Fly Me to the Dunes

For our own private Tunisia, we leave the country's beaches behind and blaze trails under the sheltering sky.

The air is purest in the desert. Or so I’m told by Rafik, a young Bedouin who leads my dromedary, Arabia, through the Sahara at twilight. Rafik’s dressed in designer knock-offs, like any European twentysomething, and speaks English gleaned from Hollywood movies subtitled in Arabic. The desert, perhaps as etymologically intended, is mostly deserted. We find ourselves incongruously exchanging cell numbers and business cards on the top of a hill of sand, under the black umbrella of a thousand stars.

Before I came, colleagues had told me that visiting Tunisia was like Alice slipping through the looking glass. After just a few days, it feels like we’ve fallen through the rabbit hole. My vision of the desert had involved Yves Saint Laurent Sahara jackets, and Tunisia, in its burgeoning tourist haze, isn’t quite there yet. This is still the kind of place where you can visit the coliseum at El Jem – the eerie double of its more famous Roman twin – and not run into a soul, except for the caretaker sweeping out the former lion’s den. Instead of tales of gladiators, they’ll tell you stories of the Berber queen who once launched herself off the topmost layer of this giant ancient cake of a ruin.

The highways, rolling out from the Mediterranean beach resorts to the Saharan outposts, are being laid like carpet almost overnight. We started our trip on the beaches of Cap Bon and Hammamet, where artist Paul Klee came to hang out and paint. It’s said that Tunisia changed the way he saw light and colour, drenched as it is in almost Floridian sunlight. The area has now become the country’s answer to Las Vegas, with an indoor skating rink and beaches lined with package tourists – all built on coastal salt flats that will eat away at the foundations of the area’s superluxury hotels within 50 years. A completely different kind of Mirage, you might say.

Which is why we’ve ventured off, migrating with the rarer breed of traveller, down into the country’s dusty heart, looping past the lip of the Algerian border, Arabic-scrawled water bottles in hand. With Tunisia at a crossroads, you have to choose which sandy stretch to travel down. We switchbacked our way through the Atlas Mountains, which run across the country like a red-granite spine, hopscotching from one mountain oasis to another in our 4 x 4. Dromedaries trot alongside the highway here with the same candour as moose in Algonquin Provincial Park. It was just us and the landscape until we met up with a group of Italian motorcyclists in a remote Berber village. You wonder how strange it must have all looked to the shepherd on the side of the road, herding his goats with a stick.

At the Tamerza Palace hotel, we ate lunch overlooking a swimming pool that overlooks an ancient mud village that’s the same ruddy colour as the desert. In Tozeur, the entire town is camouflaged, built from sun-baked bricks. We sat in the Sofitel, a table away from giddy French children in Lacoste polos who dined on lamb shanks with pomegranate and pretended to be Indiana Jones the next day. Canyons and cartoon-accurate oases break up the miles and miles of scrub and sand. We pulled off for a break amid the stalagmite-like sand rocks at Debabcha, and a falconer appeared, offering a show for a few dinars. Crossing the salt flats of Chott el Djerid, the world becomes the thinnest line of yellow, the sky wipes everything else away and you can start to believe the world is flat.

There’s something almost biblical about waking up in a hotel room in Douz, with real live sand dunes outside your window. Out front, palm trees garlanded with Tunisia’s toffee-like deglet nour (fingers of light) dates subbed in for a garden, and the birds – surprising on the edge of seemingly nothing – were as loud as a Super Bowl party. My friend gleefully plucked handfuls of dates off the swooning trees like a kid in Willy Wonka’s factory while a bemused doorman looked on.

Rafik told me that, for two or three months at a time, his family will trek out to the inner stretches of the Sahara with their goats and tents for their version of the vacation on sand. You could easily lose yourself in it, but Rafik’s cousin tapped his head. “The GPS is in here.” On top of a sand dune, on the back of a dromedary, it all made an odd amount of sense.

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