It all started with a trip up to the traffic circle on Wednesday to ask our local police officer about Tunisian seat belt laws.

To the casual observer they seem somewhat… flexible. “Excuse me Sir, we are thinking of renting a car. If we do, is there a problem with putting four kids in the back seat?” He looked at me quizzically. Maybe my French had been inadequate. I asked again, more clearly. He shook his head back and forth and smiled, “No, no problem. As long as they’re small enough to fit!” I asked three times more, at different car rental agencies, just to be sure. Seat belts are required in the front seats (although this seems largely unenforced) but in the back seat… pile in as many clowns, chickens, or sheep as you can manage and still retain enough sanity to drive. This was good news for us, as Tony mislaid his driver’s license some months ago and I’m the only driver in the family… as for renting something that seats more than five: simply, not possible.

The car rental process was more straightforward than expected. 50 dinar a day buys you a sand colored Clio with only minor scuffing and one hole in the bumper. Tony carefully circled the car with his digital camera, snapping away… making sure we were all seeing the SAME damage to the vehicle, and increasing the odds of us getting our 1000 dinar deposit back! As my Dad puts it, “It lets them know that’s not mud on your shoes… you’ve been in the barnyard before!” The car ran very well, got excellent gas mileage and had just enough room in the trunk for the gear and in the backseat for the clowns.

I think there should be some gold star awarded in my passport for learning to drive in Tunisia.

Or maybe a license add-on that would let people know that I’d passed the North African donkey-dodging course, or some such. The first 100 km were somewhat… stressful… challenging… ridiculous… not sure what the right word is. To his great credit, Tony did NOT yell at me or the other drivers… (I appreciate this quality in him… it was his lack of yelling in teaching me to drive a standard car in college that caused me to marry him). The children were deathly quiet and sat with white knuckles as I drove us to the back of a maze of narrow roads behind the souq, then had to turn around and weave back out when it dead ended. All this before we ever found the highway. The road system in Tunisia, I must say, is excellent. We had no trouble with roads and they were excellently maintained. Adherence to standard lane usage is marginal at best, and tends to disintegrate altogether at traffic circles. In spite of this, there is a groove to be found, some order within the chaos, and once recognized, one can move quite smoothly through the obstacle course with little more trouble than is encountered driving in southern Mexico.

The stretch south between Sousse and Gabes can be summed up succinctly in two words: olive groves.

For most of the ride olive trees stretch as far as can be seen in any direction. Little groups of brightly wrapped women sat beneath the trees resting in the warm part of the day. Men were up ladders picking olives by hand and dropping them onto the sheets spread beneath the trees. Having watched this process, mile after mile, I have a new appreciation for olive oil. I have decided that it is extremely cheap, for the labour that goes into it, and that I will buy it as often as I can to support the many farmers we’ve seen across Italy and now here, who make it their life’s work.

From Gabes to Douz only one word is needed: desert.

The edge of the Grand Erg Oriental, the eastern most reaches of the Sahara desert, stretching out it’s long dune shaped fingers to touch us: sand born on hot wind. The children were glued to the windows studying the landscape: “That looks like fog over there in front of those mountains Dad… but I think it’s really blowing sand!” “The sand moves like snow on the road Dad… I can’t get my mind around that… how does dirt act like snow?”

And then, all of a sudden:

“CAMELS!!!!”

A whole herd of them: majestic silhouettes at the top of a large dune and then dotting the hillside in varying shades of brown. As we passed the dune we saw the camel herder, long stick in hand moving the rest of the camels up the back side of the dune: Big ones, small ones… impressing no one but the clowns in the backseat. The one dinar camel-sighting reward was claimed by all four… and it looks like all four will have to be paid, as they all saw them at once. After that, the camel sightings came fast and furious: Elisha even saw a snow white one, a big male, standing on the top of a dune, watching us, as we watched him.

The best sighting however, was Mama’s. I screeched the car to a halt not fifteen feet from a big brown, grazing road side. He looked up, disinterested, as we snapped pictures and the unsecured children in the backseat nearly fell out of the car windows trying to get a good look and yell, “Hi Camel!!!” at the placid beast. As we were just getting ready to pull off, someone looked across the road… not twenty feet away… TWIN camels (at least they looked like twins to us!) munching, and presumably laughing at their humiliated friend across the street. So, we humiliated them too, just to even the score, and drove off with children crowing in the backseat.

“This desert road would get REALLY boring, Mom… if it weren’t for the camels!” observed Hannah.

She was right too. Camels do add something special to a landscape, for North American children. We saw lots more. I won’t bore you with the details of every sighting… you had to be here… but there was ONE worth noting, that hopefully you’ll get to see on-line. At first we thought it might be a horse and rider, trotting along the roadside toward us… but it was definitely NOT a horse… it was a camel… AND a rider. A bedouin fellow, wrapped up against the sand, perched on top of his saddled camel on a sheep skin, trotting in to town. The kids nearly fell out of the car again trying to wave and shout and were delighted when he waved back with a big grin.

The camel didn’t even deign to turn his head. They are haughty creatures. At least he didn’t spit.

*Post Script* While, by American standards, four kids in the back of a Clio seems a lot, I assure you, that by North African standards, it really is considered very safe and not in the least overloaded. Case in point: No one was actually riding OUTSIDE the car (nor was any portion of them outside the car). There were no animals riding in the backseat with them and at no point were they riding on laps in the front seat with heads stuck out of windows like dogs… as we saw several toddlers doing. So, while possibly not within American legal carload limits, we were well within the norms here, police officers at multiple checkpoints did not even bat an eyelash at us.