Tunisia
Desert Days
During dinner at our hotel in Monastir, the night before leaving for Tozeur, I talked to the only other American family we saw our entire time in Tunisia. They couldn’t believe we were leaving the nice beach resort to go on a 5 hour drive off into the desert with a two year old. We were fulfilling one of my lifelong dreams, they were there for their child’s tennis tournament. I think both our trips were equally perplexing to the other. We woke up early the next day, left our beach resort, drove by a butcher with the full horse he was working with on display, and hit the thankfully recently paved highway to start our journey through the heart of Tunisia.
The drive was uneventful other than seeing the occasional “camel crossing” sign and a mirage in the desert. About 45 minutes from our destination we stopped at the “Star Wars Canyon”. This is where a lot of the A New Hope desert scenes were filmed, scenes like R2-D2 getting stolen by the Jawas, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s introduction, and more. We wandered around trying to match what we were seeing with various scenes from the movie and managed to find just about all of them before finishing the long drive.
We got to our new hotel, the Palm Beach Palace, and checked in. Hotels offer various site seeing packages, but since we already had a car and had driven this far I figured we would be fine on our own. The hotel tour staff didn’t seem as confident about it as I felt, but I was not going to come this far just to be rushed in and out of everything I wanted to see by a tour guide.
The next day we woke up and tried to beat the sun out to the Mos Espa filming site. Mos Espa is the Tatooine city in Star Wars that Anakin is from, featured heavily in Episode I. The filming was done on site in Tunisia. The city set was built out of fiber glass and then filmed with a mix of the location and CGI. After the filming was done the entire set was abandoned and left to deteriorate. Most Tunisians haven’t seen Star Wars so most Tunisians don’t care about these sites or even understand why people would want to see them. A couple of locals set up their souvenir stands at the front of the set, knowing some tourists will come each day, but it’s nothing more than a dozen or two people a day. I don’t think any of the vendors had seen Star Wars, but for each item they were selling they would point at it and say, “Star Wars!”
We had the set mostly to ourselves and enjoyed walking around it. Keira had fun going in and out of the buildings, arches, and up and down the stairs. I had a great time matching up various scenes from the movie with the remains of the set. We tried to find a geocache, but it was long gone. I’m glad we made it out here when we did as it is clearly not being maintained and won’t be around forever. It’s a shame this site isn’t on some sort of Tunisian historical landmark list. On the way out we bought some nice warm Coke and Fanta and began the next leg of the day’s journey, driving through the desert and to Ong Jemel to see more Star Wars scenery.
I had read online that it was possible to make this drive in pretty much any car as long as it hadn’t rained in the last couple of days. It had been dry, so we got in our VW Passat and attempted it. The roads up to this point had been paved for the most part, and the dirt ones had been nice.
With the destination loaded in Google Maps we started out. As we set off, I started noticing that our road on Google Maps didn’t really match up with where we were driving. It was parallel with it, but nearly a half mile away. I didn’t see any actual road where Google said there was a road and Google Maps didn’t show the very road I was driving on. The road was good though, so we kept pressing forward, speeding up whenever we hit the occasional sand drift to not get stuck. I had a separate set of instructions for how to get there and they still were matching up for the most part, but I began to get nervous as more and more roads of various sizes started branching off of our road. There was a mountain in the distance that I knew we had to turn just after passing, so with that as our guide we pressed on, eventually ending up where we intended to.
Ong Jemel isn’t much to see unless you’re a Star Wars fan. It’s a small little hill you can climb up and look around. A couple of sites are in the vicinity, one of the locations used for the podrace scene, and the other being the location where Darth Maul and Qui-Gon Jinn faced off for the first time. Funnily enough, there was a small shack right at the base of the mountain with drinks, snacks, and a makeshift bathroom.
We did the quick hike up the steep hill, loaded up The Phantom Menace on Disney+ to find some scenes, took some pictures, and then went back down to get a drink. The guy running the shack brought a desert fox out and let Keira pet it and take pictures with it. If you are ever in the desert around here I strongly recommend stopping by the shack. It seems like a lonely place to spend your day and I didn’t see another person drive by the whole time we were there, but we appreciated the drinks and kindness.
On the way back things quickly fell apart. Without any real landmark to guide us back, Google Maps showing a single road a half mile away, and the hundreds of offshoot roads, things got a bit scary. Every half mile or so the road would start getting more and more sandy to the point where it couldn’t possibly have been the road we drove in on. We would then turn around and try and find where we had gone wrong, but it was not easy. 4x4’s drive all over here and have made so many different trails that without a GPS recording of exactly how you got there I don’t think you could ever find your exact path back. Eventually we flagged down a guy on a four-wheeler and he pointed down to where the “real” road was. Luckily the ground was fairly hard packed so rather than drive back down our current trail and try to connect I just drove straight across until I hit the real road. We made it back easily enough after that, but I will never drive in a desert without recording my trip with GPS again.
The several hours of driving through the desert all paid off when we ended our time in the area with a stop by the exterior filming site of Luke’s Tatooine home. Our entire day had an otherworldly feeling to it that I will always remember, but this was really the spot the whole trip was planned around. I have so many great memories growing up that involved Star Wars, and getting to see the place where it all began really meant a lot to me. Hopefully it will all still be around the next time we make it out to Tunisia.
