… and also wrong about my sunburnt legs.
Although I managed to go to sleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow, it didn’t last long and by midnight or so I was back wide awake again and in agony.
03:20 came round – I saw that while I was tossing and turning hoping to find a comfortable position where I could sleep with less pain, and I must have done at some point because the next thing that I remember was that it was 06:37 and light outside.
I’d been on my travels too during the night. With two friends going down to the farm, or – at least – what passed for the farm last night. We met another couple along the way and they followed us all the way down to the house of my friends. When we arrived, I invited this couple in for a coffee (although of course it wasn’t up to me) but for some reason the husband wasn’t interested so there was just me and this woman. But my friend’s wife had cleared off somewhere and my friend was being extremely distant and offhand – I couldn’t work out what was the matter with him. So instead we went to look for my friend’s wife and ended up at the top of Underwood Lane in Crewe. It was rush hour – Rolls-Royce chucking out time and the streets were crowded with people on bicycles and there was a collision between a couple of bicycles right in front of us and that needed to be sorted out. We went into a bakery there and my friend’s wife was there. She made me take a loaf from the drawer at the bottom of the display unit. It was nice and warm as I put it in a paper bag and I went off to pay for it. I’d already bought a couple of buns from here and so I didn’t want to take them up to the cash desk with me but she was rather persuasive. As I came towards the queue there were maybe three different people heading towards it from about three different directions so she told me to use a handy shopping trolley as a barricade to block off the queue from any direction other than the one in which I was heading. So I blocked one man off so that he would have to come to get behind me in the queue.
Leaving my stinking pit was awful with the pain in my legs. But a close examination of them has realised – as I feared – that it’s not just the sunburn that’s causing me problems. My legs have swollen too. The heat can’t have been good for the water retention issues which is a tragedy as far as I am concerned. I thought that I had passed beyond that, but apparently not.
I was a little late going down to breakfast, and I almost missed the people I had been hoping to see. But that can’t be helped either. But it was such beautiful morning that rather than stay in and do any work I dressed up properly, making sure that everything was covered up, and went outside.
Outside in the car park we discovered that if the tourists don’t want to go to the souk, then the souk will come to the tourists.
It’s the usual cheap touristy nonsense sold at about 10 times its value (something that should come as no surprise to anyone of course) and there was nothing on sale that was of any interest to me whatsoever anyway.
but it clearly works for some people. Almost every child in the resort was wandering around later clutching a stuffed camel. Any why not after all? It’s a kids holiday.
Talking of kids (well, at least one of us is) the hotels here are very child-friendly.
There are five swimming pools here and they all cater for kids from all ages. These water chutes would keep many a child out of mischief for a considerable period of time.
And according to a woman whom I met on the bus that took us to the desert, there are others that are even more child-friendly than here.
A nice cold orange juice on the patio by the sea was a good place to start and then making sure that the parasol was positioned correctly I installed myself on a recliner with my book. And there I stayed for several hours – longer than is appropriate but at least I was covered up from the sun.
Back in my room I had a good relax for a while before going down to lunch. The usual salad and bread, and then I was off on adventure.
Just about half a mile from the hotel is a tram stop. There’s a coastal tram that runs between Sousse, the airport, Monastir and a few points south and I was determined to have a go on it. So running the gauntlet of the taxi drivers loitering outside, I headed for the highway and the tram.
No ticket machine on the station so I enquired of a fellow passenger as to the arrangements for paying. “A man comes round on the train” so she told me. So its still the good old-fashioned conductor them. Can’t say fairer than that.
Bang on time (which I suppose is something of a novelty out here) the tram pulled up at the stop.
You can see that it’s a nice modern tram – or, I suppose – train, really. All-electric and probably metre-gauge.
Comfort was, well, basic, but you don’t expect too much. especially when you consider the price. It must be five or six miles to Sousse at least, and the fare was 800 mills – that’s about £0:25. Who can complain at that?
And there was provision for disabled passengers too, and it seemed to be respected by the passengers.
One of the reasons for going to Sousse was that coming back the other evening I had noticed a couple of large ships in the harbour, and the harbour seemed to be easily-accessible.
And I wasn’t disappointed either.
Over there we have the Bekir Hacibekiroglu, a Turkish-flagged general cargo ship with a deadweight of 3500 tonnes. Built in 1985, she sailed … "dieseled" – ed … into the harbour here in Sousse on 15th April 2015 and from what I can find out, hasn’t moved since. And so I wonder what her story is.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the usual place for ships to go to be laid up is the Gulf of Piraeus and seeing as that is much closer to Turkey than here is – and also closer to the ship-breaker’s too – I was surprised to see her parked here for so long. Just think about the berthing fees
No such issues with the Sahra 2 though. By the time that I had returned to my hotel and looked on the ship-tracking website that I use, she was halfway down the Mediterranean. And when I came to type up this article she was in the Black Sea off the coast of Romania.
She’s an agricultural commodities carrier built in 1989 and flies the flag of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines – an unusual choice for any ship if you ask me. But then there is an “offshore banking community” there, of which it has been said that “its secrecy causes some concern”.
So maybe that’s the answer.
Our third ship is the big one in the background behind the police and customs patrol boats. I couldn’t get any closer than this because that side of the port was a wall and a warehouse, not an open railing like this one.
She’s the Milou – which, by the way, is also the name of Tintin’s dog – a Panamanian bulk carrier with e deadweight of almost 17,000 tonnes. She arrived here this morning from Thessaloniki in Greece from where she had departed on the 11th, so she’s been getting about a bit too.
They aren’t the only ships in the harbour either.
Sousse was one of the centres of the Barbary pirates of the early modern era and there are several ships such as this one, all imitation pirate ships, that will take you for a run about the harbour for an hour or so.
It’s long been my ambition to got for a voyage on a sailing ship but in the heat on a sea as calm as a mill-pond isn’t quite what I have in mind. And besides, I don’t really have a couple of hours to spare.
Instead, I was going to explore the city for a couple of hours.
And the first port – if you’ll pardon the expression – is the beach. This is where all of the locals come to relax but there weren’t all that many people out there right now. They were all under the shade of nearby awnings or cafes, and where I should really be if I had any sense although that’s not likely now, is it?
It really was warm and I was glad that I had brought a bottle of water here.
Those people who were about were heading for that rather large rock over there. I’m not sure if it’s natural or man-made (the rocks around it, I mean – the concrete is certainly man-made) but it won’t be a diving platform. While it’s incorrect to say that the Mediterranean is tideless, whatever tides there are here are comparatively insignificant.
For that reason alone, you won’t find too many people diving into the sea off that. And I can’t say that I blame theM.
One of the (many) must-see places in Sousse is the Parc Charles Nicolle at the north end of the city centre. And I bet that you are all wondering who he was when he was at home, if he ever was.
He was born in Rouen in 1866 into a distinguished medical family, and followed in their footsteps into the medical profession. However he developed a deafness that inhibited his active role and instead he took to the laboratory.
In 1903 he was appointed chief of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis and remained there for the rest of his active life. At was during this period that the first serious studies of African (as opposed to world-wide) diseases and illnesses began, and he was in the van.
He will however always be noted for his fleas.
What I mean by this is that he was one of the first to investigate the spread of typhus and to work out that it was due to the flea. Disinfecting the clothing, taking a steam bath, and improving general hygiene and cleanliness, all measures that he applied to the patients in the hospitals, brought about a rapid decline in the spread of the disease.
His work in this field was to bring him a Nobel Prize in 1928.
As I wandered around the park I came across yet another photography shoot. I seem to be finding dozens of these right now, don’t I?
In this one we had a woman on a swing with a man pushing her, while a woman was taking the photographs.
No idza what they were advertising or what was the purpose of the shoot, but it seemed to be something quite complicated and serious by the looks of things.
I’ve mentioned previously that the Revolution in January 2011 affected tourism quite badly, and there were a couple of indiscriminate shootings in 2015, one of them just up the rod from here in Port-el-Kantaoui, that made matters worse.
We’ve seen a couple of hotels that have been abandoned as a result and here in the centre of Sousse there’s another one. I suppose that the issue with this one is that they can’t put a wall around it to keep the tourists in and the street pedlars and other unwanted people out
But it does go to show just how much tourism has been affected here in Tunisia by the events of the last few years.
Walking back towards the town I was accosted firstly by a taxi driver who was desperately searching for custom. I don’t know why these people think that Europeans don’t have legs but there you go.
But when I told him that I was walking, he told me all about the Medina (most of which I knew anyway) and pointed to where it was, which I also knew.
A couple of minutes later, I fell in with one of the waiters from my hotel. Or, rather, he fell in with me. He told me that it was the last day of the sale in the souk, and now was the chance to pick up a real bargain. And he knew just the person.
Without wishing to be impolite, I turned down the opportunity but he was most insistent, so seeing that I can waste far more of anyone’s time than they can ever waste of mine and that it was a chance to have a conducted tour of the souk, I tagged along.
One thing about the souk here in Sousse is that it’s said to be the most complete, orignal and authentic in the whole of North Africa. And who am I to argue with that?
Fighting off the hands that were trying to pull me into their boutique, we eventually arrived at some dingy shack down some dark alley somewhere.
And here I was shown some leather jackets.
The proprietor did the “fire test” to prove that the jackets were real leather, but of course he used his own lighter filled with his own gas rather than anyone else’s lighter filled with gas that he didn’t know, and we’ve all seen that behaviour before.
And then the bargaining commenced. It was a beautiful jacket, so he told me, “made of the finest leather and the quality is superb. It’s made by the same people who make all of the leading jackets for the Government and for export”.
It was on sale at 1350 Dinar (that’s about £425) but as a special favour to me I could have it at half-price – a bargain at just 675 Dinar.
The usual response when a price is mentioned in a place like this is to burst out into fits of uncontrollable laughter and so he tried again.
After about an hour, with my “guide”, clearly on a percentage, perspiring in a corner, we were down to 300 dinar but then I told him that I didn’t have any room in my suitcase to take it home anyway.
A while later he started to try to sell me a belt and when after another half hour, and a dramatic drop from 80 to 20 dinar, I walked away and left them cursing in their little booth.
I was more interested in the watch tower.
It’s called the Ribat of Sousse and construction began in the 8th Century when the Arabs took control of the area. It was slowly expanded and reached its present form in the 10th Century. It’s claimed to be one of the most complete and original of the surviving towers, and even has a toilet and a rainwater storage tank.
Unfortunately it also has a mosque, which means that seeing as it was prayer time I couldn’t go inside to climb to the top. But there may be another time for that.
The Medina of Sousse dates from roughly the same period (the city that was here when the Arabs arrived was totally destroyed) and is considered to be one of the finest, most complete of the “first generation” Arab medinas of North Africa. And as a “seafront” Medina it’s practically unique.
So much so that it was registered on the list of UNESCO’s places of importance in 1988, and quite rightly so.
As well as the metro station, Sousse has two main-line railway stations. And the one in the centre of town has a train that goes to Tozeur on the edge of the Sahara, and this train was going to be my fall-back method of getting to the desert in the absence of a better offer.
I wandered along there to have a look at the trains, but my attention was sidetracked by this pick-up.
We’ve seen several types of vehicle that here never offered for sale in Western Europe, and here’s another one. It’s a Mahindra Scorpio Getaway and here in Tunisia are the first that I have ever seen.
Although there is a set-up ready to import them into France and Spain (where it will be called the “Goa”) and maybe even the USA before too long
Back on the streets again and my route takes me past the statue of Habib Bourguiba – just in time for the rush hour.
And just in case you are wondering, which I must admit that I was too, Habib Bourguiba was one of the leaders of the movement opposing the French colonialism here in Tunisia.
He became the first President of an independent Tunisia and is considered by many to be the founder of the modern state.
But I’m more interested in the railway lines. It seems that at one time there was a line that connected the metro line and the main line with branches off to the docks. That would have been exciting to see.
Back at the railway station I found that there was a train all ready to depart. There was also a ticket window so I went to buy a ticket in advance of boarding.
And here we had a most delightful conversation –
Our Hero “do you have to tell the driver where to stop, or does he stop automatically at every stop?”
Girl in ticket booth (after consultation with colleague) – “yes”.
So there you are.
But never mind the Metro for the moment, I’m far more interested in the locomotive that is parked alongside it.
It’s a locomotive from our old friends the Montreal Locomotive Works and is one of the 145 examples of the MX620 C-C diesels of 2000 horsepower built during the period 1973-1980. The SNCFT bought 22 examples which, we are proudly informed, date from 1971. And I’m still trying to work that one out.
But it’s certainly not the kind of machine that you would expect to see on a tramway or a metro, or whatever they might call the line here.
Hemmed in like sardines we were on our train, which by the way was built by Hyundai in 2011. And we rattled our way back to the hotel tram stop. Another 80 mills – or £0:25.
I didn’t have to apply the test about whether I had to ask the driver to stop or whether he stopped automatically because there was a crowd of people waiting at the station to board the train and they stopped it for me.
I alighted and walked back to my hotel, dodging the traffic on the ring road.
Back here, I had a little rest and then came down for tea. And arranged an alarm call. My bus calls for me in the morning at … gulp … 02:40, so I need to be up and about by 02:00 at the latest.
I don’t like that idea at all.
