Articles > Desert Blossom Days

The little dark oasis had no name, but she was a beauty. Not as fertile as Nefta with its long avenues of eucalyptus and white-domed shrines. Less picturesque than the Roman hot springs at nearby Kebili. Nothing like as grand as Gabes, whose dates and almonds gave birth to a small city. But a neat row of trees, clearly picked out against the sky, beside a cluster of rocks surrounded by an expanse of perfectly clear water.

I wish we could have driven closer, but we were late already, crossing the great salt lake of the west, and had to settle for a distant view. But distance can deceive, and I vaguely wondered why the perspective did not shift as we put the long straight kilometers behind us. Some trick of light kept it facing the same way until it faded into the horizon.

And then I saw why the little dark oasis had no name.

This is not a tale of the deep desert, and old Sahara hands will be quick to offer you better mirages than that one. Although Tunisia does share part of the Grand Erg Oriental with Algeria, its huge blankness on the map rules it out decisively for tourists. Erg, by the way, is the real cartoonist’s desert, great scoops of caramel a thousand feet high, ribbed and rippled, shunted this way and that by the merciless sandstorm. A simple anagram gives you Reg, which is the other kind of desert, more like a Biblical wilderness, stony white soil dotted with low shrubs, and this is the fabric of Southern Tunisia as most people know it.

From the Gulf of Gabes right across to Nefta, the limit of Roman Africa and still very much the end of the line, stretches a hundred and fifty miles of dusty trails, winding past dried-up river valleys, lunar ridges and craters, palm-ringed plantations, underground villages and shady market squares, to the treacherous quagmire of Chott El Djerid, said to be birthplace of Poseidon.

The Chott is no longer the death-trap it was. It may be a few centuries since a thousand camels and their drivers were lost there in one day, but until the new road was completed, a careless motorist could pay the ultimate penalty for losing his way there. Today the eerie remoteness of this vast white salt basin is relieved by a couple of stopping places with cafes and market stalls. And although I can reassure you that the Toilette de Mirage is not in fact a mirage, almost everything else is, from the tents and fishing boats on the horizon to the weird shimmering lakes that love to tease the newcomer’s vision.

Mirages are, of course, incidental to the crossing of the Chott el Djerid, which remains the only way of reaching those two legendary oases Tozeur and Nefta.

The dates on your Christmas table have probably come from Tozeur, which can boast seventy varieties of them. The best of these is the translucent Deglat-en-nour or Date of Light. (I suppose it is too late to stop amateur linguists translating this as Finger of Light, as the error has seeped into quite reputable guidebooks.) This date-forest is strung out along miles of meandering river-beds, or wadis. It was born in a spirit of compassion, fertilised by the tears of the prophet when a pauper chose to be buried alongside her date-stones. To this day, there is something innocently welcoming in the atmosphere here, unlike the more spectacular Nefta, which seemed to me to possess a curiously lethal beauty, like a many-headed snake.

Do not, however, fail to visit this cornucopia of botanical wonders, for it is the finest oasis on earth. Filling a well-watered crater known as the corbeille (basket), it offers you dates and bananas, olives and pomegranates, figs and cotton-plants, orchids and prickly pear at all stages of nurture, fed by a thousand springs. And then you have to turn and go back through Tozeur again. One visit to Nefta, the siren-temptress. Two to the earth-mother Tozeur.

‘Ship of the Desert’ is right. Trying to anticipate the tilting and rolling of a camel is like dancing on board ship in a high sea. (There’s even an on-off rumbling from the engine-room, a sort of plaintive purring.) Eventually you stop trying to do fancy things with your knees and just roll with the punches.

I don’t know why the sunset looks better from the back of a camel, but that lofty vantage-point does seem to lend itself to such contemplative moments. The ceremonial camel-sunset starts at the old part of Tozeur and winds up towards the belvedere - a pair of high rock tables giving the best long-range view in this part of Tunisia.

And then, inevitably, it’s back across the twinkling white crust of the Chott to Kebili. This oasis takes the form of a pleasant rounded pool, neatly circled by palms, whose hot springs have eased rheumatism for two thousand years. Once a notorious slave centre, Kebili is now a major garrison town. In between times, it housed the French Foreign Legion, whose old fort is now the Governor’s headquarters. Only the outer wall is original. But behind that wall, a thousand fugitives, the sweepings and riff-raff of Europe, dreamed of their future as free citizens of France. But France knew it was on to a safe bet. For if five years under the white kepi did not defeat them, civilian life usually did. Not one ikn ten of this hard-faced crew ever made it to a peaceful retirement. The best of soldiers, the worst of citizens, they can still give young men dreams to dream.

Kebili being a junction, you can try crossing the Chott El Fedjadj - smaller but more dangerous than the Chott El Djerid - leading to Gafsa, which many, including Norman Douglas, have found less than enchanting. Or you can take the well-kept Route 16 direct to Gabes. But best of all, head due south to Douz.

It is from Douz that all journeys into the Grand Erg Oriental have to start, but these are really for keen anthropologists only. Not everybody wants to plough through fifty miles of sandstorm in the hope that someone might be getting married at Sabria, providing an excuse for the dance of the whirling hair. (This all-day knockout contest is the only time local Berber women are allowed to uncover their heads.)

You’ll do better with the Sahara Festival in December, where desert rituals are performed in Douz itself - camel fights, shooting matches, cavalry charges with gunfire and war-cries, even verbal jousting by famous Tunisian poets. And the view from Douz is your only chance to see the real deep dunes of the Erg without making a wasteful detour. You first meet this soft golden sand in the ruts of the nearby trails, often sending your Land Rover swerving out of control. And then, as you gain height, there it all is spread in front of you, smooth as satin, stretching away beyond the horizon to hidden frontiers that nobody will ever cross.

For me the most vivid sunset was nowhere near the deep desert, but up in the Matmata Hills, which are easily recognisable as one of those mini-Hollywood locations, like the mountains below Granada. Star Wars was filmed among these unearthly peaks and craters, and their sharp, lengthening shadows seemed to me something epic in themselves.

What first caused the Matmata Berbers to live the troglodyte life is debatable. Camouflage has been suggested, but tacticians have laughed this out; they would of course be sitting ducks in these open pits. Whatever it was, they noticed that underground cave homes could take the edge off hot summers and cold winters alike. And so, five thousand of their descendants continue to live simply in these perfectly practical dwellings of small rooms hollowed out from around the main crater and entered from a side passage.

More outlandish in a way is the Berbers’ other experimental habitat, the Ksar, this time clearly designed for military defence, but also adaptable as a market and a granary. The Ksar is made up of tiny stone vaults, stacked up six high, called ghorfas. With their uneven contours and steps leading up, down and through the ceiling, they suggest something between Gaudi and Dr. Caligari. In Ksar Haddada, at the other end of the Ksour Mountains from Matmata, you can even spend the night in one of these low-ceilinged cells, while the few still left in Medenine have predictably been converted into souks.

By now, we are on the fast road to Gabes and the sea. Gabes is big, boring and bureaucratic - until you visit the oasis which was its original raison d’etre. Carriage-rides can be arranged to take you round this delightful sea-garden with its quarter-million palms, and no fewer than four hundred different fruits, cereals, spices and herbs are successfully cultivated here, helped by a tiered arrangement of beds in a particularly fertile soil. Date and almond were both in blossom as we passed through, to a chorus of the loudest frogs ever heard.

A few miles North of Gabes, you will barely notice a pebble-strewn wadi called Oued Lakarit. Yet a crucial piece of modern history fought itself out here, and ‘Wadi Akarit’ remains as an unmarked monument to the dead of two great armies. Actually it’s the Germans who have the nicer word for monument (Denkmal: think a moment.) But not many Germans want to think of Akarit. For it was here that Monty’s spearhead troops - Kiwis to the left, Jocks to the right - finally punched Rommel out of Africa, and enabled the decisive crossings to Sicily.

"Djerba la douce" - a seductive phrase I first heard echoing around inside the splendid domed bar of the Hotel Menzel, quite a whispering gallery. Indeed the dome, that endlessly satisfying feature, looms large on Djerba, and you will spend much of your time relaxing contours. Even Djerba Airport is domed, lending grace to what would otherwise be a fairly identikit Swiss bank of a building.

But nothing prepares you for the impact of a 25-foot dome in your hotel bedroom. At the Menzel, apartments are arranged ten to a courtyard and if you’re lucky, you get two floors and a mezzanine on the open plan. At one end is a richly tiled wall overlooking a luxurious double bed. At the other is a large white-painted cell of monastic simplicity. You mount the steep white steps, as though ascending to a minaret. But in fact they lead up to a modern dining-room and sun terrace, topped by this majestic chalk-white dome that is all yours.

Legend is only legend - maybe - but Djerba is a prime candidate for Ulysses’ isle of the lotus-eaters, who experienced sublime oblivion and refused to sail home. A little more historically, the shellfish whose glandular fluid produced the coveted Tyrian purple dye in Roman times is still at large around these sandy bays.

The chief town, Houmt Souk, is dominated by a grim 500-year old fortress Bordj-el-Kebir, once graced by a tall pyramid of Berber skulls erected by chuckling Turks in 1560. Otherwise the town bustles with fish-auctions, leather and brassware stalls, numerous street-cafes and an excellent Folklore Museum, while a little to the south, the Ghriba Synagogue serves the last thousand Jews, the rest having gone back to Israel… Stop, this is not interesting enough.

Maybe Djerba itself is not interesting enough. I mean, look at it. Flat as a pancake. No real triumphs of architecture. No city life. But now, what was that fine phrase again? Djerba la douce…

That was actually the name of one of the first Club Med villages, still there, just beside the Menzel as it happens. And Club Med is your clue. Club Med and lotus-eaters. For Djerba is not a sightseeing island. It is a place to reserve your right to every lazy pleasure and impulse that the Mediterranean can cater for. Whatever hedonism Malta or Mykonos can offer you, Djerba offers you more of it cheaper. And with an August temperature well into the eighties (sorry, high twenties, but I wish it sounded more evocative), you may feel like being very lazy indeed. Even if not, even when you take advantage of the sailing, water-skiing, windsurfing, parascending, scuba-diving, tennis or volleyball, you are in the land of the lotus here. And you will not want to sail home.

Twice a day, we are reminded of the homogenisation of world travel: at breakfast, and a few hours earlier in the darkened boite-de-nuit where nocturnal revellers pass their time in a tradition that knows no frontiers.

At breakfast, you really don’t know or care whether you’re in Tunis, Texas or Timbuktu, with your dependable old buffet of fruit-juice, croissants, cheese, tea or coffee, maybe an apple. But as the young barefoot Arab girl stepped forward and began to vibrate suggestively at the start of the floor-show, I could not help remembering that this was still the vengeful Sunni Islam of stonings and clitorectomies. Perhaps nobody is capable of reconciling the teachings of the prophet with the urges of the flesh. One educated and well-travelled Tunisian was giving us the standard sermon about the decadent West - drugs, fast women, the lot. This did not stop him organising a party that night at which strange cigarettes were passed round, and where the girls in our group said they felt mighty relieved that our official guide was present.

Still Tunisia is often cited as the most advanced Islamic state, and perhaps that friendly approach should not be interpreted too cynically. Also Tunisia has for twenty years been the discreet choice of the gay crowd - often a tribute to the quality of life, especially the standard of cuisine. And those generous, leisurely meals - egg-&-seafood brik, the ojja or brains omelette, the ever-present couscous, the lethal harissa sauce, and the abundance of strong red wines from Bizerte and Cap Bon - have satisfied many distinguished gourmet travelers.

A spirits drinker would have brought home the famous fig brandy, sweet and stinging, alive with the fiery breath of the Sirocco. As for me, I settled for another distillation of Tunisia: a perfect golden rose, made of crystallised sand. These lie only just below the desert floor and can be dug up in clusters anything up to five feet high. But I am content with just this little palm-sized memory of the South, immortalised in flaky petals with a wink of quartz, proving that even the desert itself can blossom.

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