Tataouine

Finally, after several hours of off-road driving, we reached pavement. We found the correct road and headed off toward Ksar Haddada and the Starwars Hotel built in an old Ksar. We had a lot of fun exploring it while Xiyun slept in the car. She was feeling pretty sick and miserable. I was sick too but I wasn’t letting on. I still am not sure if I’m actually sick or if this horrible rattling cough and all of the snot coming out of my nose is due to the sand lodged in every orifice of my body. I think that it’s due to all of the sand I breathed in at Ksar Ghilane.

Chenini.

Douriet.

Blown shock absorber.

We decided to continue on up to Sfax for the night to give us a jump on getting home the next day and give us a chance to go to El Jem. We bought a few gazelle’s horn pastries, went into a seedy man bar for a coffee, and then headed north toward Sfax.

The whole region of Tataouine had been cloudy as we drove through it. It even rained on us a little bit. The weather really started getting crazy as we went through Gabes. I could swear it was snowing! It was certainly cold outside and the way the precipitation was falling it certainly resembled snow. Even the splatters on the windshield looked like snow! It just seemed so crazy though! Finally we decided it was snow and put the thought that it was snowing in the desert out of our heads. We experienced every single type of weather on our trip to the south. Sun, rain, wind, snow, sand, fog, everything!

In Sfax we parked outside the medina and went into the medina to a hotel that Maciej knew about. It was a pretty decent hotel, much better than the one that Xiyun and I had stayed in before. We settled into our rooms and quickly fell asleep. I was pretty tired from waking up at 530 and never taking a nap or anything until about 11pm! I slept right through until about 8am when I finally woke up and got up. My shoes were still full of sand. I poured some of it out into a plastic bag that I’ll take home with me. Sand from my shoes from the Sahara!