Well, there you go – airborne at last, and homeward bound on the mighty Tunis Air flight 790 – only an hour or so late, but hey, who’s complaining.
Morocco and Tunisia both do a really great line in bored, ‘I was meant for much greater things than this’ young ladies, who, in between yawns, replied vacantly to my enquiries as to why we were late, “Dix minutes en retard”. ("Ten Minutes late..")
Three times.
But as I said, who’s complaining. I certainly didn’t when we turned up at the hotel in Beija, with a fax confirming our reservation, to be told that the hotel was completely full, and they knew nothing of our reservation.
And when we’d finally found a couple of rooms in a dodgy looking ‘bar’ – with lots of strangely-painted girls, looking around them hopefully whilst talking into their mobiles – the shower attatchment in the bath was one of those that refused to be ever turned off, so when switched on, turned into a leaping, soaking, serpent of a thing thrashing around the walls. No matter I said.
The sun was still shining, and the ‘restaurant’ where we ate was showing Manchester United being thrashed by Barcelona. In Arabic. The place was packed of course, so we were given the only available space, right underneath the telly, and spent the next hour with the slightly strange sensation of having a hundred or so chain-smoking Tunisians apparently staring at us, and shrieking whenever Barcelona looked like scoring a goal. Perhaps they’d just put big money on Man Utd to win, or had bought one of their shirts. There are a lot of them about, hanging forlornly in the tourist-tat shops.
Finally, we ended up in the deep south – just on the edge of the beach there. Well, it’s a pretty major beach – stretching about two thousand miles due south to Timbuctou.
We treat the animals in the surrounding oasis – including the donkeys that get dental caries from eating too many dates, and of course the camels that get rolled out for the tourists that rock up here for their ‘desert expeience’.
As we were treating a group of complaining camels for sarcoptic mange - not surprisingly they don’t take injections very kindly – a bunch of French tourists arrived.
All are swathed in Arab cloaks and turban-like headscarves – giving a somewhat incongruous appearance with their trainers and shorts underneath, and the ‘shades’ cigarettes and cans of diet coke. Very cool. The fat ones have to be pushed and shoved into the camel saddles, and then they’re off, lurching into the distance on their ‘one-hour camel-trek’.
But we’ve treated over a hundred animals, and visited villages and hamlets in ‘La Tunisie Profonde’. So, as I said, who’s complaining?
Well, perhaps the pretty little chestnut mare who had panicked the night before and kicked a disc plough, severing all the tendons and nerves of her rear, right leg.
Nothing we can do for her, we told the owner.
He just stood with the tears streaming down over his cheeks.
Jeremy Hulme
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