My husband is thrilled. What would our life be boring without the funny ideas of a fellow traveller? Today the alarm clock rings very early. Because my idea is to be at the salt lake for sunrise. I want to see the orange sun glistening.
It's early, it's freezing cold in the hottest place in Africa: we've never had 2° Celsius before, a cold record.
So we set off with the heating on and drive the few kilometres that separate us from the lake at dawn.
Only of the lake: no trace. I leave TripTastic, our read-aloud app (it used to be called Roamy), report on the lake. "The Chott el Djerid is a sedimentary basin within a depression with a salt lake in southern Tunisia."
Early morning depression? Oh no! In our memory we have the Salt Lake in Eastern TurkeyYes, that's exactly what we want again. But we don't get it.
Only this lake here, with two neighbouring lakes, is up to about 200 km long and up to 70 km wide. A dead-straight dam road leads directly across it and we now drive over it. On the right, however, is a desert-like area, on the left the same. From time to time we read on signs that entering the "lake" is supposed to be life-threatening. My ancient guidebook tells of sunken caravans in a crusted layer of salt and sand over metre-deep mud.
Thanks to the guidebook, I also remember reading the novel "Durch die Wüste" (Through the Desert) by Karl May (my favourite author in my early youth), in which he describes these very dangers in the Chott.
In rainy times (and depending on who we believe here, there has been no rain here for 2 to 5 years), a layer of water can form which then glistens beautifully. Today there is no glitter, today we meet a coach full of sunrise photo tourists, a few traders who are slowly waking up and some salt that has been piled up for us visitors.
And why there is a bus skeleton in the middle of the lake, quite a distance from the road, we will probably never know. But it makes a nice photo subject.
At the end of the lake, the mountains of the Parc National de Dghoumès are already gleaming in the morning sun. I rejoice, Gerd doesn't know anything about the plan yet: today we will hike.
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.
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