Modern and Ancient Ruins
March 4-11, 2023
In looking for a weeklong vacation destination around Mazz’s birthday in early March, there were two main criteria: It needed to be significantly warmer than Berlin and it shouldn’t take an especially long time to get there. Mazz had a third condition as well, which more or less applies to all of our trips now: It had to be someplace new. Kirb was fine just traveling to Mallorca like all the rest of the Germans for a little bit of sunshine, but Mazz was not. All he wanted was to drink a cocktail in a t-shirt on the beach, but she wanted history and adventure. Eventually, we settled on Tunisia. We could get reasonably-priced flights that left Berlin in the early morning and arrived in the capital city of Tunis around lunch, and if the weather cooperated, we could enjoy our trip in short sleeves and jeans instead of the puffy down jackets we were still wearing at home.
In researching the trip, we learned that not all of Tunisia is particularly safe for Americans. The coastal area is built for tourism and is generally safe for anyone, but the further you venture south towards the desert, the more you risk running into people who aren’t particularly fond of American foreign policy. Since we only planned on being in Tunisia for a week, we were fine sticking to the Mediterranean and making this vacation a strictly coastal affair.
Kirb was hesitant to go back to North Africa after his experiences with food poisoning and unrelenting public harassment in Morocco, but the internet claimed that Tunisians weren’t nearly as aggressive with tourists. Still, we weren’t surprised to walk out of the airport looking for a cab to find a dozen men loudly trying to guide us to their cars. Someone ushered us inside a van, and noticing that it didn’t have a meter, we promptly got back out. They wanted to charge us a flat rate of €20, but we knew from looking online that a cab should only cost around €5. Once we got out, we were again swarmed by unlicensed cabbies trying to coax us into their cars, and there was nothing we could do but flee across the parking lot and say “no thank you” over and over. One of them followed us relentlessly as we figured out how to call an official cab using the Bolt app. He kept trying to explain how we needed to give him €20, but once we showed him the phone - and showed him that we actually knew what we were doing - he finally, reluctantly left us alone. It felt, so, so good to be back in North Africa.
Our official, licensed cabbie drove us through traffic for half an hour to the edge of the medina: a dense and weaving set of interconnected streets where cars generally shouldn’t go. He was on his phone yelling for the entire trip, but he got us where we needed to go. The entrance to our hotel, Dar Ben Gacem, was an unassuming doorway in a narrow cobblestone street, that once inside, led into a beautiful open internal courtyard. Dar Ben Gacem was built in the 17th century and our 500-year-old room had a chandelier, intricately carved wooden walls, and a cozy recessed nook for the bed. Since this trip was for Mazz’s birthday, we “splurged” on all of our accommodation, which in Tunisia meant spending an average of about €100 a night to stay in some really fancy establishments.
We asked the guy working the desk if he had any lunch recommendations and he sent us to a place called Dar Slah with the specific tip of ordering slow-cooked lamb with figs, dates, and quince. Outside the restaurant, lines of people snaked through the narrow street for Tunisian “tacos,” which looked like quesadillas filled with salad bar toppings. After a very good lunch, we started wandering through the labyrinthine medina - a UNESCO World Heritage Site - and were surprised to find that it was packed with locals doing their daily shopping, not just merchants hawking wares to tourists. We were left to explore the area in relative peace, absent of the overly-aggressive salesmanship that was constant in Marrakesh. Once we had left the cramped confines of the medina, we wandered towards what we thought was a large public park, but in reality was just a no-man’s-land, and decided to turn back around.
The route back to our hotel took us through a crowded street market that was emitting a strange, unsettling noise. The safety info we read online had instructed us to avoid public demonstrations, and the streets around this area were filled with barricades and military men with machine guns. At first, it was hard to tell exactly why this street market was so loud; for some reason it sounded like a massive protest. Eventually we figured out that it was because the majority of the tables didn’t have anyone watching the piles of cheaply-manufactured Chinese goods, but rather had just placed a bullhorn on the table that was infinitely repeating Arabic sales jargon, creating a wall of grating, amplified yelling coming from all directions. It sounded like chaos.
When we got back to the medina, all of the shops had closed and there were more stray cats in the streets than people. As we stopped to check our map for the right route, a man heard us speaking English and began to talk to us, welcoming us to his country and recommending that we go and visit the home of the former sultan, which was free to enter and had a beautiful view over the city. We were initially wary of any such unsolicited advice, as our experiences in Marrakech had left us with the distinct impression that anyone advising you do anything in this part of the world is likely trying to take advantage of you. But this man simply pointed us in the right direction and walked off, wishing us the best on our travels. We decided to go and check it out, and after only a minute or so, another man greeted us and offered to show us the way. We gave each other suspecting, sideward glances but followed him nonetheless, and to our surprise, he simply dropped us off at the entrance to a storefront and wished us the best on our vacation. Were people here really just nice and accommodating to travelers? It appeared they were.
This store was significantly nicer than anything else in the medina and the only one in the area that was still open at this point in the evening. The man working there explained that this shop was run by the Tunisian government and used to be the home of the sultan in the 1930s. It was free to access the roof, which had beautiful tile work and a full panorama of the surrounding area. When we came back downstairs, he showed us the sultan’s custom bed for he and his five wives, then explained that though we were under no obligation to buy, it was his job to try and sell us some rugs. We had been stuck in some pretty awkward rug sales pitches in Turkey the summer before, but this time around, we actually really wanted to find a nice rug for our apartment as a birthday present for Mazz. Rug shopping in this context was much more enjoyable, and eventually, we found exactly what we were looking for: A purplish-brown Berber rug that folded up into hand luggage that we could carry onto the plane and not have to pay customs on. We just accepted the price he quoted and didn’t even bother to barter, as neither of us have any interest in haggling over a perfectly reasonable price, so he lowered the total €20 on the receipt and then asked that we pay that amount in cash as a tip for him and his associates, which we were happy to do.
We navigated the medina in the dark to find Restaurant Dar Belhadj, which, like our hotel, had an unassuming doorway that led to a massive, ornate structure inside. There was a musician playing a traditional Tunisian kanun that filled the large, tiled space with music. This place was distinctively fancy, with white tablecloths and waiters in tuxedos, but a heaping plate of cous cous and slow-cooked meats only cost around €12. We learned that in this part of the world, that was a fairly steep price tag for a delicious meal.
For us, the main point of interest in Tunis was the ruins of Carthage. This area had once been a Roman stronghold in the Mediterranean and now was home to some of the best-preserved ruins in the world. We decided to try public transport and walked through the medina again to get to the train that would take us across the water to Carthage. One completely-packed train took off as we arrived, so we got on the next one and waited. And waited. Eventually, when that train was fully packed, we finally took off, and as the train lurched and chugged it became more and more noticeable that this ancient relic of public transportation was literally held together with wood fasteners and particle board. Still, it did eventually get us to our stop, not too far from a bike rental shop where we could get our own transportation to explore the ruins for the rest of the afternoon.
This turned out to be the ideal way to see Carthage, as the different sites were all spread out farther than one would probably want to walk. There was a learning curve to this expedition. First, we accidentally bought tickets to the National Institute of Marine Sciences and Technologies Museum, thinking we needed to go through a specific gate to see some nearby ruins. The aquariums in this place were pretty bleak, most of the models were noticeably damaged, and stray cats were wandering around inside. When we left and tried to see the ruins, a man at the entrance told us we needed another ticket from a place we had passed up the road. So we rode our bikes back up the street and bought the ticket that would get us into all of the Carthage sites. The historical area surrounding this ticket counter was a tiny park filled with what appeared to be small pillars. We read the placard and learned that this site was famous for hosting child sacrifices.
The real highlight of the day was visiting the Antonine Baths and having the sprawling archeological site basically to ourselves. We were free to climb around and explore the extensive ruins to our hearts’ content, which at their peak covered nearly 20,000 square meters. The guy at the entrance to the baths gave us a personal history lesson of the area, explaining how these ruins were not just Roman, but also Punic and Vandal and Byzantine, thanks to the area’s strategic placement and high rate of cultural turnover throughout the millennia.
Byrsa Hill
We rode our bikes to more Roman settlements filled with decapitated statues and up to the top of Byrsa Hill, with ancient ruins overlooking the modern city and the sea. We dropped the bikes back off and decided that while we were glad we experienced the dilapidated train to get out to Carthage, there was absolutely no reason not to pay €5 for the 30-minute cab ride directly back to our hotel in the medina. It was Sunday and the restaurant we wanted to go to was closed, so we looked for a different spot in the area that sold regional dishes. We didn’t try particularly hard to find that specific restaurant once we were in the right neighborhood, though; we gave up almost immediately upon spotting a hole-in-the-wall soup place that lots of locals were frequenting. It was popular and the food looked good, so we decided to give it a shot, even though we didn’t exactly know what we were going to get. Ordering here with no French language skills was a bit of a task, especially trying to explain that Mazz could not have any bread in her bread soup, but eventually we were able to get two bowls of Lablebi for a total of about €5. Spiced with harissa and filled with garbanzo beans and slow-cooked gelatinous meat cuts, the Lablebi was delicious and filling and exactly the sort of local dining experience we were looking for.
Eating like the locals is always a worthwhile experience
The next morning we packed up our stuff and took a cab back to the airport to pick up our rental car. We generally book with Europcar, as they have good rates and don’t try and screw you over, but even with them there were a lot of new threats renting a car in Tunisia. There were massive fines for taking the car outside of the Tunisian borders - which we had no intention of doing - as well as police-imposed fines of €200 if you returned the car later than the specified time. Getting on the highway out of Tunis was easy enough, as was reaching our first destination about 30 kilometers away. The guy at Dar Ben Gacem who had sent us to the good restaurant in the medina had also recommended that we check out a historical site called Uthina, which he claimed was one of the best in Tunisia but hardly anyone went there. When we pulled into the parking lot on a gray Monday morning there were only three other cars.
The facilities at Uthina were brand new and sleekly-designed, having just opened to the public the year before. For only a few bucks, you were given free rein to explore the excavated ruins of a massive Roman city, with the 3rd largest standing coliseum in the world, an enormous multi-story temple, and parts of an aqueduct that ran from Zaghouan through Uthina on its way to Carthage (132 km long - one of the longest aqueducts of the Roman empire). There was virtually no one else around in the sprawling grounds, save for the stray cat that followed us throughout the temple, rubbing itself against our legs as we walked from chamber to chamber. Eventually, one of the only other humans on the premises introduced himself as an employee and let us into an area with photographs of the excavation process, which began in the 1990s. It was incredible having such an immense and impressive archeological site all to ourselves. You definitely won’t get an experience like that at any of the big sites in Europe.
Tunis wasn’t a particularly clean place, but it wasn’t noticeably filthy either, as far as big cities go. As soon as we got out of Tunis and into the suburbs and surrounding countryside, Tunisia quickly revealed itself to be the dirtiest country we had ever visited. The amount of trash on the sides of the road and in the fields was shocking. It was clear there was no functioning public garbage service in these parts. The thoroughfares through small towns were bracketed by walls of refuse and the outskirts were literal dumps. The land itself was beautiful; if Tuscany was covered in garbage, it would look like this. The national flower of Tunisia must be a bush covered in plastic bags. These bags are everywhere you look, haunting the landscape like the ghosts of big petroleum. We wondered aloud what this place might have looked like before the invention of plastic and couldn’t help but laugh at a placard in Uthina that said the archeological site had been covered in broken pottery.
The Tunisian countryside was a different world entirely: People hailing cabs on the freeway; live sheep milling around the front of butcher shops; men selling caged birds and what appeared to be part of a bush at a toll booth. There are constant police and military checkpoints that make you stop and show them your papers, existing simply to harass and exert control over the populace. And the drivers there are truly world-class in impatience and dangerous maneuvers. If you don’t drive with a “me first, screw everyone else” mentality, you are going to get into an accident, because no one on the road has your safety in mind.
All we knew about Hammamet was that it was a beachside resort town, or at least, it was at some point. Driving to our hotel, we passed dozens of skeletal remains of former hotels, some half-finished and others simply abandoned. Our hotel was a gated compound, and it was clear upon arrival that we had inadvertently chosen to stay at an oasis of extravagance in a desert of economic depression. This left us with a lot to think about. La Badira was the biggest splurge of our accommodation choices, coming in at a whopping €120 a night to stay at the “5-star” hotel and spa. The poshness of the hotel was exacerbated when we decided to drive into the center of town to buy some wine. It’s not fair to call Hammamet a ghost town, because there are lots and lots of people who currently live there, but the buildings look as if they haven’t been updated (or even inhabited) for 40 years. The streets are clogged with cars and the promenade was absolutely packed with rowdy teens, yelling and lighting off fireworks. We learned that there was only one grocery chain that sold alcohol in any given town; Tunisia is deeply religious and booze is not widely enjoyed or appreciated. One trip to the wine store in Hammamet was enough to know that we would not be leaving our 5-star resort compound again until it was time to move on to the next destination.
In the wider purview, we are not particularly “fancy” people. We will only stay at a place like La Badira if it’s affordable, and we don’t go on vacation seeking extravagant things. But that doesn’t mean we don’t like to be pampered from time to time, and if La Badira exists for one purpose, it’s to pamper. Our room had a plush king-size bed with a sunset view of the water. The restaurant, while relatively expensive compared to what meals cost elsewhere in Tunisia, served up some delicious food without having to leave the premises. Kirb’s folks treated Mazz to some fun money for her birthday and we decided to spend it all on a couple’s day at the spa. When in what-used-to-be-part-of Rome, right?
First, we floated around in some extra-salty, body-temp water in a candlelit room. Then we had a traditional Tunisian Hammam, where we were rubbed down with black soap and brought into a sauna to open up our pores. After we were good and sweaty, a woman brought us into a room and scrubbed us down with sandpaper gloves and then hosed us off on a table, exfoliating the dead skin off of every part of our bodies. She put Kirb in a room and told him in French to shower and made the motion to take off his trunks. There was a stone table in there, and Kirb had no idea what he was supposed to do next, but there were two options: Shower, remove the trunks, put on his robe and wait, or shower, take off the trunks, and get on the table naked for the massage. He chose the robe, and thankfully, chose correctly, averting a very embarrassing encounter. After some hydrating tea, we were given some bizarre temporary underpants for our massages and facials. Mazz’s bikini bottoms were made of paper and looked like what Leeloo Dallas wore in The Fifth Element. Our day at the spa was lovely and extravagant and a wholly weird thing to do considering the state of the world directly outside of the compound.
We enjoyed certain elements of our posh stay at La Badira and loathed others. At dinner on our second night, the other sort of clientele who stay at resorts like this were extremely visible. On one side of our table sat a woman deeply versed in the Kardashian playbook who refused to look away from her phone to acknowledge the man she was dining with. There was a plate of food in front of her but she refused to take a bite. It was clear she detested the man she was with, but was willing to be his companion because of his money. He respectfully waited to begin eating until she did, but she refused to eat at all, so he just sat there silently, awkwardly pushing cous cous around his plate and drinking beer after beer. He had ordered six for himself, served in an icy bucket at the side of the table. Eventually, the waiter showed up and took the woman’s dish away, untouched. The waiter returned a little later with a dessert, and the second he placed it on the table, the woman got up and stormed out of the restaurant. The man pulled out a fat stack of cash and peeled off several bills for the waiter. On the other side of our table, another man sent back his steak and verbally chastised the server. It was fun to pretend we were fancy for a minute or two, but we clearly did not belong at this place.
The next morning we left the compound and tried to navigate our way to some interesting sites on the way to Sousse. The first was an “abandoned Berber village” which just turned out to be a very depressed but absolutely inhabited slum that we had no intention of “exploring.” Next, we got lost for an hour trying to get to the hilltop village of Takrouna before eventually finding the road. We parked next to some trash in a tourist pull-off and climbed up a long set of stairs to find that there was actually car parking at the top. Within a minute of entering the village, an old woman pulled us into a hut filled with rugs and trinkets and gave us some traditional semolina flatbread, tiny olives, and olive oil. We knew the pitch to buy wares was coming, and we were happy to give the woman some money for her time and forced hospitality, but were shocked to find that a pair of beautiful throw rugs only cost €20. We have no idea if this woman actually made these rugs or if they’re cheap Chinese imports, but we were happy to pay her for them either way. Once again, we didn’t even try to barter, so she gave Kirb another round of bread to go.
There are only two families that live in Takrouna, and upon leaving one domicile we were approached by the other local matron and brought to her home. We weren’t particularly interested in buying anything else, but as we went to leave she gave us a tour around the grounds overlooking the olive groves far below. She told us that her family had lived in the village for 30 generations and that her son walks two kilometers up and down the hill every day to get to school. The tour included petting a donkey and some really adorable puppies, so we were happy to throw some Dinar her way.
Sousse is a big and bustling coastal city, but the infrastructure is such that it takes a good 30 minutes on run-down streets to get from the main highway to the medina. We found parking and had a hard time communicating with the attendant for what it would cost to leave the car overnight; communicating with bare-bones French skills in Tunisia was consistently difficult. Walking though the medina with our bags to get to our hotel, Dar Lekbira, the merchants were much more aggressive in trying to get our attention, even though it was clear we had our hands full. Once again, this hotel was a gorgeous oasis hidden away behind an unsuspecting door, filled with patterned tiles and bright blue paint. Our room had another luxurious bed nook and there was a rooftop area where you could see out over the buildings all the way to the water.
As we walked to check out the waterfront, we tried to take cash out from an absurd number of ATMs before finally succeeding in the task. The first one we tried just ate the card completely and we had to go inside the bank and retrieve it. Thankfully, it was still open. Like Hammamet, there were whole huge blocks of waterfront filled with derelict resorts and plenty of locals milling about on the promenades. Our eventual destination was one of the specific grocery stores that sold wine, and when we found it we couldn’t believe the building was still functional and standing. There was a clean, fresh edifice on the front, but the entire side of the structure was crumbled away like it had been struck in a bombing raid. There was a seafood restaurant we wanted to eat at but learned it was only open for lunch, so we popped into a random establishment on the waterfront with decent enough google reviews. We were the only ones actually dining at Restaurant Lido - all of the other grizzled, older male clientele were chain-smoking, drinking beers, and watching football. Surprisingly, the grilled squid and garlic shrimp were pretty good.
From Sousse, it’s over an hour drive to get to the amphitheater of El Jem, the second-largest Roman amphitheater after the Colosseum in Rome. These ruins are really spectacular, and like the one in Rome, they exist smack-dab in the middle of a bustling city. Unlike Rome, once you’re done climbing around this amphitheater, there’s not a whole lot more you want to do in the surrounding area. So, we made our way to the seaside city of Monastir, which our host at Dar Lekbira had told us was more laid back and less touristy than Sousse.
The lunch we ate a Le Pirate in Monastir was truly bonkers. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into when we took a seat at the bustling seafood joint, and were slightly taken aback when the waiter explained that the menu was prix fixe and included roughly one thousand separate dishes. Sheepishly, we asked for the price before committing, and were only slightly shocked to find that it cost less than €20 per person. So what does that get you at Le Pirate? An entire table full of mussels, shrimp, squid cooked in harissa, yellow rice with tuna and eggs, fried seafood fritters, bread, cold calamari salad, and Tunisian salad also topped with tuna and eggs. It’s a ridiculous amount of food - and that’s just the first course. Next, they bring out two whole grilled fish with fries and red and green salsas, followed by a bowl of fruit and figs and lemon sorbet, and finally a plate of cookies. Somehow, we got most of the seafood inside of us, but we paid that pain tax to do so. It was way, way too much food, but it was definitely the best meal we ate in Tunisia.
We spent the rest of the day walking around the medina in Sousse trying to digest the five pounds of seafood in our bellies, getting lightly accosted by shop owners to come and look at their bootleg Nikes and Tunisian crafts handmade in China. Eventually, we figured we should probably have something for dinner, though part of us wondered if we ever needed to eat again. We went to an unassuming hole-in-the-wall called Chebil Star Food and the owner was happy to speak with us in English. Mazz ordered ojja with merguez - eggs cooked with peppers and tomatoes in harissa with spicy sausage - and the man applauded her for ordering the best thing on the menu. Kirb got a Tunisian-style flatbread sandwich and both were tasty and cost a total of €5, though we absolutely could have done with half of what we ordered.
The next morning we had to be up and out early to drive the rental car back to Tunis by 11 am or risk a €200 fine. We gave ourselves an extra hour to get there, and it’s good we did, because the traffic getting back into the capital was intense. In one area, we sat for nearly half an hour as a traffic jam four cars wide attempted to cram into two exiting lanes. Tunisian roads are an absolute free-for-all and Kirb was deeply relieved to get the car back to the airport and out of his possession. From there, it was another 30-minute, €5 cab ride back over to Carthage, where we had booked a lovely room in La Marsa right on the water.
It was a sunny, 70-degree day, perfect to go and check out the iconic blue and white hilltop town of Sidi Bou Said, just a 20-minute walk from our room. As we walked along the road up the hill, we noticed that there was a trail that went along the coastline and decided to take that instead. It was covered in trash and eventually led to a dead-end where the green, verdant cliffside had been used as a garbage dump from up above on the road. People apparently just tossed all of their crap down to get caught in the trees before falling down onto the beach. On the trail leading back up to the road, the rusted frame of a long-crashed car was nuzzled between two trees.
The first gift shop we walked by in Sidi Bou Said had some really cute stuff and the man inside made a point of telling us that he wasn’t going to pressure us to buy anything, but it was the first place we stopped, so we moved on empty-handed. As we hit the main street, the aggressive calls of shopkeepers began to ring out from all angles, and one of them ensnared Mazz, bringing her inside a beautiful building to show her the museum on the top floor. Kirb hesitantly followed behind, and the man proceeded to provide the most aggressive “tour” possible, constantly saying, “Look at this!” before dragging us to another room before we could even properly look at it. Every third sentence was, “Maybe you will buy something from my shop,” and Kirb quickly grew tired of the song and dance and went downstairs. There was a woman down there selling paintings on feathers and as Kirb looked at them, the man came downstairs and tried to physically pull him away from the woman’s shop and back into his own. At this point, Kirb lost it and began to yell at the man, telling him he was being far too aggressive, and stormed outside. The woman selling the paintings was visibly amused at the outburst. It was clear she had no love for her boorish neighbor either.
Uninterested in further altercations, we ducked around the corner and into Dar El Annabi, a heritage museum that our hotel had recommended we visit. This compound was filled with furnished rooms that served as a time capsule for a bygone way of life in the city. It was quiet and we were the only people inside. Kirb wished he had bought a mosaic tile from the first, kind shopkeeper at the top of the hill, but there was no way he was walking back up through the gauntlet again after losing his cool on one of the locals.
We had a delicious lunch of shrimp ojja and a chard and calf’s foot stew called Madfouna at a small restaurant called Chez Weld Moufida, then decided it was time for a cocktail. The guy at our hotel had told us about a place called The Cliff just up the road from where we were staying that had a bar and restaurant with a panoramic view of the sea, so we headed that direction. The parking lot was full of luxury cars and the restaurant was full of luxury clientele. The view was pristine; you couldn’t see the trash cliff from this angle at all. When we left, an Italian woman literally bodied Mazz out of the way to get her seat. We spent the rest of the afternoon on our deck, enjoying the lapping of waves with a book and bottle of wine.
Getting out of Tunisia was its own special ordeal. You legally have to change in your Tunisian Dinar before leaving the country, and sending postcards and exchanging our cash at a postal kiosk in the airport took well over 30 minutes and resulted in Kirb just putting his final Tunisian change in a stranger’s hand and saying, “Happy Birthday.” There were huge lines for everything, extra security controls that barely moved, and the most predatory airport pricing we’ve ever seen to get something to eat before takeoff. After a week of buying entire meals for two for €5, a Snickers bar at the airport cost more than €6. There was no logical line to get onto the plane, and once we were kicked out of one mislabeled queue and forced to the back of another, Kirb got frustrated again. A well-dressed man in line noticed, and Kirb remarked to him, “I’m done with this vacation, if you couldn’t tell.” The man looked at him flatly and responded, “I’m done with this entire country.”
We’re glad we went to Tunisia, but it’s unlikely that we will return any time soon. The freedom to explore such exquisite ruins with no other tourists around was really special, and the people that we spoke with were kind, inviting, and happy to welcome us into their country. But Tunisia is a very poor country, and understandably, people there are going to do what they must to survive. As a white, relatively-wealthy tourist, it means you might get harassed. And while this element of the trip wasn’t nearly as oppressive as it was for us in Marrakech, it’s still not a particularly pleasant way to spend part of your vacation. In the end, we did get exactly what we had sought from Tunisia: Mazz got her ruins and adventure and Kirb drank a cocktail in short sleeves overlooking the Mediterranean. We just had to endure a bunch of trash to enjoy it.