As Messrs. Druce and Stenschke take deep breaths and lean boldly over the balcony of North Africa with flip-flops in hand.
Maps are useful, but they only take you so far. Navigating the pristine and super-modern passageways of Frankfurt Airport we are reminded of Logan's Run and succeed in finding check-in desk 302 only by closing our eyes and using the force.
It wasn´t long —waiting three floors underground whilst being serenaded at midnight by a pneumatic drill— before we find ourselves in transit under the friendly eyes of Tunisair. In-flight entertainment on the midnight flight is derived from passenger conversations flowing freely from carpeted aisle to carpeted aisle. The sensation of crossing the Mediterranean in a flying living room is truly endearing. We take our hats (and our shoes) off to you, Tunisair. Shukran.
Landing in the North of Africa at one in the morning is a sensory experience par excellence as the smell of jasmine competes with that of Aviation fuel and the heat embraces you to the thrill of the cicadas. It is dark, a warm dry Scirocco wind billows around us, and we are standing at the 7th of November airport in a town called Tabarka on Tunisia's north western coast. In some kind of wonderful way we feel a familiar rush to the heart, a deep breath followed by a soothing sigh: the feeling of coming home....
Our fellow passengers on the flight are promptly packaged onto chortling holiday buses by arms with clipboards and, almost at once, we stand alone on the concourse. After a brief search, we find a local driver —whose name at this late hour sounds uncannily like Axle Madness— who takes care of the last few miles to the hotel. We abandon our rucksacks at the reception and plunge into the hotel's zygotically shaped swimming pool, steering our bodies around under the glistening moonlight, washing the journey away.
First Steps
Upon rising we scout the surroundings on scooters and the great question of the morning is, 'Where´s the sand?' This place is lush, 'tis an oasis 25 miles wide. We have reached the northern coast of Tunisia and drift amazed through the peaceful ochre and tempered greens around us. The golden coast rises steeply up into fig and cork covered mountain plateaus giving the region the name Green Tunisia.
We rest amid a fig plantation and are lucky to chance upon some of the inhabitants. We exchange smiles, basic French, and candy with them for smiles, fluent French, and supreme figs. The figs that glisten and swell here are as plump as mistress Adelaide´s chickens —though the mountain roads used to transport the figs and cork out are as curved and gritty as only Chinese built mountain roads can be.
We glide back down, park the camels, and re-enter the lush coral pink of Dar Ismail; a virgin hotel that sits on the coast —her beaches still being combed. It is a four star residence and, through happenstance, we find two of them shining at the reception. The pinkness of the hotel reflects the 
harbour town's importance of being slap bang in the middle of the richest coral area along the Maghreb. The locals refer to the scarlet and burnt-orange branches as red gold, plucked from the sea and crafted into exquisite jewellery in kiosks around the Rue Bourguiba. I suspect some decoration might be in order for the impending music festival.
Tabarka is known locally as ‘music town’, thanks to all the music festivals that take place here. Throughout the summer, Tunisians get down and dance all day to the Jazz, Raï, and Latin music festivals. If there is no space at the inn, the dance weary retire to the beaches to sleep it all off to the sound of the gentle ticking waves. Sleepy Tabarka is rarely visited by foreigners and as such has retained an old-fashioned feel where men suck on shishas in pavement cafés and watch the world drift by whilst young boys weave through the streets touting jasmines.
A Jazz Festival
We have arrived in Tabarka at the right time of year, the annual Tabarka Jazz Festival is kicking off in all its sultriness and we follow the smiling crowds towards the crumbling Roman amphitheatre. The amphitheatre hosts all of the town's music festivals and a startling array of insects attracted by the multi-coloured lighting system.
Catcher in the Raï
The night is young and outside the main amphitheatre, musicians are performing regional styles in a café lined square. Raï music derives originally from Algeria and can be heard, blended with modern musical styles, all along the low-lying streets of Tabarka. We sip strong Arabic coffee on a shady side-street with Jamel Ben Hadj Khalifa, a leading proponent of Raï, who explains how Raï mingles the best parts of genuine North-African youth related sounds with traditional Arabic scales and Western music styles.
Inside the 3500 seat and 6000 mosquito amphitheatre the brightest star by far is the 'barefoot diva', Cesaria Evora. The thousands of beautiful people who have squeezed in and up close to watch the 'Queen of Mornas' are soon, like we human gyroscopes, wrapped up in, and pulsing to, the enchanting sounds. The Cape Verdean chanteuse impassions the audience with an eclectic mixture of under-the-skin chansons and ecstatic latin grooves. We ease into the lyrical beauty of the night´s musical sessions inhaling the sweet delirious smell of jasmine poesies. A gentleness, a groove, until....
100 Camels in the Courtyard
We flee soaking from the amphitheatre as the humidity touches 90° and the dancing sheik behind us starts his I am John Travolta, I am an aeroplane, impressions. He had claimed to be from a place called Bubbletown —which appears to be just south of Khartoum judging by the map at our feet. The poor 
fellow is clearly two figs short of an oasis.
Squeezing through the clustered chairs and thousands of locals watching the magic on the big screen outside, we make like juice in an orange press to the enclave of men: a peaceful street café. It is explained to us, that women are not forbidden from these establishments, they are simply put off by the open air toilets next to the counter. 
At our plastic table, the cool zitronat drinks flow freely and a boy hurries out to us with a delirious shisha prepared with tobacco and apples. The café owner verses us in the aerodynamics of the correct shisha-taste. Well we puff and we puff and the night becomes blurrier. We vaguely remember seeing our friend Anwa —the best dancer and keenest flower seller in Tabarka— and when the haze clears we are covered in flowers....
The camels were smoking in the courtyard.
Rock & Bread Rolls
The next morning catches us wandering around rocks that needle their way up into the pristine azure skies. The Aguilles on the waterfront of Tabarka are wonderful natural rock formations, they move slowly through aeons and enjoyed elegantly posing for us. They are symbolic of this town, an enigmatic heritage and a complete disregard for the hectic fast-paced European life. Time moves more slowly here, lengthening pleasure and drawing out the senses.
We Continentals shift over to a restaurant and our hosts attempt to give us meagre-bellied journalists 2500 years of Tunisian culinary traditions in seven courses. In a way, we chew on culinary poetry. Mixed egg- and sea-fruit starters, grilled salad, Brik with egg, couscous with lamb and vegetables.... As we sail through this delicious epicurean tempest we are often entranced by the sirenic gaze of the Tunisian Goddess of Waitressing. Satisfaction is the smallest common denominator amongst us all.
A stroll around town, away from the harbour, reminds us that this wonderful respite has been home to Berbers, Phoenicians, Romans, Spanish, French and, judging by the graffiti on the walls, Cossacks. We water up, part with a few dinar for a new camel, and keep the town's discreet retailer of alcoholic beverages in business a while longer.
Sunrise & Cut-throat Razors
Come sunrise, come sea. In the sea we forget everything we have ever heard about coffee: the dance of the waves is the most effective and revitalising wake-up call there is on this small blue planet. Speckled with Mediterranean salt, we emerge like amphibians from the blue soup and make the next jump up the evolutionary scale to road-runners. We are running along the tarmac roads lined with olive trees and a Martian landscape of red-sand hillocks, it is not yet eight o´clock in the morning and the sun is asserting herself, but we are whistling, we are fine, and one foot keeps landing in front of the other. The easy going spirit of this town frees up the spirits and re-energises them.
At breakfast a huge bowl of ripe bulging figs is placed under our snouts and the old instincts return swiftly as we make like camels to the consternation of the Portuguese family to the right of us. With bellies full of figs and looking like Paul Newman in a certain scene from Cool Hand Luke we collapse into the Jeep and head down to Tabarka town. 
On the harbour we let Tunisia´s own Sweeney Todd trim down the beards. How can we be so trusting of a stranger while he runs a 5 inch long naked razor around our throats.
With faces as smooth as beach pebbles we head over to the tough old Genoese fortress at the tip of the harbour. The fort crowns this harbour town and stands proud above a long curve of alluring white sands that stretch below. 
The fort is normally closed to the curious as a military compound, but somehow, using barefaced charm or sheer brute force we caught the inhabitants completely off guard. 
Later, we discovered our guide Mahrez had made the right mobile-phone calls and actually opened Sesame for us.
Altered States
It wasn´t long after this morning´s close shave down on the waterfront, that we decided it was time to find ourselves a savvy driver and head out into the heartland....
The silver chariot, a high-axle Cherokee, pulls out of Tabarka and begins her swift ascent into the mountains. We are travelling through the Khroumirie mountains of the Jendouba region; winding our ways ever higher along the mountain road to Chemtou further south.
Trees on steep hillsides slip past in the same direction as the heart-rendering landscapes behind them, only faster: continental drift; plate tectonics; movement over time....
The driver points out long to the horizon as we skirt the Algerian border, the last hour has been measured out with small red and white milestones: Jendouba 50km; 43km; 37..., the truism reawakens that the journey is where life strives, the end-station is just that: at least until it, in turn, becomes the outset.
Chemtou —at 1100 metres one of the highest points in Tunisia— is where the Romans, 200 years before Christ, first began breaking out the rich golden coloured marble for the doorsteps of Rome. Actually, the work was done by slaves, the Romans probably kept to the shade under this piercing heat. The site is crowned by the foundations of a temple cresting her zenith —used for worshipping whichever god happened to be flavour of the century. The temple sits on one side of a tempting rocky portal that opens out into the dry haunting desert beyond.
Chemtou has, at various points throughout her industrious career, played host to Romans, Byzantines, Numids, Vandals, and Christians—I believe Ulysses also passed through here but that´s another Odyssey—the graffiti artists have yet to make it this far inland, but then at 112° Fahrenheit and rising who can blame them?
Not far from Chemtou we see desert nomads settling with their flocks on the mountain plains: receding from the desert sun and attentive to the chance of labouring in the fields thus Dinar. There are millions of years, my friend, and there are moments....
Drifting
The camels were trying to form a union whilst we are thirsting for the mirage of yet another muse on the trail. It is at times like that, that one needs to find a driver and guide, then head on out on the road again. We are whistling a happy dune as we leave our dreams a lingering and look over our salmon pink shoulders at a jazz drenched Tabarka, and a sun-baked Jendouba behind us: Tunis is calling....
Tunis Beckons
The road to Tunis is a peaceful one, embraced by a flat agricultural landscape with occasional black bin-liners blown like tumble weeds across the dusty terrain. The drive is tempered out by stops at WWII memorials and shady cafés for the national pastime of coffee and cigarettes. Montgomery travelled along this road before us and the Ras Rajel war memorial is worth consideration for the graves, aside each other, of Jews, Arabs, and Christians: all having died united fighting against a common foe.
Mad in a Medina
We gallop into Tunis just before sundown and find ourselves spoiled amid the cool splendour of a one Abou Nawas. The residence is an imposing structure on, aptly enough, the Place des Droits de l´homme. We are no astrologers, but we count at least 5 stars.
[Soundscape: A recording of street traders on an artery of the Medina. Stereophonic and Sandblasted]
The Medina in Tunis is a delirious maze of tightly packed old alleyways and hidden courtyards, a haven for tourists, writers, smugglers, dreamers, thieves, barbers, merchants, a myriad cats and the world besides. The beauty and mystery of this city within a city is intense as we traverse her arteries, with the light drawing in, heading towards the heart of the Medina: the formidable Zitouna (Olive Tree) Mosque, founded in AD 732. Once darkness has shrouded us, we drift past hammams and were greeted again and again by the rich smell of frankincense. During the day, these alleyways are decked to the brim with vibrant cloths, cuddly camels, and tourist wares. But at night, with shadows moving like cats ,a bluishness takes over, a loud silence, and the clink of coffee cups, clipped French and Arabic dialects, gazing eyes, and the pleasing gurgle of our hubble-bubbles....
The Power & The Beauty - Carthage & Sidi Bou Said
On Carthage we stood and look through portals of time at the expanse of Tunis out in the distance. The wind blows time through us as we silently consider and marvel the remains of the mighty Carthage, founded in the 8th Century B.C., having survived three Punic wars only to be burnt to the ground by the Romans in 146 A.D. The Ancient Greek writer Stabron wrote, “Carthage est un navire a´ l´ancre.” [Carthage is a ship at anchor]. That observation may well be true for Tunisia as a whole. The combined forces of beauty, history, openness, and friendship that weave their way through this great land could realise such potential if they are ever able to set sail....
It is a warm evening stroll up the hill from Carthage to the idyllic artists´ colony of Sidi Bou Said. Her winding streets, once paced by Paul Klee, are filled with the excited conversations and warm laughter that are Tunisia. The night is close and we ride the night tram back to Tunis content with our own thoughts and reflections; leaving the tram station in the city centre we, in the spirit of Paul Klee, try to convey the essence and spiritual significance of things with our own highly inventive pictorial language by pressing a button on the camera. Good night Tunis.
Returning from Tunis we pull the Nissan chariot over to the wayside to buy bread loaves from a young girl at the roadside. We step out of the silence to partake in the hushed Arabic of the transaction; the bread nourishes, comforts and is still warm The Romans had words for it thousands of years ago, Ubi panis ibi patria, [where there is bread, there is my country].
Almost Heaven, West Tunisia...
So with tears in our eyes (that Scirocco rarely lets up), jasmine in our nostrils, and sand between our toes, we gaze our long goodbye. We have voyaged well through this enchanting region. We have Arabic danced the nights away, stumbled across ancient ruins, wandered through time beneath the desert sun, glided through lush mountain forests, and swam in playful seas. Mediterranean adventures away from the crowded resorts can still be found in places like Tabarka, with people like this, and the taste of love in the air. Habiba.
