 | |
 |
 |
Fly Me to the Dunes
The air is purest in the desert. Or so I’m told by Rafik, a young Bedouin who leads my dromedary, Arabia, through the Sahara at twilight. Rafik’s dressed in designer knock-offs, like any European twentysomething, and speaks English gleaned from Hollywood movies subtitled in Arabic. The desert, perhaps as etymologically intended, is mostly deserted. We find ourselves incongruously exchanging cell numbers and business cards on the top of a hill of sand, under the black umbrella of a thousand stars. Before I came, colleagues had told me that visiting Tunisia was like Alice slipping through the looking glass. After just a few days, it feels like we’ve fallen through the rabbit hole. My vision of the desert had involved Yves Saint Laurent Sahara jackets, and Tunisia, in its burgeoning tourist haze, isn’t quite there yet. This is still the kind of place where you can visit the coliseum at El Jem – the eerie double of its more famous Roman twin – and not run into a soul, except for the caretaker sweeping out the former lion’s den. Instead of tales of gladiators, they’ll tell you stories of the Berber queen who once launched herself off the topmost layer of this giant ancient cake of a ruin. The highways, rolling out from the Mediterranean beach resorts to the Saharan outposts, are being laid like carpet almost overnight. We started our trip on the beaches of Cap Bon and Hammamet, where artist Paul Klee came to hang out and paint. It’s said that Tunisia changed the way he saw light and colour, drenched as it is in almost Floridian sunlight. The area has now become the country’s answer to Las Vegas, with an indoor skating rink and beaches lined with package tourists – all built on coastal salt flats that will eat away at the foundations of the area’s superluxury hotels within 50 years. A completely different kind of Mirage, you might say. |
