Tunisia with Adventure Center

A British company that I like is Exodus (Grange Mills, Weir Road, London, SW12 0NE, England; phone +44 [0] 20 8675 . . . From the U.S., book with Adventure Center, 1311 63rd St., Ste. 200, Emeryville, CA 94068; 800/227-8747). They offer basic travel that tries to give you a real flavor of the country.

My week-long Tunisia tour, Feb. 11-19, ’06, cost $975, including the local payment (collected by the tour leader at the start of the trip to pay for expenses that cannot be prebooked) and some meals. Round-trip airfare on Alitalia, San Francisco-New York-Milan-Tunis, cost $1,121.

There were 13 in our group, mostly teachers on the half-term holiday, with the average age in the 50s. Aside from myself, there were two sisters from Northern Ireland and two New Zealanders, with the rest Britons — an intelligent and affable group.

Our Tunisian guide was superb, knowledgeable, energetic and, whenever possible, flexible.

For the first four days we concentrated on Phoenician and Roman ruins, often with an overlay of the Ottoman Empire. The Bardo Museum in Tunis gave us a good start with its innumerable displays of treasures. We toured several UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including Carthage, Dougga and Kairouan, of which Carthage was the least impressive. Makthar and the Amphitheatre at El Jem were outstanding.

In southern Tunisia, home to date palms and olive trees, we spent one morning on a train excursion through stunning mountain scenery with spectacular river canyons. We also crossed Chott El Djerid, Tunisia’s great salt lake, to the Sahara Desert, where we rode camels in and camped bedouin style.

Near Matmata, we visited a Berber family who lived old style. Matmata is also famous for being a setting for “Star Wars IV”; Luke Skywalker’s home is now the Sidi Driss troglodyte hotel.

We ended the tour on a high note, exploring the coliseum in Tunis.

Accommodations on the tour varied, including a basic hotel for four nights, an overnight in a guest house and camping for two consecutive nights (in two locales, between which I would have preferred a hotel stay, as only one night’s camping had been listed). The guest house was charming; in one upstairs space we all slept on mats covered by lovely thick quilts. But the bedouin-style tent we camped in had limited facilities, and the desert at night is cold.

This was the first time the company had done this tour, and input from the participants was encouraged. I thought it was a really good overview of the country. It included perhaps a little more sightseeing than other tours, where I’ve had more opportunity to interact with local residents, but I had a good time and learned a lot.

And, more than ever, it made me want to visit Libya and Algeria to complete the picture of those early journeys across the Middle East and North Africa!

JO RAWLINS GILBERT
Menlo Park, CA