Africa & Middle East > Tunisia > South Coast > Tozeur > Articles > Tourism & Change Come to Southern Tunisia

They have been laying a lot of new roads in southern Tunisia recently, practically the first since Rommel. On the face of it, this is a Pretty Good Thing. RIP hire-car hell, hallelujah Sahara. But as soon as you introduce ribbons of tarmac into hitherto under-exposed territory, traditional lifestyles begin to bleed away.

In the case of Tunisia's Grand Erg Oriental, which has been at a standstill since the days of the Bible, it is as if God's finger has hit the fast forward button on life, and created a parallel universe where Berbers grazing their camels are passed by northern Europeans on tour buses.

In tourism terms the desert is a final frontier, and only a cushy place to live if you happen to be a scarab beetle, and can go for two years without food. The ocean floor and Outer Space apart, this is the last “as-nature-intended” environment that man has yet to exploit for his “R&R” - rest and recreation.

In Tunisia tourists on sun and sand holidays are being tempted away from the beach, partly lured by curiosity aroused by the English Patient and the Star Wars series, which were filmed here. To the locals, it must seem as if the future has finally arrived as these capsules of air-conditioning hum through the Erg seeking that desert-in-a-nutshell experience. And because the desert tours are bolted onto beach holidays they bring with them a jet-ski tendency; the result is that the southern oases currently offer a wide choice of weaponry with which to hurtle, ululating, into the dunes, including go-carts, quad bikes, 4WD Landcruisers, hire camels, hot air balloons and even a hovercraft. That Eric and Ernie exchange - Ernie: "Isn't the desert romantic?" Eric: "Ah, but what will it be like when the tide comes in?" - was prophetic, the tide is on its way.

"Everything here is changing very fast. It is good for us," says Faouzi Chakir, a 4WD driver from the biggest of these oases, Tozeur. The roads may have opened up his home, but the desert people are still deeply attached to their own patch. Faouzi distrusts the inhabitants of Tozeur's rival neighbour oasis of Douz for reasons he declined to give in polite company, and he hates Jerba. As we neared the sea he drew the distinctive yellow headscarf that marked him as a Tozeur man tighter around his neck.

"Smell that? I am going to get a cold". It was 80 degrees in the shade.

In 1989 the oasis of Tozeur had nine 4WD vehicles employed in tourism, mostly for Arabs from the Gulf who came to this more relaxed muslim world to hunt with falcons for the legendary houbara bustard, a wily, aggressive bird whose reputation for fighting back and the supposed aphrodisiac qualities of its meat make it prime prey. Otherwise, Tozeur's main business lay in its 40,000 date palms, and the principal activity around the main square was waiting in the shade for time to pass.

Ten years on, Tozeur has 150 tourist 4WDs, the main square is lined with carpet shops, the labyrinthine old quarter has had its neat, delicately patterned brickwork massively restored, and the new Dar Charait Museum, with a gorgeous courtyard to rival Granada's Alhambra, has just opened a ham-fisted son et lumiere Arabian Nights.

Meanwhile the original three hotels have increased to 20, including the five-star Palm Beach, where the President's Suite costs a stellar amount per day. Apparently the President, too, likes to chill out in an oasis.

He has a point. Oasis green comes as real therapy for tired eyes after a day squinting into the sun down unrelentingly straight roads. The filtered light under the canopy of the Tozeur palmerie twitters and rustles, distant voices argue over irrigation and old men lurch down foot-hardened paths patched with squashed dates, seeking fresh grass for their donkeys. The whole place smells of wildflowers, woodsmoke and horse dung.

In the evening it becomes positively bacchic. A man stopped me on the road for a light, and then apologised for being unable to hold his cigarette still enough in the unwavering flame. Smashed at sunset.

I found the nearest "bar" with the help of a deaf mute on a moped. Three men were sitting on upturned crates amongst the trees, an earthenware jug of fermented palm juice between them. It had been tapped that morning, said one, offering me a drag on his hubble-bubble and a handful of tart green apricots from a nearby bush. He had to climb 40-50 trees a day, he said, a task that would be pretty unbearable were it not for the effect on his brain of the steady fermentation of the morning's brew. Didn't he fall? “Only once”, he said, and never again.

I wanted to know if tourism was having an effect on the oasis. "The springs have gone," said the tree-climber. "Now we have to pay." The government had dug wells to supply the hotels, and the 150-odd natural springs - provided by God and therefore free of charge - had faltered. "Not so long ago, if a camel fell in there" he gesticulated towards a ditch "it would be swept away." But they didn't seem bitter; hotel work was coming their way, and it was far easier and better paid than climbing trees.

Tozeur lies on the western side of the Chott El Jerid, a 5,000 square kilometre salt lake, with practically no water but an awful lot of salt, which covers it like bitter icing. Believe the mirages, though, and you'd think there was water right up to the Tozeur to Douz causeway. It took the army much effort to create this crossing; for month upon month they'd deposit earth and stones and return the next day to find that it had gone the way of unwary past travellers and vanished into the Chott. Finally, they tried digging their hardcore from the Chott itself, and that stayed put.

"I know the Chott like my pocket," claimed Hamma, a seller of stone roses (unusually shaped salt crystals) to the passing tourist trade on the causeway's midway point. Hamma was once one of only three guides who knew a safe way across, and he was understandably unenthusiastic about the new road. But we should push on, he said - after posing for a photo - because a sandstorm was on its way.

Sure enough, the Landcruiser was soon isolated in a creamy mist with sand snaking in witches' tails across the tarmac. To stand in it, barelegged was to be assaulted by dry flannels from the shins down. Paradoxically the locals are more worried by the occasional desert rains than they are by the sandstorms. The filming of the latest Star Wars - the “Phantom Menace” - was hit by a storm, which shredded the tents and caked the costumes in wet sand. It was the same sort of weather which can turn house walls back into mud, laying waste to villages like Tamezret, Douiret and Chenini, ghost settlements which are all becoming tourist attractions.

There are other ghost towns in this parallel universe, which are not native at all. The latest Star Wars set still stands in the desert not far from Tozeur, and just south of Douz are two further film locations. The first is an oriental castle from an Italian-made western, and the second was created for a Jean-Paul Belmondo film called “Peut-etre”, which, perhaps in sympathy for its title, never happened, because the producer ran out of money. The set, though, is spellbindingly surreal, a Paris in the sand, straight out of Shelley's Ozymandias, whose traveller told of two vast and antique legs of stone left in the desert:

"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Back in Douz, we caught up with a convoy of "Desert Challenge" 4WDs in the zone touristique. The clients had gone in to eat, the guide said, but after a suitable siesta they were to head out into the sand towards the new tented village (four star, swimming pool, and all tents with ensuite facilities) at Ksar Ghilane. So where was the challenge, I wanted to know. He shrugged. "Paying the bill".

The Desert Challengers had come to Douz, as I had, for the camels. Amongst Tunisians, this oasis is known for an annual festival which features fighting dromedaries from all over north Africa, but the prize money was pocket money in comparison with what could now be made out of hourly rentals.

I doubt whether my beast had any fighting pedigree, he was so compliant. My camelteer took off his shoes as soon as we were out of sight of the road, while his animal - when it wasn't turning to look at me to see if I was taking photographs - rested its head on his shoulder and wiped its nose on his shirt. They were plainly good friends.

Afterwards, Faouzi and I shared a gamey, chewy sort of beef in a local restaurant in town. When we'd finished he pointed out that, now that we had eaten camel, we should make sure we had sex before we went to sleep.

It was Faouzi's idea to stop within sight of a nomad encampment on the way home. The nomads, he said, were intensely jealous of strange men catching sight of their womenfolk, so I should stay in the Landcruiser while he advanced half way across the scrub.

He returned with a plastic bottle full of goats' milk so alive with bacteria that if we'd left the lid off it would have got out and run in several directions at once. Commonsense shrieked at me not to let a drop pass my lips - what sort of sterilization facilities are used by nomads in tents? - but it was irresistible, like musty goat's cheese straight from the liquidizer. How much did he pay, I wanted to know. Faouzi shrugged. "The nomads will not make a charge for what God provides."

Ah-ha, I remember thinking, there's an attitude whose days will be numbered in this new, parallel universe.

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