Southern Tunisia by Nigel Tisdall
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Mirages aren't what they used to be. Cross the Chott El Jerid, the largest salt lake in the Sahara, and the horizon magically turns to water, spawning a cabaret of illusory shapes that tax the traveller's imagination. While earlier visitors simply mistook these dithering blobs for swaying camel-trains and shimmering oases, the modern, image-cluttered eye is spoilt for choice. Are they oil tankers or stretch limousines? Horror-movie insects or squashed musical notes? Rock buns or petits Mont-St-Michels?
Set in a desert landscape renown for its eye-foolery, the Chott is a natural, 360 degree mirage-cinema, and the weirdest, most unavoidable sight in southern Tunisia. An arid, café-au-lait mud puddle as big as Norfolk, it's the largest in a series of salt flats that effectively splits the country in half. Clusters of palm-shrouded oases hug its sterile shores, south of which lies a sea of sand too vast for the sun-roasted brain to contend with, the Grand Erg Oriental. While most visitors to Tunisia happily stay north, clambering round its magnificent Roman ruins or slumbering on the beaches, others are tugged south, to heat, dust and a desert encounter.
Anyone suffering from a desire to wander in rolling, golden dunes, otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia Syndrome, will need patience. A third of Tunisia may be desert, but only the south-west conforms to cliché. Warm up first with a visit to the isolated mountain oases of Mides, Tamerza and Chebika, close to the Algerian border, where you'll quickly learn how the desert is a landscape of deceits. As if by some divine finger-click, what appears to be a lifeless quarry-land constructed from very old vol-au-vents suddenly turns into a secret, shady world full of gorges and waterfalls. The valleys fill with date palms, pockmarked cliffs focus into abandoned villages, young boys appear like dei ex machina, bearing glittering geodes as big as coconuts. You might be 130 miles inland, but the hills are ridged thick with the compressed fossils of sea-shells, and all the café-shacks have boxes of shiny sharks' teeth for sale.
The mountains stop abruptly at Chebika, providing an unsettling opportunity to contemplate the desert plains panning out to the south. The Romans called this border village Ad Speculum: in their day the news came in daily mirror-winks, and every now and again the archaeologically-mad mount expeditions to search the sand for the milestones that marked out the empire's southern frontier, the limes. Today there's just a dead straight road, running across a dead beat land, hopping from chott to chott as the temperature soars. Drive it and you can watch trees shrink, rock wither to sand, everything diminish as it gets further down the route to becoming zewiq, a fine, ochre dust that permeates all things and leaves a terrible, hangover taste in the mouth.
At Douz, billed as 'The Gateway to the Sahara', the dunes begin. They're pure zewiq, the next thing up from nothing. Endless heaps of silky, powdery sand, doing their utmost take the town over. Douz is an ancient oasis now doubling as adventure playground, living evidence that, as Paul Bowles puts it, "in North Africa you are confronted with a mélange of the very old and the most recent, with no hint of anything left over from the intervening centuries". Look in the hotel car parks and you'll find expedition-scarred 4x4 vehicles loaded with shovels and water canisters. Designer nomads lounge around the swimming pools, microlites tear through the skies.
Yet go downtown at night, sit outside the Café Flame, amongst the card schools and the hookah-puffers, and you're in the world well before Michael Jackson. Just a warm breeze and friendly chatter, punctuated by the clack of dominoes, the rattle of harness, the sweep of yellow headlights past the louage station. Or go to the Thursday morning market, wander amid the spice dunes, listen to the call of the blind
scythe-seller, watch five men in matching burnouses argue over the dental state of a goat. Only the carpets signal change, for now they're using bright, synthetic dyes and incorporating new designs into the old geometry: stick-birds and camels, frogs and bulbous-headed people that seem like distant, woven cousins of the nodding, gobbling creatures of our computer games.
And every evening, the two worlds meet. The medieval and the modern, gathering at dusk on the edge of town for a little dream-fulfillment. On one side a mob of camels, drivers and hawkers. On the other a line of tourist coaches and Landcruisers, today's battleship of the desert. Suddenly, in a scene reminiscent of the closing moments of a school disco, everybody is miraculously paired off and riding into the sunset.
For many a recently be-turbaned tourist, such a gentle camel-borne plod into the tangerine is enough to get 'Sahara' a tick on the bedroom wall-map. For something more raw, you'll have to plunge another 80 miles on down to Ksar Ghilane. Beware: deserts contain untold deposits of merciless monotony, and the bum-shattering there may test your love of them. Some relief is provided by a few lonely palm frond shacks offering drinks, shade and existential entertainments: a pet desert fox-cub waggles its oversize ears, some trans-Saharan bikers discuss the weather in Switzerland, the patron bludgeons a snake to half-death, leaving its body to writhe in the sand in a macabre imitation of Arabic script.
Ksar Ghilane is a convenient objective for anyone seeking a non-life threatening brush with the void, a small oasis with a growing number of campsites equipped with Bedouin tents, showers, swimming pools and camp fire singalongs. Somehow such mod cons fail to diminish the sense of isolation, and there's ample opportunity to indulge in what the French call un baptême de la solitude. Whether you go walkabout in the virgin dunes, sit contemplating insect tracks in the sand, listen to the wind in the palms, take a camel across the Erg to a ruined Roman fort - or just stand chatting beneath a reassuring firmament of stars, it hardly matters. The desert has an overwhelming presence - and, as Bowles observed, induces feelings not of loneliness but reintegration. For only here do you have "the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute".
After this, the only way is up. A day's drive will get you to Jerba, one of several Mediterranean islands currently claiming to be the lotus-eater's paradise where Ulysses got wrecked. Devoted to package holiday hedonism, it's ideal for a little R&R, and you can gaze wistfully at the little wadi of zewiq left in that first, blissful bath.
On the way, there's more optical tricks as you return to the mountains. If the ginger-haired residents of Chenini hadn't whitewashed their mosque, it's quite possible you'd think their Berber citadel was just another dusty, camel-hump shaped hill. This is ksour country, where every village once had fortified granaries several storeys high. Many have collapsed, others have become hotels or markets, but a few, as at Ksar Ouled Soltane, survive in a proud, precarious fashion. At Tataouine the modern world returns - a former French penal colony, it now strives to ingratiate itself with visitors by producing delicious mehchi, nut-brittle cakes shaped like a gazelle horn. Once you've loaded up with these it's an easy ride down to the sea. Unless, of course, it's a mirage.