Beyond the Tourist Trail

When I told my friends in Mumbai that I was heading to Tunisia, most of them squinted, trying to remember where exactly that was on the map. “Isn’t that somewhere in the Middle East?” one asked. “Are you sure it’s safe?” another chimed in. But the real question on everyone’s face was: Why Tunisia? The truth is, I wasn’t entirely sure myself—until I got there. The journey from Mumbai to Tunis was long but uneventful, routed through Doha. I remember the layover more than the flights. At Hamad International Airport, I sat beside an elderly Tunisian couple returning home after visiting their daughter in Chicago. The wife, clad in a soft grey hijab with laughter lines crisscrossing her face, asked me in heavily accented English why I was going to Tunisia. “Curiosity,” I said. She smiled, nodded, and offered me a date from her snack box. “Then you will be full by the time you leave.”

She was right.

Tunis was a surprise. It didn’t roar to life the way Delhi or Cairo does. Instead, it slowly opened its doors, quietly urging me to pay attention. The first few hours in the capital were spent in the medina, a labyrinth of narrow alleys and high walls where smells of spices, grilled meats, and fresh bread mingled with the metallic clink of artisans hammering away at copper and brass. I bought nothing. I walked, absorbed, and eventually sat at a tiny cafe, where I met Amin, a literature student who moonlighted as a guide. We talked over mint tea that was far too sweet for my palate but perfect for the moment. Amin told me how the medina had shaped his childhood—hide and seek in alleyways, his grandmother buying spices from the same shop every Friday, the sound of the call to prayer bouncing off centuries-old stones. I asked him if Tunisia felt in transition. He looked at me with a quiet kind of defiance and said, “We’ve always been in transition. That’s our history. Carthage to now—it’s a constant becoming.” His words echoed later, as I stood amid the ruins of Carthage. They don’t overwhelm you with grandeur. What remains are scattered columns and fragments of what was once a city that challenged Rome. But the sea glimmered in the distance, the same sea that carried traders, invaders, and philosophers. I sat near the Antonine Baths, watching a group of schoolchildren run around, oblivious to the weight of history under their feet. One of them tripped, laughed, and shouted something in French. Their teacher, amused, turned to me and shrugged, “They learn better like this—by touching the past.”

Later that evening, I took a local train to Sidi Bou Said. It’s the kind of place that’s almost too pretty to be real—whitewashed buildings, blue doors, and bougainvillaea tumbling down from balconies like confetti. I was warned it could be touristy, but in the quietness of late evening, it was serene. I sat at Café des Délices, made famous by Patrick Bruel’s nostalgic song. A young couple next to me were sharing a hookah, laughing over some inside joke. I must’ve looked lost in thought because the man leaned over and asked if I wanted a photo taken. “You look like you’re trying to remember something,” he said. “Or forget,” I told him I was just trying to understand the layers of this place. He nodded. “You’ll never get them all. Tunisia hides some stories for itself.” The next morning, I took a louage—a shared taxi—to Kairouan. The road stretched endlessly, olive groves rolling past under a blazing sun. Inside the vehicle, packed with six others, conversations jumped between Arabic and French. An old man in the front seat asked me where I was from. “Inde?” he smiled. “Very far. But we are close now.” He spoke no English, and I barely knew any Arabic, but we shared almonds and gestures and a few laughs. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Kairouan, with its austere beauty, was unlike any place I had visited. The Great Mosque, with its massive courtyard and centuries-old columns, was calming. Not in a religious way, but in the way that certain spaces invite silence. I walked the city slowly, stopping at a pastry shop that Amin had told me about. The owner, a stout woman named Fatma, gave me three makroudh—semolina pastries filled with dates and dipped in honey. “Try,” she insisted, watching my reaction like a mother. I did, and the honey stuck to my fingers, the dates rich with history and sweetness. “You like?” she asked. I nodded, mouth too full to speak. She smiled. “Good. India is sweet too.”

Further south, in Matmata, I stayed in one of the troglodyte homes—underground houses that have been lived in for centuries, dug deep into the earth to escape the desert heat. A family hosted me—Abdel, his wife Leila, and their two children. They didn’t speak English, but they welcomed me with warm bread, olives, and a tomato-based stew cooked over fire. That night, we sat under the stars. Abdel pointed to the sky, tracing constellations with his finger. “You see this?” he said in French. “We all sleep under the same sky.” The desert has a way of humbling you. On the edge of the Sahara, in Douz, I met Hamza, a young camel guide. We walked rather than rode. “Camels are tired today,” he joked, before leading me out into the dunes. He was 22, had never left Tunisia, but knew every contour of the sand. “The desert changes,” he told me. “But it also never changes. Like people.” We sat for hours watching the sun dip below the dunes. He shared his dreams of opening a travel blog, learning Hindi from Bollywood films, and one day visiting the Taj Mahal. “My grandfather had a photo of it,” he said. “He said it was proof that love could be made from stone.” By the time I returned to Tunis, the city felt familiar, like a place I’d left years ago. I went back to the medina and found Amin again. We walked, this time as friends, and he took me to a rooftop with a sweeping view of the old city. “See,” he said, pointing to the domes, the minarets, the television antennas, and satellite dishes. “This is Tunisia. Old and new. Quiet and loud. Broken and beautiful.”

On the flight back to Mumbai, I thought of the elderly couple I met on the way in. The date she had given me was still in my backpack—shrivelled now, but intact. Tunisia had indeed fed me. With flavours, with stories, with moments so delicate they lingered like the aftertaste of mint tea.

As I landed in Mumbai, a city that never waits for anyone to catch their breath, I held on to the slow rhythm of Tunisia, the pauses in its conversations, the warmth of its people, and the way it whispered its stories rather than shouting them. I had gone out of curiosity. I came back with a memory.