Traveling what fun.

Well we are back from a small vacation in Tunisia. Mrs. BB and I have some friends in Tunisia so we decided to go pay them a visit. It was a delightful vacation but what a contrast. We left the day after the snow storm where we got 30 cm of snow and arrived in Tunis to a balmy 25 degrees. Then we left for a three day excursion in the southern desert. We rode camels, visited a dry salt lake, a hidden mountain oasis, climbed sand dunes, climbed in the ruins of a Roman coliseum and generally had a great time. We then came back to the hotel in Hammanet and relaxed for the next two days since it was pouring rain. Seems strange that a desert country like Tunisia should have such rain. There was 64 mm of water in 48 hours. I was reading in the news that Algeria was also hit hard. Finally we spent Saturday with our friends visiting the museums and Souks of Tunis. If you look at the picture you'll see that we went shopping at "The Bey" just like we do in Canada. ;o)
The people of Tunisia were invariably nice and helpful. In fact when we rode into Tunis on the local community taxis-bus (a small minibus that waits until full to go to destination and costs about 4 dinars ($4 cdn) from Hammanet to Tunis (75 km)) we needed to go from the terminus in Tunis to our hotel. A young lady who was on the bus with us was going our way, so we all piled into the taxi which brought us right to the door. When we offered to pay for the taxi, she just smiled, waved and wished a good day in Arabic. Their hospitality is without a doubt one of the most generous I have ever seen. Our friends refused to have us pay for anything, saying that in their culture a guest is sacred and is owed the best hospitality that they can give.
It is said that traveling widens our horizons, seeing how other cultures live makes it very hard to see them as two dimensional stereotypes. In every country we have been we have always encountered nice, generous people who would go out of their way to be helpful. From the police officer in Wales who called the hospital on his day off to ask how Mrs. BB was doing after an accident, to the staff of that hospital who went way beyond the call of duty to help, to the taxi driver in Liverpool who lead us to our destination and then refused payment, to the girl in Tunis, all of them showed us a generosity of spirit that seems to be a universal constant whatever the culture. I know that not everyone is like that but wherever we have gone we have always found generous people, and that makes traveling worth while. :o)