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’.
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
Monday, 1 June 2009
Life is a Big Beach in Tunisia
Friday, 19 September 2008
Tunisia
And if you want to know why there is a picture of an Ostrich here, you'll just have to read on...!
Hate to say anything good about Air France, but we actually managed to stage through Paris and arrived in Tunis, more or less on time, and with nearly all our luggage. There is now no way you can fly anywhere in North or West Africa by British Airways – really thoughtful business strategy that – for example now there’s three planefulls of Brits every day, direct to Marrakech, and Willie Walsh doesn’t think there’s any money in that.
From the man who organised the flawless opening of Terminal Five? Well, anyway, there it is, so Air France it has to be.
And Tunis is still 35 degrees even in the night, and of course deep into Ramadan, just to remind any non-muslims, that means not eating or drinking during the hours of daylight. Not drinking, even when it’s forty degrees plus at mid-day. So a certain degree of discomfort for all and sundry.
After doing the budget, and visiting the Education Bus – entertaining (and at the same time teaching) kids at the cultural centre in town during the summer holidays, we set off on the road north-east to Bou-salem.
This is the road the British Army fought its way down against the Deutsche Afrika Korps. All along the road are little green signs indicating Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries.
Immaculately kept, they chart the battles against General Von Arnim and the heavy price that had to be paid in young men’s lives. There are many graves of Black Watch soldiers, my old outfit, all the more tragic by the simple inscriptions on the plain stones - ‘Our only child’, ‘Farewell Daddy’, or ‘Aged 18 years’. And all killed in the last days of April and early May 1943 – it was all over on May the 8th.
Now, they really did have a degree of discomfort.
All a bit humbling and deflating as we continued visiting our three centres in the country. Bou-salem in the north, Kasserine in the dry, bleak middle, and Kebili down on the edge of the Sahara in the south.
We built a little hospital there in the sand of the palmerie – just half a dozen stables, and a classroom over the top of the surgery. And a pond of course – and boy, you should see the colours of the dragonflies. Oh, I nearly forgot, two ostriches as well. And before you ask, no, I’ve no idea how we end up with two ostriches. But I bet the eggs make a hell of a big omelette.
What a place this is. In the hotel we stay in in Douz, a village about ten miles further south, you look out of the window, across a little road, and that’s it. Sand. Miles and miles and miles of it. About two thousand in fact, of wonderful, rolling dunes before you hit the Niger River (remember that?) on the other side. Some beach.
And lots and lots of camels.
But of course all this comes at a price. Tourists. Thousands of them.
Working with the mobile clinic amongst the camels (mostly treating them for mange), we watch as streams of tourists – usually Italian or French, stream by for their ‘desert experience’. They appear to have to wear a brightly coloured tea-towel wrapped around their heads, and a stripy sort of cloak thing - makes them look like convicts on a chain gang. One can only imagine it’s meant to make them look like some kind of Arab warrior. But as most of them are fat, wearing trainers, baseball caps (yes, under the tea-towel), and smoking or chewing gum – it somewhat fails to capture the desired romance and mystery.
Oh, what a piece of work is man!
Jeremy Hulme
Monday, 19 November 2007
Poppies in Tunisia
Yesterday we drove up into the north-west of the country, almost up to the border with Algeria – the tail end of the Atlas mountains. Cold and bleak at this time of the year, it was also drizzling with rain.
The hills themselves are either stripped bare by over-grazing and wood-cutting (who can blame them for trying to keep warm), but where given some kind of protection they are thickly forested with mostly cork-oak trees. Incidentally these are the only refuge for the Barbary Stag, the only species of deer in Africa and now very rare.
But one of the reasons SPANA is in the area is to help the mules that work in the woods, bringing down great loads of cork to the collecting points.Yesterday, however, we took the mobile clinic to the souk in Bousalem town itself. Held every Thursday, it reminded me of a British boot-sale only most of the stuff was not stolen goods. Farmers and traders bring in all their produce, and a sea of tents and shelters springs up, selling everything from vegetables to shoes, buckets to shovels, cereals to spices – a vast assault on the senses – noise, colour and smell.
And of course there are animals in their thousands. From chickens (in truth, not destined probably to have a very good day), rabbits (likewise), sheep, goats, cattle and hundreds of horses, mules and donkeys – many carrying the goods for sale, and the people to buy them. It must have been a bit like that in Medieval Britain – I bet Robin Hood would have felt quite at home. We park the Landrover in a corner, where people park their animals, and treat a steady stream of sore feet, cuts and scratches, a bit of a cough, a touch of mange, an infected eye – all the usual complaints.
But then after the crowds have started to drift away about mid-day, we pack up and head up into the hills – a different village each afternoon. We arrive in a cluster of shabby stone houses and yards – it looks as if everyone has emigrated - but suddenly, almost out of the rocks and ground itself, animals start to appear.
Amazingly, after a mere ten minutes, there are thirty or so owners and their animals standing round the mobile clinic getting wormed, or feet trimmed, even anti-biotics for an infection. And here there is time to talk to the owners and tell them what is going wrong, and how to look after their livestock better.
That’s another myth – most visitors only see the rich coastal strip of the country, with its hotels, shops and bars, and the money that comes from the tourists. But twenty miles inland, it’s quite another story - another world in fact – where poverty is still rife, and people and their animals struggle to wrest a living from a hard country.
By this time we are frozen stiff, and grateful to climb into the Landrover, say ‘Goodbye’ to the team, and start the long drive back to Tunis.
November is a particularly poignant time to drive along that road, as it was the same road that the First Army fought their way along in the winter and spring of 1942/43. All along the road there are the green signs of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, marking the cemeteries that plot their route to the capital. In one, at Medjez-al-bab, there are nearly fifteen hundred graves, mostly of men killed in late April 1943, just a fortnight before the Germans finally surrendered in Tunis.
I say men, but most of them, as can be seen from the ages on their gravestones, are just boys. In the failing light and November drizzle, I put last week’s poppy on the grave of an unknown soldier of the Black Watch.
Perhaps it’s just that we were cold and tired, and working with another very basic sort of existence, but walking out of that tragic, lonely garden was a very sobering and humbling experience.
Jeremy Hulme
