Sunday 21st April A slack start today on our way to Matmata where we saw the troglodyte houses which are underground & are set into the side of the hills, as the winter & summer climates are quite extreme. The house we visited had 4 rooms with 2 bedrooms, a kitchen & a storeroom together with an underground cistern which collected rain water from the ground above the rooms. Many of the houses have been abandoned as people leave the Berber villages to...

Saturday 20th April Off in 4 wheel drives across a salt lake & into the Atlas Mountains, very close to the Algerian border to see 2 oases which were quite fascinating. The villages were on gorges & had both been evacuated & re-sited after severe flooding in 1969 so that the stone buildings were gradually falling into ruin. In the first the water from a very clear creek falling down about 5m into a beautiful pool with weed & rushes, where frogs we...

Friday 19th April After a late start we drove back to Gafsa to catch the 'Red Lizard', an old train which took us to the spectacular Gorge of Selja & the phosphate mine through several tunnels. On our return, after lunch, we went in 4wds to the oasis of Tamerza via the Star Wars set used in 1997, across the dunes. Then on to Chebike where we looked down on the small oasis which is set in an amphitheatre like layout with a pool about 50m by 20m constantly bei...

Thursday 18th April Another 7am start on our way south through the outskirts of Tunis towards Thuburbo Majus, a small Roman city of about 2000 founded in the 200s AD & still only partially excavated but with baths, a small amphitheatre (stadium) & some temples later converted to churches. The town survived until the Arab invasion in the 700s when it was moved down the hillside closer to the river. It had been supplied by an aqueduct & had a huge cis...

Wednesday 17th April Carthage is a suburb of Tunis & here we drove up to the main hill where the Romans had built their forum over Carthaginian houses & the site was excavated in the 1920s & 30s. It overlooks the sea & the Tunis lakes. Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians who fought the Romans in the Punic wars which they lost eventually in 146 BC. The city then had a population of about 100,000 & later, in Roman times, this grew to 500,00...