Tunisia: Tunis Carthage Airport, or how to lower the Bar
Part of the price you pay for decent foreign travel (or at least the pursuit of it) to exotic places in Africa, Asia or South America will be certain sacrifices (language, broadband, potable water), or cutbacks you will have to accept. This can add to the stress before even embarking on your trip, which, let’s face it, can cancel out any enjoyment you were hoping to achieve. In the end, though, the trip will be largely in the black, meaning the experience will be overwhelmingly positive. For this most recent trip, it took us a while to reach black numbers, and at this point, I’m still recounting and wondering whether we’ve even broken even.
We always wanted to travel to Tunesia, although we were not in the mood for the steaming hot summer months we’ve already known from Morocco. December, then. Sunshine, weathers in the 60’s and 70’s. Sounded like a plan and another good opportunity to spend quality family time together.
The airport in Frankfurt this time around was not nearly the pain it was last time when we traveled to Morocco. The plane itself was an old Airbus, and in the most pitiful of conditions. I’m guessing the seats were still hanging on to their original gray leather cover, from the looks of things, whereas graffiti drawings were exhibited everywhere, mostly on the seats themselves. Minor details, admittedly, and not something that would trigger any stress receptor, but a precursor of things to come nonetheless. The flight time was less than two hours, and we figured we’d be able to make it to our hotel in Mahdia with time to spare. Until Carthage Airport, everything worked as planned, although the performance (cabin crew) could hardly be labeled as spectacular.
From then on, it became a train (or plane) wreck.
Carthage Airport in itself is nothing special. It fulfills its purpose, and that’s the best we can say about it. It won’t give the Frankfurts and Londons (or even the Cairos and Rabats) a run for their money, but it is still functional and will beat a lesser airport in third world capitals like La Paz or Kathmandu. That said, the baggage claim was atrocious. Supposedly there was a strike by the baggage handlers, which led to a near uprising from some of the passengers. One of them foolishly made his own way to the runway to claim his bags and was mugged for his efforts, as in beaten up by the existing ground crew. You couldn’t blame the guy.
This was still something I could easily deal with, if it weren’t for two little kids doing summersaults right where they were standing. Any line for a little kid is absolute murder, which is why every family must think long and hard about any trip they’ve planned that will include too many queues, which is almost a given in third world countries. As much as I love Arabs, too, they are not familiar with the ‘standing in line’ principle, meaning it will be elbows and mouths that will carry the day, instead of the Zen-like patience they taught me about so long ago.
Once we have our bags, we need to find our shuttle driver, who announces it’s a good four hours to the hotel. Keep in mind that this is also a Tunisian driver, who knows two functions about the automobile: gas and brakes, like a go-kart. So it goes like this. Hit it, accelerator, oops, there’s a traffic circle, didn’t see that in time, hit the brakes. Repeat until you’ve reached your destiny, everybody on board has spewed into your britches or said passengers have hanged the driver high up a palm tree along the Mediterranean Coast.
The driver, when I protest, suddenly pretends not to understand German or French (or even Arabic—Moroccan, which is understandable, I guess). What he does understand is the tip he doesn’t receive in the end. An inauspicious beginning to our trip, but we survived. The only way is up from here.
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