Transit in Tunisia:

           While some of the other blog posts in the next few days will focus on our fantastic meetings here in Tunisia, I wanted to write about one of my favorite subjects, transportation. Coming to Tunisia, we could have booked a private van with a driver at a very high cost to the group. Since I was told that Tunis had cheap and effective transportation and that trains and louages would take us to our other destinations outside of Tunis, I decided to choose this option for our transportation. Needless to say it’s been an adventure.

             When we landed at the airport, we were told to catch a cab at the departure level to ensure that we were not ripped off. However, the police decided to seal off the departure level to prevent people from doing this trick. Therefore, we were attacked by twenty cab drivers instantly upon walking out of the airport. Due to Sari’s strong negotiating skills, we managed to get 3 cabs for 10 dinars apiece (about $6.50) when they started the price at 25 dinars per cab. Once we made it into Tunis, we did not leave the city center for the next 24 hours as we had 3 meetings all within walking distance.

It turned out that all of our meetings on Thursday and Friday were not on Metro lines, which led to the following experiences. Yesterday afternoon, we took cabs at rush hour to meet a prominent lawyer in the El Manar II suburb of Tunis. Finding open cabs in downtown Tunis was a nightmare. It turns out that cabs with a red light are free and those with a green light are occupied. We ended up needing a hotel bellman to snatch us cabs since we had been waiting for 15 minutes. We were told that the cab ride would take 15-20 minutes, but it ended up taking 45 minutes with the traffic. Luckily, the Arab World does not have as finite of a sense of time as we had a successful meeting despite arriving over an hour late. After the meeting, we had to walk a kilometer to a nearby mall to catch cabs back to the city center. Despite the long walk, that ride was pretty straightforward.

On Friday, we encountered the biggest problem for taxis in Tunisia, a lack of specific addresses. While most streets have names, in theory, many of these streets do not have signs. Therefore, we had to be dropped off at nearby landmarks and then walk to our destinations. This morning I had a very detailed map from the organization we were meeting with, so their office was not too difficult to find. However, our lunch meeting proved a bit harder to find. Despite giving us a quite detailed description of their building, the organization did not provide us with directions from the highway exit. Through a bit of luck, we found the building, but it was quite stressful. Luckily, we had a great lunch and they arranged a car service to take us to our next meeting, which was also in a location off the beaten path. Since this meeting was in a difficult to reach location for cabs, they drove us to our next meeting.

Getting from our last meeting to the train station to head to Sousse was the most stressful part of the day for me. We had to catch a 645 PM train since I really did not want to take the 9 PM train that would arrive after 11 PM. Our meeting that was supposed to wrap up at 530 PM ended at 545 (a common theme), and we thought it would be easy to catch a cab from the Sheraton hotel to downtown Tunis. The bellman there was not helpful as it took us 15 minutes to get 3 cabs. By running back to our hotel, packing up near the speed light, sprinting with luggage in hand to the train station, we made it there six minutes before our train was supposed to depart. We bought the tickets (only 7.6 dinars for the 2 hour ride to Sousse) and then raced towards the train. We panicked as we thought we saw our train pulling away from the station. Again, luck was on our side. That train was actually a suburban train and our train pulled into the station right as we walked up. The train was an old Italian train that was not great, but it was a decent deal for the price. We got to Sousse a half hour late, but overall it was a successful trip.

Today we had a minor nightmare with the louage drivers from Sousse to Kairouan. Louages are shared taxis that can handle eight passengers each. We had to split up into two louages since we were just one person over. Honestly, we could have fit a ninth person in the van (and we did on the way back), and we should have done it. One of the vans managed to get dropped off directly at the Great Mosque in Kairouan and the other group was dropped off at the louage station. Since the group at the Mosque did not have a cell phone with them (stupid mistake on my part), the group at the louage station waited for 40 minutes to walk to the Medina. On the way to the Medina, we got lost (actually it was not my fault for once) and we had to take a cab to the Medina. Over the course of the next hour, we managed to run into people that had seen the mosque group. Eventually they found a phone to call me, and we met up. The ride back was less eventful except for the fact that the driver of one of the vans did not have the legal paperwork to enter the station. Therefore, nine of us fit together into one van for the last 10 minutes of the ride. 

As you can probably imagine this trip has been exhausting. I am having a great time co-leading the group, but almost everyone is tired and/or has some stomach problem. None of the problems are too bad, but we need to slow down our hectic pace a little bit.