29.November 2009: Arrival in Tunis

At 9 p.m we arrived at the harbour of Tunis. The sailing was quiet and we were on board with Heidi and Guido, and another couple Ursl and Hans both from Germany. All of them were also expierenced travellers and so we were telling travel stories and had great fun. When we arrived in Tunis we had to get through customs first, which was a little bit tricky because there are so many helpers around. It is hard to distinguish who is a helper and who is a customs officer. No one is wearing a uniform and you can not tell who is who. One of them brought us some forms demanding we had to pay 10 Euros for processing. We fell into the trap, paid, and realized we could have managed this by ourselves. Anyway if you arrive from Europe you would never expect having people within the custom boundaries, that are not officials. We learned our lecture. We have expierenced this on other borders as well, but there is no strict rule on hiring a helper or not, at some borders they are really quite helpful and save you a lot of time.

When we had passed the immigration we had to get to the agreed campsite where we should met with the other travellers. They were expected to come some days after us. Although we had the name of the site and some vague GPS coordinates it was rather difficult to find it. I was the only one who had the Garmin already in use I had to lead the group of a total of three vehicles through Tunis to the campsite which was about 30 km far from Tunis. As the coverage of tracks4africa is not 80%, Northern Africa is really not well covered, it was really not easy to find it, it was very similar to the wanderings of Odysseus.We finally arrived somewhere past midnight and spent the night in a courtyard where we until now do not know, if it was a school or a military camp, anyway the guard let us in. In the morning we realized that we missed the campsite only by a few hundred metres. Me culpa, but non of our companion travellers complained.

Campsite close to Tunis. Heidi and Guido relaxing, our car in the background.