Tunisia - Matmata

We hadn't really planned on taking a Star Wars tour of Tunisia, but it's kind of hard to escape the frequency of movie-related locations. In fact the more time you spend in Tunisia the more you realise that the fantastic scenes, place names and costumes came more from Tunisian reality, than the imagination of the film makers.

So we visited Matmata to see the troglodyte houses, and not because these houses were Luke's home on Tatooine (Tataouine is the name of a nearby town).

We visited a few of the troglodyte houses, which felt a bit odd in parts because people actually still live in these houses, but it was very interesting to see nevertheless.

In fact we didn't just see the houses, we actually spent the night in one of the rooms in one of the houses converted to a hotel. Certainly one night was enough - the mosquitos and minimalistic bedding ensured that.

Apart from the houses, Matmata is set in quite amazing surrounds - with dry, rocky , terraced hills, and splashes of green where somehow moisture had been retained in the soil.

The plan was to use Matmata as a base to visit some of the old Berber towns in the area, and our second night was in more civilised accommodation. Although we couldn't escape the Tunisian staple dinners of Harissa, Briks and Couscous.

Tunisia - El Jem and Mahdia

Well it's taken me a long time to get around to blogging our trip to Tunisia over Easter, with parents visiting and a busy time at work I simply haven't had the time to organise the photos and write some words.

Anyway, enough with the excuses. On the 4th April we flew out to Tunisia for 8 days of 'holiday' driving around the country to see what it had to offer.

Originally we saw Tunisia as a place with great potential for Roman ruins etc., given it's history as one-time competition for Rome in the region, but the more we read the more we became interested instead in the Berber and Arabic cultures in Tunisia.

This was put aside somewhat when we arrived at El Jem, south of Tunisia, which has an amazing Roman Amphitheatre, only slightly smaller than the Colosseum in Rome, and somewhat more accessible (once you'd navigated your way through the town itself, which didn't seem that interested in directing tourists in the right direction).

We stayed in El Jem until sunset, taking in the contrasting sights of the Roman ruins and the arabic styled town, before heading on to the fishing town of Mahdia where we planned to stay the night. We had the first of many dinners of white baguette bread, Harissa and Couscous.

The next morning in Mahdia we wandered around the town, getting our first taste of a Medina (old town centre) and wandering around the mosque before checking out the coastline.

The weather was very nice, but not nice enough to tempt us into the water!