Tunisia - A cross-country drive & motorway tolls

An overland journey & motorway toll

The road leads us to the sea again. We want to spend a few days on the Kerkennah Islands. We have never heard of these islands. Google Maps, however, shows beautiful beach pictures and my ancient travel guide tells of tranquillity, fishermen's romance and endless palm fields. But more about that later.

So we leave El Djem in rare rain. The fabulous dust on Felix now mixes with the few drops to form grease and due to the insane speed, the mud just slides a bit further. Neither the rain nor the speed is enough to wash it off.

On the country road we come across many donkey carts and a lot of mopeds, which, as Gerd says, must have existed when he was riding a motorbike. At least they look pretty battered. But, and that seems to be the most important thing, they still ride. Sometimes, however, I think that the drivers would be faster if they were walking. That is also my personal assessment of the situation. Who knows the real background?

So once again we get caught in a weekly market with our huge van. "Stop for a moment!", I shout. And what does my husband do? He stops. Right in the roundabout. That's what they do here. We buy fresh water, sun-ripened pomegranates and a few bags of chips for Gerd. 

I'm starting to worry about how the traffic rules will be when we're in Switzerland again. Parking on a roundabout? Having a chat and buying some fruit on the central reservation? Driving in the opposite direction on one-way streets? He'll have a lot to learn then. 

Then the first time on the motorway.

At the entrance, similar to Italy, we get a slip of paper, and about 50 kilometres further on, just before Sfax at the exit, we get the payment station. 

People-powered, phew, that's good. I have all the credit cards and a lot of banknotes ready. Gerd asks the amount. "1 dinar please." I quickly put the banknotes and credit cards away and dig a dinar out of my pocket. 29 centimes (or about 29 cents) for 50 kilometres, okay, that's a fair price.

The motorway itself was almost empty. Weekend? Or was it the toll? We could drive about 90 to 100 km/h, we couldn't go any faster because of the bumps and our "flywheel mass". But instead of jogging through all the villages and being an obstacle at all the weekly markets, it was always a good decision.

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Merci for "travelling with us

We are thinking about taking another break from travelling in the summer and visiting our families in Germany and Switzerland. One of the ideas is to organise a Lecture about our long journey to the Persian Gulf to prepare. If you would like to, what would interest you the most? We will also tell stories here that don't find a place here on the blog. We're thinking of the Bern and Berlin area - simply because we have family there. But other places are also conceivable. Feel free to write to us.

By the way, we are travelling through Iran. It's possible that we won't be writing posts at all or will be late. We first have to see if it works for us. And whether we can even manage to write down all the fantastic impressions in good time.

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