The Sahara: It's Sandy!

Greetings from sunny Tunisia! I recently returned from a five-day press trip to the lovely North African country, where I was able to take part in one of the most exotic holidays I could imagine. I've included some photos and videos below to try and describe the experience, though I'm afraid words and images don't do it justice. It was really incredibly amazing!

We spent our first day at a Jewish festival on the island of Djerba. We visited a synagogue, a yeshiva (Jewish school), and joined in a little market set up for the event with rabbis passing out glasses of liquor. It was very different than any shul experience I've ever had.

After our Jewish festivities, we visited a 1,000-year-old mosque and met Tunisia's head imam, who spoke about the great relationship beween North African Jews and Muslims, where the two religions live not just peacefully, but as good friends. I kept noticing signs in the villages, with Arab writing right on top of Hebrew.

Tunisia is filled with some of the most vibrant pottery. Residents use their immense supply of sand, mix it with water, fire it then paint it gorgeous colors. Everywhere you looked there were hundreds of bowls, plates and lamps and they were all unique looking. I got to go into an underground dwelling (that was really more like a cave) and watch two men make the stuff. It was dark and the floor was all sand with flickering candles. It felt like Aladdin's Cave of Wonders.

This was an area with 500 year old mud huts. You could climb in and out of each hut by tiny little ladders, and a man there showed me how to jump from each one to walk on the roofs, where you had the most amazing view of the entire desert.

We spent a lot of time driving through mountain terrain, and we would stop every now and then to look around. There are small clusters where people live in tiny homes carved out of the actual rock of the mountain, and the peopl we met there were incredibly kind, often inviting us inside to look at their houses.

In the villages we stopped at, women were weaving rugs and they would stop to show us their work. It made for a very colorful backdrop to the cream colored desert.

We rode camels through the Sahara; mine was named Caramel. We were surrounded by sand, you couldn't see anything but the dunes, and it was very cool. You felt completely isolated and couldn't hear anything but the sand whipping around.