“Do you want to go to Mahdia or not?” said Sarah over the phone, her Italian accent squawking over my Tunisia cell.
It was hot, my cupboard was bare, and I had no desire to travel three hours south to visit yet another stunningly gorgeous beach. School was starting soon, and I was tired. Then my eyes fell on a picture of my dog Sugar Bowl. My litte Corgi would have no hesitations to get out to sniff around.
The next day I was miserable. My sweat was mingling with my neighbor in a tiny louage, mini-van. The crevasse between our thighs was a putrid mess. On our way south through Sousse to Mahdia, the city faded away to the sahel, or grasslands, now bronze in the summer heat. The louage passed trucks carrying mountains of watermelons and hay, at times defying my grasp of physics. Camels squatted on the roadside. Enterprising Tunisians sold jars of pure honey and fruit in the shade, and skinny children’s arms held out loaves of taboona and khobz.
We arrived in Mahdia on market day, and walked through a bustling kaleidoscope of commerce. Two kids on a bicycle crashed in front of Sara and I, and we had to pull his foot out of the spokes as a crowd gathered around the screaming boy. He hobbled off quickly, and the crowd melted just as fast. In the US, this scene would’ve been an act.
Past piles of clothes, spreads of jewelry, collections of statues, appliances, and a jumble of inks, we ducked into an alley, following signs to our hotel. We arranged for a room on the rooftop terrace next to our Taiwanese friends Min-Han and Wan-Chi. Everything was painted white except for the blue doors. We shed our packs and soon began exploring the peninsula of Mahdia.
Phoenician, Roman, then Arab, the natural defenses of this little finger of land improved when it was the capital of the Fatimid Ifriqiya empire. Two giant gates sealed entry by land, three sea walls deterred naval attack, and a large borj watched over all. The remnants still stand: ruins along the coast of impressive walls and the gates open still unto markets. One can still see the ships rolling in from atop the borj’s ramparts. The lone archway on the tip of the peninsula stands thirty feet high as testament to the past, open to the sea and imagination.
(Mahdia is also the location an untold tale of WW2. Khaled Abdul-Wahab saved two dozen Jews during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia, and is the first Arab nominated by the Holocaust memorial center for The Righteous Gentile Award.)
We enjoyed fresh fish that night underneath a new moon, the town quiet and sleepy. Our return was announced solely by our footsteps on the cobblestone alleys.
The next day was July 4th, and I had to go to a barbecue, which meant Tunis. Back again in the louage, we arrived just in time to drink Czechoslovakian liquor with a bunch of American and Aussie English teachers and my Finnish friend Ilmari. Somewhere during the long night, he mentioned a weekly run of expatriates. It sounded rather strange.
The next Monday I was breathing hard, pumping my legs after little piles of flour in the road. The white powder path split, and I ducked left following the flour. A big X told me I had made a mistake, and I shouted to my teammates not to follow. I turned on my heels, wiped my brow and set off to rejoin the pack. I was running my first HASH, a fun exercise in maniacal group sport. It’s like jogging a fox hunt.
I met a oil geologist named Niall running after flour. We hit it off and he invited me to go to Tabarqa for the Jazz festival the week before. After a week of very intense, almost deadening, language classes, I met Niall in park Belvedere for our trip. I brought my friend Adnan, and Niall his roommate and colleague from Libya, Hisham.
Our car pulled into Tabarqa at dusk, and the city once familiar to me was unrecognizable. Throngs of people crushed the sidewalks. Speakers competed for supremacy in the sticky night air. We quickly ate chawarmas and found front-row seats for the night’s concert: Raul De Souz, a Brazilian trombonist, and Nabil Khemir, a Tunisian who plans an oud-guitar hybrid. The amphitheater slowly filled as the guitar and oud swept out over us. After the sexagenarian trombonist played, we filed out to a cafe and smoked sheesha and talked until late.
Niall had made a friend at the concert, a French journalist specializing in North African travel named Elizabeth, who recommended a nearby cove called Molollo. We woke the next day with ambitions to reach the promised seculsion, but we had vague directions: go west. Niall and Hisham’s company car climbed the Tabarqan hills as we headed away from the rising sun.
Suddenly, a kid jumped in front of us, waving his arms. We slowed, then followed the his hand signals up a small road. The kid and a few friends began trailing our car up the hillside. The road stopped at the edge of cliff, and we got out to stare: Tabarqa in miniature lay at our feet, nestled next to aquamarine waters and lush green canopy. The gaggle of kids caught up, panting and sweating, and tried to sell us jewelry. Adnan gave them some money for their advice and exercise, and we got back in the car.
The turn off for Molollo didn’t have a sign - we found it by heading downhill past goats, dogs and others beach-bound. The beach was rocky and beautiful and the sea frothy was with whitecaps. A group of teenage tourists from France had taken over the lone restaurant. One girl had an Arabic henna tattoo above her biki backside: sheddu baiidun, look far away. No one seemed interested in us at all, a welcome thing in a tourist nation. Niall was keen to use his new snorkeling gear, and we ended up in the slags and powerful waves on the westward side of the cove.
The seabed was mostly covered with seaweed, which moved eerily with the currents. Caught in the same motion, if one watched just the thrushes, the earth itself seemed to careen beneath you. At first disoriented by the timeless interaction of surf, life and earth, soon I was spotting fish inside the underwater forest.
A large rock in the center of the cove beckoned us: the primordial urge to summit is still there, after all these years. We then moved our camp of towels, peaches and sun cream to the eastern side of the cove. While closer to the rock, the swim was still about 300 meters, and mostly through a thick mat of seaweed. I goaded Adnan into taking the plunge, and we gurgled our way to the bird-shit stained peak in the fading rays of daylight. Niall and Hisham followed soon with a frisbee. Through the pulsating waves, which either deposited, slammed or kept you away from the rock, we all struggled to beach ourselves on the warm, slippery massive. Upon it, we stood tall, basking in the biological recognition of success, however slight. We then took turns jumping forty feet into the clear waters, alternatively throwing and catching the white frisbee in air.
The sun set early down inside the cove, and we swam back to dry and eat plums and fresh almonds, watching the blood-red disk dip below the sea.
After showers and a meal with Elizabeth and some street cats, we found ourselves in a city-wide party. Tarbarqa was alive with reggae. Alpha Blondy has a lot of fans in Tunisia, apparently, and we had to fight for a spot on the stairs of the amphitheater. With lyrics in English, set breaks in French, and choruses in Arabic, the band drove everyone in the crowd to dance. The time quickly passed, and we were soon following the mass exodus to the next, unofficial stage of the Tabarqa Jazz Festival.
My friend Wael gave me a ride while Niall, Hisham and Adnan followed in the company car. A thick line of vehicles and converging night owls confirmed the location of the party: a big hotel in the zone touristique on the beach. As soon as we opened our doors, loud bass assailed our ears, and then our bodies as we closed in on the party. Near the entrance, I recognized one of the guitarists of Alpha Blondy. He's easily six and a half feet tall with a mane of dreadlocks.
“Do you have something to smoke?” he asked me, his fingers in a V for Victory sign mimicking inhaling burnt leaves. I mumbled something about a cigarette, he looked down at me over his sunglasses and shook his head.
The planks of the boardwalk leading down to the beach were covered with revelers. Nearly 400 people crowded the sands, dancing, smoking, drinking and talking. But most were men. As my friend Stepháne put it later sarcastically, “you go to a beach at night for it,” or, if a girl goes to a beach at night, she’s asking to be harassed at best. Considering women have it better here in Tunisia than most other Arab countries, it’s a sad state of affairs. But I’m a guy, was hanging out with guys, and we were able to have fun despite two large fights in the surf and very abrasive, boring music.
We left Tabarqa the next day laden with fruits from the local souq. Our car headed west along the northern coast of Tunisia through the hill country towards Cape Serrat. Alongside the road, stacks of honey jars overwhelmed our curiosities and hungers, and we ended up with three amber pots of gold. The bees were raised next to an orchard, and you can taste the tartness of apples in every syrupy spoonful.
Cape Serrat was packed with Tunsiis, Tunisians, running in the surf, swimming and sunning. The wide beach has a thick sandbar were most people frolic: a beach within a beach. The water between the two is warm and slow moving. Groups of boys struggled to launch an old fishing boat when we first arrived, counting down to heave the hull across the sand towards the buoyant freedom of the sea. We tossed a frisbee in the shallow waters and nibbled at our loaf of bread, and ate almonds and peaches. On top of the ruddy sand we must’ve looked strange to Tunsiis: between us we had English ivory, Libyan tawny, American freckles, and Nigerian ebony.
Frankly, I don’t remember the ride home. Adnan and I passed out in the backseat moments after leaving the lazy sunday in Cape Serrat. I awoke at twilight, near Tunis, and directed Hisham to my home in El Omrane. Happily greeting me there was my neighborhood friend Husama and his pals, sipping beers and smoking Belgian cigarettes. I turned down the offered alcohol and shuffled my way past a stray kitten to unlock my blue door, throw my bags down, and crash land into unconsciousness.
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Dispatches The North Coastal Mahdia, Alpha Blondy and Honey Jars
Dispatches The North Coastal Mahdia, Alpha Blondy and Honey Jars
Coastal Mahdia, Alpha Blondy and Honey Jars
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