A Day Out in Sousse

 

One dinar each gets you a train ride (complete with whistles and uniformed conductors) up the coast to the ancient city of Sousse. Originally Phoenician, this fertile and strategic site has been occupied by the Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Arabs again, Spanish, French and again the Arabs. All have left traces, and the place to get a real sense of this is in the huge kasbah and medina of the old city. It's a beautiful structure, with golden sandstone walls that seem to flow in curves over the landscape, contrasting with the angularity of the more modern buildings. The medina has a very lively souk, with just about everything you can imagine for sale. I would so love a pet chameleon (to be named Karma, of course) but I don't know how well they take to life at sea.

 

The museum is a gem: a beautifully designed new building integrated into the old fortress, it houses a display of funeral artefacts from early Christian times and the most awesome collection of Roman mosaics, depicting scenes from myth and especially from everyday life. They are all made painstakingly from natural coloured stone (not glazed ceramics) and you can look at them for hours, noticing more and more little details.

Look again at that first image of Neptune with his sea-horses - did you notice the resemblance?

One mosaic depicts a head of Medusa, and it's displayed with a big overhead mirror - so the viewer doesn't run the risk if being turned to stone! I really enjoyed a huge mosaic showing four famous gladiators, all named, fighting four leopards - also named and, apparently, equally famous. In the middle of the picture is a bloke with a pile of moneybags, which suggests to me that it was the Roman equivalent of World Championship Wrestling.

Unfortunately the Khalef Tower was closed, so we didn't get to experience what must be an incredible view over the harbour and the whole Bay of Hammamet. We've learnt to be philosophical about the arbitrary nature of opening and closing hours in this part of the world - often those frustrating efforts to do one thing turn into interesting adventures doing something else.

We enjoyed a coffee on a lovely broad promenade in the town centre, where a very obliging waiter ran off to a patisserie to get us some cakes when they didn't have any on the menu. Of course we got sold a few things by persuasive (but not aggressive or intrusive) vendors throughout the day - massive lumps of almond toffee and the Tunisian version of Turkish Delight, one of those Arab headscarf thingies that Terry has always wanted, a French dictionary, a few presents, some fruit ...

And finally a pleasant walk to the station along the waterfront at sunset and a crowded, but always interesting, train ride back to our marina.