Tunisian Travels – Day 3: El Jem and Sousse

I woke up at five o’clock in the morning as I bought a 6:05 train ticket yesterday to El Jem. Since I packed up faster than I expected and checked out quickly as well, I arrived at the Tunis train station at half past five. The train did not, in fact, leave at 6:05 but instead arrived at 6:05, at which point the amassed crowd thronged the doors and rushed into the two wagons, paying no heed to the seats written on their tickets. I managed to board quite early and participated in the general chaos by sitting down one row behind my original seat to get a better view from the window. The train did not leave for another fifteen minutes, during which time several people passed in and out of the cab for a friendly chat with the conductor. At one point, the cab held at least four people, two of whom left the train before it even departed.

No one sat down next to me for a while, but during the ride I cycled through three neighbours. The first was an older lady in a bright red hijab patterned with white flowers. She spent her whole ride in an animated conversation with her group and joked loudly with the ticket inspector. The second was a man in military fatigues. There was a whole group of identically dressed men headed to Sousse; my neighbour must have been travelling with his family as his son briefly came to sit on his lap. I glanced at him as he slept and he struck me as quite young for a father, but all the wrinkles returned to his face as soon as he woke up.

My final neighbour was a boy wearing a bobble hat. His mother, who sat across the aisle one row down, would not let the boy doze off and whenever she turned around to find him asleep, she would slap him across the thigh. Awake, the boy spent much of the ride sneaking surreptitious glances at me: with my blonde hair and blue eyes, I could not have seemed more foreign to this child with long eyelashes and chocolate-coloured skin. I have read that up to fifteen per cent of Tunisia’s population is black, a group that comprises more recent migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa as well as the descendants of slaves. I have also heard Berbers (also called Amazigh) referred to as black, but the Berbers I have seen – distinguished by their face tattoos when not wearing their traditional clothing – tend to have much lighter-coloured skin than people from Sub-Saharan Africa.

We arrived in El Jem at around ten o’clock, and I made sure to ask the lady behind the till at what time the next train to Sousse would leave. She told me it would be at around eleven fifty. I thus had almost two hours to explore the town and possibly find something to eat: all I had eaten that morning was a flaky chocolate croissant that I bought from a vendor who boarded the train during our stop in Sousse. The sight of me trying to brush the tiny crumbs off my clothes evidently provided an additional source of amusement to the boy in the bobble hat.

The main attraction in El Jem is a spectacularly huge and well-preserved amphitheatre dated to 238 CE. Back then, the city was known as Thysdrus, a name derived from what the Berbers called the settlement, which was originally founded by Carthaginians. At present, El Jem is a small town of around twenty thousand people. I have read it being described as sleepy, but that certainly did not seem to be the case this Sunday morning as people swarmed the fruit market on a dirt path right off the road to the amphitheatre. Indeed, the few paved roads, whose zebra crossings have all but completely worn off, were almost impossible to cross because of the constant rush of cars and motorcycles.

As I walked around the amphitheatre’s podium, I wondered whether there were snobbish Romans who looked down on amphitheatres and the unwashed crowds they attracted, preferring the more refined experience of watching Aeschylus or Plautus at theatres that were not preceded by the prefix “amphi.” After all, the amphitheatre could fit 35,000 people at full capacity, which must have made events feel quite close to modern-day sporting matches, complete with all the shouting, cheering, and loud conversations.

After finishing my visit, I walked over to the El Jem Museum, which houses a number of impressively large mosaics from the Roman villas around the area. The ancients were clearly very fond of animal depictions. Just as at the Bardo Museum, many mosaics portrayed wild animals, including those native to Africa like lions and elephants. One recurring motif I noticed at the Bardo and in El Jem was the hexagonal depiction of the gods of the week, with Saturn (standing in for Saturday) at the centre, and all the other gods (Sol, Luna, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus) forming a ring around him. The museum also has an outside area with an extensive patchwork of Roman-era foundations and a partial reconstruction of a Roman villa.

I returned to the train station about fifteen minutes before the train was supposed to leave, having bought myself no food at all. Instead of that, I made a quick excursion to the smaller amphitheatre just east of the museum. Initially, I thought the label on Google Maps was made accidentally, but then I saw the same label and a crude outline drawn on the map of El Jem at the museum, which convinced me to go check it out. The amphitheatre was much smaller and in considerably worse shape than its more famous sibling. As I approached it, I initially thought it was a small hill or a nondescript pile of rubble.

There was another lady behind the counter at the train station who told me that the train would not leave at 11:50 but closer to one o’clock. This news confused me, and I wondered whether I had somehow missed the earlier connection. After checking the timetable on the wall, I went to the counter again and asked whether the 11:50 train was delayed by a whole hour. The lady confirmed this unlikely surmise. In fact, the train was not delayed by an hour but by two. I ended up waiting at the station for over an hour and a half, having returned at around 12:30 after failing to find a vegetarian lunch. Instead of this, I drank an orange juice at a café in front of the amphitheatre and bought some biscuits and cashews at a nearby store, which I ate at the train station.

The ride back made me appreciate just how smooth the ride to El Jem had been. The train stopped every few minutes as the power cut out, and the scheduled stops at actual stations seemed to take forever for no apparent reason. I found this change in pace startling, as the train was the exact same train I had taken on my way to El Jem. I could tell because one of the windows had a huge crack in exactly the same place and because the conductor was the same man (which, assuming he went all the way back to Tunis, meant he had worked a shift of at least twelve hours).

To pass the time, most passengers scrolled on their phones at an increasingly frenzied speed, and I could not tell for the longest time whether the birdsong I kept hearing was coming from someone’s phone or an actual bird. Eventually, I noticed a birdcage covered in a translucent black plastic bag hanging from a window at the front of the carriage. I did not manage to find a seat and spent the ride shifting back and forth to let people pass down the stairs. When the train stopped by a station, the men would clamour to go outside for a smoke, though one man simply smoked through the open door while squatting inside the train. When the train was moving, the men would go to the bathroom to urinate. I assume it was far too dirty to entice any woman.

We arrived in Sousse at around four o’clock and I was almost deliriously happy to be able to walk again. Just a block away from the train station, the medieval town seemed much more pleasant than that of Tunis with its cobblestone streets and better-kept houses. The narrow alleyways and roofed markets gave Tunis an oppressive atmosphere, whereas Sousse had generally fewer roadside vendors and more space, allowing me to finally breathe a little more freely.

Using the little daylight I had left, I visited the city’s Ribat, an eighth century fort and the oldest remaining building in the city. Although the history of Sousse goes all the way back to the Phoenicians in the eleventh century BCE, neither their nor Roman structures remain, as they were razed after a dramatic Umayyad siege. The Ribat has a tall tower, which looks over the medina and straight into the courtyard of the Great Mosque of Sousse.

I climbed the tower just in time to see a Tunisian wedding party make its way to the gate of the mosque. The sound was unmistakable. Drumming echoed through the streets, first in three quarter time and then, as the climax drew near, in two quarter time, accompanied by the frenzied wailing of bagpipes and jubilant ululations. At the centre of it all, of course, walked the bride dressed in white and the groom with a sash on each shoulder. The drummers contributed to the visual spectacle by dancing and spinning around with the drums on their heads, and the flag-bearers spun around the outer ring of the party.

When all that was over, I made a quick visit to the mosque and checked into my hotel. Before dinner, I also walked around the western walls of the city, which must be some of the best-preserved city walls I have ever seen. Their colour and style reminded me a little of the walls in Alcúdia in Mallorca, though these seemed taller to me.