Cruise Day 4: Tunis, Tunisia

We're in port for a short day only in Tunis. It's our second stop, so we're not tired yet, but it's our first time to Tunisia and we're really excited to do a lot more than we've got time for. First I'll say what we want to do here, then I'll go into what we managed to get done. Of course, what we want is unrealistic, but we've tried to come up with a plan that has a chance of success.
May 18, 2010

We're in port for a short day only in Tunis. It's our second stop, so we're not tired yet, but it's our first time to Tunisia and we're really excited to do a lot more than we've got time for. First I'll say what we want to do here, then I'll go into what we managed to get done. Of course, what we want is unrealistic, but we've tried to come up with a plan that has a chance of success.

Tunis, from Cruise 2010 - Ports

Tunis has got a lot to offer in the way of Roman ruins, which we're excited about. First of all, it's the site of ancient Carthage, the city founded in mythology by Alyssa, also known as Dido in Virgil's Aeneid. Let's see if I can remember this right: At its founding, Dido went to the Phoenician king and asked for land to found her own city. Her wish was granted in a snide way: she was given a bull hide and told to cover (or surround) as much land as she wanted by nightfall. The king expected her to win a small plot, not much bigger than the bull hide, but instead she craftily cut the hide into thin strips and covered an enormous region of the north African coast and founded Carthage on the spot. Dido's story ends in tragedy when Aeneas, after fleeing Troy with his father on his back, came to Carthage and won the heart of its queen. After staying in Carthage a few months, he left, driven by his destiny to found the Roman people (on the shores of Alba Longa, in Italy). Dido was distraught and burned herself on a pyre of all the belongings that Aeneas left behind. Later she treats Aeneas coldly in the underworld when he visits. So the ancient ruins of Carthage are something with some historical appeal, though all that's left is mostly rubble and a decent amphitheater.

In the opposite direction from Carthage is the well-preserved Roman village of Dougga. It's one of the best preserved Roman villages and probably worth a visit, but it's 90 minutes away, if you have reliable transportation. About 20 minutes farther is another Roman site, Bulla Regia, where there are some underground Roman houses. About six of them are very well preserved, and just the sort of thing we'd love to explore.

On the one hand, there are these ancient Roman ruins that would be fun to see. On the other hand, the Bardo museum in Tunis has all the best treasures recovered from the ruins, including one of the best collections of Roman mosaics. The Lonely Planet recommends taking a half day for the museum, which means that we have to choose between Carthage, Dougga (and possibly Bulla Regia), or the Bardo museum. When we were initially making our plans, we weren't yet aware of Bulla Regia, so the choice was just between those three places. There was a guided tour offered by the Disney cruise to Carthage and the Bardo, or to Dougga, but nothing to Dougga and the Bardo, which we would have most preferred. Even then, the tour only allots one hour for the museum, which is way too short for us, and later we talked to some people who did that tour and they said they didn't spend enough time in Carthage either. So realistically we could only choose one place. We chose to go to the Bardo, and if there was time, maybe we could hit Carthage on the way back.

Here's what actually happened: We left the ship and headed towards where we hoped the train station would be to take us into the town adjacent to Tunis where the Bardo museum is. We lacked a map, and even the Lonely Planet was no help here, never expecting that its readers would arrive by cruise ship, so we walked until we were just the slightest bit lost and then the taxi drivers attacked. They insisted that there was no train station here (though I thought I could see a platform about a quarter kilometer away, and it turns out I was right, but I couldn't tell for sure and we were already suffering from the problem of not having any local currency yet), they insisted that there was no bank or ATM nearby (though the merchant at the duty free shops had pointed me in this direction when I asked for a bank machine), they insisted that all the taxis operated on a fixed price [which at least the ones right by the ship did], and so on, until there was nothing we felt we could do but take a taxi to the museum and figure things out from there.

The taxi stopped in town so I could withdraw some dinars and then stopped again to pass us off to his brother who drives his own taxi, and finally after a lot of traffic and sour feelings we arrived at the Bardo. It was closed, not to open for another half hour, which is earlier than the Lonely Planet reports once the lack of daylight saving time is taken into account, which we'd failed to do when making our plan. We sat in the shade and tried to consult the map on the Lonely Planet PDF on Ryan's iPod until the museum opened.

Half of the museum was closed for renovation and expansion of the museum. Actually, only a small part was closed for renovation, but the closed rooms shut off access to the rest of the museum, so we only got to see about half the rooms. A sign informed us that the mosaics from those areas had been moved so we could still see them, but the best works weren't present, so I suppose those were the ones being repaired. It's tragic. At least what we did see was amazing and we thoroughly enjoyed the collection of recovered shipwreck goods, and some of the mosaics were really cool. There was a planetarium in a similar arrangement to the one in Italica near Sevilla, Spain, but this one had a very different artistic style. We'll post a picture later when we get better internet speeds. The planetarium has the seven heavenly gods in the center (six arranged around a central one) with emblems of the zodiac around. In Italica, Venus sat central and the gods had a very Roman look. Here in Tunis, the gods looked more realistic (less stylized) and Saturn sits central. The other gods are Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Selene, and Helios, representing the 5 planets and the sun and the moon. Earth, of course, is not a planet yet.

Planetarium, from Cruise 2010 - Ports

Other spectacular mosaics include a large, banquet hall-spanning mosaic of Neptune, surrounded by tritons and sea creatures: "The Triumph of Neptune." This mosaic was under repair but we could still view it. One of the workers nicely walked out to the middle to take a better photo of the centerpiece Neptune. Another floor mosaic depicted Bacchus with all his cherubs harvesting grapes for the wine. We liked a pastoral scene with workers in a field, some chasing a gaggle of grouse into a trap. The wall mosaic that one of the ubiquitous tour guides claimed was the highlight of the museum (and it is culturally significant) has Virgil composing some opening lines of his epic poem on a scroll: Musa, mihi causas memora (O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate …) [And the portrait on the mosaic is supposedly the only one done of Virgil from life --Ryan]

Neptune centerpiece, from Cruise 2010 - Ports

Daily life mosaic, from Cruise 2010 - Ports

As I said, the Lonely Planet recommends allowing a half day (4 hours?) for the whole museum. At our slow pace, we finished half the museum in 2 hours, and then we didn't know what to do. We'd planned to spend the extra time either going to Carthage, or to the medina and the souks, or if we really had a lot of time left, maybe going out to Dougga and Bulla Regia. But even though we'd spent only two hours at the museum, we were delayed getting there and then delayed again waiting for the museum to open, and by now it was 12:00 ship time, and we had to be back by 4 or get left behind. With only four hours to go, we didn't think we had time to go to Dougga and back (that's three hours travel and only 1 hour to see the ruins, and then we'd regret not going to Bulla Regia, too. Anyway, there wasn't enough time for Dougga. We thought we might be able to get to Carthage, so we walked to the metro and took that back to the train station, except that the metro took a long time, too. It's above ground, so not actually a subway, just a light rail that runs through town and through traffic, and it's as crowded as they come, and a pickpocket tried to pinch something from Ryan's pocket except he was guarding against that already so nothing happened there. By the time we got to the transfer station (transferring to another metro line before getting to the train station) we decided to try to exchange our money back into euros before going to Carthage where we worried there might be no banks or services. But then we realized the time and now we had only three hours to get to Carthage (about a 40 minute train ride) and back to the port (another 20 minutes, plus walking) so that left a little less than two hours to see Carthage, not counting delays in waiting for the train, getting our money changed back, etc. We didn't even know the train schedule, only that the Lonely Planet says it runs "frequently." So we scrapped the plan to see Carthage. Of course, now we were feeling terrible about our decisions. The Bardo was half closed and opened late, leaving us too little time to tack Carthage onto our itinerary, and by the time we ever get back to Tunis, if we ever get back to Tunis, I'm sure the underground Roman villas in Bulla Regia will be roped off and inaccessible. We were despondent and sure that we should have taken a private car or a taxi for the day to Dougga and Bulla Regia, and done just that. We imagine that that would have been a splendid day with no difficulties and everything to our satisfaction. Who knows whether that would have been the case?

Attempting to salvage the situation, we went looking for lunch. We decided to trust the Lonely Planet's eating recommendations even though our PDF is from 2007, but Tunis doesn’t seem to change that quickly and it's got very few tourists not with guided groups. One place sounded interesting, so we went there and didn't order the menu du jour (Tunis is bilingual with Arabic and French), so we became anxious when our order took a long time to arrive (45 minutes), but then what we had was quite tasty and we were resigned to our choices which were already made and the day could not be done over, so we determined that we would look only forward again and not wallow in regret. My lunch was something unfamiliar to me, called Ojja, and I had it with fruits de mar (pardon my French spelling). What arrived was an amazing array of seafood varieties, with baby octopus and baby squid, several types of clams and shrimps and other assorted sea creatures, all in a spicy tomato sauce with cooked hot peppers interspersed, and buried within this delicacy were two poached eggs, with liquid yolks that ran out into the tomato sauce when punctured and the entire creation was delicious. Ryan had a tempting fish couscous and the couscous was very good, small and fine, and moist and flavorful. [Possibly the best couscous I've ever had --Ryan]

Tunisian lunch, from Cruise 2010 - Ports

Our spirits were lifted for the moment, until we went to change our remaining dinars back into euros. At the bank where I stopped, we were told that only Tunisian citizens are allowed to change Tunisian dinars into euros at the banks in town. For us, the cashier suggested that we could make the exchange at the airport. We told him we had arrived by boat, and he assured us we could exchange the money at the port, too, but I didn't believe him since I hadn't seen anything like that when we arrived and no one had mentioned any money changers when I was looking for banks upon arrival. Still, we had no choice but to wait until we got back to the port. We browsed a souvenir shop but found nothing worth buying, so we walked to the train station and bought our train tickets back. The taxi to the Bardo cost us 25 euros; the metro ticket from the Bardo to the train cost us 900 dinars, or about 0.45 euros for both of us. The train from Tunis to the port cost us another 900 dinars. Total transportation cost out was less than 1 euro for both. Sigh.

When we got to the port, there was no controlled departure, just a couple of touristy shops claiming to be duty free. We could have walked in from the boat through these shops without going through passport control. There was no organization, only chaos. We learned there's no money exchange here, but a man thought he might be able to sell our dinars to a local merchant and asked around. We had 40,000 dinars left (equivalent to about 20 euros), but he couldn't find any buyers. The merchants kept telling us we should keep the dinars as souvenirs. They're not worth anything else to us. The man helping us (and that's a loose term here) offered us 10 euros for our 40 kilodinars, and we countered with 30 - our three "10"s (3 x 10 kilodinars), and keeping the stack of "1" coins to ourselves. He agreed grudgingly. So that was a bad exchange rate, but we were done with it and got more than nothing for our dinars. We had saved some nice looking coins, but we still had a stack of 10 grubby coins, valued at about 5 euros.

Right by the boat we'd seen camel rides for the tourists as we left in the morning, so when we came upon them again in the afternoon we thought about buying a camel ride for fun with our stack of worn coins. The man was reluctant, but we drove a hard bargain and gave him the stack for a short camel ride. It's silly and fun, but now we've ridden a camel this trip (we did a much better ride a long time ago in Egypt).

Camel ride, from Cruise 2010 - Ports

At last, we're back aboard. We met up with Adrian and Margaret for a game of Settlers of Catan, and Colin, the thirteen year old from the dinner table next to us, joined us to learn the game, but then left early for one of the teen activities. We had to cut the game short anyhow for the evening show, which we hoped would be as good as the show a couple nights ago. This one was "Once Upon a Song" and didn't have any fancy costumes and no story, either. It was just medleys of Disney songs and I'd probably rather skipped it and done something productive.

Singing show, from Cruise 2010 - On the boat

Because we were just in Tunisia, we thought it would be fun to wear some Moroccan costumes we got in Marrakech, and we looked smart in them. We took our photo with Chip and Dale in their Arabian wear, and also with Mickey and with Minnie in their costumes, too. We wore the garb to dinner, and walking around the ship we got a lot of appreciative comments and some people took photos with us. The Disney crew seemed to get an even bigger kick out of our getups than the cruisers.

Dressed up, from Cruise 2010 - On the boat

We weren't really interested in any of the after dinner entertainment, so we retired early to work on the blog and more planning, but I fell asleep.

I'm writing this on the train from Civitavecchia to Roma Termini where we're hoping for some espresso and some sweets and then taking another train to Ostia Antica.