Whilst crossing the lagoon on the train and watching the surreal city approach, I got laughed at for eagerly pulling out Google Earth on the iPhone for an additional birds-eye view and showing it to Katherine — “How cool does this look!” — evoking the response that it also looked pretty cool out the window (she said bemusedly that I was missing it because I had my head buried in my iPhone). Andrea laughed knowingly, saying that he does exactly the same thing. We emerged from the train station onto the bustling streets of Venice. Andrea and Silvia took us up and over Ponte degri Scalzi, the bridge crossing the main canal, and proceeded to lead us through a warren of tiny streets, frequently crossing picturesque little bridges over narrow canals lined with boats.

It was very difficult to visualise the city as the collection of little islands that it is — it seemed decidedly more like a solid landmass interspersed by canals! As Katherine answered when asked later that night what she thought of Venice, “I thought there’d be more water”. It was quite cool to think that we were crossing between islands when we passed over those little bridges though. Katherine later remarked on the unusual quantity of graffiti (something I blithely failed to notice), noting that perhaps tagging a place so astronomically famous is quite the ego trip!

A big trade in Venice was in exotic carnival masks — there were lots of little shops selling them, representing a variety of Commedia dell’arte characters. These had Katherine feeling inspired, especially when she spotted the unpainted plaster ones you can buy and decorate yourself.

As we walked, Andrea pointed out one of the university buildings nestled amongst the narrow streets and canals, and introduced us to a great Italian word that we haven’t really been able to find an English version of: Simpatico, which Andrea and Silvia described as meaning something like funny, friendly; basically a word describing someone who’s good company, of pleasant character and who puts one in the mood they’re in just by being with them. (Admittedly, if said about a woman however, it means she has a nice personality but isn’t much to look at, as in “she has a great personality, but…“). It seemed apt, being introduced to the word by those two simpatici.

Andrea was explaining the verb ‘andare’ to me (to go), and a guy passed us and made a friendly comment to Andrea in Italian — something about giving the Americans language lessons and “Americani non parlano Italiano”. We stopped to talk for a moment; he asked us where we were from (actually, Australia!), and our conversation moved from there. and it turned out that Ben was an American who’d just kinda settled in Venice for a few months and had landed some sort of architect internship there – not a bad gig! He looked entirely Italian, and his Italian seemed pretty solid, so I was surprised when he switched to English to talk to all four of us. He was a friendly sort, and brainstormed with us about what to show his visiting mother later that day, given that Andrea and Silvia were being tour guides for the day, as well. When we parted ways with Ben, Andrea turned to us and explained “he is simpatico”.

Andrea grabbed simpatico Ben’s contact details, and we pressed on to Piazza San Marco, one of the main tourist draws of Venice. It was funny, our first visit there with Andrea and Silvia with the pressing hoards of other visitors had us almost entirely unaware of the square’s charms — it was difficult to appreciate the basilica with most of it covered with scaffolding, and the press of people left little breathing-room to look around.

Poor Silvia was feeling pretty drained by this point — our plans to have locals show us around had inadvertently resulted in us dragging a pregnant woman around Venice — sorry Silvia! With Silvia desperately in need of sustenance and a rest we sat down by the water and talked for a while, then pressed on and stopped for lunch at a little pizza cafe way off the beaten track (which made it consequently quite tasty, and very cheap!).

Some more ambling around back-streets and we came across a gelato shop — Andrea and Silvia had two rounds, so I suppose that must be high praise indeed. They laughed at our restraint (only one helping, pah!). We discovered later that the gelateria was listed in our travel guide: Quite a validation for Lonely Planet recommendations right there!

We jumped back on the train and made our way to Andrea and Silvia’s, in Padova. All four of us napped on the journey back (after plodding our way around most of Venice!), although not before Andrea and Silvia had to endure the apparently maddeningly inane chatter of two Italian women in the seats near us; the one benefit to not speaking Italian! We hung around on the couch for a while, and I pulled up an impressive recording on YouTube of Andrea and Silvia’s old band, “K”, playing a gig to a huge crowd.

Paolo and Vivian (Vivienne? Forgive me if I’m wrong on the names, Paolovigo!) had kindly invited us around for dinner, so the four of us joined them at “the cube”, their very Nordic-styled, gleaming house, along with Zage and his partner, and Paolo’s brother Robert and his girlfriend Alice. We chatted with Alice for a while, who spoke excellent English, and then gathered around as Paola and Vivian served up some absolutely awesome home-made pizza. We were startled when out came the shredded horse-meat — really, guys?

At the end of a really enjoyable evening with our new simpatici friends, Andrea and Silvia drove us back to “Monsangeles” (an in-joke name for Monselice that they couldn’t actually remember the origins of!). On the way we introduced them to one more favourite Aussie band, Powderfinger, which went down very well. We said a warm farewell, and promised that we would be back to pester them again — for longer, next time, and hopefully in Italian! Andrea gave us some Italian comic books to practise with – that’s how he learnt English! We’ve got no excuse now.

We’re really excited to have met them — for sure, they’re ‘our people’ — and we can’t wait to be back.

I found Padova, in a strange way, to be a bit like our home town of Melbourne in Australia. It doesn’t look like it at all but I found that Padova didn’t seem to have any grand tourist attractions to it’s name – just like Melbourne – but what it does have is a sense of “liveability”. It’s a nice city. It has pretty parts, it has a pleasant atmosphere and there seems be a lot going on. This was interesting to me as the longer we’ve spent in Italy the more I’ve come to feel that I wouldn’t want to live here. I’ve become very aware of the general lack of space – doors opening right up onto the road in towns, the “country” still being quite populated with at least a house or two always in view. To me, this has amounted to a general sense of crowdedness. This is something I love about travel and learning about other cultures – it shines a new light on our own country and culture. Intellectually I understood that Australia has a tiny population and is massive with wide, open spaces but I didn’t understand what that felt like until I felt what a large population in a small country feels like. It may have been because of our friends’ presence but Padova felt like one of the few places in Italy where I could live – I say “I” as Mike has felt there have been plenty of places that he would be happy staying put in.

It was absolutely wonderful spending time with locals and gleaning little insights we otherwise wouldn’t have gleaned. I love my coffee, I come from a city that has a well-known and respected coffee culture but I can’t for the life of me understand Italian coffee – the espresso. “Sip” and it’s gone! Andrea shed some light on it for me when he likened it to a small gourmet chocolate – it doesn’t last long but it’s a taste sensation for as long as it does.

We had a traditional “spritzer” – a cocktail – at “spritzer o’clock” – sometime in the evening before dinner – and watched the “fighetti” – comically fashionable Italian youth – strut and generally stand around looking rich and beautiful in “The Uniform” – the wardrobe that it seems all Italians have agreed to adopt. I asked Silvia, who expressed exasperation at “The Uniform”, where she does her shopping. Her answer – she doesn’t shop! She proceeded to point out her hole-ridden Doc Martins that were The Thing to have in the 90s!

Just as Andrea finished explaining to us what “fighetti” means, a very expensive looking car that barely came up to knee-level came to a screeching halt right in front of the busy cafe and a trendy young thing strutted out in The Uniform. Everyone in the vicinity turned and stared. Andrea turned back to us, shrugged, and announced, “fighetti”. We all cracked up as the guy sauntered off nonchalantly.

We talked for a while about the band they were in in their twenties, “K”. Turns out our new friends were quite the rock stars back in the day! Later that night at their apartment we watched a concert they played at to a massive audience, Silvia on guitar and Andrea the lead singer! That night we introduced the guys to some Aussie bands – Clare Bowditch and The Cat Empire. It was fun seeing Andrea rock out to a song about our home-town “The Crowd”.

We had a wonderful home-cooked meal with a couple of Andrea and Silvia’s lovely friends and the best strawberries I’ve ever tasted with nothing but a bit of water, lemon and sugar. After dinner we went to the “Gelateria da Bepi”, a gelateria with a very unconventional array of flavours, including basil, carrot, sweet potato, pepper, tomato, rosemary, sage, celery, pumpkin and salmon!

We discussed our plans for Sunday and couldn’t pass up the opportunity of visiting Venice with locals – both Silvia and Andrea went to university there, the lucky things!

Then a car pulled up and a greeting in a very broad Australian accent announced the arrival of two expat Australians who had noticed our Aussie flag sticker on the back, which we put there to inform the French that we weren’t British and please don’t hate us.

We invited them in for a cuppa and did a round of introductions: They were Ray (Raylene) and Sam, and had lived here for twenty-three years. Ray was a Port Adelaide girl, and Sam was born in Lucca, a town not far from Poggibonsi, and had spent twenty years in Australia. They were very friendly and curious, and we very quickly made weekend plans!

Sam picked us up early on Saturday morning and drove us around the Chianti region. Along the way, we visited an old convent, inhabited by six Australian nuns who were sent here thirty years ago or thereabouts. Sam and Ray had originally heard about them and dropped in to say hello, and had been friends with them since. We met two of them, very friendly and Australian in an ‘old school’ way (they used the word ‘wog’ to describe a flu they’d had! — to us younger Australians, it’s solely a derogatory term to describe Italians and Greeks in Australia!). When they’d arrived at the convent, it was falling down, the roof just about to collapse, dirt floors — they’ve been fixing it up ever since. They laughed and described it as a challenging time, and I wasn’t surprised.

Sam took us back to their house — with some stilted conversation in the car on the way, with Sam’s amusing tendency to either not hear or ignore much of what we say! — and we enjoyed a several-course lunch with them. Katherine was particularly excited by an Australian-style roast for the main course, as she is a little deprived of this kind of cuisine, with us being vegetarians at home (and not having an oven!).

After lunch they drove us out to a charming fortress-village — Monteriggioni — which we wandered around for a time, talking. The surrounding countryside was beautiful and emerald-coloured.

On the way back, they stopped via a shop that makes and sells crystal — something the region’s known for — and while we wandered around talking with Ray, Sam bought us a gift from them, a little crystal olive-oil dish. How lovely!

The following day Sam and Ray picked us up very early and we drove north west for three hours towards a little town called Villa Collemandina. The drive there was beautiful, heading through (or at least nearby) the Garfagnana, a spectacular-looking region of green mountains and valleys I’d marked as a place I’d like to visit.

We drove alongside a bright blue river, along its valley with multi-hued mountains around us, and stopped by ‘Ponte Diablo’ in Borgo a Mozzano, a spectacular bridge over the Serchio river. Ray and Sam explained the legend: In return for bringing about the bridge’s completion, the devil demanded the first thing to cross the bridge. It was a pig, and a pissed-off devil got some rather petty revenge by making the bridge the odd shape it is. Fair enough.

We drove upwards into the mountains and arrived in Villa Collemandina: Sam and Ray had invited us there to join them at a restaurant they enjoyed, Ristorante Panoramico. The restaurant were celebrating Italy’s Liberation Day (liberation from Nazi Germany, that is) by holding a very inexpensive banquet. First we walked around the compact town’s little paths amongst the tightly-packed houses. A rather disturbing (but slightly amusing) old guy laughed at my hair and asked (translated by Ray) whether I was masculine or feminine! Guess I probably do need a haircut. Then he became overly friendly with Katherine, which was a little off! Eww.

The view from the town was great, as it was perched high on a mountain:

So, we filed into the restaurant and were treated to a feast — prosciutto, slices of local salami served interleaved with slices of kiwi-fruit, a wild mushroom risotto, and some rather more dangerous risotto containing mortal quantities of cheese. For the main course, big hunks of chicken, lamb, and many other different kinds of animal. This prompted Sam to proudly recount the Noah’s Ark of animalia he’s consumed in his life, including snails, sparrows (he described how he built a trap to catch them), wild boar piglets, deer, budgies (of all things!), and donkeys — and lungs & tripe, body parts he was particularly proud to have consumed.

We’ve been curious about gypsy (nomad) culture too, having heard some rather extreme things said — mostly the impression we’ve received that they’re thought of generally thieving and morally deficient — which seemed to us too extraordinary to be anything but widespread prejudice. So we sought Ray and Sam’s impressions, which didn’t differ greatly from what we’d previously heard. In fact, they told us that they’d heard recently in the news that a young girl had been sold from one group to another because she was considered a skilled thief, and thus valuable. It still all seems a little extreme to me — that, generally speaking, one whole culture can be so ‘corrupt’ — so I reserve judgement until I know more!

We were interested in their decision to move to Italy, and Sam explained that Ray’s family had been hostile towards Sam as an Italian, calling him Mafia, apparently, and had made their lives so unpleasant they decided to move. Good old Aussie racism, but fascinating to hear that the family were so caught up in their prejudice that they apparently drove their daughter away to another country!

We were equally fascinated to hear Sam talking about Southern Italians — unprompted, he loudly complained that there was “one law for them, another law for us”, with car registrations, TV licences… — very interesting to behold those sentiments, particularly in light of their exodus from Australia!

After lunch we sat outside in the sun and talked with Ray — as it turned out, we seem to share a lot of similar opinions and we enjoyed discussing the big issues (environmental collapse, overpopulation, asylum seekers and immigration and the popular attitudes to it…).

Back home, we exchanged contact details, and we told them to get in touch when they visit Australia again (if we’re there!), and we said farewell.

It was very interesting to meet some locals who also have an Australian perspective, and we really enjoyed meeting Sam and Ray!

Our unexpected detour resulted in some excitement as we were waved by another officer right into the town’s narrow, pedestrian-filled streets. We cruised slowly down a main street lined with cafés and boutiques; shoppers threw us surprised/bemused looks as we drove along, close enough to do some window shopping, maybe grab a cappuccino.

Things got a little tight as we drove through the piazza and down another little street past parked cars — this guy’s expression was classic:

Apart from some harmless scraping of our driver’s side step on a step as we passed, we escaped unscathed and drove on into the town of Arezzo. We found ourselves a sosta to stay in, and walked up the steps into the town via a park overlooking the surrounding countryside. We were in Arezzo primarily to visit the Duomo (partly to exercise our new-found HDR tools!), so that was our first stop, right beside the park.

It was an imposing old building, looming over the square, and its interior was lovely, and immense. We took lots of photos, Katherine’s shoulder acting as a tripod because it was so dark inside.

We ventured outside again and walked through the town’s little, steep cobbled streets. We were reminded by a sign that this was the town in which a lot of one of our favourite films, La Vita e Bella, was filmed — I can’t say I recognised anything in particular though.

We came across some stalls selling salami, cheese, and a variety of herbs and spices. It turns out we managed to stumble upon a food festival, and found lots of stalls dotted around the town, each with a different theme – here, meat and cheese, there gelato and chocolate, and in the main piazza more salami, bread, and a couple of makeshift restaurants. We mused afterwards on the homogeneity of the food and had it been a food festival in Australia there would have been Middle Eastern cuisine, Indian, African, European, Asian and of course the more traditional mother-land type fare.

So, we got ourselves some gelati (Katherine picked well with a strawberry and white chocolate blend and cinnamon chocolate), took them back to the park and sat on the grass in the sun watching the world go by as the cathedral bells rang. We laughed at a toddler who had already mastered the Italian tradition of wild hand-gestures while talking.

We stayed the night in Arezzo, and prepared to head off the next morning. Stopping at a service station to check the tyre pressures, I realised that the front-right tyre valve was leaking air, hissing wildly when I gently pushed the valve to one side. Uh-oh! The service station had a garage, so I poked my head around the corner and stuttered out in Italian that I had a problem with the tyre. The guy apologetically said they couldn’t help, but directed us around the corner to a tyre specialist. Miraculously, I actually understood the directions and could find the place he was referring to in Google Maps, but the guy there couldn’t help us either. He pointed us onwards to another garage, pointing it out to me on my iPhone’s map. We found the place, and I looked up and stumbled through an Italian translation of our problem. A helpful and very friendly mechanic from Bangladesh waved us in, jacked up Nettle, whipped off her tyre and replaced the valve within about five minutes, and five Euros later, cheerfully waved us onwards.

Sorted!

We were there to see the Good Friday procession, apparently the most ancient procession tradition in Italy. Every year, local men and children wear spooky-looking white hoods (Yes, I know what they look like…) and bearing torches, accompany floats carried by solemn-looking bearers through the town. The floats represented various stations of the cross — lances, rooster and a severed hand, Christ on the cross, the body of Christ, a mourning Mary — none of which I really understood with my lack of religious education, but Katherine filled in some blanks later on. Particularly promising-sounding was the orchestra and choir that accompanied the procession, who performed Miserere, apparently the work of a local composer, Selecchy (1708-1788).

We found the piazza at the front of the cathedral and milled around with a few hundred others — seemingly almost all locals, we didn’t see any other obvious foreigners there. Participants were all dressed up and chatting, adjusting hoods and shaking their glow-sticks to life (Glow sticks! How could they!).

As the sky began to darken and the cathedral’s bells rang, people shuffled around to face the cathedral’s entrance; those participating were lined up in parish groups. Down the steps came the first station of the cross, borne by men in gold and black — an angel, presumably, although neither of us knew the significance. This was met by the first group who marched onwards, as the next float came down, four or five pikes sticking up.

The procession continued, winding around the piazza and leading down a small side street as we gathered and watched them go. Almost everyone in the crowd around us crossed themselves as the float carrying the body of Christ went past! Finally, the musicians followed, violins, flutes and a variety of brass instruments, and the choir.

There was a sermon in Italian, broadcast through speakers being borne along with the procession, and the orchestra and choir started — quite moving, and impressive with the acoustics of the square.

We followed the crowd down a different street to meet the procession there, and heard another run through of the speech, and another Miserere. We waited at the side of the torch-lined street, noticing others doing the same, for the procession to come back around so we could get a better look. Half an hour or more passed, watching kids race around each other making gzzzsh gun noises at each other, then an amusing scene with a little girl standing and pointing at another girl holding an ice-cream, getting increasingly upset in her envy as the ice-cream bearer returned her gaze nonchalantly. This is where we learn about not always getting what we want!

Police motorcycles cleared the road, and the first of the procession arrived, two rows passing beside us, with the floats in the middle. Kinda creepy, with those masks!

The trailing orchestra reached us, and started up as they walked past.

Those voices belting out right beside us was quite a thing to behold — quite powerful and moving! We shared an impressed glance as they came to an end, then as the crowd dispersed, set off on the walk back home.

That was absolutely awesome! The whole thing felt authentic and genuine, no touristy stuff here, just a fine tradition that we were fortunate enough to get to witness.

(Busker in Salerno)

We awoke in the late morning, after a wonderful sleep, to the cosy sound of rain on the roof, washing all the salt from the long voyage off Nettle’s flanks.

We had nice and hot, refreshing showers, and by the time we were all dressed and ready to head out, the rain had stopped and a cautious sun was peeking through the clouds. Oh, what a feeling to be looking forward to spending a day out in the world!

We were parked about a half hour’s walk from Salerno’s centre, and the walk along the foreshore was lovely. We marvelled at everything, soaking it all in — with a little bit of wry joking here and there: Ah! Solid footpaths! With people walking on them, instead of on the road! Finished buildings! Not a bare concrete wall or patch of bare dirt in sight! No one staring at us, asking for money or alcohol, or sleazing up to Katherine!

More earnestly, we were charmed with this pretty little town. Our last time in Salerno, we were here just briefly, passing through on the way south. At the time, we were still a trifle shell-shocked at the rather unpalatable urban sprawl of Naples, and didn’t really give Salerno much of a chance. This time around, though, we opened our eyes and were impressed. The beautiful hills that marked the southern end of the stunning Amalfi coast loomed over the town, making me feel like we were walking through a pretty matte painting. The delightful canyon-like alleyways, packed with interesting shops, cafés and restaurants, as well as immaculately-dressed friendly Italians, brought big smiles to our faces.

Our first stop in Salerno was a café for breakfast: A nice little place with a warm wooden interior, a counter with lots of exciting looking pastries; we grabbed a couple of croissants and cappuccinos and sat at a table. We enjoyed our coffees so much, we ordered two more.

Fed, coffee’d and feeling good, our next task was to grab some credit with Wind and get our mobile Internet access up and running. We’d taken so long with sleeping in and having breakfast, though, that everything had closed for the afternoon — Those 1:30-4:30 closing hours will take a bit of getting used to. We did find an open wi-fi network just outside the Wind shop, though, so we jumped online and I looked up the info I thought I’d need to set up the SIM cards once we had credit, which we could buy anywhere.

With the shops closed, we wandered aimlessly through the delightful little cobbled streets of the town.

I said a cheerful “Ciao!” to a woman in her late 60′s or early 70′s we passed, and she stopped and said a very friendly “ciao!” back, and asked us where we were from, how long we were staying, and if we’d seen the Amalfi coast, then when we parted, warmly bid us many wishes! Katherine and I grinned at each other — we love Italy!!.

We walked back to Nettle to pass the couple of hours until the shops opened again. On the way I bought a little Wind credit, hoping to set up one SIM card (we have two, one to use with a volume-based plan, to stay online doing low-volume stuff, and one to use with a time-based plan, to do lots of downloading with). No go, though — I couldn’t figure out the Italian system, so I postponed until we could visit the Wind store again.

We ventured out again later (after carefully checking our appearance — very high fashion standards here!), and headed straight to Wind; thankfully, one of the assistants there spoke a little English, and with the help of a little sketching on a pad we brought along, we managed to work out how to make it happen: We bought a new SIM card and activated the 4.5 Gb/month plan, and got a little extra credit to activate the 100 hours/month plan on the other SIM card we had. Sorted! We couldn’t wait to start catching up on all the TV and film we’d missed!

We wandered on, in search of a couple of things. We were delighted to find a little home-wares shop with impressively cheap throw-rugs; we bought two, to keep us warm during the cool evenings.

Evening had fallen and Salerno looked magical with the lights from shops spilling out onto the cobbled streets, while buskers played accordions. For dinner, we found a pizza restaurant after a little wandering: A tiny, brightly lit place called O’Spicule one street back from the foreshore towards the town’s western side, near an old church. We took a seat beside some locals; the menu was a bit cryptic, with no descriptions — always a good sign. Katherine ordered a Siciliana, and I asked for “qualcosa vegetariano” (mangled Italian for “something vegetarian”). Katherine’s Siciliana turned out to be eggplant on a tomato base, and mine was, amazingly, lettuce. It was basically the best pizza we’ve ever had, quite possibly the equal of Sharamanika in Sicily. The lettuce pizza was our favourite — who knew lettuce could work on pizza? It was extremely garlicky, and absolutely brilliant.

Astonishingly, our two pizzas, plus two glasses of wine and a coke to satisfy Katherine’s craving came to €8 in total. About $12 AUD, with the current brilliant exchange rate. That’s the same or less than we would’ve paid for a meal in Tunisia! Our whole day had been full of surprises about how cheap everything was. Amazing.

So, full of fantastic pizza and feeling like Italy has given us the best welcome we could’ve hoped for, we happily wandered home along the foreshore.

Aah. Italy, vi amiamo.

We finished up our final tasks, which including emptying the black water cassette into the nasty pit supplied, which was a particularly unpleasant experience when a splashback from the poorly-designed emptying facility hit me in the face!!! Freaking hell! Much washing of my face followed. (It was to become one of the more pleasant experiences of the day!)

We hit the road, marvelling for the last time at the antics of the other drivers; our favourite was taking a shortcut, going around a roundabout the wrong way, and even one car doing a U-turn at a roundabout rather than going around, nearly running into an oncoming car in the process. Please don’t run into our motorhome, I kept repeating in my head. We both had that nervous feeling, the same we get before an international flight, about something going wrong and missing the ferry.

But we made it unscathed to our favourite town in the world, La Goulette. We were met by an attendant who helped us through the check-in procedure and directed us to the queue of cars waiting to enter the port.

That was a mercy — trying to navigate that would’ve been very difficult. Then, he asked for a tip, putting on an unpleasant sooky-puppy-dog face; I gave him the few coins we had left, then he indicated it wasn’t enough, or wasn’t in the right currency or something. He tried to get us to exchange our money though him, telling us the banks are closed and they are greedy. Right.

He said a bunch of other stuff that passed us by, and simply wouldn’t let up. Katherine later observed how, when we indicated that we didn’t understand him, he would simply talk louder and louder, rather than slowing down or breaking it down into more easily understood portions. Funny being on the other side of that, given that English speakers tend to do that to foreigners all the time.

Having got outside Nettle with him, I just walked away from him, and luckily, wasn’t followed. I asked a security guard at the gate if I could exchange currency once we got inside, and after being told we could, headed back to Nettle for the wait.

The tip guy returned and badgered us for a little longer. We couldn’t wait to get away from Tunisia and its plentitude of creeps, that’s for sure. For the purposes of peace I offered a five-dinar coin, which he just sniffed at, and asked for a note. The small change we’d given him earlier, plus the five dinar coin come to about seven dinars, so, he wants a note, let him have a tenner; I asked him for our change back, telling him I’d then give him a note. He put about half a dinar in my hand. Um. The tool wasn’t going to get away with that. I told him we’d given him about seven dinars, and he finally capitulated and handed over the rest. Then I gave him the tenner, and — big surprise — the guy sniffed at that too. “Un billet rouge“, he said, meaning a 20 DT note. This prompted some delicious aggression in very good French from Katherine. I shut the window.

After about an hour, some cars started shuffling around in front of us; Not trusting anyone to tell us when it was time to board, I sought out someone official-looking to ask if it was time. Yes, it was. We headed forward in Nettle, and as we approached the gate, were instead sent off to one side and not through. It turns out it wasn’t time after all. Okay.

The ferry’s departure time came and went, as cars and trucks streamed through the gate beside us, and we got increasingly anxious. Had they forgotten us? Did our greedy new friend have some buddies working the gates who were getting revenge? I headed back out on foot to again ask one of the staff if everything was fine. They nodded — “Oui, attendez.”.

Our worries weren’t entirely assuaged, having seen something like an hour pass already since the ferry was meant to depart, but we were eventually waved through the gate.

We pulled over and I jumped out with passports in hand, with little idea of what to expect next. We had a great deal of confusion with our visa in the first month here, first being told that we could get a 3 month visa at the border, then upon arrival being told no such thing was possible, and that we had to get visas one month at a time, at the local police station. Finally, we were told that we needed no visa at all, and instead paid 10 dinars per week we were in-country. The latter came from the visa desk at the Tunis airport, so we stuck with that.

Upon presenting our passports to an official at the dock, he vaguely beckoned me to follow, and handed over to a police officer at the visa bureau. I told him about the ten-dinar-per-week thing, and he sought out his superior and showed him our visas. The superior, an arrogant, self-important-looking guy, said something in curt Arabic, which the other guy translated: “Why have you overstayed your visa?”. Brilliant.

Again, I recounted what we had been told at the airport visa office, and was berated with “Why didn’t you visit a police station?”. Calmly, I explained that we had visited several police stations, including the one at the airport who had led us to the visa office. Incomprehensible muttering followed, until I brought out the 160 dinars I had determined was the fee, and their eyes lit up: “Ah, trés bien”.

The younger officer directed me to wait while our passports were stamped. He told me “You should give the boss a big present!”. I laughed it off uncomfortably and waited. He returned a few minutes later, showed me into his superior’s office, and said again, “Okay, a present for the boss, now”. Big joke, laugh it off; I sat down in the foyer again. One last time, he tried it — “A present, for the boss”; I put a vague expression on my face, and managed to successfully avoid the situation; the superior gave the passports to another officer for processing, while I went and exchanged our money into Euros.

Finally, it was done — I had our passports in hand, with all the appropriate stamps and a great sigh of relief.

Back to Nettle for another half hour or so; another foray out to make sure everything was still okay — I could barely get a word out of the curt staff member I actually found to ask, but I gathered that the ferry was still loading, and we were in the correct place.

The few of cars that were strewn around in front of us shuffled forward, and we moved forward too. We finally reached the concourse along the waterfront, two ferries tied up further down the dock, and an official asked for our paperwork, which we presented. “Un petit probléme,” he said, slightly apologetically. We needed an export stamp for Nettle. Nice of them to let us know, at the last minute.

Feeling panicky, watching the last few cars progress along the dock towards the ferry, we swung around in a U-turn, and I ran out to find another official to do whatever needed to be done. I found one in a dockside café, waved the offending piece of paper at him, and he joined me outside and took a quick look inside Nettle and underneath, presumably checking for stowaways. He scribbled something on the piece of paper, then pointed vaguely back through the docks the way we had originally come, and told me to find “un petit bureau” (a little office).

All of the booths beside the entranceway were closed, and not a person was in sight; I asked an official outside the police office where to go, and he pointed vaguely ahead. I remembered our rather uncomfortable entrance to Tunisia, and the set of offices we passed through to get Nettle’s paperwork done, and I headed back there. While I was running, I noticed the obnoxious mute man that had taken us though the entrance bureaucracy when we first arrived, and steadfastly pretended I hadn’t seen him; I think he recognised me, as he grunted as I ran past and thumped the side of a building to try to get my attention.

The first official I waved my piece of paper at unhelpfully tapped his shoulder and indicated I should find the captain. No such individual was in sight, so I tried again, and asked another official. He showed me into a smoky office, where the official behind the desk took the piece of paper, put a stamp in my passport, and waved me off. I guess that’s it.

A sprint back to Nettle. Katherine told me later that while I was gone, the official who had stopped us on the waterfront concourse had attempted to hit on her in my absence, asking if she was married, and was she travelling with her brother?

We joined the end of a line of cars, and I verified that we were in the correct place — a big sigh of relief when we found all was well, and the ferry was still being loaded. Another couple of passport checks, a quick search again (these people love double-handling), and we were waved onto the ship.

We locked up and headed up onto the passenger deck, feeling light-headed and a bit shaky with relief, hunger, and the toll the stresses of the evening had taken. Thankfully, the onboard restaurant was open, and we found ourselves a surprisingly inexpensive and decent meal.

Exhausted, we sought out the “pullman seats” we had booked. An attendant showed us to them, and we stared in disbelief — they were either side of the aisle; one had a sleeping man sprawled at it’s foot.

We found the attendant again and asked if there were any other seats free that we could claim — no such luck. There were shelves for baggage at the front of the room; I eyed one alcove speculatively, and thought I could curl up there for the night. Katherine had a better idea; the two seats beside her were claimed with some stray items of clothing, but I moved the jumper on the seat beside her over, and sat down there, just for now. We leaned against each other and tried to shut our eyes against the glare of the room’s lighting.

Then our luck found us — the prior occupant of the seat I was in returned; I excused myself and offered the seat back, and he smiled and shook his head, taking the clothing off the seat and the one beside, freeing up all three seats for us! Hoorah!

So, we lay back and slept fitfully, taking turns to shift around, waking when people opened the door right in front of us (but enjoying the breeze through the door which briefly mitigated the stifling heat of the room). But at least we had somewhere to be!

We gave up around 9am, and ventured back to the deck for a coffee and croissant. Soon after, land appeared outside the window, and we walked out to lean against the railing in the warm breeze and watch as the ferry was ushered into the docks of Palermo. Ah, Palermo, our old friend. We felt wonderful, gazing out at Sicily, flooded with happy memories. We wondered how Mount Etna was looking, covered in snow.

We found a table inside again and watched some old So You Think You Can Dance episodes for a while. Every now and then there were high-volume announcements made in Italian, and after the third, I thought we best find out what they were about, and headed towards reception to find someone to ask in English/French. The staff member I found said it was a call for all passengers to passport control, and to hurry because they wanted to leave! I ran back to get Katherine and our passports, and just as we were returning, an announcement was made calling for something-something-Tai-Sono-é-something-Hai-rah-mahn — they were calling us! So, we were the last to have our passports stamped, as the officials joked with us about my name (Mike Tyson, that old chestnut). I recognised one of the officials from our departure from Sicily, months ago.

It was a very long day; we both felt pretty rough from the poor sleep we’d had. The deck was almost empty of people now, and we claimed a choice spot on a bench in the corner, where we could spread out and lie down. A group of loud Arabic men were playing an unfamiliar but entertaining-looking card game for most of the day; we became a little irritated with them towards the end, with their periodic loud shouting. Quiet down, you lot!

Arrival time came and went. Eventually, around midnight, lights appeared out the window, and we had arrived! After a bit of a wait, we found our way back to the car deck, and wearily but delightedly returned “home”. We drove down the ramp, to the inspection area. An ununiformed Italian women asked us something about cigarettes, and made a smoking gesture — was she asking us for cigarettes?? Nope — she was just asking if we were importing any, or any alcohol. We were relieved and happy to be clear of begging, clutching Tunisian dock staff!

A quick stop in to the office to make sure we were all sorted with our Schengen visas, and we were done. 10 minutes tops.

A little giddy, we drove out of the dock and through familiar-looking Salerno — Italy! I spotted the area sosta I’d researched, and we pulled in, a little surprised to find it a run-down looking car park littered with dead cars, but a little too tired to care. It’s fine! We sank gratefully into our own bed and fell asleep.

We had a big list of things to find — throw rugs to keep us warm while we’re sitting around in Nettle, a laptop stand, keyboard and mouse for Katherine, who has been coveting my awesome workstation setup and the lack of back-pain that goes with it, a bunch of other stuff and second-hand bikes, which we still somehow haven’t managed to come by yet.

We spotted a shopping centre, which turned out to be quite small, but we did find a computer tech shop and nabbed a mouse, then headed onwards towards the medina, which we wanted to wander around for a while.

As we approached we were immediately set upon by someone who spotted us, the rich tourists; I steadfastly ignored him, having had well enough of being polite! Into the crowded cave-like corridors we went, moving at a crawl through the tight press of people — all Tunisians, no tourists that we could spot. A guy who was walking to his stall for the day, remarked to us on the busyness of the place. He worked in a perfumery, making oils and such. He told us that the proper ‘tourist’ medina was further onwards and offered to lead the way. We preferred to wander where we were, but he’d said it wasn’t far and it would’ve been nice to get our bearings a little. We followed a little way, farther than we’d anticipated, until we spotted a corridor lined with rug and blanket stalls and, spotting our opportunity to politely slip away, bid him farewell and headed down to see if we could find any throw-rugs.

No luck, but we continued wandering aimlessly, more-or-less un-harassed. It was a funny place, lots and lots of different goods available, but within each category (jeans, shoes, rugs, kitchen utensils, electronic goods, art supplies…) the goods were all the same, and choice was very limited. So, we didn’t do too well with our list of things to buy while we were still paying in Dinars.

We stopped at a café located off to the side of a covered corridor and had lunch of tasty grilled fish on a tomato sauce with chips on the side. The place was quite atmospheric, a dimly lit tunnel with Tunisians wandering by with their shopping, a bunch of men sitting outside another café nearby smoking sheeshas.

We found ourselves in the ‘touristy’ part of the medina, and entered a world of annoying pushy merchants, all with the same wares — copper-and-glass lanterns, painted pottery jars/urns, ornate hinged boxes, sheeshas (those water pipe things), bird cages, like the one Katherine bought in Medenine, and various leather goods.

The stores looked fascinating, and we would’ve stopped to investigate more, but for the amazingly stupid behaviour of the vendors — they would all stand, blocking the entrance to their shops, and as soon as they saw you looking at anything near their stall (actually, as soon as you were within earshot). they start with the badgering. Where are you from? Come look at my shop. You very beautiful. (to Katherine). One glance at a lamp or a birdcage and they would pounce and wouldn’t let you do anything else but start talking prices. We just wanted to look at stuff!

One vendor, who we naïvely thought may have been just being friendly, brought us tea and talked with us, then it was clear it was a ploy to guilt us into staying and buying something; he would first tell us to take our time looking around, give us a couple of seconds, then be back prodding and nudging, being a complete ass and touching Katherine’s hand. Katherine had originally wanted a closer look at a lamp, and by blocking the exit and keeping on us, we were hard-pressed to find an exit. He asked several times more than we would be willing to pay for a lamp that didn’t really suit us, and it was only by basically forcing our way past him out of the shop that we managed to escape. If that wasn’t enough, he actually scolded us as we walked by later!

Another vendor noticed we were looking at a bird cage, and told us it was five dinars, then once we were inside told us this one was more expensive, because it was better quality. The others were five dinars though.

After a couple of similar experiences, as well as more sleazy behaviour towards Katherine than anyone should ever have to put up with, we had had enough — it was either bail now, or fashion a shiv from whatever’s handy and just get stabby. Katherine actually wanted the bird cage we were looking at, but we were furious with the terrible behaviour of the merchant, and just walked out on him as he shouted decreasing prices after us.

We wonder if they have any idea their behaviour is so offensive as to scare off customers. We were very pleased we had visited the medina at Sfax, which was entirely devoid of such unacceptable behaviour!

We’d had enough of Tunis, and despite having managed almost nothing on our to do list, we headed back to Nettle through the rain, via the supermarket we’d identified earlier.

We’d identified a caravan park relatively close by, the other side of Hammam Lif, to spend the last few days, and headed off down the motorway. A stopover to get fuel while it was still so bafflingly cheap ended with a little concern after the attendant ripped the cover off Nettle’s fuel inlet in the process of filling up, then blithely said “ça va.” (it’s okay), and then asked for payment. Luckily it was just a clip-on thing that had come undone, and I clipped it back on easily while holding the fuel pipe from the other side. Phew!

We found our way to the caravan park, located on the far side of a very weird collection of half-finished buildings and puddle-covered dirt roads. We originally thought it was an under-construction tourist zone or something, but we later found it was a residential area. Tunisia is weird.

The caravan park appeared closed; I wandered around trying to find someone to talk to, but failed, so we just pulled up within the entrance-way, nicely out of the way, and closed up for the night.

I said something to the effect of “Now, what would be good is for there to be a knock at the door and there to be a caravan park attendant to open up for us“. Then, there was a knock at the door and there was a caravan park attendant welcoming us in. After experimentally trying “Now, what would be good is for there to be a suitcase of a few million dollars to appear“, we happily followed the dude in, plugged into the electricity hook-up, and settled in.

We ventured out, and headed to the livestock area. Wow! It was another world. The air rang with the bleats and yells of sheep, goats, and the shriller trills of baby animals of various species — some insanely cute goat kids. The place was packed, so we edged through the crowd, squeezing past animals and people alike. Not a woman in sight, I might add, aside from Katherine and another tourist we saw.

We passed some youngsters pushing a goat in a wheelbarrow; a man wresting an errant goat, a wheelbarrow full of chickens (and a man picking one up by its wing, which we weren’t too happy with), and a very bewildered-looking newborn goat — what a place to be born!

I recorded the sounds of the animal market, but was disappointed to find later that something had gone wrong with the recorder application, and the recording was gone. Oh, well.

We wandered onto the streets of Douz, thronging with people and lined with stalls. Katherine found a belt, and we met up with Birgit and Dieter, and their friends Manfred and his wife, who’s name currently eludes me, in the market square and had some very good sweet tea with them.

We also met a local souvenir vendor who we’d met the other day (Katherine bought some sunglasses from him) — he was actually an English teacher, but couldn’t find work, so he was getting by running a stall here! He had told us the other day that business was slowing down: The financial crisis was causing the number of visitors to dwindle, so he was wondering what he’d do next.

We wandered on, through the market square (we had a chuckle at the child’s jumper pictured below, for sale in one of the stalls. Right.), and on through the streets in search of water and bread, then back home.

There were lots of little stands by the road with piles of plastic containers filled with something-or-other, funny men standing beside them waving at us frantically. Turns out they were selling fuel — Katherine spotted a car pulled over, being filled up with a pipe. We found out later that the fuel is brought from Libya, where it’s dramatically cheaper, and sold here by the road!

We were racing the clock a little, wanting to drive the 100km to Gabès and be safely tucked into a caravan park before dark — and we wanted to have the following day ‘off’ to do things like blogging, without having to muck about finding somewhere to stay. It was dusk by the time we arrived on the outskirts of Gabès, but we made it! Katherine navigated us to the place, Fella Parc, while I concentrated on not running into anything. We weren’t sure we’d found the caravan park when we did — the sign was broken and it was kinda dark; we wandered around and decided it must be it, so we poked our heads into the restaurant and found a guy who led us to the camping pitches, amidst a construction zone.

We settled in, and there was a knock at the door later by the manager who’d come out to greet us and point out the facilities, somewhat excitedly — it was a new ‘parc ecologie’, he told me proudly after pointing out the big cage for some poor future inhabitant. Right.

We stayed two nights, I did some blogging and lots of catching up on reading others’ blogs, which I thoroughly enjoyed, particularly Katherine’s blog; kinda nice doing something that isn’t programming for a change. While we were still in bed in the morning, the manager or someone knocked on the door — a little over-keen still, I think — and I managed to make myself understood that they should come back later. The manager dude eagerly showed me around, then somehow roped me into typing up some English translation of the website when he found out I was a programmer. Then he was on my case every time I saw him later about putting up an advertisement with an Australian motorhoming club! He wouldn’t let up! Just… weird and uncomfortable.

In return for the typing, he invited us to lunch at the restaurant, with what I originally thought he meant was his family (ma famille), which would’ve been interesting, but I think he actually said “your wife” (ta/votre femme), so it was just Katherine and I — eh, that works too, we’re not particularly social people. Lunch was fun, some Tunisian soup, a frittata-like slice thing, and lots of tasty, cinnamon-y couscous. Plus wine, ah, red wine, it’s been so long!

We set off with some relief from Gabès, headed for Medenine. The scenery got very deserty and interesting. There were more 4WD roadworks, and some hilarious bad-truck-driver shenanigans — big truck overtaking another big truck on a crest of a hill with zero-visibility of oncoming traffic, always a recipe for awesomeness. And, there was a whole lot of empty space.

We arrived in Medenine, had a little trouble finding our destination, but made it after asking someone; we were there to have a look at the Medenine ksar, a Berber construction: A series of mud-brick granaries built all together making a continuous collection of cave-like alcoves. It was all a bit disappointing — probably, a Google image search would’ve been sufficient to see what there was to see — and the aforementioned alcoves were chock full of pushy souvenir vendors. Still, Katherine managed to score some bits that she genuinely liked, so not a total loss! The town itself was fairly unpleasant, so we were happy to drive out again soon after.

We were hoping to make it all the way to Tataouine and stay there for the night, but we know of no caravan parks anywhere near it, and we remain a little skittish about wildcamping still. We decided to stay in a caravan park/hotel in the little nearby village of Metameur, Hotel les Gorfas.

We had read that the place was converted from a ksar, but when we got there we realised we’d done a lot better than we’d imagined: The place was beautiful, the mud-brick hut things all piled up on top of each other whimsically. It was a vastly more awesome ksar than the one we’d actually come to the area to see. It was also very peaceful and quiet, something we hadn’t really had yet in Tunisia.

What was even cooler was the reception we had. A young man and older woman, both incredibly sweet, showed us in and pointed us to the facilities, then the adorable older woman offered us some mint tea and showed us around the impressive ksar.

Then, just after we thought we might take a walk through the village, a friendly guy around our age said hello to us and took us on a tour through the village!

He showed us several ancient Berber residences, part of the ksar, and pointed out the house (now abandoned) where his grandmother once lived.

He introduced us to someone who I assume was a family member (we spoke in French, and most of it’s guesswork for us!), in a yard with two frolicking horses. He was working on a stall, and discovered a scorpion in the process, picking it up in his hand, then offered it to me. Jibbley-jibbley a real live scorpion in my hand, but not killing me apparently cos here I am still alive. Also I may be overstating things slightly.

He pointed out the village graveyard, and the area where some of his family members are buried, and he asked if Katherine and I come from the same village, which hurt my head a little trying to think of our home towns as villages.

Then he showed us how the Tunisian scarves are worn:

Awesome! This place and its people are the greatest!

We inched our way through the city traffic, weaving around pedestrians and motorbikes (not the other way around, of course), and with minimal pain found a spacious manned car park. We were here to visit the medina, the ancient marketplace, which we’ve read is one of the most ‘real’ and un-touristy, where others tend to be packed full of pushy souvenir vendors.

Sure enough, it was brilliant — no hassling whatsoever. We just wandered around amongst the locals, with a friendly “salut” or an “aslama” here and there.

We met a guy working a stall when he asked where we were from as we passed by — we paused to answer, and we just kinda kept talking; His name was Baha, and he spoke English, which was refreshing. He got a neighbouring vendor to watch his store and took us around the corner (we lagged behind a little, cautiously) to where his brother was selling drums and some other freaky-looking traditional instruments.

He surprised us by not asking us to buy anything, and instead took us for a coffee, which was great — he told us he lived in Tataouine (you know, where Anakin Skywalker lived), and travelled in to work sometimes. As always, there was a bit of a communication barrier, but we got by. He showed us how our names were written in Arabic:

And he wrote down his address in Tataouine for us, in case we needed him! We’d read about the persistence of the hospitable Berber culture in Tunisia, and I think it’s definitely apparent.

We’d just said farewell to Baha, and were wandering through some back-alleys taking pictures of some excitingly grungey-looking doors, when two young women paused to puzzle over what we were doing, and one jokingly posed for me in front of a door:

They surprised us by speaking to us in excellent English. They gave us funny looks and asked us why the hell we were taking pictures of grotty doors, and what on earth we were doing in Tunisia of all places. Classic!

They were art students at the Sfax art university, Sirine and Amal, and after checking what our plans were, they invited us to have coffee with them at a café/studio they were headed to.

It was absolutely brilliant to be able to meet some Tunisian women finally — we were a little frustrated at talking with just guys, not having a woman’s perspective at all; in fact, just the day before Katherine had voiced that frustration, so it was great timing! Plus speaking in English helped massively — we really aren’t at the point where we can understand very much at all. We just tend to make up for ourselves the other person’s side of the conversation, which can have interesting results. They said it was nice to speak English for a while.

So, we joined them at the café, an artist’s haunt, with a room upstairs for painting and milling about creatively — Sirine negotiated for us to head upstairs briefly to say hi to their friends (I admit, at this point I was remembering the art scam that got Kevin Rose and Glenn McElhose in China, but once again, all was well!). They spoke for a moment in Arabic, and when I observantly noted “that isn’t English!”, they explained that they were commenting on my beauty. It’s the hair, you see. I nodded modestly and agreed that I was quite the looker.

So, we four grabbed a table downstairs and spoke for ages about a variety of topics — life in Tunisia for women, and in Australia, and marriage; Sirine was, I suspect, a tad baffled at our opinions towards marriage — “but you love each other, why not just get married?” — We explained how marriage has much less weight in Australia, for various reasons, and that with us two it was just something we didn’t see as necessary; We know we’re going to spend the rest of our lives loving each other, and that was enough, at least for now! Of course, that’s a very big contrast to here in Tunisia, where you’re not even really allowed to even go out at night as a woman until you’re married. It’s actually illegal to live together here unless you’re married! Luckily, there’s a little lenience towards tourists. It sounds a bit like one remains with a child’s restrictions until the ring is on your finger! Sirine mused that she’s probably quite fortunate — her family sound quite tolerant and moderate!

We spoke about family life and obligations, the art university and it’s modern and moderate nature, and their chosen specialities — ceramics for Amal, and sculpture for Sirine. They told us that teaching art was a very good career, and well paid.

We also spoke about being a traveller in Tunisia, and they warned us about being too trusting, like when meeting someone who offers to take you somewhere. We gave them a look — “well, not us!”. I think they should make the evil-doers wear a badge or something. Sirine said something disparaging about my manly strength compared to the big strong dangerous local men. I think she probably had a point. Maybe I could defeat them with my mighty brain? It’s an interesting conundrum, though. Do you play it safe all the time and never have any new experiences, or do you take chances and risk your safety? Maybe we just need to learn how to improvise a shiv from nearby objects.

Sirine was engaged to a Tunisian man — from Sfax — living in Paris, and was happy to be getting out of Tunisia. She told us that she always knew she wanted to marry a foreigner (I guess this way she keeps the family happy and gets to marry someone who’s living overseas and is all Frenchified!). She actually suggested that we come and attend her wedding in Sfax in August, which was very touching, although we couldn’t have made it. We’re totally going to catch up in Paris though.

So, Amal and Sirine gave us their full names to look them up on Facebook (man, that thing is so international!), and we’re going to stay in touch. It was just brilliant to meet them, both to talk about how they lived and just to hang out with cool people in our age group! We wished each other well and parted ways.

We wandered our way back to Nettle, who was still there and still in one piece — awesome — then had a quick lunch and headed out of Sfax. People here drive…differently to people in other places.

I finished off a project, Talkie, and got it on the market, as well as working on some other upcoming projects, and properly setting up the ‘public’ face of my obsession/business, A Tasty Pixel, with some awesome concept/design ‘consulting’ from Katherine (all the pixel character ideas came from her — the freaking genius).

Katherine made the first steps towards setting up her art business, doing lots of blogging in the process, and created some killer paintings as well in the ‘studio‘.

We started most days about 10 or 11. Sometimes I’d venture out to the local boulangerie (bakery) for fresh bread — which costs basically nothing, being subsidised by the government. Four loaves of bread costs around 0.700 DT (about AU$0.56, €0.35). Together with croissants and cake, it was a couple of dinars. Awesome.

We’d work in Nettle till about 3-4pm, and one of us would cook ‘dinner’ (we started referring to it as dunch); then we’d keep working until about 1am, occasionally 2 or 3.

And we both loved every minute of it — working on the things we love, entirely unrestrained by logistics like power availability, or diurnal waking cycles. Or eating three times a day. We’re fortunate to be so well matched, that both of us tend to feel like doing a thing at the same time — in this case, doing 14 hour ‘work’ days, sitting inside a motorhome.

The internet access was kinda crap, failing entirely about half the time during the evening, but we were grateful we had access at all — it’s remarkably progressive of Tunisia to have a feasible data plan for mobile internet. Beats the hell outta the system in France. I discovered on the last night that our flaky connectivity was due to a dodgy DNS server, and solved the problem by using Google’s public DNS instead, for our final evening. Brilliant. (If that didn’t make sense to you, replace the confusing stuff with the word “Magic!”).

We cooked every night, with fantastic results, having access to vast quantities of exciting spices, and our increasing flair in the kitchen! Shopping was less fun — it really was quite disgusting out there, a dirty, loud street. Getting to the little mini-mart-esque shops was a bit of a gauntlet run, with beggars, pushy taxi drivers and friendly-but-kinda-mocking locals with carts full of clock radios and shoes. Plus there was the shop with the two guys who kept laughing at me! Just because I speak French like a slow four-year-old. Big meanies.

During one shopping expedition, a friendly local in his early thirties started speaking to us, and invited us to have a coffee — we accepted and joined him in his favourite café, all Arabic-looking tiles and fancy bongs. He didn’t speak any English, so we spoke in French, with mixed results, but it got the job done. His name was Taoufik (too-feek), and he lived nearby and worked as a chef in a local hotel and also in a grocery shop. We caught up with him a few times after that, once for dinner at a local café — total bachelor food! — followed by the best tea we’ve ever had (mint tea, very sweet) in a different café/bar. I joined him solo several times too, for coffee or a stroll — we spoke about his work; he told me of his passion for working with spices, and he was fascinated by our grand make-our-living-on-the-internets scheme. He even invited us on a trip north to visit his family, but that didn’t end up panning out.

The staff at the caravan park were quite friendly — one of the dudes who worked around the grounds (he always seemed busy doing something or other) brought us cut flowers a few times, which was lovely. He also bought us some olives from the trees of the caravan park!

We felt keenly for the dogs that were tied up around the caravan park, for no reason that we could see — so far apart from each other that socialising would’ve been impossible, and on short leashes that meant their world was about 3-4 square metres. One dog that we came to know was tied up near where we do the camper-service thing; he’d go absolutely bananas when you came close, begging for attention and play. I went right up to him and tried to be friendly for a while — but it was difficult to stay, as he just kept jumping and licking constantly, pushing me over. I made myself say hello every now and then, but it was a real endurance test. Poor little guy; we’d read about the most horrendous animal cruelty in Tunisia, and I guess this is just a slightly more chronic form. Awful.

During the last week or two, a group of people were harvesting olives, putting blankets down beneath the trees, then sharing a ladder as they worked round each tree, pulling off the olives and letting them fall into the blankets below. They ended up with an insane amount of harvested olives, massive hessian bag after massive hessian bag. I went out to them and asked if I could take their picture.

Then, they invited me later to join them for tea, sitting around a little fire-in-a-pot with them while they had lunch, which they shared too — bread and olive oil, and a curry-like dish with lots of chillies. The tea was in a shot-glass, black and incredibly sweet. Yum. There were introductions (as usual, I introduced myself as “Michelle”), and my horrendous memory for foreign-sounding names let me down once more. It always feels slightly racist of me. I brought out some Nutella on bread for ‘dessert’ and Bi..Bilahh…Bilal…Dammit. ‘Bill-something’ pulled out a makeshift pipe — a copper pipe with holes drilled in it — and played some charming, very Arabic-sounding music. They were lovely people, and we waved and “comment ça va?-d” (how’s it going?) regularly.

So, all up, we had a quite lovely couple months — it was warm and sunny for the most part, the olivey surroundings were quite pleasant (we loved the little birds), and we were spending about AU$17-20 (about €10-12) per day!

Our first foray out into the world was a day trip, out to Kerkouane near the tip of Cap Bon. Kerkouane is apparently the world’s most well-preserved Carthaginian city, abandoned in 3 BC during the Punic Wars.

The drive out there was quite lengthy, and ran through many small towns with tricky, crowded narrow streets, with every man and his donkey wandering over them — footpaths are for wimps and tourists, donchaknow? We are constantly amused by the way the locals drive and act on the roads — it’s every man for himself, for sure, even if you’re a pedestrian!

We saw lots of horse-drawn carts ambling along the soft edges of the road, and fields and fields of fennel — they love the fennel, here!

We arrived outside the entrance to Kerkouane, and had lunch in Nettle in the car park while we watched a Buffy episode (of course). We wandered around the site, fascinated — it really is quite amazing: Although the walls are sheared down to waist-height, it’s quite easy to make out the layout of all of the houses. Red baths are still there in the bathrooms, the drains, indoor wells…Plaques around the site explained a few things here and there, including describing the layouts of a few houses, kitchens, dining rooms, bedrooms, private worship altars. Awesome. People actually lived here 2000 years ago, within these walls. They probably didn’t watch Buffy though. Maybe the Simpsons.

We pondered our next move for a while, feeling silly about just retracing our steps back to Hammamet for the night, but decided to stick with it, as it made the most sense logistically. Long drive back to Hammamet for our last night — the manager laughed when he saw us again, and when I grinned and asked him if it was cool if we stayed one more night, he said we can stay ‘tout de l’année‘ – all year!

Three months sounded like such a long time, but on the ground, it’s actually very short! So, our time was up and we had to disappear ourselves for a while. This was always going to be Morocco — French-speaking (good for us to practice!), motorhome-friendly and warm during the winter. Then, when plans changed and we were headed to Italy, it was going to be Croatia. Finally, after we decided Croatia may be on the challenging side for now — not being especially motorhome-friendly, or at least so we’ve been told, plus the cold factor, and the distance from Sicily — we cast around for other ideas.

It turns out, Tunisia is surprisingly close to Sicily — a comparatively short ferry ride away — and it’s French-speaking, has a nice warm winter, some nice sights to see, and is quite modern. Quite a change in plans, but it fit perfectly.

So, Katherine had done the hard work of finding and booking us a ferry trip there from Palermo.

We took the quite pleasant inland motorway route from Linguaglossa — southwards, then cutting inland across the middle and up to Palermo in the north-west. We stayed in the ‘caravan park’ (glorified car park, really) in the city’s outer limits for a couple of days, setting ourselves up; mostly, downloading stuff to watch, using up the last of our 3G account, and further researching Tunisia. We also replaced our water pump, which was on the weary side — this was a €12 revelation, and suddenly we had awesome pressure for showers again.

So the time came to catch the ferry — we drove carefully through nutty Palermo traffic to the docks, parked, and lined up with a bunch of very middle-eastern looking folks until one of them kindly indicated we were in the wrong line entirely. Corrected, we found a door with a man behind a screen and give him some pieces of paper; he gave us some different pieces of paper and pointed to the other door, with another man. We lined up again and eventually got to the police-y dude, who didn’t like our fancy-shmancy printed-out online tickets but gave us some stamps or something on stuff anyway, after a little conferring. Then waved us off…Uh, okay…

We wandered back to Nettle, obviously looking quite lost, because a fellow traveller pointed us in the right direction — a queue of vehicles lined up along the dock. Almost every vehicle (banged up utes, most of them) were stacked high (I mean seriously stacked high) with…well, just about anything. Mostly whitegoods, bicycles, mattresses, that sort of thing. The undersides of many of the cars were all but scraping along the ground. And yeah, that is a kitchen sink in the photo. Two of them, actually.

So, we settled down to wait in the queue of bizarrely-adorned vehicles until a deep rumble signified the arrival of the ferry. A very, very long time later, we started inching forward and into the ferry’s belly: Absolute freaking chaos. Because having a system is for wimps! Somehow we made it on board in one piece and were ushered into something vaguely resembling a row of vehicles.

We would’ve loved to have spent the journey in Nettle, but ’tis not the Done Thing, apparently, so up we went onto the main deck, and found a table at which to sit for the 12 hour ride. Pretty much the moment the ferry pulled into the dock, a dense fog rolled in, and the ferry was forced to go at a crawl for the first five hours or so.

We were joined by an older couple, a Sicilian man and a Tunisian woman who lived together in Sicily. We got “chatting” with her, in French — it started out fairly well, Katherine and I working together to augment each other’s understanding as best we could. Then our table-mate started using more and more Italian (possibly led to believe that we spoke better Italian than French, as we kept accidentally using Italian words instead of French ones), until she was completely incomprehensible. We tried to remind her that we had almost no Italian, and we could understand French better, but to no avail…Eventually the conversation lapsed and we settled down to reading and passing the time.

We noticed the occupants of the ferry were 99.9% males, which we found bizarre until we realised they were contract workers in Sicily, returning home. Some folks had mats out on the floor, preying at the appropriate times, which was all very exciting and foreign.

We arrived in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, at about midnight and very slowly inched our way down to the car deck and hopped back into Nettle — Aah, home again. A quite long wait while chaos again reigned on the car deck: The every-man-for-himself system was in action, which always works well.

What followed, once we exited the ferry, defies sanity, and I’d rather not recall it in too much detail. It took us three hours to get out of the port: There was the surprise of finding out that the visa situation was entirely different to that which our prior research had turned up — I still don’t entirely understand how it works, honestly — and there was our first encounter with the Arabic sense of humour, when, returning to the visa office with payment for the visas, we were stopped at the door by an officer who, when I explained why we were there (in French, of course), gestured that he couldn’t hear me. Over, and over he repeated it after each re-phrasing of mine, until he grinned and let us through.

Then, there was the strange mute man who escorted me through the Nettle-importing paperwork, gesturing frantically the whole time and getting more and more worked up, dragging me from office to office, some several times, collecting a bit of paperwork here, a stamp there, a nothing-at-all over there… It was entirely baffling. During the whole process, our passports were demanded about five to ten times. Then he asked for a tip, and because we had almost no change, only massive notes from the currency transfer, I had little to give him — He kept grunting and holding out his hand, then when I bid him goodnight, he came up to the drivers-side window and made “sad face” at me until I drove off! Freaky.

So, eventually we made it out, driving through the port’s gates hearts-in-mouth lest someone else come by to take us through further hours of bureaucracy. Exhausted, we parked in a brightly-lit truck stop just outside the docks and fell into bed.

Let us never speak of it again.