I wouldn’t have sought out a Tunisian travelog, but I enjoyed Michael J. Totten’s Crossing the Fossa Regia nonetheless:
Tunisia isn’t an island, but it might as well be. If you visit you will arrive the same way you would an isolated coastal town in Alaska — by boat or by plane. No Western traveler arrives from the border states. You won’t take the bus from anarchic Algeria, nor will you pull up at a remote border post in a rental car from Libya. Tunisians have all but walled themselves off from the fundamentalism and fanaticism that surround them. They look instead to their more like-minded neighbors across the Mediterranean to the north. You will think of Europe, too, if you go.
Tunis, the capital, is a cosmopolitan mix:
After checking into our hotel, my wife Shelly and I headed straight for the old city — the ancient Tunis medina. We walked the maze of twisting streets, carpet stalls, cafes, shuttered windows, arched passageways, minarets, and secret paths. Turkish lamps lit the darkened covered corners of the souk. Potted flowers in hanging baskets added delicate touches of color and life. The aromas of orange oil and curling smoke from burning incense were amplified by the warm heavy air. The muezzin’s haunting call to prayer from the Great Mosque in the center was the perfect grace note. This was the East in its glory, the most intoxicating place in the capital.We left the medina through the arch to the east and found ourselves in the French imperialist quarter known today as the Cit? Nouvelle. In the space of less than 100 feet we walked from the Middle East to France, and we did it without leaving Africa.
And it’s fairly liberal:
Some conservative women did wear the hijab over their hair, but they were distinctly in the minority. Men wore collared button-up shirts and young women competed to see who could resemble hot young French models the most.Despite Shelly’s blue eyes and red hair, she didn’t get stared at much. If you want to turn heads in Tunis, dress like a Saudi. While sitting at the Caf? de Paris on the Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the Cit? Nouvelle’s own Champs Elysee, three women walked past wearing black head-to-toe chadors that covered up all but their eyes. I leaned to the right to get a view of everyone else on the street. Almost every man and most of the women turned their heads to gawk at the three wraiths in black.
Then they crossed the Fossa Regia into the Sahara:
Matmata sat atop an eerie upland moonscape. The Berbers went underground more than a thousand years ago to escape the infernal heat of the Sahara. You would, too, if you didn’t have central air. You would tunnel into the walls with your hands if you had to.The underground “troglodyte” houses were a cool 75 degrees at midday. George Lucas thought them the perfect setting for Star Wars. Both Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi lived on the desert planet Tatooine (which is the name of a real town a few miles away) in caves tunneled out from the center of open-air pits. Not everyone in Matmata lived underground, though. Most of the buildings were top-side and — whenever possible — were cooled down the usual way.
In Tunis the mosques were architectural masterpieces, with soaring minarets, marble floors, Roman columns, and intricately tiled blue and white walls. The mosque in Matmata was made of the same white- and lime-washed adobe as the walls inside the Berber houses. It was primitive and misshapen as though it were a gigantic version of a clay mosque made by a child in art class.
Chickens, donkeys, and even camels ran loose in the streets. It was hard to believe there was another street in the same country that made me think of a less-fancy Champs Elysee. Some people lived in one-room caves even in the middle of town — the Berber version of tin shacks. The gender apartheid was total. The number of women we saw while in town: zero. We did, however, see a bloody fly-blown goat’s head on the sidewalk.
The backwardness and extreme conservatism was as exhausting as the heat. The streets full of men had an edge to them, even though every last one was kind, generous, and embarrassingly friendly.
Then they visited the Middle East’s version of Miami:
The Zone Touristique was a bit like Las Vegas and a lot like Cancun. Vaguely Middle Eastern-themed hotels, some shaped like castles and Berber ksars, fronted the horseshoe-shaped bay. They catered to hip young Eurotourists who mostly came to Tunisia for the beach. I saw handbills advertising nightclubs and meet-markets. A large wooden sign just a block from our hotel informed me that Sousse’s sister city back in the States was Miami.The amount of wealth in a given place in Tunisia seemed to me directly proportional to its amount of contact with people from somewhere else, even if that contact was in the past. Souse benefited from being inside Rome’s Fossa Regia, more recently from restoration by the French who fell in love with the city, and currently by an enormous injection of cash in the form of tourist Euros every single day of the year.