The phone rang! I was in that state of deep sleep when you have no idea what is going on. It took me a while to realize I was not dreaming. I picked up the phone and a polite voice told me in English: “It’s four in the morning, please prepare for departure.”
Maximum confusion! Judging by the noise and sounds coming from the corridor I was convinced that I was not the only one woke up this way. Still, one thought persisted: “Why?”
We took our seats in the bus parked in front of Douz. Outside a moonless night, total darkness. The bus started moving and we reluctantly left behind the date palms from which we had picked the delicious fruits just hours before. The direction in which we were travelling at such early morning hours remained a mystery. Well, let this be an adventure!
After an hour we stopped in the middle of nowhere, in total darkness. I do not know if you imagine how it is to hear the others but do not see them two feet apart. I had nowhere to go and we sat near each other waiting for something. Suddenly somebody caught the idea: “Hey these guys want us to see the sunrise, that is why we are here!” And so it was, after about 30 minutes, a light was seen on the horizon, flickering gently. Then, very quickly, the landscape took shape around us, leaving us speechless.
By day, the scenery was incredible: we were in the middle of a salted dried lake, where from place to place, different mineral salts reflected the rays of the sun coloring the landscape in a very unusual, beautiful way.
Meanwhile I saw that in all this time we sat next to a shed located on the roadside, where with the arrival of light, the seller removed the boxes from the interior placing them neatly on the table. Boxes filled with what do you think? Dates of course!
And then we were on the road again. After an hour we stopped in another town in the desert, in order to transfer us onto the jeeps. They just briefly announced us: “safari”. As our car had room for only 6 persons, (of which only two men) I pulled the winning ticket and reserved the place without a chair between the spare tire and the canister. Wonderful! I was actually in the opened trunk of a Jeep Nissan. Within minutes we found ourselves jumping on the high dunes of sand. Roller-Coaster sensations and I in Spiderman position (grabbing whatever I could to stay safe) living intensely this unexpected rally.
After loud protests from the ladies the driver slowed down his enthusiasm and stopped the car at the base of a dune, giving us a brief moment to enjoy the desert. I might also add that the sand was surreally smooth, so we held on to the memory by taking some home in a plastic bottle. Part of the 6:00 h rally was also the visit to the oases of the Atlas Mountains. I lived, perhaps on a smaller scale, the joy of seeing water and the palm trees after many hours of walking through the desert. At the end of the two days in the desert we arrived in the hotel room in Sousse, which now seemed so familiar to us that already we called it “home”.
From my experience in Tunisia it is a way to travel around the world and if you want to see how and what it is all about, you can have a look here.
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