T Is For Tunisia & Time Travel

During April, we're participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Every day (except Sundays), we’ll be doing an alphabet themed post starting with “A is for Adventurous” and ending with “Z is for Zinc”. We've got a theme for every letter sorted except for Y. If you have any ideas for the letter Y, please leave a comment or email

T is for Tunisia. It also stands for Time Travel - and that's what this post is about. A little travel back in time to when Scott and I did a very cheesy Saharan Safari in Tunisia. 

Back when we lived in Scotland, one of the ways we traveled cheaply was to scour the internet for last minute package holiday deals. It was a great way for us to get flights, hotels and some of our meals at a lower price then if we bought everything separately. Usually, we used the hotel as a base for our do-it-yourself explorations and skipped any of the excursions that the tour companies offer. But because we were only in Tunisia for a week and we wanted to see as much of the country as we could, we signed up for one of the popular whirlwind two day Saharan Safari tours. We didn't get to see anything in-depth, but we were able to take in some amazing scenery and hit a few of the highlights as we traveled via bus and train.

El Djem 

El Djem is one of the best conserved Roman amphitheaters in the world. Built around 238, it could hold 35,000 people eager to see gladiator matches and chariot races. One of our slightly bizarre Christmas traditions is to watch Monty Python's Life of Brian, so it was pretty neat to see where some of the scenes were filmed. We also eat curry on Christmas - perhaps not your typical Christmas meal.

Matmata {May The Force Be With You}

Are you a Star Wars geek? Then maybe you've been to Tunisia already to see the old Star Wars sets. We traveled to Matmata, which was the set for Luke Skywalker's home on the desert planet Tatooine. Remember when Luke was living with his aunt and uncle and they tried to dissuade him from going off with Obi Wan Kenobi to learn the way of the Force? This is the very place where it took place! I'm glad I had a chance to see it before the desert swallowed it up. 

Train Ride

In addition to riding on camels, we also got to ride on the old Lezar Rouge train taking in some amazing sights including the Metlaoui train station. Talk about photo ops!

Camel Ride {Cheesy, But Cool}

The highlight of the trip has to be riding camels in the desert. Definitely cheesy, but definitely cool. Such a strange sensation to ride a camel - their gait is seems really wonky. I'm actually not sure how I managed to keep my balance! They pushed us to rent these silly outfits to wear on the camel ride. Scott and I resisted - they didn't look all that clean and smelled a bit funky. So while we didn't quite blend in with our fellow tourists, we all had smiles from ear to ear riding on our camels.

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