Participants: Andrew, Gwen
Dates: 2004-10-26 to 2004-10-30
This is a trip that we booked at the last minute while I was visiting Gwen in The Netherlands during our holidays. We had been contemplating a number of different ideas, including visiting a city like Rome for a few days, or driving into the Alps in France or Austria. When visiting a travel agency, the agent suggested Tunisia. It wasn't a place that either of us had really considered when we were originally planning our holiday, but we decided to take the trip, and it turned out to be a lot of fun, and very interesting.
The trip was a package deal through Holland International, part of TUI that included a charter flight with Transavia and four nights (breakfast and dinner included) at the Riadh Palms Hotel, a tourist resort in Sousse. In the future, if we ever did such a trip again, we would only take the breakfast option, as we found much better dinners at the restaurants even just a short walk from our resort. Fortunately, the dinner was only E3- per person, per day, so even if we didn't eat dinner at the resort, it didn't cost us that much extra. But, you get what you pay for, and E3- per day doesn't buy particularly spectacular food.
Monastir and Sousse are both resort towns, with the beaches on the Med lined with tourist hotels. These hotels are filled with European tourists from France, Germany, UK, The Netherlands and others (notably Quebec due to the French speaking nature of Tunisia) much the same as hotels in the Carribean are filled with North Americans, seeking a cheap vacation with sun and warmer temperatures in both situations. Lots of people come, and some may never leave the resort, and in doing so, miss out on the greatest aspects of being in another country, but that is their loss, and not ours.
We did make one small oversight when booking this trip. I completely forgot that it was Ramadan during the time we were traveling. Because of this, we did not make a trip to Tunis or its environs, for reasons that will be outlined below. Ramadan is pretty easy to deal with as a tourist in Sousse/Monastir, simply don't eat or drink outside during daylight hours, but restaurants are open because it is a tourist area and there is plenty of business, and food is easily purchased in the markets of the Medina, just best not eaten in the open. However, we learned from others that Tunis was a different story, and if we traveled there, we would likely not find any restaurant or cafe open anywhere, and so would struggle to find things to eat during the day. We probably could have managed, but chose to occupy our time in other ways instead. So, on to the report.
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