Heat is a blanket covering this land. Summer is here in Tunisia. Swimming is now glorious, but during the sun’s zenith all is sticky.
I have spent most of the month of May in Cape Bon, a green peninsula in the north eastern most corner of Tunisia. Cape Bon is the western arm of the Atlas Mountain range, which run through Algeria, to Morocco and into the Atlantic. During different geologic periods and climatic conditions, Africa joined Europe here. Animals are part of the evidence of this cross-continental link: fossils of African hippopotamuses and dwarf elephants can be found in Sicily, birds still fly between Cape Bon and the tip of the Italian boot during migration, and the only Italian residence of the African painted frog is in Sicily. Looking at a map, this connection is obvious. The Sicilian-Tunisia Platform is also believed to hold untapped oil in shallow water.
My old roommate Didier is doing agricultural research in Cape Bon, focusing on the looming problem of salinity in irrigation and sustainable farming. The problem isn’t properly recognized or addressed by the Tunisian government, said Didier, and part of his role in the research team is to use his diplomatic immunity as a French citizen to criticize this inaction. He came back to Tunis to pick up some more data three weeks ago, and Valerio and I followed him on his way back out to explore Didier’s new land.
The louage was hot, the beers from the night before unhelpful, and Didier said we took “the ugliest road” to the eastern shore of Cape Bon. We disembarked in Kelibia and hiked to its old Carthaginian fort. First built by Berbers, Kelibia was a major defensive position for Carthage, a Roman possession, and then the last holdout for the Byzantines in Tunisia. Under the Arab empire, the fort held back the Normans and then the Spanish. Germans added guns in World War 2.
We climbed the old steps on a hot day, the busy port below. A rickety amusement park could be heard in the distance, mixing with the industrial clanking of ships unloading. The west was a patchwork quilt of green and brown farmland. The view from the fort told an ancient story: the economy of fertile land and the waters of the Mediterranean. Farming and shipping, spade and oar. It was the same under the Amilcars.
The next weekend, I met Valerio and our friend Adnan outside the Bourguiba school. We then headed southeast to Cape Bon, driving through verdant and calm towns, passing heavily laden donkeys and herds of sheep. Road signs was scarce, but Adnan reminded us, “I am suprised, man. This is a lot better than Nigeria.”
The car ride was silent, Adnan had renounced music as haram to his Islamic faith. Adnan is from Nigeria, but spent his childhood in Prince George’s County in Maryland, just like me. He now lives in Wales, studying at university, and is in Tunis visiting his family who lives here. He’s an easy guy to like, with a deliberate, friendly attitude. Not to be brash, but its odd that I can get along so well with a guy doesn’t share three of my favorite things: women, booze and rock ‘n roll.
Our first destination was the most intact archaeological site of Punic-Phoenician civilization: Kerkoaune. Adnan, Valerio and I crawled over the brown foundations, following a brown trench coat wrapped around a small, smiling man spouting history. We sat in the surviving Punic baths and toilets. Some old mosaics were still visible, the recognizable symbol for “Women’s Bathroom” apparent across the millenias. Along the old market road and its stalls, we reached the Mediterranean. We stood as the wind wrapped around us, watching the morning sun glint of the waves. In the silence I wondered: for how long have people doing exactly this?
We moved long the eastern coast north to the northern tip of Cape Bon, or where the African plate submerges briefly before rising as Sicily. We passed a valley of wind turbines along the way. Their giant white blades spun slowly above farms and grazing herds. Arriving in El Haouaria, we were now closer to Italy than Algeria, Libya or the Sahara. Starving, we ordered a full spread of seafood at a local restaurant. Valerio didn’t share the same zeal for shell cracking as Adnan and I: the two sons of Chesapeake Bay. There we learned a valuable lesson: always ask the price first, especially if the owner offers “something special.”
El Haouaria looks like Larrabee Park near Bellingham but grander. The bright blue sea is white where it meets brown blocks of earth. This land was an ancient quarry of the Romans, who cut into the cliffs rather than dig down for the desired yellow sandstone. The surface stone is molded to the wind, pockmarked by water, alternatively smooth and sharp. The jagged cliffs along the frothy sea are broken at times into regimented rectangles and sharp corners. These are evidence of a thousand years of Roman cuts: gigantic geometric relics.
The sun was beginning to wear us out. We headed along the west towards relaxation. Korbous is unique geology: a sulfur spring here empties directly into the sea. Now, crowds flock to the springs to clean and heal. According to an wizened old man along the sulfur stream, the water is good for the stomach, the skin and the soul. Stalls surround the hot, stinky water, selling packaged or bottled sugar and tourist articles. Enterprising youth call out “sura, sura, sura” with Polaroid cameras around their necks, picture, picture, picture. Adnan and I entered the cold sea amidst a range of Tunisians: tattoos to chechias, unsteady old men around frolicking toddlers, headscarves next to designer jeans. But everyone was here for the same thing, and it was a sociable scramble in the cold Mediterranean for the healing waters of Korbous.
Leaving was less romantic: our car became ensnared in an immense traffic jam along the one-lane shoreline road. Cars rushed forward to plug gaps promised to incoming vehicles, side mirrors scraped and snapped in the chaos, and bystanders spontaneously transformed into traffic police. Caught in the passion of escape, we took a wrong turn and hit a dead end in the beautiful town carved into the cliffs south of the hot springs. We had to reverse and repeat the process. Jars of honey lined the road out of Korbous, golden in the lazy, fading sunlight. Adnan showed us his compass, and explained how it reveals the direction of Mecca. We pulled over near a small farm house at the end of dirt road so he could pray, and Valerio and I changed into pants.
When Adnan dropped Valerio and I off in downtown Tunis, my stomach began to gurgle. Something wicked this way comes, I thought. Sure enough, for the next two days I was out of commission, unable to drink enough water or hold down any food. My brain seemed to be resting on a bed of broken glass. My stomach was wrestling a pit viper. Thankfully, my roommate Giorgia’s parents are a nurse and a doctor, and they were visiting her in Tunis. They had some good drugs, and I was soon back in school, learning how to describe matrimonial ambitions in Arabic.
The following weekend I took a train to Hammam Chat with Aida, my half-Tunisian half-Parisian friend. The train was moving through Tunisia’s industrial zone in the south, past the Olympic stadium, when a glorious smell entered the cabin. Imagine a thousands chocolate cakes baking, or a geyser of milk chocolate. Aida smiled knowingly, and my stomach pleaded for mercy as the chocolate factory faded into the distance and my dreams.
Aida’s town is a nice suburb between the mountains and the sea, about halfway between Tunis and Cape Bon. I met her father, a comical retired professor of linguistics with bronze skin, white hair sprouting from the sides of his head, and two curious, small eyes.
“I do not like my daughter living in Paris,” he said, proud of his Arabic and Tunisian heritage. T
hey converse in a flutter of French and Arabic, and I saw why Aida is at the top of her class. Her friend Najet was staying with them to prepare for a French-language test in theater. Najet, Aida and I went to the souq together, buying a small wagon load of fresh produce. Aida saw me eyeing what looked like a small peach: bikhookh she explained. A dinar later, I was carrying a kilo of the yellow, golf-ball sized fruits on the way to dinner.
Over tajeen, omelet, and pasta, I gobbled bikhookh, their tart flavor lush in my wheat and meat palate. Aida’s father said their name in French was ibakoot, in Spanish abrikoot. So this was a fresh apricot, I mused as I watched light move through one’s orange flesh.
After digesting the large meal, Aida and I donned running shoes and followed a water pipeline at the foot of the mountains at a steady pace. My sickness had really taken it out of me, though, and I struggled up the hill. The pipeline ended in a concrete waterway, which we ran alongside, dodging rocks, and a herd of sheep. Birds chirped in the fading daylight as we stretched, panting and sweating heavily. The ocean was just visible on the horizon, and the green mountains rose sharply above us. Long shadows ran behind us, golden light sparkled in the broken glass beneath our feet as we trod along. After a shower, Najet helped me with some Arabic, and then made a bed for me in her room.
“This is my first time,” she said, graciously acknowledging our distance, before she turned off the light. The wind blew open the door and windows later, cool with a faint hint of forest.
In the morning I cut vegetables for a giant salad: we were going on a pique nique. Adnan and Valerio picked Aida and I up along the highway, and we struggled with the Tunisian signage again. Arriving in the old city in Hammamet, I bought new Persol sunglasses, two parasols and some water before we set up camp next to a fishing boat called Dinar. We spread towels, buried Aida’s cooler, and built a mound for Adnan’s grill. An American, an Italian, a French-Tunisian and a Nigerian, sharing shade and bread along the white sands of northern Africa.
Adnan was accosted by local kids because he looks like a Tunisian soccer champion, not the first time either, he said. Valerio was buried to his neck in sand. My left foot is now sunburned. Adnan garnered another local following with his kite, later he left us to pray at the local mosque. I listened to the surf and spit out bikhookh seeds, watching the coals char our chicken. As the sun fell behind us in the hills of southern Cape Bon, we packed up our gear and loaded into the car.
Shaking the sand from our feet, we slipped on sandals and went to Hammamet’s cemetery. Valerio wanted to stop here on an atheist pilgrimage. The small Christian section holds the remains of the first Socialist Prime Minister of Italy, Bettino Craxi. I wandered the beautiful Islamic tombstones, my favorite were simple rectangles holding a single-specie tangle of succulent. The bibliophile in me warmed to the common book motif, the rest shirked at the pile of refuse pile inside the cemetery wall.
We dropped Aida off, and after promising to return after our final exam in two weeks, we left at dusk to Tunis with heavy limbs and eyelids.
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Dispatches Africa North Cape Bon: Roman Quarry, Bzyantine Fort and Hot Springs
Dispatches Africa North Cape Bon: Roman Quarry, Bzyantine Fort and Hot Springs
Cape Bon: Roman Quarry, Bzyantine Fort and Hot Springs
