Articles > Oasis Holidays in Tunisia

In the tourism business, holidays in the desert are something of a final frontier. The ocean floor and Outer Space apart, this is practically the only as-nature-intended environment that has yet to be extensively featured in the brochures. Sun, sea and sand are marketed in spades, but sun and sand minus the sea is only perceived as being fun for scarab beetles, which can last for a couple of years without food. Until now.

The most famous desert in the world, the Sahara, sprawls across several north African countries, but it is at its most civilised in southern Tunisia. Here, oasis towns like Douz, Nefta and Tozeur have been discovered by Europeans seeking winter sun, and Tozeur in particular has become so popular that it now has 25 hotels, most of them with pools, a line up which includes the five-star Palm Beach where the President's Suite costs a stellar œ450 per day. So you don't have to have the staying power of a scarab beetle to survive in this particular bit of the Sahara - locally known as the Grand Erg Oriental.

Back in the 1980s the oasis of Tozeur had nine 4WD vehicles employed in tourism, mostly for Arabs who came to this more relaxed muslim world from the Gulf states to hunt with falcons for the legendary houbara bustard, prized for the supposed aphrodisiac qualities of its meat. Otherwise, the local scene was basically the same as it would have been 500 years ago, with berbers, camels and 40,000 date palms.

It was the movie business which really put the Erg and its oases on the map. Big hits like Star Wars and the English Patient were filmed here, and bits of film sets can still be visited where they have been left standing in the desert. Meanwhile the stars themselves needed to be accommodated somewhere appropriate, which led to a flurry of upmarket hotel-building, and then once the film crews departed, those hotels needed to be filled by more humdrum paying guests.

Today, the town has a well-connected airport, fleets of buses and 4WDs, the main square is lined with carpet shops, and the labyrinthine old quarter has had its delicately patterned brickwork restored. The Dar Charait Museum, with a gorgeous courtyard to rival Granada's Alhambra, runs a son-et-lumiere Arabian Nights.

But it is the date-palm oasis itself to which new arrivals should direct their feet. Oasis green comes as real therapy for tired eyes. 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 bucolic. 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 morning's brew.

Sadly, looking after the date palms is taking something of a back seat in these oases now that tourism has really arrived. But all sorts of new businesses have sprung up within and without the town walls, with quad bikes and hire camels for anyone who wants to hit the dunes, hot springs and hot air balloons for less energetic alternatives, and organised visits to mountain villages, cave-dwellings and the remains of the film sets.

Two of the Grand Erg's side trips are particularly worth mentioning here: the Chott El Jerid, and the Lezard Rouge - one a salt lake and the other an old train.

When I first saw the Chott El Jerid it reminded me of that old Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise exchange: Ernie: "Isn't the desert romantic?" Eric: "Ah, but what will it be like when the tide comes in?" The so-called lake is actually a huge 5,000 sq km flat expanse covered in a crust of bitter icing. Believe the mirages, though, and you'd think there was water right up to the Tozeur to Douz causeway.

One of the Chott's few inhabitants is Hamma, who lives midway across the trans-Chott causeway and makes his money from selling stone roses (unusually shaped salt crystals) to passing tourists. He is one of only three guides who still knows a safe way of crossing the Chott on foot, avoiding the quicksands, and it was he who sniffed the air and warned us of the imminent sandstorm.

Sure enough, our 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, because a deluge of water can turn their house walls back into the mud from which they came, laying waste to villages like Tamezret, Douiret and Chenini, ghost settlements which are all becoming tourist attractions.

The other big attraction hereabouts starts on the northern edge of the desert. The Lezard Rouge is a antique train which was presented by the French government to the bey of Tunis back in 1952, and every day it sets out from the town of Metlaoui to climb up into the foothills of the Atlas mountains.

Inside, the carriages are walnut-walled, mirrored and with leather sofas and armchairs; outside, the setting is stark and arid. Initially the track skirts the mountains, but then it spots an opening and dives in, threading up slowly through rock-cut tunnels, flickering in and out of the sunlight, broaching secret valleys, crossing and recrossing a rivulet of mud which turns into a canyon-carving torrent on the rare occasions it rains.

The train stops a couple of times in particularly otherworldly cliffscapes, and everyone piles out while the diesel yowls to stay close, like an anxious mother cat. After an hour you reach the top, a shunting yard next to the phosphate mine, and then you trundle back down again through deep romantic chasms and caverns measureless to man.

All of this new tourism exists in a parallel world to traditional desert life. On the way back to Tozeur from the train our driver stopped by a camp of nomadic goat herders, returning to the vehicle with a bottle full of 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, but it was irresistible, like musty goat's cheese straight from the liquidizer. How much did he pay, we wanted to know? Our driver shrugged. "The nomads will not make a charge for what God provides."

There's a Biblical quality to life in these parts, and obviously some of the Biblical values still apply.

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