Tunis Awalan!
8.2.2004 | Hammamet, Tunisia
We were dealing also with other alternative sports in Hammamat, not only with falling on the bitumen. Apart from practicing bowling, we watched and listened on Friday evening Lebanese Star Academy (al-Akadeemeeya) at the Dolce Vita Café, and yesterday we were sharing happiness with Tunisian People upon their victory over Senegal in the North African Football Cup that's taking place in Tunisia. Guys are entering semi-finals, as it was explained to us. And where exactly is our contribution to the world of sport? We were honking and lighting as we were approaching Sheraton hotel in Hammamat (we were unable to find a Tunisian flag to stick it to the car).
New sport
7.2.2004 | Hammamet, Tunisia
If you see the first photo you could get the impression that we're bored and spending all the time (and money) at the same café. This impression would actually be quite realistic, although here's Peter's report on how we amuse ourselves on boring days, waiting for the ferry:
- We woke up as usual – several times. We got up late and on my surprise my private driver Tilen asked: "Shall we have some reading?" Some two hours of silence followed. The foggy morning hours passed and then Tilen, out of the sudden, said:
Where's the hole?
6.2.2004 | Hammamet, Tunisia
Since sleeping is still a tough job, Peter and I still wake up several times during the night, namely we still couldn't find the last hole. It's a piece of cake to patch it, but where is it hiding? We've been busy with this question since long ago. We alternate as night guards each night. This means: to sit on the empty airbed, start the engine (the air-pump takes a lot of energy to the cold battery), take the pump off the shelf, open the bed valve, insert the pump, start the pump and vegetate until the bed is fully loaded. Then turn off the pump, close the valve, turn off the engine and try to get into the sleeping bag again. For the next three hours. The one that is off-duty feels a heavenly relief as an unknown force takes him off the luggage.
Hotel chain PEPA
5.2.2004 | Tunisia
I haven't spoken yet about the hotel chain PEPA, hotels I've been using since the beginning of November and the room which I'm sharing with Peter since the beginning of January. Hotels are excellent, very cheap and fantastically located! Can you imagine sleeping in İstanbul half a minute from Aya Sofya, five minutes from the Topkapi Palace and mere two minutes from the Blue Mosque? For only two and a half million Turkish Lira per day? Or, for example, overnight on no man's land between Albania and Kosovo (where I was looking directly into the barrel of a pissed-off American police-officer's charged gun), a morning view over white pools at Pamukkale or the citadel of Haleb (Aleppo), first waterfront line (in front of all the other hotels) in Lebanon or Egypt, sleeping a few metres off the Dead Sea shore, morning view over the Giza Pyramids, Nile feluccas, sunrise in the middle of the sand… ¡Almost like Paradores in Spain!
Imagine everything you can not imagine
1.2.2004 | Libya
This is one of the slogans Libyan peoples' committee for tourism was using a couple of years ago and it best describes what Peter and I were experiencing during last days. Here we got stuck for so much time, after two hundred metres we got stuck for so many hours etc. This kind of statistics gets boring so we won't bother you with it. I could write that we slept in the middle of white sand dunes, red sand dunes, that we had dinner in the pleasant company of the driver Ebraheem and the guide Hakeem at our campfire, that we made 1.400 kilometres of off-road in six days, that we were admiring 10.000 year old wall paintings, that we enjoyed complete peace and silence in the middle of the desert, that we haven't met a single human being for a few days, that desert lizards and quails let us approach them only a few feet away, that we felt extreme heat (and it's January!), that we climbed dunes that steep that we thought the car would roll-over, that we almost had a swim in salt lakes (the water was still too cold at the end), that we… and so on and on.