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.

It was time to get out of Tunis.  It wasn’t that it was a bad city.  On the contrary, it was actually reasonably beautiful, in a shabby sort of way.  The streets were lined with bougainvillea, and after they suddenly cut all the foliage down one day, you could see that it wasn’t a slouch architecturally either.  It all needed a lick of paint, but the Ville Nouvelle was an interesting mix of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and the slow bleed of the former into the latter.  On some streets you could literally watch the march of architectural fashion, as curves became less floral and more abstract on each subsequent building.

I think part of the reason it looked so decent was the light out here.  It really is amazing.  I’m not sure if it has to do with the latitude or some optimum level of dust to moisture, but it was particularly clear and made everything look wonderful.  If I didn’t hate the word, I’d describe it as limpid.  It also led to a remarkable range of clouds, painted in far more than fifty shades of grey, with detours through blue and purple, and highlights of white, pink and orange.  I didn’t pay enough attention in Geography class to describe the moosemash of different types of clouds, or why they arose, but they were astounding.  I can just see the next advertising campaign – come to Tunisia and see our clouds!