Will the darkness never end? Well in fact it has, spring has sprung and Seasonally Affected Disorder is out of the way for another year. Have to come up with something else to be miserable about. Easter holidays are upon us and we are off to Tunisia. Flying Air Tunisia and so avoiding any strike induced mayhem we arrived in Tunis airport and then tried to make our way to our hotel, which is supposed to be somewhere on the road to and past Gammarth (which might as well have been the Road to Nowhere) that's how it looks on Google Maps. No road, no directions, just relying on satellite image to get us there. Well it's 11 at night so the pictorial view is hard to follow. After driving up and down the road a bit and having agreed that the road and buildings were in fact running out, I tried to phone the hotel to be told "Hotel is closed come back 8."
Well this is what you do when you arrive in a foreign country and find that your pre-arranged accommodation does not exist - you purse your lips a bit, shuffle around in your car seats and try not to be the first to complain. After that bit of nonsense is over you turn around and play hotel roulette. Its sufficiently late to say we'll take the first one that will let us through the gate. So after asking at a few places that looked a little out of our league, we found a nice enough place that would let us book in for the night. We decided to check out hotels tomorrow morning. The man on reception was lovely he understood priorities and new that getting to the bar before it shut was more important than completing the check in papers, as they could of course wait. We kept hearing him tell people how "Soif" or thirsty we were and this all seemed good. We were indeed very soif as we had been travelling for 12 hours, so we were served some beer and water which we quaffed gratefully before retiring.
Comfortable room, good sleep and nice breakfast later, we set off to explore Gammarth and perhaps find our hotel. The receptionist in our emergency hotel agreedto ring them up for us. Now last night I thought the man on the phone said come back at eight in the morning but as it turned out he could have meant in 8 days, 8 weeks or 8 months. The receptionist in the new hotel also told us that the hotel was closed... closed down.
Never mind, the sun is shining - I've got shades on and a sleeveless top! we are exploring the town and we will take a little drive down the coast to see what all the fuss is about.
