Tourist Stalking in Ancient Homes
Ah, mountains! Well, the great mountain ranges of the world would scornfully call these foothills, but I’m from Finland, so who am I to complain. And the views are very nice. In terms of the nature, this is the prettiest corner of Tunisia.
I have entered the border regions, with Algeria hovering just kilometres away. There is an ongoing and semi-permanent operation by the Tunisian police and army to try to stop the smugglers taking food and contraband to war-torn Algeria. The Tunisian authorities call the smugglers terrorists, but apparently the motivation for this activity is purely mercenary, not political or religious.
The first indication of this border unrest I got in the charming town of El Kef. High in the mountains with an old basar on the top of the hills and stunning views, el Kef was a very nice place, where I roamed free as a bird. There are old Roman baths still in use located 12 km from El Kef. Bathing in 2000 year old pools was definitely on my agenda. But alas, the police didn’t allow foreigners to the pools, which were too close to the border. So close!
My next port of call was Jandouba and specifically the unique ancient Roman ruins of Bulla Regia. Bulla Regia has pretty views and the usual ruins overground, with some rather wonderful mosaics still in situ, being rained on, walked on by tourists and gradually being overgrown by weeds.
There was a well preserved theatre with a mosaic of a ferocious bear as a reminder that theatres featured not only ancient tragedies, but other forms of entertainment as well - including bear fights.
And of course there are several hammams, with pools that looked ready to slip into.
But the truly unique feature of Bulla Regia is, that like the Berbers with their trogladyte dwellings, also here the locals dug deep. Below the semi-ruined ground floors of the buildings
are living spaces dug underground to escape the brutal heat of summer.
And in many of the excavated homes, the lowest levels have remained intact. So here you can actually enter a Roman villa which has walls and a ceiling and so get a totally unique sense of what these luxury homes were like.
And though many of the best mosaics have been removed to museums around the country, some stunners are left.
The most impressive of these being a mosaic of Venus being borne aloft by two sea gods and crowned by cupids.
This was once a dining hall, where the seating was around the walls, so that the mosaic was clearly visible and formed a nice centrepiece and possibly a menu for a fish dinner.
In Jendouba the secrity measures really caught up with me. As I stepped off the bus I was accosted by the security police, who wanted to know where I was going. I duly told them. On returning from Bulla Regia the local security guard flagged down a shared taxi for me (these shared taxis work rather like louages, except the taxis pick up customers en route, so they are not necessarily full when setting off). The guard took all kinds of info from the driver including his telephone number. I told him and the driver I wished to be dropped off in the centre of town to find my dinner (which project didn’t end well as all who read my last entry will know). However halfway to town the driver got a call and I understood it was the security guard directing the driver to take me to my hotel instead. So despite my protests, he refused to let me off in the centre but drove me to my hotel and even demanded that I physically walk into the hotel - not start walking straight to town to find food as I would have otherwise done. I understood he was just the messenger so I didn’t shoot him. But when I finally had swung by the hotel lobby to let him off the hook, I swung right back out again and started walking towards the centre. I managed to walk around 50 meters before I got stopped by the tourist police, who questioned me about where I was going and had a big pow-wow on whether my walking about was ok or not.
To some extent this has been the pattern for the next two towns I went to after Jendouba as well. At least in the next town, the pretty mountain village of Ain Draham, the tourist police who leeched onto me the moment I got off the bus gave me a lift to my hotel. Unlike the ones in my third port of call, Tabarka. They just followed me in their pickup as I huffed and puffed up a steep and seemingly endless driveway to my hotel carrying my backpack. Tabarka is, in other respects a totally charming seaside town with an old fortress on an island.
In these border regions, the tourist police are always asking how long I will be staying at the hotel (answer: I don’t know. Depends what I feel like doing tomorrow morning), where I will be going next (answer: same as previously) and what time in the morning I’ll be leaving (answer: depends when I wake up). I’m clearly a very odd and badly behaved kind of tourist in their books.
But dammit, I would be really crap at living in a totalitarian police state!
I’m obviously not used to it, for one thing. But this regime of officials telling me what I can or can’t do and monitoring my every move is starting to get my goat.
Austensibly all this activity is for my safety. But the activities of these ”security” police seem totally random, more beaurocratic than genuinely safety inducing. At the same time as they will make the hotel concierge knock on my door at night to check if I’m really leaving the next morning (papers must be filled), and the whole louage wait while they take copies of my passport, nobody seems interested when I set out on lonesome treks up the local mountains through cork and pine groves getting a bit lost and tangled up in brambles and bleated at by goats. As an activity I would presume these rambles are more of a safety hazard than the tourist police not knowing what time I’m having breakfast.
Oh well, as my last week in Tunis commences, I’m heading East and away from the mountains and the border - leaving tourist police behind me. They will not be missed.
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