Having spent our first evening in the seedy lounge of Sousse Palace, me and Anna wake up hung over. Our companions in the other room are also well hung and are sleeping it off.
We leave the hotel in hot pursuit of groceries for breakfast, and soon end up in a plaza café close to the medina. We drink orange juice made from a citrus-like fruit and coffee. I sit in the sun and bitch about the sun a bit; everything is as it should be.
It’s much easier to brush people off when you’re hung over. You feel righteous when you’re hung over, you have a right to be be in a pissy mood. Regardless the validity of this assertion, it helps us to quickly make our way to a veggie market we’d spotted the day before.
Anna does her bit as the matron of a household, and I am the guy carrying stuff and paying people, appearing every bit as the whipped person I can be. We get deformed pears, damaged tomates, half-rotten pomegranates and some fresh mint.
You are far less hassled if you’re carrying bags of groceries – they act like a spell of +5 camouflage, allowing you to slip by hucksters.
In the evening Sine cooks a mint/chili pasta, and we decide to take a two day bus trip arranged by the travel agent the next day. It’s rather pricy, but we figure that it’s the only way we’ll get any grasp of the country and what the hell, how bad can it get.
We drag ourselves out of bed the next morning and at seven we’re in the bus, slowly realising that yes, it can and will get bad. The name of the travel agent should have given us a clue: Detour. I imagine that whoever came up with the name wanted to imply a detour off the beaten path, a trip into the unknown and real. Rather, it proved to be a detour from common decency and any sense of well-being.
Our guide quickly enthused about how fun we would have, and even made “fun” rhyme with “detour” to instill an association between those two words. She had Tunisian parents but had grown up in a small Swedish town, and spoke Swedish with an odd Norwegian flavour.
She was happy with her job. Not that she was particularly interesting or bright, and not that we enjoyed her folksy racism and lack of knowledge, but she did set the tone of the whole trip with her jolly remarks that she blessed us with over the loudspeakers that didn’t have an off-switch.
-Look at that woman everyone! She’s wearing black and lives in a hole! That’s their style!
The goal of the trip was Sahara, with a dash of oasis and local colour thrown in. “Local colour” proved to be references to what movie was recorded where, and a slightly different tomato salad from one place to another.
Tunisia is not a very large country, but differes in flora – south of Sousse you find a steppe that changes into a desert proper the closer you get to Sahara. You’re watching olive trees change into date palms and then into underbrush and then salt and sand. The change is rather gradual; you’re snoozing merrily and drooling onto the person next to you, and waking up you can’t really tell if you’re in the same place.
One of the few tell-tale signs of actual movement is that different regions deal in different goods. Selling peppers by the roadside becomes selling date palm juice, which in turn becomes selling petrol smuggled in from Libya.
Whenever I travel through Sweden, I am surprised that people actually live in all those small places in the middle of bloody nowhere. Gothenburg and Stockholm feel small enough as they are, but what are you going to do in Töreboda except smelling your cousins underpants and sell strawberries to tourists? I imagine that the situation for those living in El Hamma is similar.
When we passed the Mareth Line, a system of bunkers the French built in defense against Italy before WWII, our helpful guide explained that “the French would jump into the box on your left (everyone in the bus looked left) and then pop up in the box to your right (everyone in the bus looked right)” and that seemed to exhaust the topic. Later we were told that if we were looking for a more in depth history tour, we should definitely go on the historic Detour trip on Wednesday.
Anyway. We reach Sahara and everyone in the bus but me gets on a dromedary after being dressed in Sahara chic tunics and scarfs. I have some animal rights issues and stay behind drinking coffee, writing a polemic on morals or something.
At the café I have the first of only two exchanges during my stay in Tunisia that doesn’t involve someone trying to sell me something; I’m alone at a table and there’s a guy who asks me for the extra chair next to me.
It’s hard to appreciate, but this was really encouraging – tourism has fucked Tunisia in the ass with a tour-bus shaped dildo; protruding hands grasping at the intestinal lining for souvenirs. As a result all visitors are alienated from any sense of normality. You’re a tourist and that’s all that you’ll be, constantly suspecting everyone of wanting to cheat you in some way, and you’ll become so reserved and impolite that no-one in their right mind would want anything to do with you, except the assholes that made you suspicious in the first place.
We’ve managed to reach Sahara in time to see the sun set over the dunes, and it’s a very pretty sight, even from where I’m sitting. Darkness comes suddenly, the cold with it. I watch a group of Japanese tourists dismount their dromedaries and laughingly look at the pictures of themselves in the desert that have been rapidly printed. A generous hour later my friends ride back into view, their silhouettes appearing over the horizon in flashes from compact cameras.
Judging from comments made by some of my travelling companions, the walking style of camels has a stimulating potential that should not be underestimated. They rode in from the desert with rosy cheeks and nothing but praise for the animals. Good for them. The closest I get to a sexual encounter on the trip is when a cockroach scuttles over the bathroom tiles and sees me naked.
Anna and Christoffer buy pre-packaged Saharan sand because they are being ironic, and we all file back into the bus. We’re staying at a hotel nearby which proves to be very nice – it’s an open reception area with a proper bar, and we finish the evening drinking and smoking as much as is humanly possible, occasionaly doubling over in bouts of caugh and blowing our noses. It’s getting chilly and Sine retires for the night, citing an oncoming cold and the un-godly hour at which we have to get up the next day. An hour or so later we all follow suit and go to bed.