A Backpacking Guide to Tunis, Tunisia
Through Carthage and Sidi Bou Said
Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, has quite a different vibe than Sousse. As soon as we arrived, we felt that the city was more business-oriented and slightly less friendly. We were warned (multiple times) to hide our phones on the trams and to watch out for phone thieves. We walked through the Medina but it felt uncomfortable (perhaps because of all the warnings?) so we left pretty quickly.
Tunis Metro
The Tunis metro system is pretty straightforward, but finding a map outside of the trams is near impossible. At one point, we spent 45 minutes waiting for Tram 3 at Bab el Assel station to get to Tunis Marine station; we found out later that we could have taken Tram 4 or 5 (which comes every 10 minutes) and transferred at Barcelone station. Tunis Marine, located at the end of lines 3 and 6, is the setoff point for a light-rail service to Carthage and Sidi Bou Said.
Carthage
The nice thing about Carthage is that a single 10 Dinar entrance ticket covers seven different sites. We visited the four most popular sites including the Baths of Antoninus, the Roman Villas, the Amphitheatre, and the Museum.
The Baths of Antoninus are one of the three largest baths in the Roman empire. Although there aren’t much more than ruins there today, it was a fun place to walk around and imagine what it might have looked like in the past. What the place lacks in information and signage is made up by its openness and our ability to explore any of its corners without any boundaries.
The Roman Villas are just across the main road and are much the same as the baths, in the sense that all that remains is bits of wall. There are some cisterns, but mostly the grass just grows between the walls.
Beside the Roman Villas is an Amphitheatre that is still in use today. It was exciting to walk into a huge outdoor concert venue, lined with old marble statues and column bits. The Amphitheatre seems like any other modern structure except for the odd bits of Roman ruins sticking up out of the seats like callouses.
Unfortunately the Carthage museum was closed for renovations when we visited, so we only got to see the exterior grounds. Since the museum is up on a hill there’s a good view of the city below. The grounds had some ruins, though the ruins here were just for display; conversely, we were able to walk around the ruins scattered throughout the Baths and the Villas.
The back of the museum seems to be a storage area for lots of marble bits. There were fragments of columns, coffins, and tiles lying about.
Sidi Bou Said
We were interested in visiting another town, Sidi Bou Said, for its signature white buildings and blue doors (similar to what you might see in the much more popular tourist destination in Greece: Santorini). The Tunisian version is still pretty touristy, with lots of souvenir shops and other hawkers.
Sidi Bou Said is also popular among the locals and seems to be a common place to go for the evening, since it is located quite close to Tunis.
There’s a main walking path up the hill towards the coast that ends with a great view of the Mediterranean Sea. We visited in the evening, which gave us a soft atmosphere and made for a good walk. We didn’t stay for food since we’d found an excellent restaurant near our AirBnB and enjoyed eating there every night.
National Bardo Museum
The largest museum in Tunis was recommended to us by our AirBnB hosts, but we found it pretty similar to the Sousse and El Jem museums. Although they are much larger there, there are only so many tiled mosaics you could look at before the novelty wears off. Unlike the previous two museums we’ve been to, however, we found lots of written summaries describing Tunisia’s history; unfortunately, the English translations were hard to follow. After a while, we stopped trying to understand them. Unfortunately, we arrived relatively late in the day and the museum closed at 4:30 so we only got to see one of two floors.
For 11 Dinar, it was the most expensive of the museums we’ve been to. By the end we didn’t feel like we’d seen anything new that we hadn’t already seen in Sousse or El Jem.
Our flight out was early in the morning and we ended up taking a cab, which cost 5 Dinar from Bab Laassal station to the airport. We used our last 5 Dinar on a really expensive cookie in the airport and were left with 0.15 Dinar. This is the closest we’ve ever been to running out of money before leaving a country. Keeing in mind that our first AirBnB included free dinners, we spent a total of 327 Dinar (90 Euros) during our time in Tunisia.
