The Drums of Nefta August 31, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Africa, France, Hotels, Rail Pass, Tour, Trails, Trip , trackbackIt is late evening and Marianne, Walter and I have just finished a large couscous washed down by several bottles of heady local wine. My companions start talking in Arabic again and I have the depressing sense of being a hick tourist fallen among real travellers. Wine- numbed and bloated, I lapse into silent recapitulation of what has brought us here.
I met Marianne on Jerba, an island claiming mythic status as the place where the Sirens held Ulysses. I too was becalmed, though the Sirens were inaudible. I would take bus trips from the island to towns in southern Tunisia but they never lasted longer than a day. Their chaos and squalor did not compare well with the pristine beauty of Jerba and, as a lone male out of season, I was prey to a horde of street hustlers. On Jerba I had made it clear that I was not in the market for anything and they left me alone.
Returning on the bus from Medenine I noticed a solitary blonde whom I assumed was a stray package tourist from one of the hotels on the west of the island. I asked if she was lost. She was not. She had just arrived and was looking for a cheap hotel. I suggested mine which was cheap, central and practically empty. So our friendship began, and the Siren spell was broken.
Her story is barely credible. She is Dutch, in her late twenties, and she has been in North Africa for one-and-a-half years. During this time her sole contact with a European has been a fortnight with a German woman in Algeria. She has almost always travelled alone and has lived with very poor and very rich families, participating in the most private aspects of Arab family life. At times she has dressed as an Arab woman, worn the ha’ik, looked at the ground as she walked, among women only. At other times she cut her hair short, wore a djellaba and travelled as a man. In relatively Europeanised Tunisia she has shed these disguises. She is fluent in the Moroccan dialect of Arabic, to the amazement and amusement of the Tunisians.
She has penetrated other exclusive worlds before this. In spite of the slimmest Jewish credentials, a surname inherited from a non-practising father, she spent six months at a yeshiva in the ultra-orthodox Mea Shearim quarter ofJerusalem. By virtue of her fluent Hebrew she once led prayers at a Passover feast of wealthy Moroccan Jews — the only one present who could read them in the absence of a rabbi. She had no ideas of conversion since she previously spent six months in an ecumenical Christian community in the South of France. Why had she done these things?
`How else do you find out?’
I have no answer to that.
A trail through several Saharan oases brought us to Nefta, close to the Algerian border. If Jerba was picturesque, Nefta is magical and I regret that I must fly home in a week. Our hotel in the medina is run by an amiable eccentric whose vagueness probably results from constant imbibing of palm wine and smoking harar, a local herb similar in effect to mild hash. Last night he claimed that President Bourguiba used his hotel before he came to power and that Brigitte Bardot, accompanied by a canine entourage, stayed there in the early Seventies. He produced newspaper cuttings proving that BB came to Nefta but I am not convinced that she stayed in the Hotel de la Liberté, whose plumbing leaves everything to be desired.
But little would be surprising in Nefta. It is on the edge of the Chott el-Jerid, a saline depression in the Sahara once part of the Mediterranean. From late morning onward the combination of sunlight, heat and the reflective properties of its salt surface throws up a host of mirages. Seen from the hills above the town the Chott becomes not an arid wasteland but a phantom sea, piercingly blue.
Dominating Nefta is another extraordinary feature, so incongruous that at first sight it might well be a mirage. It is the Sahara Palace Hotel, the most luxurious in Tunisia, a cavernous, currently near- deserted edifice with all the charm and intimacy of an international airport lounge. Below it is the old palmerie, the Corbeille, nourished by channels of water running from a hot spring poetically named The Source. In the heart of the palms is a pool credited with miraculous curative powers where the Neftis come to bathe: women in the morning, men in the afternoon. Looking toward the town from here, the sky is dominated by the seat of a religious brotherhood from whose minaret a human muezzin, instead of the usual loudspeaker, calls the faithful to prayer. Nefta has more than sixty places of worship and is a centre of Sufism, but there is no fanatical edge to its people. Once, being led by a boy through the maze of the medina, Marianne asked our guide if the people were religious. He laughed loudly. ‘No, we are not religious. Nefta is a town of drunks and revolutionaries.’ I was heartened by this news though Marianne, who has experienced the unpredictable effects of alcohol on the North African male to her cost, was less amused.
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