Morocco is shot through with a dreamlike essence. In the Medinas the concepts of inside and outside are blurred and forgotten, every straight line bends, and no 'street' ends up in the place the direction of travel promises. In Tangier I once took 20 minutes to walk down an empty alley in one direction, but only 3 minutes to walk back to the start. Time and space become slightly wibbly wobbly, and every moment in history is happening now. People talk on phones whilst riding mopeds down medieval streets lined with shops that haven't changed in the last 100 years, and in the mountains, the only change that the centuries have begotten is that even in villages without electricity, someone, somewhere, will be showing the football.

On my first trip to Morocco 12 years ago, I landed in Marrakesh and was hit by the blunting effects of culture shock. I quickly headed up into the mountains, where some confusion with my grand taxi driver led to me getting out in the wrong village, one having no truck with that interloper, electricity. That night, wandering streets lit only by moonlight, a man in full pointy-headed djelleba came out of a door directly in front of me, swinging a brazier of hot coals from a long iron chain. As he briskly turned and walked away the brazier swung out and sent up a great chorus of sparks, swaying and dancing towards their sisters in the stars. Straight away, with a rush, the culture shock melted away and I realised I was here, in this place, and in this place, this was what passed for reality.

Still, it has a lovely beach, which is accessed walking down steps past the old jail in the shape of a stylised ship. Splashing in the Atlantic breakers I came across the other oneiric aspect of Sidi Ifni. It has a microclimate that causes lots of brief but dense mists to arise. Combined with the bright, bright, Bright sunshine, it has an effect I've never experienced before. Turning back to face the cliffs, I watched the town slowly drift out of existence, buildings fading, then disappearing, one by one.

Despite it being January, the beach was hotter than I had expected, with the mist making it wicked humid. By the time I had reached the climb up to the fort I needed a break. As I looked for some shade to sit in I saw the rocks were scattered with wooden fetishes, more or less human in shape, and generally of a benevolent spirit. The mystery was soon solved when a voice called from a shallow cave, beckoning me in to have some tea with him as he continued whittling. I don't share the same belief most Moroccans have about the restorative powers of super sweet heavily brewed green tea, but the shade was inviting enough that I thought it would be worth what I presumed would be the hard sell to follow.

But none came. This nut-brown old man spent most of his days down here carving these sculptures not because he wanted to palm them off on tourists, but simply because the wood kept washing ashore. He was happy of the company, but was focused on his knife, trimming and scraping until he was satisfied. Suitably refreshed, I left, but he barely noticed my passing.

It wasn't too much of a climb up the cliffs to the fort, and now that the mist had burned off, it didn't feel too hot either. The fort impressed me with its bleak modernity, allowing me to take my favourite kinds of photos from the outside. I walked along the cliff edge trying to find a way in. Yet although there were places here and there where people had clearly piled up stones to get over the high walls, whenever I climbed up and looked I never saw a way to get back out.

Yet all the roads lead to it, and the edges are lined with cafés where you can sit and stare at the emperor's new airport, waiting for contact from the outside world, waiting to be sure that we're on the same plane of existence. The capital of a country that barely was, the dreams of a fading empire, a liminal space, a border between our world and something other. It's easy to forget that people live here and that this is their normal and not a metaphor or a half memory.

I take breakfast each morning in Le Café des Artistes, just round the corner from the Shake Shack, a nightclub and tiki bar that looks like it hasn't been open since tiki bars were a thing. It overlooks the old cinema whose doors remain firmly shut as well. The staff don't mind that I have their breakfast spread at 11. I don't mind that when a mist forms, the rest of the town drifts away, and I'm left drinking coffee alone in the void.

For a long time I thought I wanted to winter somewhere depressing by the sea, to watch the grey sky churn up the waves that  smash against endless concrete. It turns out that there's a lot of joy to be found in the simply melancholy. Sidi Ifni is a ghost, and sometimes the effort of being real is just too much for it to take. But even if it barely troubles existence, I can always visit it when I close my eyes. Our little life may be rounded with a sleep, but as long as dreams are made of uncut Morocco, I have much less to fear.

Thus the nightmarish Interzone that Tangier represented to the Beats, a place where one was absolutely free, with all the terror that brought, turns, in time, into the hypercapitalist, dystopian resorts that tormented Ballard so.

Instead of everything being permitted, everything is encouraged, for a price. Pork and booze are on all the menus. Everything is 50% off but it still seems too expensive. Restaurants play Beiber & Ed Sheeran, and 'English Pub' does Full English's and shows all the footy. There are two English language bookshops, but both have been boarded up for years. Every mosque and every tree is dressed up head to foot in disco rope, and the cats eyes flash & dance in elaborate patterns after dark.

The sketchy end of sketchy street, where djellabas hunch at long closed cafes, sheltering men with nowhere else to go, and where teenage boys ask for a dirham and tell you you're pretty, now had a massive Carrefour supermarket, where they actually turn on the fridges they store the drinks in! Actual cold drinks! There's posh flats and a gym above it, and a plaza that's walled off so that the new inhabitants can see the sea but not their neighbours.  I thought to break the chain of tajines by going to an Asian restaurant there. The summer rolls were in the right ballpark, but the 'thai' main had obviously never even been introduced to the concept of thai cuisine, or any flavour other than sweet. 

​But the weirdest thing about Agadir is that it's actually fairly pleasant. It may not be my dream, but it's increasingly the dream of many Moroccans. The conurbation surrounding it is now the fifth biggest in the land, and the cranes are still working, building more attractive housing and apartments. That's how capitalism gets you in the end: it may not be unique, or special, or authentic, but it's pretty decent, you know? A tea bag is more expensive and not as nice as loose leaf tea, but it's very slightly less faff. And in the end, we've proven that being fine is a lot less scary than being free.

Zigui's laid-back charms could hold you for a lifetime, slowing your pulse in the torpid heat, smilingly offering you a beer by the river as the sun settles down for the night. Yet we wanted to see a little more of the Casamance, and head a bit off the beaten track. Initially we had planned to head to the empty white sand beaches of Cap Skiring, but we decided to check out the seat of the Jola priest-kings, Oussouye, instead. The road winded past crocodile farms and dense hardwood forests to a town that for the first time felt entirely African, a village grown large, with a dilapidated Hotel de Ville the only sign of colonial influence. We settled into our very own Case à Impluvium, complete with pet monkey and crocodile, and sampled a more traditional way of living.

Off the wide dust roads, tracks wound through the bush on a wanderer's whim. Nature seemed very much in charge round here, with people quite literally in its shadow. There was also a mystical feeling to the place. We would wander past huts hung with drums, drawn by the sound of far off music. The Jola have a very different musical tradition to much of the rest of West Africa, having no griots, the wandering minstrels who play the pentatonic scales that came through blues to form much of the rock music so familiar to us today. Instead their music has a lamentative air, playing out over a crazed percussive bed that sounds almost like gamelan. When we found the source of the music, a house full of and surrounded by smartly dressed people, it was impossible to tell if it was a religious event or a Saturday night house party. The keening women's voices gave it something of the feel of a funeral, and as we were resolutely ignored and not invited in, we decided to keep walking.

The EU had invested in fishing in Kafountine, and boats stretched as far as the eye could see. The men working here were happy for us to lend a hand, hauling boats in to get fixed and painted up, and then back out again. On the busiest part of the beach, where catches are sorted and sold, huge fields of drying racks made out of sticks hold the pungent remains of that which cannot be sold. I wish I had taken some photos of this seemingly endless spectacle, but the occasional brightly coloured groups of women laying out the catch looked at us askance as we made our way through their place of work. Fishing has overtaken tourism as Kafountine's raison d'être, a fact starkly illustrated by an abandoned campement right next to the drying racks. It had clearly been quite an important one back in the day, but sweeping balustrades and sun decks couldn't beat out the smell of millions upon millions of desiccating fish.

The fact that tourism isn't the only game in town makes Kafountine feel a bit more genuine than some other beach resorts. Sure, occasionally an old man in a beach buggy would buzz down the otherwise empty beach, a worryingly young, bikini clad babe riding pinion, but most of the time the only other inhabitants on the beach were cows. We also met some locals who told us what things were like before the fishing came. Apparently there was some tension because a lot of the fishermen weren't from the Casamance, or even from Senegal. Still, they were trying to do up their part of the beach, and we'd always find them tidying up or building beach furniture, though they were always happy to stop for a beer and a chat.

We had met them as they sat round a fire on the beach, drumming. Sometimes I felt that all the drum circles advertised up and down the coast of West Africa were a bit tourist driven and over the top, but these guys were playing for their pleasure alone. They invited us to join in the singing and dancing. Kicking up African sand under a full moon to a range of rhythms and the deep bass of the ocean should be prescribed on the NHS as rejuvenative for the soul. The eternal blue of the sea becomes gilded in silver by the moon, and as the poly-rhythms pounded we spun circles in the sand, our spirits soaring heavenwards alongside the sparks from the bonfire.

Eventually all good things must come to an end, though, and it was time to bid farewell to Soph. I was continuing on for another month, heading North to fly home from Morocco. Travelling with Sophie had been a real pleasure, and one of the funniest fortnights I'd had in a long time. It's pretty incredible to be able to spend two weeks in constant company with nary an argument or disagreement to show for it. Our dry run-eymoon has set high standards for a real one to match up to.

I returned to catch the ferry from Ziguinchor to Dakar. Zigui's languid decay suited my soft mood perfectly. My hotel wasn't quite as plush as the one I'd shared with Soph, disgracefully lacking a swimming pool, but it made up for it by the great gaggle of birds that lived in its trees and by the fact that it overlooked the river. The deep peace of the Casamance stilled my soul and prepared me for the journey ahead.

I was intending to call it an early night so I was up in time for the ferry, but as midnight hit, a tremendous drumming started. Thoughts of sleep were banished so I set off to find its source. It appeared to be coming from some nearby tennis courts, home to a bar that Soph and I had visited once before but left without drinking anything because we found it ineffably weird. There was just something off about it, nothing to do with the purple lighting or the fact that it was a bar in a tennis court. Tonight, though, the tennis court was full of chairs for visiting dignitaries, flapping themselves with fly whisks and settling down to watch the Ballet National du Senegal.

I think it's fair to say that their ballet is a little more, energetic, than that on offer in the West. Drummers pounded, old men wailed terribly off-key, women ululated and sang choruses, whilst the dancers span and stomped their feet, flailing their arms in practised spasticity. Soloists would body-pop, before things got really hectic and the gymnastics started. At one point someone dressed as some kind of archetype put on a bit of a show before flipping and tumbling for the audiences pleasure. It was a real joy to behold. Again, I apologise for the video being dark - this is the last one before I worked out how to resolve that - but after 2 minutes the soloists come down into the bright lights and it gets a little more interesting anyway.

The next day I was relieved to find that the ferry was modern and Western, not the clapped out rust bucket I feared. This was particularly important because the currents off the coast of West Africa make travelling North exceptionally hard. The difficulty of going North kept most of West Africa isolated from the rest of the world, as it was only when Chinese technology reached Portugal in the fifteenth century that anyone was able to sail down there and actually come back. Over time this led to the increasing irrelevance of the trans-Saharan caravans and the mighty African Empires based around them, and opened up the slave trade and the eventual colonisation of Africa. This fierce sea had been West Africa's defender for millennia, and I was glad to have a solid ship to rely on as we faced its rolling troughs and peaks.

I was also lucky to have met a fascinating American girl as I embarked. Kathryn had written articles and made documentaries about Malian music, and divided her time between Dakar and Berlin, peppering her enthusiastic chatter with outbursts in German and Wolof. We stood on the top deck as we sailed down the wide Casamance and watched dolphins dance in the bow waves, the sun setting behind us. I had never seen so many dolphins at once, as pod after pod would come and jump friskily in the golden waves. As we turned to the open sea they finally left us, and as the waves started to grow in stature and we seemed to move more vertically than horizontally, more than half the passengers seemed to break out in sweats and had to lie down. It was a good time to count your blessings if seasickness were not a personal affliction. Dinner was rather unsubscribed for such a large ship, and it made sense to keep your glass more than half empty if you didn't want it to scale the sides.

I settled down for the night and looked forward to what the North would have to offer...

South of Gambia, the Casamance is tucked away from the rest of Senegal, a vast flat land inundated with water.  The landscape contrasts fairly hectic forest with impossibly extensive mangroves and rice fields that stretched on out towards the horizon – no paddies here.  It’s Senegal’s premier holiday destination, with golden sand beaches almost completely untouched except for fishermen landing their bounteous catch and the occasional cow.  It has also been undergoing a low-level insurgency for the last 30 years, one, in a somewhat Liliputan turn of events, that has its roots in an argument over what’s better, rice or peanuts.

Still, it’s not really something that has to worry you, as tension you didn’t even realise was there in Gambia drops away as you coast over the border.  The Casamance seems a particularly relaxed part of the world, and the border guards were under clear instructions to wave Westerners through with a smile.  The same couldn’t be said for the poor African student girl who was trying to get through before us.  It was hard to tell from the Wolof, but it seemed like her ID card wasn’t official enough for the border guards liking.  It looked like there was a major problem until a stranger stepped in and slipped a banknote onto the weathered desk, a banknote it swiftly inhaled, the border guard's attitude changing as quickly as his hands moved.  As we left the border shack, the stranger turned to us and said, “This is why it’s hard for us to survive in Africa.  Everyone wants to eat.”

Catching a sept-place to Ziguinchor, the capital of the Casamance, was a breeze, and a stark contrast to the fight that had almost broken out amongst the bus boys in the Gambia that morning to get us to take their bus to the border.  Even more astonishingly, the shared taxi really did only take the seven people it logically could fit, although given the general state of disrepair it was in, perhaps the driver didn’t want to chance it.

And then we were off, with a treat straight away as we watched green monkeys frolic by a watering hole whilst we cruised past.  There was also the surreal sight of young mangroves, all parabolic roots arcing out of the water just to support a few meagre green leaves.  As we drove through villages normally located in the slightly drier woods, I was worried to notice logs laid out across the road.  Could the insurgency be heating up?

It turned out just to be an army roadblock, one that they could often not be fussed about, meaning all drivers had worked out a way of slaloming through whilst barely dropping speed.  Still, the sept-place could only make about 30mph, so it wasn’t like there was much to drop in the first place.  Every now and again someone would wave us over and we’d all troop out, show him our passports or ID cards, and then he could go back to sleeping in the shade.  At one point we sidled past a squad of soldiers descending into a rice field, their guns drawn.  On the front of their jeep glowered a fierce fetish, something we noticed every army vehicle had, no doubt to increase their fighting ju-ju.

Crossing the mighty Casamance river itself you slip into Graham Greene land, a sleepy, quietly deteriorating ex-colonial town.  From the fairly manic bus station a taxi will take you the short distance into town for pennies, rolling slowly past grand old manors with peeling paint down deeply rutted roads, stopping to pick up pensioners and pregnant ladies to join you on your 700 metre journey.

It is officially impossible to dislike Ziguinchor, or Zigi, as everyone seems to end up calling it.  Even the overly persistent souvenir seller outside our hotel didn’t detract from the torpid atmosphere of delicious decay.  The town seems built for drinks overlooking the river, watched over with dead-eyed wisdom by the yellow billed storks who haunt the trees with folk memories of plague doctors.  The river is alive with fishermen and commerce, and pirogues, or motorised canoes, are the main way of getting around for locals.

Our hotel was quite frankly ridiculous for the price they asked.  It was designed in the style of half of a local case à impluvium, the communal circular houses that channel rainwater into a central reservoir.  In this case, they’d stuck in a swimming pool instead.  I cannot stress enough how much this was appreciated.  Days were spent wandering the streets, drinking in the post-colonial charm, perhaps taking a turn down to the psychedelic Alliance Franco-Sénégalaise, who took the case à impluvium style to joyous extremes, with colours that mimicked some of the most over the top African fabrics.

The only problem with all this wonder, as with most of West Africa, is that photography is very much discouraged.  You can turn a corner and see a delightful piece of Afro-Futurism incongruously rising above so much in a more typical French style, and if you raise your camera, someone will shout at you for taking a photo of something official.  Woe betide you if you ever try to take a photo with people in it – it is still very much frowned upon.  Even street scenes where no-one is a focus draw angry ripostes, and if you take a phone out nowadays people can get shirty if they think you might capture them.  This leads to a slightly strange situation where many of your photos are of empty streets, somewhat Hitler-ly (most people don’t Godwin with reference to Hitler’s art…), and is a real shame in countries where people’s fantastic sense of style is a real draw.

I do wonder if this will change as smartphones become more ubiquitous among locals, and they get used to taking photos themselves.  Certainly the Gambia and Northern Senegal were already filled with them, and the richer West Africans seem well versed in the world of the selfy and just taking photos rather than actually experiencing something.  Still, I feel it is important to respect locals wishes on this as much as possible, and it can be a good reason for just throwing yourself into something without always considering capturing the perfect shot.

Casamance rice was the basis of most dishes.  It is very short grained – Sophie thought it was big cous cous at first – and has a nutty bite and flavour.  The Casamance region grows most of the rice that is a staple for the whole of Senegal and the Gambia, and feel they never get credit for it.  In a bizarre turn of events I shall go into further in a later article, a revolutionary religious leader called Bamba colluded with the French to increase peanut production, the main cash crop.  He made it a religious duty to grow peanuts, and in Senegal much of your status is derived from how many peanuts you grow.  This pisses the inhabitants of the Casamance off no end, and I am informed that this grievance is a deeper cause of their insurgency than ethnic differences.  Still, it was delicious, and went well with the spicey stews and fish the meals invariably involved, although, pointedly, with a less nutty complexion than further north.

One day we booked a pirogue to take us out along the Casamance to a local village.  As we set off we glided past sunken ships to the Isle of Birds, which was certainly onomastically correct.  On our outbound trip we watched flamingos goose step in rows, their stick person bodies a jumble of awkward pink lines.  A kingfisher sat on a stray stick, surveying his kingdom, gliding off to strafe the water mercilessly.  A yellow billed stork stalked a mud bank, sagaciously judging the scrawing crowds around him, before turning his beady eye on us.

And then we were off, back into the mainstream of the Casamance, crossing over and plunging into a tributary.  Here the mangroves closed around us, and as we twisted through the tight vegetative labyrinth birds would flap from side to side over our heads, keeping the busy interlopers in check.  Mangroves have a curious ambience, as they’re not as high or all-encompassing as jungle.  The sky never loses itself amongst the green, and the mangroves seem quite happy to expand in area rather than reach for the light.  There’s almost a temporary feeling to them, or an idea that you’re just on some great estate whose rhododendrons have got somewhat out of control.

We pulled out into another wide channel and headed towards Affiniam, our destination.  It was marked by a line of tall palms in the distance, across wide fields of rice.  We pulled up by one of the most African groups of buildings I’d seen, sun bleached shells with a welcome sign on them.  By now it was approaching midday and the heat was intense, and we still had a fair trek before we could make it to the shade.  The farmers wore wide brimmed straw hats to protect them from the heat, Sophie was wearing a fetching army cap.  My dark hair drank up the sun and generously bathed my brain in heat.  We trudged on.

Our guide was fascinating, telling us about all the local plants in French.  I’d never seen a loofah plant before, and I guess my child mind had made them sub-aqueous, like sponges.  In fact they are a cross between okra and squashes, and can be eaten when young and green.  Once they grow and dry out you crack the shell and the intensely fibrous loofah is right there in your hands, travelling through time and space from lime green 80s bathrooms to the modern day African bush.

He also told us of the mighty silk-cotton trees, whose seeds can indeed be used to make clothes.  In French they’re called fromager, though as far as I’m aware they mong no cheeses.  Despite their huge size, the wood is very light, so it is used to make pirogues.  Their roots also stretch as far as the tree is tall, and whilst I can’t verify the exactitude of this claim, they did indeed sinuously weave their way through the village just beneath the earth’s skin.

Fruits included Japanese Mandarins, all stripey and seemingly unknown to google, and a couple of boys who wanted to sell us a grapefruit.  They were shy but friendly, unlike in so many other places in the world.  We shared it with our guide – everyone loves pamplemousse out there – and he showed us a way to eat it that makes it less violently disgusting.  It turns out it’s not just the pith that is bitter, but the skin of the individual flypes.  Hmmm, just discovered that flype is a Goss word – I guess the rest of you call them segments.  How disappointing.  Anyway, if you bite the head off a flype of grapefruit then you can squeeze the less bitter packets of deliciously perfumed juice into your mouth, and discard the manky skins like a wilted French letter.  This helped replenish us.  We also fashioned a jaunty chapeau out of a gourd to protect my head.

On the way home we saw great flocks of birds swarming and flowing over the isle of birds, and revelled in the impossible grandeur of nature.

A light mist rises from the sea; together with the setting sun it melts the beach and line of palms into a honeyed haze.  Two horses thunder along the foreshore, churning up the backwash and effortlessly overtaking the persistent souls who insist on cycling through the sand.  We sit on a raised platform under shady palm fronds, beers in hand, gazing along the curve of the bay filled with people working out or playing football.  A child nearby is playing with an iPad, a row of tiny, inquisitive black heads propped up on the parapet behind her.

(At the bottom of this blog there is a YouTube clip that is fairly murky - I was still learning how to shoot at night - but you may want to listen to the music whilst you read the post to give you a flavour of the place)

Imagine the West African landscape of your dreams, all red dirt roads leading through jungle and scrub to beaches teased by Atlantic breakers.  Now take that landscape, and dot it with concrete walled compounds, megahotels and purple signs every 15 metres enjoining you to sign up to Africell.  This is the Gambia, where odd bits of modernity draw a thinly sketched façade over the bush that is still firmly in control between the scatter of buildings.  As soon as you step off the paved roads the trees swallow you, birdsong covers the traffic, and time seems to fall away.

The Gambia is a historical mistake of a country, a small patch of land either side of a river that the British held on to in hopes of swapping it for somewhere better with the French.  At best we can be said to have neglected it benignly, something that modern mass tourism has rectified with a vengeance.  All along the coast planning laws have been thrown to the wind to create a bizarre semi-urban area where the bulk of the country now live, and where many package tourists come for exoticism without leaving the poolside.

Our hotel was reached by following a sandy track through a wood, dotted with posh flats and ‘shops’ selling ‘art’.  In most cases these were just places where locals hung out, trying to work out if they can do anything to please tourists and make some cash.  Arriving to a fanfare of birds over the growling of Atlantic waves, we were shown to the honeymoon suite, a comfortable room that suffered only from a bathroom door that required some serious tricknology to shut, and a bed whose subsidence was so bad that we took to sleeping feet to the headboard to avoid the pit.

Still, it was cute that they had scattered petals on the bed and left us a bottle of wine.  We weren’t actually married, but sex tourism is so prevalent in the Gambia that it seemed wise to protect Sophie’s virtue somewhat by sheltering her beneath my marital wing.  Now it was actually earning us free shit.  At this point, knocking back the eminently quaffable South African white, looking down through the palms to the breakers we could just make out, we decided to ride this Dry Run-eymoon for all it was worth.

We headed down to the beach.  This was our first run in with Carl the juice salesman.  A sixth finger that dangled flappingly from his right hand rather precluded him from the Gambian dream of meeting a wealthy European who would fall in love with him and whisk him away, so he concentrated on making juices and being ‘helpful’.  On this occasion, he told us where to swim (“Where everyone else is swimming”) and where to avoid (“Where no-one is swimming”), and let us know he’d be happy to serve us juices any time we fancied.

We may have cursed the early morning flight when faced, pre-dawn, with our sour-faced harridan of a host (“Flights’ll probably be cancelled.  Too much rain.”), but now, as we frolicked and gambolled through waves at lunchtime, it seemed inspired.  The beach was practically empty, the weather was perfect, the sea warm.  Ish.  It was still the Atlantic.  Yet the ocean smiled gaminely at us rather than glowering greyly, and we had a chance to decompress that afternoon and readjust to being somewhere completely different.

Had we arrived that evening it would have been in the middle of a powercut, which made venturing through the forest to the main road a trip through time itself.  Children laughed in the darkness, and the sounds were more African village than metropole.  We stopped at the first restaurant we found, which naturally was run by a Moroccan celebrity chef.  The décor was naturally suited to lamps and candles, all soft silks and plush furnishings, and the food was spectacular, if not entirely Gambian.  Duck spring rolls had roasted peanuts added to increase authenticity, and the wise diner would be sure to order some captain fish, a local monster with a similar meaty texture to sea bass, which was succulent when steamed in banana leaves with ginger, coriander and chilli.  Of course, being on our dry-runeymoon we got a free ginger and carrot cake desert that we certainly didn’t need but was bloody lovely.

It was also at the restaurant that we started to notice tourists’ ‘friends’.  We were the only white people in the restaurant who didn’t have one or more black people sitting with them.  What was particularly weird was that the Gambians and Europeans often made no attempt to talk to each other.  They sat in two different worlds, the Gambians often tapping away on their smartphones looking indescribably bored.

In fact, as the days wore on, we would realise that this was the norm everywhere.  It was expected you would have your own local fixer to book you taxis, and perhaps more importantly, keep other people away from you.  I’m not sure what saddened me more, the people who would pay someone they didn’t like to cocoon themselves from all the other locals, and then travel round with them in tow whilst trying to ignore them, or the people who were so lonely they would see them as genuine friends or lovers, and spend hours giving unreciprocated chat to locals who were visibly calculating whether the value of the meal was worth listening to another story about how difficult it was to get a hairdryer to work out here.

A fixer seemed a little excessive, given how easy it was to get around without hiring your own taxi, as the main routes had a constant stream of shared taxis called ‘8-8s’ running along them.  They got their name from the fact that every ride was eight dalasi (about 12p), and they were a great way to meet local people.  Most assumed we must be working for VSO or some other NGO, as the impenetrable difficulty of catching an 8-8 was presumed to be beyond mere tourists.  Given there were only two directions to go in, and it sometimes seemed every second vehicle was an 8-8, I didn’t really understand why more people didn’t do it.

To be fair, though, the constant attention could be a little wearying, with everyone we met offering us juices, massages, or anything they could possibly imagine they could make money from.  It was all done in an unfailingly friendly manner, with lots of reminders that we were on “Africa’s Smiling Coast”, but even though it was sad to see the low level desperation, in general if you were friendly back but firm that you didn’t want anything, then things went well and it just became part of the culture.

We did get scammed once, but what was so weird was that we both knew from the very start that it was a scam, but there was something hypnotic about the whole thing that somehow kept us both involved to see how it would pan out.  After one person had greeted us, loudly repeating our names and the fact we were recently married, another person shambled out of the undergrowth saying, “Simon!  Sophie!  You remember me from the hotel?  You are on honeymoon, right?”  When we replied that he had somehow slipped our attention, he became quite excitedly elaborate:

“I too am just married!  In fact, I got married in your hotel!  Yes, just the day before you came!  Do you know Dave, at the hotel? [no]  Afterwards he came up to me and said, tears streaming down his face, he said – this is the most beautiful ceremony I have ever seen.  He was so happy, Mr Dave.”

After this he invited us to his compound to meet his wife.  Despite this being an obviously terrible idea, we acquiesced.  A friend appeared from nowhere, introducing himself as Jimmy the Fixer, and a truer scallywag I had never seen in my whole life.  We started taking a very windy and inefficient path through the compounds, probably in an effort to make us feel disorientated.  Despite giving each other various outs, neither of us quite had the willpower to just stop and leave.  We could feel the scam coming, but how would it break?

Turning another corner, we came across twenty to thirty children playing in the dust.  “Ah yes,” our soi-disant friend said, “these are the children our family looks after.  Did I forget to mention that?  I am so caught up in my marriage.  It is so lucky I met you today, because tomorrow we are going on honeymoon so even if you came looking for me you would not be able to find me.”  He barked some orders to the kids, who jumped up and swarmed round us, hands seeking ours, or just interested in touching the white skin.  Was this to be it?  Were they pickpockets?  I kept my hands hovering over my wallet and camera as our merry group pushed on to the compound.

Inside a long suffering woman rolled her eyes and kept washing clothes as our group entered.  The compound had high breezeblock walls like most of the others around it, and although it covered a large area, there were only two or three small buildings dotted around it, the rest of the area being the same scrub as outside the walls.  We were ushered into one of the buildings, a single room mostly filled by a large double bed made grand by the mosquito net, an armchair and a sofa on its last legs.

“All the children sleep here.  We take them all in because we are so charitable.  It is hard because we are so poor, but our family are very generous.”  There wasn’t enough room for all the children in the room when they were standing up, so they sat on each other’s knees or hovered outside the door.  I’m not sure it was physically possible for them to sleep here.  “Quick, bring refreshments for our guests!”

We were brought a Fanta, despite our protests.  To be honest, this was the one scam I was particularly worried about, the old ‘slip-a-mickey-in-a-drink’ play.  I didn’t want to wake up sans camera, wallet and clothes.  He did bite the top off in front of us, which gave me some comfort but made Soph worry somewhat on account of hygiene.  Still, she knocked some back, which meant I had to put my hand around the neck and pretend to drink.  It wasn’t that I was making Sophie take one for the team, I just figured that it’d be better if only one of us passed out and she’d already volunteered, quite selflessly, I thought, for that role.

Still, our host was continuing.  “My grandfather also lives in this compound.  He is a very holy man.  In fact, he is the most holy man in this area.  Our President regularly comes to see him.  In fact, your President Tonyblair also came to visit him.  Everyone comes to pay respects to him because he is so holy and generous and deserving of respect.  What, no, I’m afraid you can’t see him.  He’s too… old.  It is so hard for someone so old and poor and deserving of respect to have to buy so much rice for all these children.  Can you imagine?  Perhaps you could help?”  [And suddenly the scam starts to come into view, I’m now regretting missing out on a free Fanta]

“If you could just buy us a little rice it would help us so much.  Children, say ‘Thankyou Simon and Sophie’”

“Thankyou Simo Sofee.”

“Say ‘Thankyou for the rice.’”

“Thankyou for rice.”

He got them to chant this again and again whilst he fetched a worn jotter.  “This is my grandfather’s book.  Please write how much you will donate here so I can show it to my grandfather, and remember that he deserves a lot of respect so make sure whatever you write down you definitely give me because otherwise you will be disrespecting my grandfather who is the most holy man in Gambia!”

Throughout this the children continued to chant, more or less intelligibly, thankyous to us for buying them rice.  Looking through the jotter I saw that many donors had been very generous, giving over a hundred pounds, and any claim that the handwriting of the most generous was somewhat similar is a bald faced lie that you should take back this very minute.

I said I was happy to buy them some rice, but seeing how expensive the honeymoon was, I couldn’t commit to the amounts listed here.  I was happy to go to the shop and buy them a small bag.  “Write it down!  Write that you will buy a bag of rice in the book!  For my grandfather, who is the most holy man in West Africa!”  I wrote ‘some rice’ in the jotter, which was snatched greedily out of my hands.  We were bustled out of the compound to a shop next door.

“The smallest bag is 3,000 dalasi [£50].”

“Really?  I can’t afford that.”

“YOU WROTE IN THE BOOK!  YOU MUST GIVE US 3,000 DALASI!”

“You really don’t sell any rice for less than 3,000 dalasi?” [Bearing in mind that’s over a month’s wage for most Gambians]

“She can’t speak.  You must pay us 3,000 dalasi.  It’s in my Grandfather’s book.”

“Listen, there is absolutely no way I am giving you 3,000 dalasi.”

“WHY ARE YOU DISRESPECTING MY GRANDFATHER!?!”

“WHY ARE YOU DISRESPECTING ME AND MY WIFE?  We came to wish your new wife a happy honeymoon, now you are demanding money from us.  Here’s 80 dalasi for rice.  We’re going now.”

And suddenly all was smiles.  I figured that 80 dalasi, whilst not much over a pound, would cover the cost of the Fanta and Jimmy the Fixer’s ‘fee’ for tagging along, whilst also saving face.  We also decided that we would have a new code – whenever we felt that something was getting dodge, we would ask if it was time to go back to the hotel for Sophie to take her medication.  We figured we could extract ourselves from any situation without causing offence by making it a medical emergency.

There were times when it was beneficial to have that excuse.  One of the things that we had discovered in pre-holiday discoveries was how important wrestling is in Sene-gambian culture, infused with juju practices and the honour of the village.  Indeed, even the inflight magazine had spoke of how amazing the experience was, and given us the number of a fixer who would take us to see some.  Of course, on calling him he was utterly bemused, asking how we had got his number and being very non-specific about the possibility of seeing some.

We then asked the waitresses at our hotel.  In general we found that guys tried to bullshit us, possibly in the hope that at some point they might make some money off of us in some unspecified way, whereas women were just honest.  Straight off, they said they thought that it was probably out of season, but that if there was any going on, it would be this Sunday afternoon before sunset, and in a stadium they gave us directions to.

Naturally, having learnt well from my father, half-way along the route, brandishing the map from the guidebook and some unshakeable confidence, I explained I knew exactly where we were and that jumping off this 8-8 would be a great shortcut.  It wasn’t.  It did take us to a stadium, but everyone was playing football.  We jumped in another 8-8 that swore he would take us to the wrestling stadium, but we made the cardinal mistake of not confirming that he would continue to be an 8-8, and as soon as the other passengers got out we turned into a ‘city taxi’ and set off onto the red dust roads that wove through the locals houses.

I still had a good idea of where we were, but from Sophie’s point of view we were now twisting through minor roads we’d never seen before, with a driver loudly declaiming that we should never trust Senegalese people, because they were always trying to scam you and should never be trusted, unlike the Gambians who were as honest as the day was long.  At this point we suddenly remembered Sophie’s medical condition and got the car to stop next to a main road back into town.  To be fair to the driver, there was another playing field on the other side of the road, but once again, they were playing football, not wrestling.  It was almost as if it wasn’t the season for wrestling…

We only had a few days in the Gambia, and at the time we were planning to do a loop that would involve Sophie coming back down from the north on her own.  This would involve crossing the river Gambia on boats.  Reports varied as to how safe this was, from, “Dear sweet God you will surely die and then have your corpse picked over and robbed,” to, “Yeah, it’s fine.”  Personally I think that the fact that there is so much package tourism means that most Gambians think that white people are precious little bubbles who will pop if they get nudged, but we set off into Banjul, the capital, to see what the boats looked like.

We were dropped off next to the President’s compound.  I started taking photos of what I thought was an art installation, until a passing local told me that photographing the President’s juju could get us into serious trouble.  The President is, to put it kindly, borderline mental.  He’s been in power now for almost 20 years, and has got steadily more repressive, arbitrarily deciding to kill prisoners, letting it be known he can cure AIDs, and pulling out of the Commonwealth when it criticised him.  He’s probably not the kind of guy you want to mess with.  We moved on; it was a Sunday and most of the streets were empty, Nelson Mandela Avenue almost eerily so.  We popped into the main market, but the number of people who wanted to show us around outnumbered the number of people selling stuff, so we soon retreated and headed down to the port.

Here we were surrounded by a number of people who, when they found out we were only checking for a future journey, all implored us to remember the number printed on their halberds.  It wasn’t immediately clear why or what they did for a living, but as we walked up the rubbish encrusted shore of the river towards the boat launch it became clearer.  As there was no pier people had to be carried onto the boats on the porters’ shoulders.  They were then paid a tip.  I have to say, it looked pretty cool, and the fact that everyone on the boats was wearing lifejackets assuaged some of Sophie’s worries.

Unfortunately, Sophie was feeling rather the worse for wear, so we ended up spending a bit more time in Gambia than we expected.  It turned out to be an excellent decision, though, as we went down to check out the fish market at sunset.  The best views are from the terrace of the Bakau Guest Lodge, which looks a bit ramshackle from the main road, but opens out into a charmingly shabby colonial type building once you get inside.  It’s lovely to sip a beer and watch the boats come in, see arguments flair as prices are discussed and declared completely unreasonable, whilst shacks on the front fry the fresh catch straight from the sea.  Aside from the views over the vibrant market, the lodge doubles as a mask museum.  The collection is simply stunning, and spread out over many floors.  The quality would put many national museums to shame, and highlights the inventiveness of local carvers and the power of their imagination.

After dark we were meeting up with a local.  Alimamo was a friend of someone we knew who had been coming to the Gambia for years.  We thought it would be better for Sophie to have someone meet her when we split and help her get back across the river.  Alimamo was a genial Islamic Rasta guy who we felt we could trust, especially as he didn’t drink (though he chugged energy drinks like there was no tomorrow), and we made sure to display lots of affection for each other in front of him just so he wouldn’t get any ideas.

We met in a place he had recommended as doing some of the best Gambian food.  Although there wasn’t the widest range of food in the Gambia, when done right it was bloody delicious.  Almost all roads were lined with little stalls where women sold either phone credit or peanuts.  Both Sophie and I agreed the peanuts were quite the best we’d ever had: we had no idea they could even taste like that.  Unsurprisingly, the dish I liked most was Domoda, a rich peanut stew, although Yassa, made with mustard and spices, was also top notch.  The juices were also incredible – when we finally took Karl up on his offer of juices he got us to knock up the baobab juice ourselves.  The fruit of a baobab tree forms a calcium-ish deposit around the seeds.  You load them into a water bottle with another juice, such as orange, then shake it until it all dissolves.  The resulting creamy drink is wonderfully tart and supposedly good for stomach aches.  Another local favourite is Wanja, purple and ridiculously sweet, and not too far off flat Vimto, which might explain why Vimto was so big in Gambia, out advertising Coke about three to one.

The restaurant that Alimamo took us to was good, but the best news was that a band came on afterwards.  The music of West Africa is one of its greatest achievements, stretching back to the complex cultures that formed in the medieval empires that stretched across Western Africa.  The most characteristic instrument is the kora, made out of a giant gourd, and sounding like a cross between a harp and a guitar. Traditional Griots could play melodies and bass-lines on the kora whilst singing praise songs, passing on oral history or extemporising on current events.  Nowadays they are often accompanied by djembe drummers, especially in Gambia, where it sometimes seemed that everyone and their dog had a drumming circle or workshop to try and entice foreigners, irrespective of talent.

This band were fantastic, though, with drummers, a kora player and a singer.  The first tune was a praise song to Alimamo himself, who nodded beneficently at this honour.  Slowly the tempo picked up, and a dancer came out and started the spastic dancing that is characteristic throughout Senegambia.  She was soon joined by most of the locals in the joint, and Soph and I needed little more encouragement.  Although we couldn’t quite manage the jerks and spasms of the band’s dancer, we ended up pounding the dancefloor with our new found friends for hours, whilst the rest of the white cliental looked on in a mixture of horror and bemusement.

It was a great way to feel connected to the Gambia, rather than always feeling somewhat on the outside, and the funky, beautiful tunes stayed with us as we rode an 8-8 back to the hotel.  The next day we would be leaving for Senegal, so it was good to feel that we had found a way into the culture.  Gambia can seem a little predatory and unreal at times, so it’s great every time you get a chance to break through and see how Gambians are when they’re not looking for a way to make money from you.  Beaches, peanuts and beautiful music – they’re not the shabbiest memories to take away from a country.

The road South to Kasserine ran through the dictionary definition of badlands.  Despite occasional half-hearted showers, the ground remained angry and arid, with scratches of wiry esparto grass the only vegetation braving such an inhospitable environment.  Dry wadis wandered between steep mesas, listless goats pretended they could make a living by lapping at stagnant pools and tearing up the memory of plants.

The scenery was dramatic, a post-apocalyptic Wild West, with glowering skies completing the look.  The unhappy towns and single street villages we passed through completed the look: quite what people did out here remained mysterious, and houses seemed to sprout solely because two roads were crossing.  The revolution grew in towns like these, anonymous and purposeless, much like their inhabitants.  No jobs or support, but with a long history of Berber resistance to le pouvoir, stretching back to Roman times.  If nature herself was that cruel a mistress, why would you put up with any crap from a master from some other world, a land of bounteous crops and fat livestock?

As you approach the Kasserine Pass, famous for being one of the most unhappy battles in World War II, some industry starts to pull itself together in an effort to give people something to do. Mostly it takes the form of turning esparto grass into something that people might actually want.  Yet there is no reason to stick around in Kasserine itself, so on, always onwards, to Sbeitla, a short drive down the road, and home to a remarkably complete Roman town.  The Arab town is strangely over-provided with places to eat, with ever more being built. Naturally, however, the quality restaurant that served alcohol had closed down.   There appeared to be no reason why every street would be so stuffed with pizza joints and local eateries, but none of them seemed to be short of trade.  I asked the man who sold tickets at the ruins if they got many tourists through, but he bemoaned the fact that they had stopped coming, and he could only rely on Allah to send them back.

The tourists would do well to come back.  The site is massive, all built from a beautiful honey coloured stone that glows in the sun.  It is famous for its central group of temples in an almost complete forum. Stood amongst them, you can briefly imagine you are back in ancient times.  Surrounding the forum are many massive bath houses, evoking a time when travellers, dusty after such a terrible journey, would clean up and ease their aches and pains.  Between the bath houses, temples, forts and churches, the actual town is fairly skeletal and resolutely geometric, a fact that made me inappropriately think of Auschwitz.  The fascist mind seems to be eternal, and seeks order in all things.

Still, when you stand in the forum you forget all these things and immerse yourself in living history.  You can walk the colonnaded walk past old civil service offices around the main square, and climb the steps into the imperial temples and kneel at the altars to offer thanks to past Emperors.  The touts trying to sell you Roman coins fresh from their brother's foundry seem very far away.

The next day I forgot that I was meant to be going to Sidi Bou Zid, the cradle of the Tunisian revolution.  But there was nothing to see there anyway, just bored young Arabs whiling time away in cafés, looking out over nowheresville and dreaming of a better life.  There was nothing to distinguish that town from any of the other dead-end places I'd been driving through, nothing that made those people more angry or ready for change.  The whole of the western Tunisia was waiting, but it wasn't clear what for.  I'm not sure they even knew themselves.  Something had to give, or any one of them could be the spark for more trouble.

I came down from the mountains and travelled through the verdant hills.  My destination sat on a ridge on the southern edge of these fields and pastures, looking south over the badlands that came next.  In the distance the sun and clouds played over cliffs, mesas and plateaus, casting crepuscular rays over the sort of landscape I’d always thought as more suited to the Maghreb.  Le Kef was also a more traditionally Arabic town: the sprawl was all to one side of the walled Medina, which meant that you could walk out of some of its ancient gates and be in the countryside straight away, which gave you an interesting taste of how things were before.

Le Kef was right on the border of the North-South divide in Tunisia, which runs from here down to Sfax on the coast, about 100 miles to the south.  The southern half is far poorer and also much more traditional.  Headscarves start becoming a lot more common on women.  Not everyone speaks French.

Whilst French isn’t universal in the North, almost everyone speaks it to some degree, and people who don’t speak any at all get teased by their friends.  A lot of people are effectively bilingual, and switch back and forth, sometimes in the same sentence.  By far the most common greeting in the North is “ ‘Assalama, ça va?”  I’ve seen women admonish their child in French then switch back to Arabic to be more accommodating.  At the very least, like nineteenth century Europe, it’s de rigueur to be au fait with French bon mots.

I had initially thought everyone was fluent, so whenever I didn’t understand someone I thought my French was at fault.  I soon realised that the vast majority of people in the North were about at my level, and indeed, if I ever fluffed something I was saying I could see that most of them thought that they had been at fault for not understanding me.  At the very least, they would speak much better French than I spoke Arabic, which meant I had hardly used Arabic at all, and in fact, could barely understand the dialect.

‘Ali was the first person I had a conversation with who spoke no French at all.  As we sat on the minibus next to each other we quickly ran through the commonplaces I was relatively comfortable with, such as where I was from.  He wasn’t to be dissuaded, though, and I was finally made to understand that he had a lot of love in his heart, that he wanted to welcome the world to Tunisia, but that the government made him cry, and so he hoped to go to Holland.  I can’t swear to any of that, as a lot of it was helped along by sign language, and another passenger who looked like his patience was being severely tried when ‘Ali kept asking him for help to get his important message across.

As we walked from the bus station up to the old town, ‘Ali pointed to a heap of festering rubbish by the roadside and signalled that this was one of the things that made him cry.  Tunisia wasn’t actually that filthy, compared to some countries I’d been to, but it was one of the things I’d wondered about whilst walking through the hills and seeing rubbish strewn liberally on the outskirts of a village. Why was I physically incapable of taking any pleasure in the multi-coloured waste dotted here and there like wildflowers?  Was it because it wasn’t ‘natural’?  Was it simply my cultural associations about litter and pollution?  Could the Arab who happily chucks his rubbish out the window not see it as a problem because he didn’t mind all the crap that was building up?  Did ‘Ali’s attitude reveal a fundamental truth in Tunisian culture, that rather than take responsibility for a problem, including the fact his own actions were contributing to it, he’d rather complain that the government wasn’t sorting it out for him?  Or did it just show the dangers of extrapolating from one isolated incident and judging a whole culture on the basis of it?

Le Kef’s medina tumbled haphazardly down the ridge in a series of steps that eschered their way back and forth.  No matter which direction you started out in you’d always end up at the Kasbah, grumpily watching over the town and defiantly closed for the winter.  Walking along the walls beneath it led to a curious site – a cross between some outsider art and what I presume was a café.  Or maybe it was just a garden, filled with all the refuse that the government refused to take away, painted in garish colours and slogans of happiness and joy.

Some of the other walls were carved with holes like a dovecot, for reasons I couldn’t fathom.  The wind blew through them hard, a harmonica moaning and wheezing, giving the streets beside them an eerie, gothic feel.  The town was ripe for ghosts: next to the spring that was the reason for its existence cafés spread around roman baths and cisterns.

Yet I was after bigger fish.  The next day I set off to visit Dougga, one of the best preserved roman sites in the world.  It wasn’t too far to Nouvelle Dougga, an afterthought on the main road when they realised there was money to be made from the ruins and kicked their inhabitants out; an untidy grid of squalor, just about passing in the sunshine.  Unfortunately, despite the sun’s brilliance, the wind had found an icy rain and was driving it in my face.  As I stumbled up the road to the ruins, the wind hardened and rain ran horizontal through me.  Dark clouds piled over the ridge.  I hid behind an olive tree, which was totally inadequate in terms of providing shelter.  The thought of a whole day in such weather was rather dampening my exuberance.

In between what I thought was the worst of the weather, I would make my way further up the hill and into the teeth of the next squall.  It was only four kilometres, but they were fought metre by metre in an ugly struggle.  I was soaked through, and could barely feel my feet and hands, but by and by the rain fell a little, the sun deigned to cast his fingers across the landscape, and I thrilled when I caught a glimpse of the ruins on the opposing hillside for the first time.

The ticket booth was fastened down hard, but at my approach a tiny window opened, and the guardian looked out in disbelief above his steaming tea.  “You walked through that?”  Still, once I was among the old walls and a little sheltered, I began to ignore my extremities and focus on the astonishing ruins around me.  The city used to be Carthaginian, which is normally given as the explanation why it ignores the normal roman pattern of fascistic grids and instead creeps round the hillside in a tight weave of streets.  The fact everything is so closely bound together means a lot of the walls have remained in fairly good nick, and the height differential means you can look down into the buildings from above.  In all, it gives you a real feeling that you are actually in a town, and it’s easy to imagine what life was like there.

There’s the usual temples, theatres and bath houses, of course, but there’s also a genuinely massive brothel, and you can wander through the underground tunnels the slaves used to take so as not to offend their masters’ vision.  The forum and market isn’t in bad shape, and you can saunter through the houses of both rich people and artisans.  There’s a huge funeral monument from Punic times down among the olive groves, and there’s views across the wide agricultural valley to the mountains beyond.  Every now and then a herd of goats will wander down a thoroughfare, and if you head through a triumphal arch then you reach the villas that have once again been requisitioned by the locals.  They slap a roof on top and straight away you have a goatherd’s palace.

One of the grand spaces was entitled the place of the twelve winds: according to the guidebook no-one knows why the winds were given such prominence or what the square was used for.  Although the weather had improved dramatically, and there were whole periods of sunshine between the fast moving clouds that danced overhead, I felt I had a fairly good idea.  I hope I’m not alone in having always imagined the ancients living in a perpetual summer, a happy Mediterranean climate where they flounced around in togas that were white to reflect the sun.  My go to image of roman life isn’t some poor, sodden bloke shivering in a toga that the rain has made transparent, splashed by mud and chilled to their very soul.  There’s a reason that the romans invented central heating and were so fond of bath-houses.  I wonder if the fact we often visit ruins on summer holidays affects our perceptions of classical civilisations, or perhaps it’s just me who was foolish enough to be blind to how often it must have been cold, wet and windy back then, even more often than it was now.

I managed to hitch a ride back down to Nouvelle Dougga, but I was taking no chances the next day, when I headed to a roman bath that was still in use.  It was ten kilometres from the edge of town, but I wasn’t exactly sure where town ended, given its propensity to grow.  The thought of walking for hours in the same conditions as yesterday was just too much, even if there was a prospect of a hot bath at the end of it.

I hired a guy in a pickup to take me.  He cranked up the tunes and off we set.  In fact, he cranked them up so loud that I had to hang my head out the window with a finger in my facing ear to stop it hurting.  I can see why autotune has caught on out here, given that the digital artefacts and distortion is nothing compared to what you get when playing badly normalized music at such volumes through dodgy speakers.  Still, the trip was lovely, if not restful, up through fields and over some rocky hills, along a gully to a small stone building on a bluff overlooking a lazy, greening river.

The bathhouse was isolated, which had no doubt helped save it, especially when combined with the fact it was fed naturally from hot springs.  It was made from honey coloured sandstone, except when you got into the caldarium itself, where heavily worn marble steps led down to the shallow pool of ruddy water, giving off a faint ferrous smell and a gentle play of steam.  It was fairly petite, with the pool being about five metres long and three across.  The ceiling was arched and almost four metres above the water.  At the top of the steps, where you came in, the room was lit through a small hole in a dome.

I got changed in a circular antechamber, then walked gingerly down into the steam.  The water didn’t quite reach my knees, but was the absolute perfect temperature.  It wasn’t the kind of hot that makes you pull your feet out and glower at the water, entirely sure that nothing delicate will stand that kind of punishment.  Yet it was hot enough that when you lay out in it, your aches and even time itself begins to dissolve under its pressure.  Lying there in the dull light, you could just make out the memories of bathers from centuries past, resting their weary bones after such a long trek.

After a few minutes, hours, days or years – it was hard to tell, my heartbeat a slowing metronome – my driver joined me, and gradually more and more locals started trickling in.  It seems like chilling out isn’t entirely engrained into Tunisian culture, and soon the bath house was reverberating to the clatter of Arabic consonants, whilst they rubbed each other down and splashed merrily away.  Luckily, by this point, the heat had shut down my reptilian brain, meaning response to stimuli was pretty much out of the question.   I floated, eyes just above the surface, whilst plosives detonated and echoed around the stone arch and dome.  The locals spoke a harsh colloquial, this wasn’t a tourist site for Gulf Arabs, and the scent of engine oil was melded to the water’s iron.  It was nice to see that this was still just a local hangout, and I imagined the surrounding villagers taking great care of it over the centuries, making sure they didn’t lose their great treasure.

Eventually, around the turn of the century, I began to sit on the cool marble steps for periods, head above the steam, my body little more than the thudding of my heart, before returning to the welcoming, numbing warmth.  This process was continued for millennia, until I could finally sit in the little antechamber and consider returning to the outside world.  For the first time on my trip I had been deliciously, gloriously hot, and a return to the bluster of reality wasn’t the most pleasant prospect.  The idea of hiding out in this refuge from time, beneath the mists that would hide me from untold conquerors and from want of anything but the earth’s cradling heat, was a beautiful dream, finally to emerge in the foreign country of the deep future with a Roman who’d been sequestered away there himself.

Still, when I got back to Le Kef and parted from my driver, I realised something had changed.  The wind had stopped.  There was an almost eerie calmness, after weeks of constant blowing.  The clouds, confused at what to do with themselves now they were no longer pursued so mercilessly around the sky, began to break up and dissipate.  As I sat outside a café that shared some steps with a mosque and an ancient fig tree, it was almost entirely blue above me.  Down the steps and across the plains, a few angry hangers on scudded round the distant peaks, but the weather had come to peace with me, and let me be.

I wanted more of this.  I wanted to be hot.  This was better than the mountains, but I still needed to go South. 

Trundeling through the Tunisian countryside this time, I saw what would have made the Romans feel at home.  Great, wide bowls of wheatfields, broken up with the occasional olive plantation, or with avenues of straight poplars leading to French built manors on top of cols.  Here and there an ignored triumphal arch or toppled column marked their presence.  Only a faint backdrop of twisted mountains suggested you weren’t on the northern side of the Mediterranean.

I’d been surprised at how verdant Egypt had been, but it at least had the decency to look tropical, all palm trees and sugar cane.  Despite being on the same latitude as Gibraltar, northern Tunisia looked more like France or perhaps southern Tuscany.  Things got even weirder when I reached my destination, the mountains overlooking Algeria around the village of ‘Ain Draham.  Here the profusion of pine and heather lent an almost Scottish feel to the highlands, one helped by the extreme changeability of the weather.  I could go for a walk in glorious sunshine, sit out a hailstorm in a café, then walk home through sleet and snow.

The village itself had a slight alpine feel, no doubt because the French had built it initially as a hill-station to escape the heat.  There were lots of beautiful old buildings with red, sloping roofs and contrasting green highlights.  Sadly, as it’s cheaper to build a new house than maintain an old one, Ave. Habib Bourguiba was lined with old wrecks, and Arab sprawl was starting to fill the valleys below.  Still, it hadn’t quite reached tipping point, and the view from my balcony whilst the sun was shining was spectacular.

My hotel, overall, was very good.  The shower had power and was hot.  I had a heater in my room.  Yet at night, when the wind tore over the ridge, it moaned its way through the cracks and slammed doors already loose in their holdings like a pubescent teenager in ill-fitting clothes.  If I went down to the lobby to use the wifi, I had to layer up and wrap myself in my scarf, as I could often see my breath.  Every hotel I’ve stayed in has had wifi, yet its effective range is often less than five metres.  If you get a room directly above the reception desk then you’re in luck, as you might be able to access it from your bed.  Maybe.

It was beautiful roaming in the forests on the hills.  A lot of them were filled with cork oaks.  Their bark has been harvested since time immemorial for bottle stoppers, and rather than doing the tree any harm it actually causes it to take in three to five times as much CO2 as normal whilst it grows back.  It also provides a great habitat for birds and animals, and provides a steady income for the locals that encourages them to treasure their woodlands.  Every time you have a screwcap bottle of wine I hope you consider how you are basically destroying the Earth with your callow heartlessness.  So.  Evil.

The best thing from a traveller’s point of view is that there are paths everywhere, as people need access to trees to harvest them.  That meant I could wander as I was wont, sheltered from the wind, and gaze out across Algeria.  Certainly the view wasn’t quite as I anticipated it.  The country people were very friendly, albeit a little surprised to see a foreigner so stupid to visit in the middle of winter.

I had a very interesting chat with a middle aged guy I forgot to catch the name of.  He was sunning himself on a plastic lawn chair outside what I presume was his shop, on a road in the middle of nowhere.  He had an easy smile, but one that showed that his front teeth had all been knocked out.  Apparently he had been an air force officer, when Ben Ali had heard a rumour about a coup being plotted and sent them all to prison.  He didn’t dwell on what he had experienced during his three years inside, but I would surmise it wasn’t a walk in the park.  What really infuriated him though was what had happened when he got out.  Every day he had to walk four miles to the nearest post office to register.  That had been going on for 15 years when the revolution broke out and put a stop to it.

Apparently things like this were very common under Ben Ali.  People were made to register sometimes up to three times a day at different locations.  It made living a normal life, and holding down a job, very difficult, especially as they could be made to wait for a long time when they finally got there.  I find it interesting, though, that this wasn’t a law, or an official policy.  It was just generally agreed that something like it was a good idea, and it was up to individual officers’ initiative to work out what punishment was imposed.  At the risk of Godwinning myself, I find it interesting that a similar thing went on under the Nazis.  Hitler, apparently, had no real policies himself.  It was up to his ministers and bureaucrats to come up with policies they thought would please the great leader, with each upping the ante in terms of extremism in an effort to get noticed.

I wonder if this vacuum at the heart of politics is something distinctive of a certain type of totalitarianism.  It certainly brings home to me the smallness of most dictators.  I think I had a default unthought that dictators were probably to some degree ubermensch – evil sure, but to some degree they must be great thinkers or powerful personalities.  I guess the whole cult of personality builds towards that.  For me, one of the most obscene revelations of the Syrian revolution is that Assad loves I’m Sexy and I Know It.  The idea of such a half-man listening to this song whilst unwinding from a hard day ordering massacres makes me so angry.  It also makes me realise that most dictators are probably just the front guys for a whole raft of interests, and those interests remain when the dictator is disposed.  The worry is that when the dictator goes, those really in power remain, and after a period of destabilising democracy, they start to reassert themselves.  Certainly that doesn’t seem a thousand miles from what we’ve seen from the Arab Spring thus far.

I asked my Air Force friend what he thought of the revolution.  His face lit up.  “How long have you been in this country?”  I told him two weeks.  “During this time, has anyone asked for your papers?  Has anyone told you where you can or cannot go?    For this, the revolution was wonderful.  Everything else will come.”

On a particularly sunny day I caught the bus down the mountain to visit Tabarka.  It’s a seaside resort with the best diving in Tunisia.  Unfortunately, the dive shops were taking the opportunity to do some renovations whilst it was quiet, but that gave me the chance to wander round this tranquil town.  It was resolutely modern, with an almost flash marina, but aside from the clear corners cut and work unfinished, a herd of goats was roaming around and having to be chased from the cafés and posh restaurants.

There was a Genoese fort on an old island now connected by a causeway.  It sat dramatically above some wave teased cliffs, and looked gorgeous when the sun chased the clouds away and shone forth beneficently upon it.  It was also officially the property of the army, which still seems to be the majority landowner in Tunisia, and you weren’t allowed in.  Weirdly, all army property has this bizarre symbol on it that looks like it was crayoned by a child, but as it’s often next to a stern no photo sign I haven’t got a picture of it for you.  The fort really wasn’t doing anything for the African flavour of the place, but then much of Tunisia’s coastline was under European control for much of its history.

The other highlight of Tabarka (that fort was one, keep up!) was an old Ottoman café.  It didn’t look much from outside, with its large plastic awning, but the doors and the woodwork inside were beautifully carved and painted, and the tiles were covered in the tobacco of ages.  There were lots of giant Ottoman soldier puppets hanging from the ceiling, each chandelier was unique, and there was a raised dais where musicians play during the summer festival.  Yet what I liked most about it was that it was just another café to the locals.  A TV was playing the football in a corner, most guys were mucking around with cards, and tea was just 15 pence for a glass with a chunk of orange in it.

I like the idea that it can survive as a proper café, without needing to go down the tourist route of preserving it in aspic and charging ridiculous prices.  Some people would probably complain about the television and the strip fluorescent lighting, but I loved the fact that it was a slice of real life.  I remember wandering in the georgian valleys of Turkey with a photographer, and he was complaining how all the satellite dishes on the wooden peasant shacks were ruining his photos.  Yet I think it’s almost better when you see that tradition continues in a modern context: it implies that these traditions will carry on, that they have been adapted and are still alive, rather than remaining frozen as a museum piece.  If the café was reliant on tourists then a downturn like the one Tunisia is currently experiencing could wipe it out, but the fact it’s doing well as a local café means it will probably have legs.

Market day in ‘Ain Draham was interesting, as the folks from surrounding villages came in and the cafés filled up.  The number of headscarves went up, and some old women had the Berber tattoos on their cheeks and chin, but everyone was still very friendly and chatty.  One woman stopped me to ask about the snow in England and how bad it was.  To be fair, as Premiership football was being broadcast everywhere it probably wasn’t that surprising.

Tunisia is completely sport mad, with gaps in football being devoted to handball.  Apparently Ben Ali tried to promote sport to distract people from politics.  Certainly there are an inordinate amount of large sporting academies everywhere you look, and Tunisia punches above its weight internationally.  Sometimes I wish I cared even a tiny bit about football, as it would give me an in with about a third of the planet.

However, the cold was starting to get to me.  The cold weather at home had translated itself into rain and sleet by the time it made its way down here, and going walking was becoming less pleasant.  I resolved to head south and start getting warm.

Tunis felt fairly cosmopolitan too.  About 60-70% of women didn’t wear the headscarf, and you’d certainly see more women wearing the full niqab any day in East London than around Tunis.  The black population were surprisingly well integrated, compared to my experiences in other North African countries.  I later found out that the blacks in the North were originally brought by the Ottomans as slaves, so had been integrated a lot longer, and weren’t seen as separate tribes of dubious patriotism as in certain other countries.

Yet even though I was always able to fill my days with walks round the medina, I’d overstayed my welcome.  For all its cosmopolitanism, it was also fairly provincial.  First I’d had a week of waiting for the anniversary of the revolution, and then I had been trying to get my phone to work, but had to get it unlocked first.  This is a relatively unknown task in Tunisia.  The first guy managed to wipe everything off my phone, whilst playing Gangnam Style to me on repeat.  Over.  And Over.  Again.  Thanks to this Awesome Guy I’ll also need your numbers when I get back.  THANKS GUY!


I finally headed out and up to the old French enclave of Bizerte.  The bus was filthy and so was the weather.  The much admired clouds had finally decided to spite me and rain, and between that and the thick black streaks covering the windows I couldn’t see much of what was going on.  It appeared to be a bucolic scene of shepherds pushing massive flocks of sheep across gently rolling green hills.

Bizerte was a curious town, where a superb natural harbour had led to a decision to combine a heavy industrial town with a tourist resort.  Naturally this works perfectly.  I had met Hamdi on the bus, a squidgy ogre of a man who thought deeply before answering any questions.  Partly this might have been because he wanted to practise his English before he moved to Quebec, though he still left heavy silences no matter what language we used.  He told me he hated Bizerte, because there was nothing to do there, a confession that left me brimming with confidence about the next couple of days.

He did, however, love the view from the drawbridge that led into town.  Instead of opening in the middle like Tower Bridge, it pivoted on one end.  Despite this seeming fairly crazy and inefficient, it was pretty fun, as it was already very high up, and when it poked straight up it looked ridiculous.  Hamdi told me people jumped off it in the summer, and I couldn’t tell from his inscrutable demeanour whether he was describing suicide attempts or not.  Mind you, as he was about six and a half foot the world must have seemed that much more puny to him, and the leap much the less fearful.

After we parted, I found that the hotel I was planning on staying in was closed, and wandered down Avenue Habib Bourguiba (away from Boulevard Habib Bourguiba) wondering what to do.  It was then I saw a hotel that wasn’t listed just up the street and decided to give it a go.  Oh fateful day!  The Hotel Oasis was a good advert for getting professional builders to do your building work for you.  My bathroom was where the window should have been, leaving a sliver of light by its side and a bathroom sized space in the opposite corner.  Downlighters had been installed, as every style magazine would recommend, but they were just about powerful enough to light a corner of my bed, like someone was shining a puny torch on it.  More worryingly, the lift doors were held closed by wooden blocks.  You had to take the lift, lurching its way irregularly up the five totally structurally sound floors, because they hadn’t actually finished the stairs.  There was just an uneven ramp and lots of signs warning you to turn back.

Still, it had hot water, was cheap, and the owner was very friendly.  He gave me a free ‘coffee’, or rather, he microwaved some water and stirred something black in it.  Next doors wifi was very fast and didn’t have a password.  The owner had an English wife who was very glad to talk to me.  She had a nervous disposition and rarely met my eyes.  Every time she made a joke she immediately explained it, even if I had laughed.

She told me that Bizerte was now effectively dry, as a boy had been killed by some drunk drivers, and some vigilantes had taken vengeance by burning down the restaurant that had served them.  Also, another person who had been selling alcohol had had their throat cut.  Actually, she wasn’t sure about that one, but probably.  I mentioned that I noticed all the supermarkets had stopped selling alcohol, and she explained that it was just the supermarkets you could walk to.  If it was an out of town supermarket then you could still buy it from there.  She explained how people had looted the local Monoprix after the revolution.  I asked if that was because of them selling alcohol.  Kind of, yes, but then it could also just be because Monoprix was owned by family members of Ben Ali, so the people felt the stuff belonged to them anyway.

She was nervous about creeping Islamification of the country, and complained that very time she went to the market she saw more people with beards.  Still, she felt that Tunisia was probably the best country to be in the Arab world, and Bizerte probably the best place out of that.  It had been French for another seven years after the country had gained independence, and there were definitely more French noses and paler skins to be seen on the streets.  She also complained about the difficulty for her husband’s family of getting visas for studying in Britain.  When I explained that it was to do with the Conservatives trying to keep a manifesto promise to bring down immigration by tightening up the only things they had power over, without missing a beat she went into the perils of immigration and how Britain couldn’t possibly cope.

Although consistency may not have been her strong suit, she was a genuinely lovely person.  The next day she brought in the weekly paper she got.  She hated watching the news because it was all about politics, which bored her, but she read the paper every week, “mostly just to see who had been killed.”  That might seem like a somewhat unusual statement, but Arabic papers are famous for their lurid crime pages.  Now, a cynic might think this has something to do with a fearful population being more malleable, and more appreciative of a strong police force, but there is a grim fascination to them.  They’re told as morality tales, such as the one that featured on the front page of the copy she brought me.  It was about a woman who had stabbed the hairdresser she worked for when he wouldn’t give her an advance.  Despite being in fairly simple French, there was something about the way it was told that I couldn’t quite get at first.  It was only after reading it a couple of times that I worked out what was going on.  I at first took it as incidental that she was living with her boyfriend, but I realised that this was given as the whole reason why a woman was capable of such a violent act.  Once on the slippery slope of living in sin, stabbery could only but follow.

The view from my sliver of window was over an upturned applecart of a city, the typical tumescences sprouting from the messy undergrowth of the unplanned Arab quarter, showing that whatever planning regulations might have been in place pre-revolution were definitely off the books now.  The Ville Nouvelle had some decent buildings, laid out in the shape of a Union Jack.  Everything was soggy in the persistent drizzle, and didn’t look the better for it.  The medina was just around the corner from my hotel, but unless they were building in concrete quite some time ago, it wasn’t that old.  I made my way through its twisting streets down to the old port, soaked in misery and long term economic decline.  On the whole, a more depressing protuberance could surely not be found anywhere on the earth.

Then the rain stopped and the sun came out, and it was gorgeous.  The little fishing boats lining the harbour shone brightly after their recent wash down, and led the eye to the golden walls of the Kasbah that guarded the entrance to the port.  On the other side of the channel a cute mini-Kasbah, or Ksibah, tried its darndest to look as fierce as its big brother.  Only a half built mega hotel, slap bang in-between them, dampened the view somewhat.

It overlooked a new marina, the biggest on the Mediterranean.  Or rather, it overlooked the idea of a new Marina – the developers had run out of money, leaving a wasteland surrounding a large number of berthings and no boats.  What probably isn’t clear to you, is that it was planned to be this way.

Ben Ali’s regime, his much touted ‘economic miracle’, ran on bad debt.  The international norm for loans that go bad, and never get paid back, is 2%.  The official government statistics showed the rate as somewhere between 22-30%, and most analysts reckon it was closer to 40%.  Banks didn’t lend money on the basis of the loans’ viability, but on political say so to allies of the regime.  They were then allowed to pay themselves huge salaries whilst doing very little work towards their purported goal.  When the money ran out and the project wasn’t finished, the bank wasn’t allowed to confiscate any of the debtors’ wealth.  When the banks ran out of money and had to be recapitalised, the EU and the IMF stepped in.

It’s an interesting form of corruption, responsible for all the shoddily built and skeletal mega-hotels that fill Tunisia.  Officially, no-one is committing a crime, and as GDP measures economic activity, not useful economic activity, it looks like the country is thriving.  Meanwhile, apart from a few jobs in construction, seemingly done by the blind from the available evidence, very little wealth trickles down to the vast majority of the population

I had intended to move on the next day, but some more ‘manifestations’ had cut the only road across the whole of the North, making it impassable.  Bizerte was growing on me though.  The patisseries were an excellent legacy of the French, their pastries not too sweet like the standard Arabic ones, just flaky and wonderful.  Strolling the litter strewn and seaweed covered beach, I came across some youths practising parkour.  They were leaping and somersaulting off the blocks that were used to protect the harbour and using the sand to cushion their falls, which I thought showed initiative.  Further out, the blocks of the harbour wall were so covered in seaweed that as each wave hit it sprayed black confetti 20 to 30 feet into the air, a never-ending goth wedding.

The medina also started to appeal to me.  It was resolutely quotidian.  There was nothing there aimed at tourists, but lots of blacksmiths and shops selling pots and pans.  Not only was this an out of the way town, but it was an out of the way country.  Again and again, Tunisia kicked something off, but then watched as all the excitement happened somewhere else.  Their greatest home-grown dynasty, the Fatimids, promptly decamped and took Egypt, founding Cairo.  The medina had been provincial from Phoenician times, it really didn’t have to impress.  That didn’t stop the kasbah from having lovely little whitewashed streets that I’d have wandered for much longer if there had been more than about five of them.

Whilst the rain had stopped, the wind was persistent, if gusty.  It could be nice in the sun, standing atop an old fort above the chaotic sprawl town, my only companion a dog tenderly licking itself.  Yet at night I had to layer up as it did get a bit chilly.  I was tempted to make a pun about the town being called Breezerte, but I’ve listened to enough of The Bugle to know that that way madness lies.

Still, when I heard the next day that the road would likely be out for the next eight days, I headed back to Tunis and found another way round.  Sure, I find joy everywhere, but I have my limits.

My plane was delayed leaving Gatwick.  I didn’t mind – it meant I flew over the Alps at sunset, the light just catching the snow-clad resorts I’d skied in my youth: peach crests on deep blue waves, heavy black outlines of tree and stone.  It did mean I got into Tunis a bit later than I expected, and by the time I made it into town it was about half seven.  All the Arabic cities I’d been to before ran late into the night, fuelled by caffeine and dominoes, so I was a bit surprised to find the main street, avenue Habib Bourguiba, almost deserted.  Razor wire spiralled round several buildings and out onto the pavement, forcing you to cross the road under the watchful eyes of army recruits.  The temperature was mild, and there was the slightest breath of mist, which ghosted the headlights of the slow flow of taxis that didn’t seem to be taking anyone anywhere.

If anything, it got quieter in the streets around my hotel, hard up against the medina.  Cats mewed and scratched through piles of rubbish, everything was shut, and I started to feel like I’d stepped into some post-apocalyptic movie (there Needs to be an Arabic zombie movie).  At least the hotel was open, nicely tiled and relatively friendly.  I was a little concerned about heading back out, but I needed to eat.  I also wanted to try and figure out the city I would be staying in for the next ten days, covering the anniversary of the revolution and shooting a documentary on how things had changed.  The maze of the medina with its warren of ancient streets could wait.  I was sure that unless things had radically changed since the revolution, I should be able to find somewhere to eat in the centre of a city of two million people at eight o’clock at night.

I didn’t have to walk too far in the backstreets below Habib Bourguiba to find the ‘nightlife’ zone.  The bars were buzzing.  Again, this was totally different from what I was used to.  Bars in Arabic cities are normally sad places with a scattering of crying, moustachioed men, waving their arms and declaiming the ways the world has hurt them.  The moustaches were still present, wrapped around bottle tops or cigarettes, but here they were resting atop smiles and garrulous chatter.  The bars were absolutely rammed – I doubted a Sunday night back home would compete in terms of punters – and the thought of squeezing in for a drink wasn’t massively appealing.  Still, where drunk people congregate, greasy food must follow, and I soon found a friendly restaurant where ordering a quarter chicken got me salad, beans in sauce, chips and a baguette on the side.  I was tired and couldn’t face arguing, but I expected to be stung when the bill came.  It was delicious, and it turned out all the sides were included in the price, a princely one pound fifty.

Walking back home I was surprised to hear through a wall what sounded like Arabic karaoke over Spastik.  If I hadn’t been tired – nothing is as wearying as sitting very still for most of the day whilst being transported over a quarter of the world – then I would have investigated further.  I made a mental note to investigate at the next possible opportunity, but despite my best efforts this joyous sound has never been repeated.

I was approached by my first panhandler on the way home.  I have since found out they haunt Habib Bourguiba at all times, preying on Western flesh, and you start to get a sixth sense for them that allows you to change direction a couple of times and shake them off.  Theoretically, these guys are easy sources, so I tried to probe this one for information.  His name was Omar, and aside from flattery (it was clear to him I was a man of culture, a man of the world) he was very happy to talk about this ‘révolution des conneries’ – perhaps best translated as a revolution of idiocy, given the unpalatability of the direct translation.  Things were moving too slowly for Omar, where were the jobs, and specifically, how come the government hadn’t given Omar a job?  He suggested that we go and get a beer to discuss this terrible injustice further, his scent suggesting this wouldn’t be the first he’d had that day.  When I declined, he recommended that we head straight into the medina.  What better way to spend your first night in a new country than with a drunk in a deserted labyrinth?

One better way, of many, was to shake him off, go back to the hotel, get some sleep, and be ready for the next day, when things would hopefully make a bit more sense.

The first shock, upon leaving the hotel, was just how busy things were.  Tunis holds about two million, in a country of ten to eleven, and it sometimes feels like all of them are in central Tunis during the day.  The streets were thronged, with half the streets turned into impromptu markets.  Unlike the constant war of man and machine that characterises the streets of Cairo, where the mortal fear of crossing the road is probably the reason that people are so religious, in Tunis people are polite.  Cars let you cross, and play definite second fiddle to the hordes of people that surge through the streets.

Only the occasional moped braves the narrow alleys of the medina.  Apart from a couple of streets, the souks here are aimed more at local needs than at those of tourists.  Perhaps for this reason, there’s very little hassle.  The only time I noticed any was when a Russian tour group was in town, when the transformation was remarkable.  Suddenly everyone wanted to be my friend, no matter what their shop sold, and I was awash with offers of tea.  As medinas go, it’s big, and although lacking some of the spectacular architecture of cities such as Cairo or Marrakech, its winding streets have a definite charm.  Here and there they lean together to create domed thoroughfares conflating the concepts of inside and outside, but even in places where it doesn’t there’s barely a sliver of sky that makes it down to the torrents of humanity that wash its streets.  The old city was built around a hill for defensive reasons, and this three dimensionality makes it feel like its own world.  Coupled with the lack of any skyline, it starts to feel all encompassing, almost womb-like.  I wonder how often people left when the city used to finish at the walls?

Yet all these people leave not long after the sun goes down, and the streets become empty again.  Basically, Tunis is very suburban.  It sprawls in all directions for miles, around a lake, down to the sea and along the coast.  Those are just the suburbs you’d want to visit.  Inland, there’s just miles of flats, coffee shops, and pizza and chicken joints.  To be fair, there’s also a prestigious museum, the Bardo, which has the world’s greatest collection of mosaics.  I went to visit, but it was all somewhat lost on me.  I find mosaics affect me in much the same way that other people claim to find most other visual art: vaguely impressed at how hard it must be to do it, but in all honesty a bit lost as to what the point is.

There is a visceral thrill in stumbling across an ancient site and seeing a mosaic still in place, but walking around this vast palace looking at the best examples of ancient pixelated art was fine without being transcendental.  Some of it uses tiny bits of stone so well it almost looks as good as a terrible painting!

Not that there was a lack of this available around Tunis as well.  A palace in the medina was putting on a show of new artists, which I thought would be ideal for taking the pulse of the nation.  What was going through the minds of the young generation?  Mostly, it was breasts.  A totally abstract cross between Pollock and Rothko, with a hint of Gerhart Richter and a big naked woman in the middle.  A scribble of women and more women drawn all over the top of each other, their breasts gradually getting bigger.  A nice abstract carpet, sans bosom.

I headed out to one of the nicer suburbs.  Sidi Bou Saïd is a lovely, whitewashed Arab fishing village that was frozen in time by the French at the turn of the century as their perfect pleasure zone.  Despite its humble beginnings, famous Frenchmen from Foucault to Gide enjoyed its cliff top location and narrow, twisting streets, all whitewashed with a regulation blue for the doors and shutters.  Artists came to stay to enjoy its remarkable light, and the galleries here have nothing so crude as breasts on display.  In fact, some of them had rather good exhibitions on.

As I headed further up the hill I came to what I can only describe as the model for my future home.  Some Baron came over and built an astonishing amalgamation of the best of Islamic architecture with clean modernist lines.  Each curtained bedchamber gave onto gorgeous reception rooms that are bigger than my flat, with shaded balconies that overlooked the sea.  There were a couple of inner courtyards that were delightful, with impeccable attention to detail and wonderful Arabesques.  Normally chamber music recitals are given here, but when I asked, the sorrowful answer was that they had had to be cancelled because of ‘les manifestations’.  I felt this was a bit of an excuse – I couldn’t possibly see what the small demonstrations of about 50 people or so I’d seen outside of Parliament many miles away could affect their ability to put on concerts.  Or were people protesting the concerts themselves?

Sadly, I wasn’t meant to take pictures inside the building itself, but I enjoyed rambling round the beautiful gardens that took advantage of its location along the cliff.  Even better was a café a bit further up, balanced delicately on the cliff edge, gazing out over the Gulf of Tunis to the mountains of Cap Bon.  It was such a delightful spot, as the sun slowly set, I didn’t even mind paying ten times the going rate for a cup of tea.  At two quid it wasn’t that extortionate, and it was the first time I tried Thé au Pignons, or tea with pinenuts to its friends.  Quite frankly, it’s bloody fantastic: almost buttery, if that didn’t sound disgusting.  Obviously I can see why no-one thought of putting pinenuts in tea, it’s a ludicrous idea, but one that really, really works.

Not long after I visited the Salafis came and burnt down the tomb of poor old Bou Saïd – Sidi means saint, and the Salafis were apparently making a point about saint worship, much as the rebels in Mali had pulled down the tombs in Timbuktu.  The difference is that there’s no real tradition of saint worship in Northern Tunisia.  Burning down a harmless saint’s tomb in one of Tunisia’s prime tourist spots two days before the anniversary of the revolution, when the eyes of the world would, however briefly, be focused on Tunisia, shows that once again Islamists have had either a clear grasp of symbolism or a killer PR department.  Rather than pre-modern, Islamism often turns out to be a post-modern movement par excellance.

There wasn’t much fuss inside Tunisia.  Tunisians had got used to the Salafis acting out, and ever since the revolution there had been a low but constant level of arson attacks and beatings, first by the Salafis and soon afterwards responses from militias formed to ‘defend the revolution’.  Each side accused the other of being protected by the government, of being close to those in power, and said the proof was that there were very few prosecutions of their sworn enemies.  As far as I could tell, no-one seemed to be suggesting that the police were cynically allowing low level chaos to persist, encouraging an ‘après moi le déluge’ type effect.  In fact, of all the countries affected by the Arab Spring, it’s noticeable that Tunisia has been the most calm afterwards.  People, for the most part, seem content in the streets.

The anniversary of the revolution itself went past without much drama.  On the Sunday the day before there was live music on Habib Bourguiba.  Mostly it was traditional music, with the Hip Hop that had soundtracked much of the Revolution itself mostly confined to big screens between the stages.  I should, at this point, mention that most Tunisian Hip Hop I’ve heard is fairly awful.  I’m sure the lyrics are great, but the production is understandably terrible, autotune casts its baleful influence, and the flows are really weak.  It sounds like a limper version of Road Rap, with Arabic instruments.

The vast majority of people over the two days were just wandering around, munching popcorn, taking it all in and enjoying the holiday.  There were a lot of Tunisian flags.  Everyone seemed to have forgotten about their worries and agreed that the revolution was a wonderful thing.  I bumped into Omar, who was drunk, and as he kissed me on both cheeks he told me how glorious the revolution was and how great things were.

There was a hardcore of marchers, though.  On the Sunday night a little under a thousand of them marched up and down Habib Bourguiba chanting slogans, holding aloft pictures of people they had lost, and a mock martyrs coffin covered in blood.  For the most part the crowds not taking part looked on bemused, but everyone cheered when someone let off a flare, and the one slogan that everyone joined in on was ‘Ash-sha’ab yurid isqat al-nizam.’

This is the key slogan of the Arab Spring.  It sprung up spontaneously in Tunisia (captured here on video) and since spread to every country of the region.  It is usually translated as ‘the people want to bring down the regime’, but if this is the case, then why does it still arouse such passion in Tunisia, where the regime has unambiguously fallen?  Could it just be nostalgia?

Without going deeply into the etymology of the words, suffice to say that a better translation could be ‘the people want to bring down the system.’  On the Monday of the anniversary itself, along with all the thousands of Tunisian flags (and a handful of the black Salafi ones), there were a large number of other Arab states’ flags – with the Palestinian flag being the largest one, but with representation for Egypt, Syria, Libya and so on.  The system that Tunisians want to break down isn’t restricted to the regime that terrorised them and stole their money.  Tunisians feel their place within the world, they’re proud of what their country has started and how it has spread, and they want to see the current world order shaken up and a fairer deal for all.  If they’re as susceptible to conspiracy theories as Egyptians then they’re too polite to mention it to me, but it’s fair to say that they regard the international system that supported the status quo in Arab dictatorships – and still does in places such as Palestine and Bahrain – as not entirely favourable to the world.

My visit to the police showed me a clear example of how much of the system was still in place in Tunisia itself, and how things had changed.  I had been quite proud of my day’s work in Carthage, and had started to see how a documentary could come together.  I’d spent the morning filming in an eerie site where the Carthaginians had sacrificed their own young.  I was hoping to contrast this with interviews with some of the youths I’d met in the medina, their faces hideously scarred from run-ins with the police in the days before the revolution.

Carthage was an interesting mix of a posh, almost Americanised suburb, laced with ancient sites.  There was a harbour with a central island that had originally held lots of warships up ramps, ready to launch Thunderbird like.  Above this rose the hill that Carthage had originally been built on, with many of its old streets well preserved as the Romans had filled them in to build a temple complex on top.  When the French came they promptly built a cathedral on the symbolic site, and the President’s palace is currently just down the road.

Carthage eventually became the third largest city in the Roman Empire, a fact well attested to by the size of the Roman baths that remain.  This complex is so vast that what archaeologists initially thought was a theatre ended up just being some communal toilets.  There’s an 18 metre high column still in place that weighs eight tonnes, together with its missing partners it would have held up the roof of the frigidarium and created a space that many cathedrals would be jealous of.  All this majesty was right next to the sea, and I considered hanging out for a cup of tea whilst the sun set, but decided to head down to La Goulette, or ‘the gullet’, the port of Tunis famous for its fish restaurants and nightlife.  It was so easy to get around thanks to the TGM suburban train…


Standing in the road, gazing round blurredly, it took me a while to see it had really happened, that everything was really gone.  Someone hands me my shoe, another person passes me a twisted scrap of metal with vague memories of being my glasses.  I start to be able to express myself in French, instead of just screaming “Where are the boys?” and everyone tuts and looks disappointed.  The thieves have long gone.

A friendly old man decides to drive me to the police station.  Getting the keys from his TV shop, he jumps in the car, leaving the shop open with no-one watching it.  He doesn't worry that anything will be stolen from it as theft is so rare in Arabic cities.  The police take my statement and generally all gather around and frown.  I’m driven from station to station to look at mug shots on decrepit computers, the adrenalin wearing off and my body starting to complain that bouncing it off tarmac at high speed isn’t one of its preferred activities.

Disturbingly, the older the pictures, the more evidence there is of beatings.  Faces are bloody, covered in tears and terror.  Eyes are swollen, blood drips from noses and mouths.  All the suspects look poor and desperate.  None of them look like the kids who robbed me.

The chief investigator arrives, gets out his phone, far more powerful than any of the computers at the police stations.  Here the photos are different.  Kids in expensive clothes, caps balancing on top of coiffed hair, chins stuck out defiantly.  These recent photos have swagger, there isn’t any fear here.  I think I recognise one of them, but I’ve been looking at photos for so long there’s a high chance someone just looks familiar from another photo, the faces starting to blend into one and eliding the faces I glimpsed just for seconds on the train.

As I’m once more driven fruitlessly between stations, the police chat in Arabic, and I haven’t yet been able to get to grips with the Tunisian dialect.  A guy who doesn’t seem quite to fit with the rest of the officers, who a million cop shows have convinced me lies somewhere between assorted toady and informant, says in French “C’est une révolution des voleurs” – a revolution of thieves.  Giggling slightly, he repeats it again and again, glancing sidelong at me to see if I’ve understood.  The rest of the cops look stoney faced and eventually hush him.  I look out the window at the country I don’t yet understand, and just wish it was all over and done with.