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Fly Me to the Dunes
Which is why we’ve ventured off, migrating with the rarer breed of traveller, down into the country’s dusty heart, looping past the lip of the Algerian border, Arabic-scrawled water bottles in hand. With Tunisia at a crossroads, you have to choose which sandy stretch to travel down. We switchbacked our way through the Atlas Mountains, which run across the country like a red-granite spine, hopscotching from one mountain oasis to another in our 4 x 4. Dromedaries trot alongside the highway here with the same candour as moose in Algonquin Provincial Park. It was just us and the landscape until we met up with a group of Italian motorcyclists in a remote Berber village. You wonder how strange it must have all looked to the shepherd on the side of the road, herding his goats with a stick. At the Tamerza Palace hotel, we ate lunch overlooking a swimming pool that overlooks an ancient mud village that’s the same ruddy colour as the desert. In Tozeur, the entire town is camouflaged, built from sun-baked bricks. We sat in the Sofitel, a table away from giddy French children in Lacoste polos who dined on lamb shanks with pomegranate and pretended to be Indiana Jones the next day. Canyons and cartoon-accurate oases break up the miles and miles of scrub and sand. We pulled off for a break amid the stalagmite-like sand rocks at Debabcha, and a falconer appeared, offering a show for a few dinars. Crossing the salt flats of Chott el Djerid, the world becomes the thinnest line of yellow, the sky wipes everything else away and you can start to believe the world is flat. There’s something almost biblical about waking up in a hotel room in Douz, with real live sand dunes outside your window. Out front, palm trees garlanded with Tunisia’s toffee-like deglet nour (fingers of light) dates subbed in for a garden, and the birds – surprising on the edge of seemingly nothing – were as loud as a Super Bowl party. My friend gleefully plucked handfuls of dates off the swooning trees like a kid in Willy Wonka’s factory while a bemused doorman looked on. Rafik told me that, for two or three months at a time, his family will trek out to the inner stretches of the Sahara with their goats and tents for their version of the vacation on sand. You could easily lose yourself in it, but Rafik’s cousin tapped his head. “The GPS is in here.” On top of a sand dune, on the back of a dromedary, it all made an odd amount of sense. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net |
