Kairouan
Pictire: The medina at Kairouan
Click here to see our Ofoto album from Kairouan
Kairouan is a holy city a little over an hour by louage west of Sousse. It was founded in times of the caliphate by someone whose horse tripped over a goblet in the sand causing water to miraculously gush forth. From this miracle it was assumed that despite improbable distance this spring must derive from the same source of the well of Zam Zam in Mecca and so a shrine was built on the spot. Nowadays a camel is kept harnessed in the shrine and when someone wants to drink the holy water the camel is put in circular motion and the water is drawn from the well. LPG billed this as the biggest tourist trap in Kairouan but of all the holy sites there it turned out to be the most accessible, and no one asked us for money.
The LPG is only good for its maps in Tunisia. At least on arrival in town we were able to figure out when we were passing by the great mosque inside the old city walls and get the louage to stop and let us off rather than take us out of town to the station. In the heat outside the walls we got conflicting instructions from passers-by who pointed us away from the mosque toward the medina proper. i had read in the lpg that the mosque closed early in the day and that we could get our all-sites ticket there, but one passer-by told us that the president of senegal as coming to pray there and that the monuments in town would be closing first, so he suggested we should follow him. He pointed out buildings along the way and ushered us inside a madrasah, telling us to feel chez nous and take a picture here, and take a picture there. We followed as far as the mosque with three doors, and then we knew about where we were on our map, so when he told us to go one way, we said we were going another, and then he mentioned we should at least drop by the carpet shop to see how the carpets were made, very interesting for us, and cheap price, and we had a sudden urge to turn a corner. He followed. We turned another corner in the labyrinth souq and before he could get to that point, ran to the next turn, suprising and nearly bowling over a lady in a straw hat coming the other way. We moved quickly until we came to a butcher shop with severed heads lying on a counter out front below a picturesque black and white striped arch. We paused to take pictures and congratulate ourselves for having lost our antagonist.
The fact was, we didn't really want to visit the ancient bldgs there. The ticket to enter all of them was about 5 dinars (each) but that wasn't the point. if you buy one of these tickets then you feel obligated to seek out each site and enter each one, and as they were islamic sites, non-muslims were only allowed to enter the outer areas, and on a hot day, one is not inclined to follow such a schedule. The souk on the other hand was fascinating, the best we saw in tunisia. There were a lot of tourists around, but they were by no means dominant. No one seemed to mind if we snapped photos wherever we liked. Apart from being accosted by the occasional carpet/stuffed camel salesman, pretty low key sales asides, we were left alone to enjoy ourselves. We wandered the covered souks, admired the colorful costumes of the ladies, let ourselves get caught up in the ebb and flow of the market medina. We paused and bought cold liters of coke, avoided the medina coffee shops with plush ottomans where there were no Tunisian customers, walked along the walls, made it as far as the great mosque (and realized by now that this story about the president of senegal was a pile of garbage; and as it was a small place we even saw our carpet tout with another pair of tourists in tow).
When clouds welled overhead we made our way back to the main gate to the Medina and when it started to rain we got a cab to the louage station. We made him use his meter, only a little more than a dirham. By early afternoon we were back in Sousse.
We had a job to do. We has left 6 bags in Mahia the week before so we could travel light but we needed to retrieve them and take them with us up to Tunis. We had the whole rest of the day to work out how to do that, and at the train station earlier that day we had got the train schedules for the side track from Sousse to Mahdia and the main Tunis to Tatouine line. We had left our light packs at the station in Sousse because the flop house we'd stayed in the night before was too flaky to bother to keep bags for its clients. Our goal now was to reconcile these two sets of bags at the train station in Sousse and then get them from there to Tunis. We figured the only way to travel with so many bags was by train.
No need to go into great detail here. We continued by louage to Mahdia and got let out near the town center, again avoiding going all the way to the louage station a bit further out of town. We walked from there to the beach and made the familiar turn toward the Topkapi. A bit hungry we paused for a cold shwarma sandwich. We didn't know it was cold when we bought them and cold goat on a spit is not all that palatable. We ate them anyway, on the trot, and washed them down with cold beer once we reached the Topkapi.
The manager seemed pleased to see us, and I'd always liked him, an urbane chap with decent English, unusual there (normally we spoke French or Arabic). The animateur was in the bar, tall peculiar looking fellow who looked the part of La Danse de Canard, which he always led off his show with, invariably, night after night. The rest of the show was invariable as well. I wanted to suggest he should try and find new material, or play some of the songs backwards, or something, ANYthing to make the show something other than boooriiingg. But he was being innocently friendly, so I was diplomatic.
Click here to see our Ofoto album from Kairouan
Kairouan is a holy city a little over an hour by louage west of Sousse. It was founded in times of the caliphate by someone whose horse tripped over a goblet in the sand causing water to miraculously gush forth. From this miracle it was assumed that despite improbable distance this spring must derive from the same source of the well of Zam Zam in Mecca and so a shrine was built on the spot. Nowadays a camel is kept harnessed in the shrine and when someone wants to drink the holy water the camel is put in circular motion and the water is drawn from the well. LPG billed this as the biggest tourist trap in Kairouan but of all the holy sites there it turned out to be the most accessible, and no one asked us for money.
The LPG is only good for its maps in Tunisia. At least on arrival in town we were able to figure out when we were passing by the great mosque inside the old city walls and get the louage to stop and let us off rather than take us out of town to the station. In the heat outside the walls we got conflicting instructions from passers-by who pointed us away from the mosque toward the medina proper. i had read in the lpg that the mosque closed early in the day and that we could get our all-sites ticket there, but one passer-by told us that the president of senegal as coming to pray there and that the monuments in town would be closing first, so he suggested we should follow him. He pointed out buildings along the way and ushered us inside a madrasah, telling us to feel chez nous and take a picture here, and take a picture there. We followed as far as the mosque with three doors, and then we knew about where we were on our map, so when he told us to go one way, we said we were going another, and then he mentioned we should at least drop by the carpet shop to see how the carpets were made, very interesting for us, and cheap price, and we had a sudden urge to turn a corner. He followed. We turned another corner in the labyrinth souq and before he could get to that point, ran to the next turn, suprising and nearly bowling over a lady in a straw hat coming the other way. We moved quickly until we came to a butcher shop with severed heads lying on a counter out front below a picturesque black and white striped arch. We paused to take pictures and congratulate ourselves for having lost our antagonist.
The fact was, we didn't really want to visit the ancient bldgs there. The ticket to enter all of them was about 5 dinars (each) but that wasn't the point. if you buy one of these tickets then you feel obligated to seek out each site and enter each one, and as they were islamic sites, non-muslims were only allowed to enter the outer areas, and on a hot day, one is not inclined to follow such a schedule. The souk on the other hand was fascinating, the best we saw in tunisia. There were a lot of tourists around, but they were by no means dominant. No one seemed to mind if we snapped photos wherever we liked. Apart from being accosted by the occasional carpet/stuffed camel salesman, pretty low key sales asides, we were left alone to enjoy ourselves. We wandered the covered souks, admired the colorful costumes of the ladies, let ourselves get caught up in the ebb and flow of the market medina. We paused and bought cold liters of coke, avoided the medina coffee shops with plush ottomans where there were no Tunisian customers, walked along the walls, made it as far as the great mosque (and realized by now that this story about the president of senegal was a pile of garbage; and as it was a small place we even saw our carpet tout with another pair of tourists in tow).
When clouds welled overhead we made our way back to the main gate to the Medina and when it started to rain we got a cab to the louage station. We made him use his meter, only a little more than a dirham. By early afternoon we were back in Sousse.
We had a job to do. We has left 6 bags in Mahia the week before so we could travel light but we needed to retrieve them and take them with us up to Tunis. We had the whole rest of the day to work out how to do that, and at the train station earlier that day we had got the train schedules for the side track from Sousse to Mahdia and the main Tunis to Tatouine line. We had left our light packs at the station in Sousse because the flop house we'd stayed in the night before was too flaky to bother to keep bags for its clients. Our goal now was to reconcile these two sets of bags at the train station in Sousse and then get them from there to Tunis. We figured the only way to travel with so many bags was by train.
No need to go into great detail here. We continued by louage to Mahdia and got let out near the town center, again avoiding going all the way to the louage station a bit further out of town. We walked from there to the beach and made the familiar turn toward the Topkapi. A bit hungry we paused for a cold shwarma sandwich. We didn't know it was cold when we bought them and cold goat on a spit is not all that palatable. We ate them anyway, on the trot, and washed them down with cold beer once we reached the Topkapi.
The manager seemed pleased to see us, and I'd always liked him, an urbane chap with decent English, unusual there (normally we spoke French or Arabic). The animateur was in the bar, tall peculiar looking fellow who looked the part of La Danse de Canard, which he always led off his show with, invariably, night after night. The rest of the show was invariable as well. I wanted to suggest he should try and find new material, or play some of the songs backwards, or something, ANYthing to make the show something other than boooriiingg. But he was being innocently friendly, so I was diplomatic.
