Chapter 7 – The beach and its revenge

And then Michael went to a resort. OK, close your gaping maws or you’ll catch flies. I do like a little R&R on vacation and the opportunity presented itself to catch a little culture of a different sort – so why not? We usually try to reserve a few days at the end of any trip to kick back and relax. Sometimes this is on the beach, sometimes its on a boat (a la Halong Bay in Vietnam), sometimes it’s just a few days in a nice hotel.

Anyway, we had been doing a lot of driving. Check that, I had been doing a lot of driving. And while that was a big part of the planned activities, it was getting a bit tiring. We were often in a destination one night and then a 4-5 hour drive the next day. As I’ve said before, the drivers here are pretty bad (makes Boston look good) so that adds a stress level. So while we had planned to go farther south into the desert to Tatouine to see the Berber fortresses, we chose instead to head to cut that part of the trip and spend a few days on the beach in Hammamet.

Hamammet is classic resortville. Big hotels all lined up in a row on the beach. Most of these resorts are filled with package tourists on all inclusive packages for a week. These tourists are here to sit on the beach or go to the pool or just drink (yes there were people drinking at 9:30 in the morning).

What this place really reminds me of is summer camp without the bug juice and cold showers. There are activities every hour (bocci!, archery!, aerobics! Water aerobics!). I’ve done archery a couple of times and am proud to say that I’m still pretty good at it. They’ve made it idiot proof by having arrows that notch into the line instead of having to hold it and they keep you pretty close to the target. Nevertheless, that was one part of camp I really enjoyed.

There’s a large central dining hall where everyone takes their meals. At least the food is OK (unlike my camp where the food was essentially inedible). Ironically, the Tunisian food they serve is the worst thing they do. I think they’ve been dumbing it down for the crowd. But the desert table is something to behold what with 10 different types of pastries, chocolate mousse, whipped cream and ice cream. People pile their plates up high and keep going back for more rounds. This morning at breakfast, I saw a man with 6, count em 6, hard boiled eggs on his plate. And let me tell you, this man did not need to eat six hard boiled eggs given his current girth. The excess is just remarkable especially in a country that’s not overflowing with plenty. I can only imagine the training sessions the staff must go through to prepare them for the sight of so much wasted food.

It has been a shock to the system to go from the real country to resortville. The resort is literally gated – no riffraff allowed. The guests seem pretty much oblivious to the rest of the country around them. The big excursion the resort provides is a pirate cruise. Literally, you would have no idea you were in North Africa if it wasn’t for the few Tunisian channels on television.

Speaking of television, there’s only one English channel, RT, which is for expats living in Russia. Now this seems fine, but it seems odd that this would be the choice given that there are actually Russians here who speak Russian. The channel is a hoot – it’s way way left – like Russia’s answer to Fox News. They have a program called “crosstalk” which is supposed to be a show that has different viewpoint on an issue. We watched one on US immigration and it was a giant love fest in favor. These are not folks who are spending a lot of time in the US.

Anyway, it’s just a bit odd to be suddenly in the lap of luxury and secluded from the real world. But I guess that’s kind of what camp is like (but with cold showers)

Quick note on booking the room. We had read in the guidebooks that off season, most of the big resorts have pretty big discounts for walk-ups. We had done a bit of research and had found the one we wanted and knew the relative price. We didn’t book online though and figured it would be the same if we walked in. Not so, the price we were quoted was about triple what we had seen online. So I got the trusty netbook, sat down in the lobby and logged onto their wifi and made the reservation. Voila!

So the bad news is that we came down with “la grippe” aka the stomach flu. We thought it might have been something we ate, but the doctor who came and made a housecall for us today (we’ve both been running fevers) said it was just a flu. Good news I guess is no food poisoning, bad news is that it just takes time to pass. Good news is that we are in a comfortable place where if you have to be cooped up it’s pretty nice. Bad news is that we’re missing a major Carthage ruin site, a major bird watching site and another whole town up north. Alas –that’s the way the baguette crumbles.

Our only major worry now is that the volcano behaves. On our incoming flight, I think we just made it out before they canceled some flights. In fact, we took a very circuitous route to Paris from NY. We flew underneath Spain and then came back up. I can only assume the cloud was hanging out over the more northern route.