Welcome to Africa

We're sitting in a car park plotted up for the night with the sun setting behind us and the waves crashing on the shore In front at Carthage. Couples are strolling along the promenade in front of us wrapped up in winter coats and we've just put the heating on! We arrived off the ferry in the dark 2 days ago after filling in numerous forms and getting them stamped by various officials in what was a fairly well organized port. We had managed to get off the ship last - so busy chatting to a German that in the end they had to make an aNnouncement asking us to move our van off the car deck. When we got to Taffy it was sitting alone in the middle of the deck and the Italian crew were getting a touch animated. This proved fortuitous as we just followed the 20 motor homes on an organised tour out of the port to their overnight pitch and joined them for our first night.
The next day we drove into Tunis and parked up for our second night. We walked into the city and managed to get accosted by the captain of the ferry who had dropped an envelope on the ground. We made the mistake of calling him and giving him his envelope which resulted in a long chat lots of hand shaking then an appeal for cash. We even saw the guys ID card so think he was actually the Captain! 10 minutes later and we'd been collared by a 'friendly' local who turned out to want to sell us carpets and then the family scented oil for £18 for 10 ml - he was down to £5 before he figured out Linda was related to Scrooge And we left. Another 10 minutes and Jon had to extract someone's hand from his inside jacket pocket and another 10 and we were thinking what the hell have we done.

24 hours later and we've visited the fabulous Bardot museum and seen (and walked all over) some outstanding mosaics and found our little plot up and are beginning to settle in. We always find the first 48 hours anywhere the most difficult and certainly Tunisia has taken this to a new level, but we are sitting in Taffy, in the ancient city of Carthage, looking out at the med, with a bottle of wine, surrounded by cactus, palm trees and bright rust colored cliffs and we consider ourselves incredibly lucky to be here - what a difference a day makes.
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