desert south - and setting off the usual alarums. Shampoo from zealously clean Germans is said to be defiling the hot springs of the oases. Zones touristiques (or international hotels en masse) have been unimaginatively tacked onto towns like Tozeur, palm date and poetry capital of the south, bringing comfortable accommodation to the region but perhaps doing less for the local colour. 'Tous les poetes?' as one mournful local remarked. 'In the hotel kitchens. Serving up cutlets where they once composed couplets.'.
The fact that I did stumble across a Tunisian poet, not in a kitchen but sitting amongst the ruins of old Tamerza, a village abandoned after being destroyed by a flash flood, suggested that tourism had not bluntened the country's atmospheric edge . 'La vie est un theatre,' the poet told me solemnly, 'et chacun a son role'. I don't know about that, but can tell you that Tunisia's south boasts a wealth of unspoilt outposts that are mostly within reach of a reasonably stout hire car, or at least a four-wheel drive.
The collage of epic landscapes on offer includes coastal olive groves, precipitous hill villages, date palm oases and the great dunescapes such as those surrounding Ksar Ghilane, a truly remote old fort afloat in the sand swells of the Sahara. From the fort's ramparts, we listened to the desert silence, grateful that we were beyond the long arm of Tunisia's trinketeers. We felt we could do without their stock-in-trade fossils, their crystallised desert stones known as sand roses and even their toy camels - miniature mementoes of the majestic if cantankerous beasts that had brought us to the fort while the wind ran a warm, artistic file across the graceful lines of the dunes.
At Tozeur, we dived into the town's little-visited fourteenth-century medina, a place of cool, deep shadows that fell across intricately decorated brickwork. At once, the zone touristique was forgotten as old men in the ubiquitous fez-cum-beret chechias sat in sunlit doorways, goats and sheep were glimpsed in family courtyards, and the old greniers loomed above us, where deglat en nour or 'fingers of light', as the grand cru Tunisian dates are called, were hung to ripen in a cooling breeze.
'Allah has given us the best dates in Tunisia,' explained Mohammed, a somewhat theatrical welder moonlighting as a guide, voicing a claim that we would hear in oasis villages all over the region. 'But he has also given us the palm tree, and the palm tree gives us more than just dates. It gives us life. We eat date honey and palm hearts. We make juice from dates, and laghmi alcohol from palm leaves. We use palm fibre to make straw hats, shoes and rope. We use the fronds for shade, and we burn the wood for cooking and to heat our hammams (Turkish baths). We use the wood to make gutters, beams, doors, chairs and tables. But we first we season it for maybe a year out on the Chott el Jerid.'
We crossed the Chott, a vast, mirage-infested salt flat immediately south of Tozeur, early one morning when the soft light turned it to cobalt. A thousand camels and their attendants, it is said, once perished in the endless ooze that lies beneath the Chott's thin salt crust when they erred from the path. Now a ruler-straight causeway carried us without incident to Douz, so-called Gateway to the Sahara.
At the town's justly renowned Souk des Animaux, old men were patting bovine flanks and peering among sets of camel's teeth. '700 dinar [£450],' a camel seller courted my casual inquiry. 'But a fine camel for the price.' Prices quoted were 350 dinar for a horse, 100 dinar for a sheep, 80 dinar for a young donkey, 60 dinar for a goat and 9 dinar for a handsome cockerel - but haggle. (For those not interested in livestock, the market also contained an excellent range of clothes, spices, saddles and rugs.)
In the office of Douz' Ecrivain public or town scribe, Ben Yahia Ali Azouz made me a cup of sweet mint tea, confirmed that 700 dinar was the going rate for a camel and told me something of his work. 'I write letters in French or Arabic for the town's many illiterates,' he explained. 'Letters of condolences, legal letters, applications for a visa or a job - or even perhaps to express respectful interest in another man's daughter. Little has really changed in Tunisia.'
That much was increasingly clear in the ubiquitous marabouts or shrines containing the sarcophagae of revered village saints; the still-used old ghorfas or granaries at Ksar Ouled Soltane where an elderly villager merely demanded our delight rather than our dinar as he showed us round; and the sound of drums leading us to a frenzied procession of menfolk following a proud if apprehensive young boy dressed in a chechia through a village to his circumcision.
One afternoon, we reached the hillside village of Douiret. The village, a young local called Hussein explained, had been abandoned when piped water and electricity was supplied to the valley below. As we peered into the mosque, examined the old clay olive jars and marvelled at the fish motifs signifying good fortune that decorated the weathered wooden doors, we wondered why everything seemed so beautifully maintained. 'This is still our village,' explained Hussein. 'This is where we return to bury our dead. This is where our daughters spend four days in complete darkness in preparation for their weddings.' So much then for the impact of trinket bazaars, zones touristiques and German shampoo.
ENDS
FACTBOX
Getting there: Tunis Air (0171 734 7644) and GB Airways (0181 897 4000) both fly thrice weekly Heathrow to Tunis with prices from £179 return. Tunis-Tozeur domestic flights, booked through Tunis Air, cost £57 return.
Accommodation: A good range of modern, keenly priced hotels such as the three-star Hotel Palmyre, Tozeur, and four star Tamerza Palace, Tamerza as well as basic desert accommodation such as at Camping Najar Chabaane, Ksar Ghilane.
Desert specialists include Wigmore Holidays (0171 486 4425) who can tailor-make to clients requirements. A typical week's package, including all flights, bed and breakfast, four-wheel drive vehicle and driver, costs £650.
The desert is pleasant in the spring and autumn although it can be chilly at night, and gets very hot in high summer.
Guide books: Rough Guide to Tunisia (£8.99)
The Tunisian National Tourist Office: 0171 224 5561