We only have two days left of what was supposed to have been a six-day road trip. We sort of “lost” the first two days due to the package ordeal, but we are still satisfied with the trip. We are especially excited for today.

But let’s get back to last night. We arrived at the Maison D’Hôtes Dar Fatima in the early evening. This is a B&B and what a B&B it is! We 100 percent recommend this to anyone who wants to stay in a lovely home, with delightful and friendly proprietors, and excellent food! Oh, if you like cats, you will like one of their cats. Even they say that one is nice and one is mean! 🙂

Here are a few pictures of the rooms and the terrace:

We ate a big breakfast and headed out the door.

I’d told Michael that I wanted pictures of camels today. We hadn’t seen many at all thus far (maybe three?) and hadn’t taken any pictures. Boy, did we hit the motherload of camels!!! I mean, we didn’t really hit them, we just admired them. First there was just this one guy by the side of the road:

Then, there were 11 camels crossing the road. . . . quite near a camel crossing sign. 🙂 🙂

Continue reading →

We decided to take a road trip. As I began investigating places, I learned that several Star Wars scenes were filmed here. In fact, Tunisia is distinguished as the country with the second most number of unique Star Wars film sites (12 in total).

Our road trip began with a bit of a challenge.

Day One:
We first drove to Tunis (2.5 hours in the “wrong” direction) because a portside window that was supposed to have been delivered to the marina was held up in Customs. Not knowing where exactly to go, we went to the airport. One person directed us to an office at the airport. After finding someone who spoke English there, we were told to go somewhere else. There, we located a FedEx agent who told us that we had to go to a different location to see the Customs Inspector. He mentioned that the inspector works from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. It was about 2:00 p.m. at this point. He told us we could go there anyway to see if they would release the package.

The building he showed us on the map turned out to be the wrong building. After asking a few people where to go, we found the FedEx building. Here we learned two things: 1) the package was there, and 2) they would not release the package until the inspector had done his thing. We were instructed to return to return at 9:00 a.m. the next day.

We didn’t want to drive 2.5 hours back to Monastir only to have to return the next morning, so we spent the night in Tunis. We stayed at a lovely hotel and had a nice dinner. But we completely missed the site we were supposed to have visited that day.

Day Two:
We arrived at the FedEx office the next morning at about 9:30. The inspector arrived at about 10:30 a.m. He informed us that we needed to pay a 100 TD fee, but that we needed to go elsewhere to pay it. Luckily, the “payment” location was where we’d been the day before, so we knew where to go. We made the payment and headed back to FedEx with the receipt. We paid another 18 TD (why, we don’t know) to FedEx, after which they assured us that they would mail the package to the marina.

We now needed to drive straight to our hotel, so we didn’t get to see what we’d planned to see on the second day. We drove the last hour in the rain and darkness on some iffy roads, with water, sand and rather large rocks deposited at unexpected intervals due to recent heavy rains. We enjoyed the view of the thousands of trees planted along the way, as well as how the terrain changed from orange to tan.

Continue reading →