Travel Guides: All Countries / Africa / Tunisia
 |  | Travel Reviews : Tunisia |
|
| | | | Welcoming in all respects
We returned from a first visit to Tunisia three weeks ago. A country full of contrasts and welcoming in all respects.
The Tunisian people, helpful and friendly. The weather, absolutely beautiful.
A two-day round trip south from Port el Kantaoui into the Sahara desert, Matmarta, then onto the oasis at Touzeur, then through the Atlas Mountains was the icing on the cake to a truly memorable holiday.
Thank you Tunisia! We'll be back soon!
Travel guide: Tunisia
Cheap transport for hagglers
My husband and I stayed at Hotel Saadia in Skanes. Although only a fifteen minute transfer from Monastir, you were not disturbed by planes flying overhead.
The people of the hotel were excellent as were the entertainment team. Food was very varied and good, even for a person like me with a food allergy.
It was very easy to travel, either by horse and cart. But agree your price before getting on the cart.
Taxis from Lourges were very inexpensive. You have to find a taxi driver that is going to your destination and wait until it gets full, but this only takes a a short time.
We travelled to Tunis and back for £7. Again, agree your price before alighting.
There is plenty to visit, from marvellous beaches to mosques and markets. The people are lovely too.
Travel guide: Tunisia
An all-round winner
A wonderful country with fantastic weather, beaches and great hotels.
Very friendly people and great food everywhere.
Travel guide: Tunisia
So good I'm going back
My mother and I stayed in the Sahara Beech Hotel near Monastir in November 2004. We found the food to be fantastic and the people were very friendly.
We went on several excursions including the desert. The scenery was absolutely stunning. We were lucky enough to go on a camel ride to see the sunset over the sands of the desert. The, the following morning, we saw the sun rising over the salt lakes.
We both enjoyed the country so much, we are looking forward to going back next year.
Travel guide: Tunisia
Glimpse of a great past
Our hotel in Hammamet was right on the beach, which was impressively clean, wide and safe - apart from dodging the hawkers trying to sell you things.
The town, with its walled old section and kasbah containing the souks, was pleasant to walk around and less threatening than markets I'd been to in Morocco. We were unadventurous and took organised trips everywhere, but it was a good way of learning a lot in a week.
It was fascinating to visit ancient Carthage in its impressive position by the sea and it brought dusty schoolbook memories to life. Later we saw the far better preserved Roman ruins at Dougga, but Carthage still held more mystique for me because of its legendary status.
My artist daughter loved the whitewashed hilltop village of Sidi bou Said, with its pretty blue iron railings and shutters and its cobbled streets. The candy stalls on the streets were colourful, even if the sweets looked jawbreaking! We bought a beautiful tin doll here.
I fell in love with the great ancient city of Kairouan, where we sat in a carpet shop sipping sweet mint tea and managed to resist buying a handsome rug. The Great Mosque here is superb with a wonderful atmosphere - the whole city has an air of past greatness.
Near Hammamet, we joined the masses at the Nabeul Friday market - chaotic but fun. Not many bargains as they're out to catch the tourists, but I did buy some blue and white bowls. Some were very brittle and broke on the way home, but other pieces survived to grace my kitchen and remind me of North Africa.
Travel guide: Tunisia
A wonderful country
A wonderful country, I was there six times in six months, I even went by myself and I am only 30 and female so it is safe.
If you possibly can try to go the Carbus, Northeast peninsula south from Tunis along the coast with natural geysers and hot springs into the ocean - it's a favourite of the locals to go swimming there for all the minerals coming out but I think it is a secret kept by them!
I have even had the opportunity to have the company of the Mayor of Tunis as a table guest who welcomed me very warmly.
However, if you do go to Tunis do not give them any temptation with bags as they will take it.
From my experience, which was twice, stay clear of the Medinas - it's too long to explain but do not go in.
Try leblebbie - bread, chick peas and spicy sauce and beautiful.
Inlaid chessboards are a good buy, but do not pay more that £40 for one.
And if you are going I wish I was coming with you and have a wonderful time.
Travel guide: Tunisia
An exotic mosaic with souks appeal
From the Mail on Sunday
Fifteen years back I had lunch at the Abou Nawas Hotel on the coastal outskirts of Tunis and promised myself that, one day, I'd make a return visit. It seemed the perfect place for a week's crash-out, a friendly five-star with enough diversions to hand should I get bored with just lying back and not thinking of England. I finally made it a few weeks ago, and rediscovered the joys of indolence.
Day One was bliss, padding to and fro across the deep-pile grass of the lush gardens to the pool or the Mediterranean Sea beyond. The beach here curls in a sandy sweep from Gammarth to La Marsa. In days before independence, it was dubbed the 'baie des singes' (bay of monkeys) by the locals when the French colonials tanned au naturel. Nowadays, curiously, no one even goes topless.
The morning passed with nothing other than the latest Maeve Binchy to engage my brain and, for lunch, I heaved myself all of ten yards to the pool restaurant for a plate of mechouia, Tunisia's twist on grilled vegetables, topped with tuna and olives. With a glass of local wine and a coffee, the bill came to £8. I swam, I read, I applied Factor 4.
Tunisia, the most European of the North African countries, is a safe bet for a late holiday. Temperatures are settling into the comfortable mid-20s Celsius in October and November, which is just right for relaxed sunbathing as well as sightseeing - in fact, trips down to the Sahara, where it's always a few degrees hotter, aren't really bearable until then.
On Day Three, the pool began to pall - partly due to the frequent trill of nearby mobile phones. A ten-minute taxi ride and I was in Sidi Bou Said, a dazzling white village whose Andalusian style, influenced by the Moors retreating from Spain, is zealously preserved. House prices in Sidi Bou Said are on a par with London's, so des. are the whitewashed res. with their studded doorways, blue shutters and window grilles.
Flanked by wafting cheesecloth and twirly wire birdcages, I climbed up the cobbled main street, made friends with a chameleon posing on a rack of leather slippers and, at Mohamed's perfume shop, had fun sniffing samples - Mille Et Une Nuits and Secrets De Desert, a snip at 50ml for five dinars (about £2.50).
The Dar El Annabi palace, family home of a former Mufti of Tunis's main mosque, is open to the public. So is the Ennejma Ezzahra, a palatial villa overlooking the sea, built in the Twenties by a French artist, Baron d'Erlanger, whose love of Arab culture clearly shows in the voluptuous interior full of filigree plasterwork and playing fountains.
Adjourning to the Cafe des Nattes, a time warp of hubble-bubble pipes and carpeted banquettes, I sat on the balcony sipping mint tea with toasted pine nuts and watched the jasmine seller begin his evening round of the tables in the street below.
Travel guide: Tunisia
Very friendly destination
Just returned from one week's holiday in Sousse at The Royal Beach Hotel. I was quite frightened as it was booked last minute and we just did not know what to expect.
It was fantastic. The hotel was excellent, very clean, the food was great and the staff 10/10.
Lovely scenery, great beaches and very friendly people.
Myself and my husband would definitely go again.
Travel guide: Tunisia
Massage, mosaics and fresh oranges
We had a very good hotel with very helpful staff, though English was not their usual language here as the hotel mainly catered for Germans.
The food was very good - continental and Tunisian - and there was plenty of choice.
If you enjoy golf then this is the place for you. A course outside the hotel. There is a gym,sauna,massage (very relaxing), indoor and outdoor pools and tennis. Situated on the beach (clean and pleasant) with a pleasant port.
A taxi into Sousse is £4.The souks were amazing as were the historical mosaics. Look for the man who makes his own perfumes, choose all the best names, and he will sell you OIL not paraffin, for £3 per bottle and it lasts for five years if kept in the dark.
We even purchased a carpet for our lounge, hand knotted, and brought it back on the plane - although my husband swears his arms are a few inches longer now.
Also super weather to drink lots of freshly squeezed oranges.
Travel guide: Tunisia
A Sahara cry from Tunisia's old image
From the Mail on Sunday
Tunisia was once a country you saw only on screen. Raiders Of The Lost Ark, The Life Of Brian and Jesus Of Nazareth were filmed there. The Sahara was deserted in tourism terms until President Ben-Ali took over 10 years ago and vowed to make it a holiday destination. Engineering projects brought in water and there is now an airport at Tozeur, new roads, electricity and luxury hotels.
The finest Indiana Jones scenery is in the Selja Gorge, which is best viewed from the Red Lizard, a restored Pullman train which trundles from one end to the other. Otherwise, hire a four-wheel-drive and head for the Chott, a vast, dry salt lake fringed with oases. Dotted around it are still a number of quiet Berber villages such as Tamerza, built on a rock above a fabulous waterfall.
Many have clean and comfortable rooms available, yet most visitors still stay in Douz, the last staging post before the empty sands of the desert proper reach across to the impenetrable Algerian frontier.
Arriving there, they are shepherded towards the Zone Touristique on the edge of town, a ghetto filled with enormous, impersonal hotels, restaurants, museums and 'entertainment spaces'. These zones are common to many of the bigger towns around the Sahara and are aimed at keeping tourists inside, spending money and enjoying a slick, desert theme park-style experience.
Douz itself springs to life on Thursdays, when a huge market draws in people from miles around, trading in everything from camels, sheep and goats to tons of dates.
For visitors there are brightly woven rugs, silver jewellery, painted plates and vast slabs of coarse olive oil soap.
For refreshment you can buy glasses of thick mint tea and take home dried harissa chillies, pots of olives and hand-pressed, horribly bitter olive oil (be warned - my five-litre purchase was not a good idea).
It is well worth ensuring that your stay at Douz includes a Thursday. Make a day of it - starting with the market in the morning, checking out the couscous at the Restaurant Ali Baba on the Kebili Road for lunch and winding down at the sumptuous Museum of the Sahara in the afternoon.
Travel guide: Tunisia
|
|
|
|
|
| | | | Bedouin shepherds outside the bedroom
On Day Five, I bought a ticket to ride on the little suburban train to Tunis, which for the half-hour journey cost 70p - even less than the taxi to the station. Backpackers and commuters crammed in, the latter babbling away in a wonderful mix of French and Arabic. We trundled through an oriental Croydon of neat back gardens and satellite dishes, with five stops for Carthage, including Carthage Hannibal which has fragments of Roman capitals on the platform.
I didn't redo Carthage, having seen it before, but it's well worth a visit. While nothing is left of Punic times, bits of Roman amphitheatre remain amid sighing pines and buzzing cicadas. Tunisia was Rome's first colony south of the Mediterranean and there are many other sites in splendid nick - Thuburbo Majus and, the most complete, Dougga, are both accessible on day trips from Gammarth.
I decided on a visit to the Bardo Museum, which has the biggest collection of Roman mosaics in existence, taking in the souks on the way. Tunis's Medina is a cultural shakeout after walking the length of the shady Avenue Habib Bourguiba. From a boulevard seemingly transplanted from the fringes of Left Bank Paris, with attendant poster pillars and pavement cafes, you're suddenly pitched into a medieval warren of covered lanes, where the shops sell everything from copper trays to cuddly toy camels.
It's fun and full of bargains; it's also hot. I sank a mineral water in three seconds at Restaurant Mahdaoui, below the Zitouna Mosque, and ordered the local fast food, a brik, a soft-yolked egg in crisp, fried pastry. This, plus a plate of fish couscous, cost £3. The Dar Ben Abdallah Palace is the only building in the Medina that you can go into. It shows domestic life in the 18th-century with tableaux and props - a bride being hennaed for her big day, a boy sitting cross-legged before his tutor who is brandishing a large rod.
My failure to flag down a cab to take me to the Bardo on the opposite side of town was the only hitch of the day. After nine refusals, I finally found a willing driver who eased my paranoia by explaining the problem. It was lunchtime and few wanted to go that far.
I didn't regret persevering. The mosaics were a knockout. Unbelievably vivid and exuberant, with Romans of the third century cavorting, hunting, fishing, banqueting and bathing - in short, having a Roman holiday. It was, however, rather like seeing Monet's waterlilies at the Royal Academy - after an hour-and-a-half I was mosaiced out.
Day Six was sadly my last, so it was spent once again being a pool lizard. I wished I'd had time to go down to the oases and the desert again. I did it one October, driving across the Chott El Jerid salt flats to Tozeur, where suddenly a chasm of fertile gardens opens up and, in the morning, you swish back your curtains to find Bedouin shepherds and their tents outside on the sand.
Tunisia's deep south is riveting. Its ancient fortified granaries, troglodyte caves and vast sandstone wilderness have been used as locations for every Star Wars movie. I've set my sights on a luxury tented camp right at the edge of the Sahara for a winter getaway. Who needs long-haul and jet lag when you can find warmth and a touch of the exotic just over three hours away?
|
|
|
|
|
| | Available rental properties in Tunisia |
|
| |  | | 4 bedrooms detached villa
6 rooms,of wich 4 bedrooms, independent kitchen, living room,dining room,2 bathroomshowers,3 separate toilets,2 balconys ,veranda
|  | | Nice apartment in Touristic area of Monastir
Avery nice apartment (2 bedrooms) tastfully decorated in Monastir touristic zone, near the beach, Golf...15min to Sousse, and 15min to Monastir town c
|  | | Rent Holiday apartment in Marina Hammamet
Holiday apartment in Marina Hammamet Tunisia.
4-5 persons.
2 rooms ,of which 1 Bedroom, Open-plan kitchen, Living room, 1 bathroom, Balcony
|  | | Villa Yasmine, Hammamet
Modern property in a private residential complex, 500m from its beautiful sandy beach. A 5-bedroom property tastefully furnished with a self-contained
|  | | appartment near port kantaoui ,sousse
5 minutes from the beach,plenty of local shops ,grosseries around however its very calm and safe area
| | Click here for more properties... |
|
|
|
|
|
|
