5am Saturday morning the phone in my hotel bedroom rings. Groggily I answer it and the overly cheerful switchboard operator wishes me good morning and informs me that this is my wake-up call. I quickly ready myself and head down to the lobby where I meet up with Keith. 5.25am the coach arrives and we are first on, reserving the front two seats for ourselves for the rest of the two day tour of South Tunisia and the Sahara Desert.

One thing that I noticed when doing these coach pickups for various tours is that you can guess the nationality of the people getting onto the coach based on how ready they are. Germans wait outside their hotels and are very quickly on the bus. The English generally wait in the lobby until the coach arrives and then walk out to check if it is theirs or not. The French run on their own time zone and have to be chivvied along by the tour guide so as not to make everything run late. More often than not this social stereotyping was correct. I was only caught out once when what I thought was a French couple, mainly due to their use of the French language, were ready for the bus as it pulled up outside their hotel. It turned out that the lady of the couple was English but had a French boyfriend.

We left Yasmine Hammamet at around 7am and began the hour and a half journey down the GP1 to the town of El Djem. The town is situated within a very flat expanse of scrubland and olive orchards. As you drive towards the town the horizon slowly fills with the silhouette of the third largest Roman amphitheatre ever built. In its heyday the colossal structure would have had a seating capacity of around 35,000 people and the stone used in construction completely covered in marble.

Driving around Tunisia you notice that a large number of houses are in some way incomplete. What looks like a bungalow will have metal rods sticking out of the flat roof awaiting the addition of a first floor. Concrete structures with no brickwork or half finished brickwork adorn the skyline of many a town. On inquiring of the guide why the houses appeared unfinished he said that it was because people just couldn’t afford to complete the buildings. Tunisian banks are reluctant to lend money unless you can prove to them a reliable source of income. For the less affluent people this can sometimes prove difficult and therefore instead of taking out a mortgage they will build their houses bit by bit, adding extra floors and rooms as and when they have the money to do so. Our guide told us that his own home took eight years to complete. The advantage of this slow building process is that once your home is complete you do not owe anyone any money. While a mortgage may end up costing you three times as much as the original build price these people owned their homes outright and only paid what it cost for the construction.

After looking around the amphitheatre at El Djem the tour continued into the south of the country. The further south you go the hotter and dryer the land becomes. You move from the relatively fertile north into scrubland rocky desert which slowly gives way to sand when you get into the Saharan zone. Another few hours on the road brought us to the outskirts of the village of Matmata where the Berber people have built Troglodyte cave homes into the ground. The homes consist of a pit approximately seven to fifteen meters in diameter and seven meters deep. Caves are excavated into the walls of the pit to act as rooms while access is provided either by a ramp or, where the home is built into the side of a hill, through a tunnel with a door on the front. The walls of the home are whitewashed to prevent the soil from collapsing inwards. We were offered traditionally baked bread, which we dipped into a mixture of olive oil and honey, and drank mint tea. These cave homes were the inspiration for the home of Beru Lars and Owen Lars, Luke Skywalker’s Aunt and Uncle in the film Star Wars.

Part three is coming tomorrow.