OK, I will take a deep breath. This was advertised as basically 2 hours at a private resort, on a private beach in Tunisia. I will point out that they said "private" several times in the description. The ride to and from the resort was supposed to be only 20 minutes. This fit nicely with all my family criteria and, after forcing the kids to be on a bus in Malta, it seemed like a good opportunity for them to run around and for us to lie in the sand and watch them run around. Not a @#@*ing chance.
The ride to the resort was, in truth, only 20 minutes and the walk to the bus had some nice exotic looking scenery despite the overcast skies
. Once we got there, the hotel was huge and extremely empty. It actually had a creepy, echoey, "the Shining" kind of feel. It was also quite a hike from the hotel lobby out to the beach, which required constantly pulling Lucas away from all the attractive nuisance items along the way...bugs, flowers, sand, small bits of rock. But all this was quasi normal and no real problem. The problem was when we got to the beach.
I don't know if they have different translations for the word "private" and that is how wires got crossed but suffice it to say that this was NOT a private beach. This was the antithesis of a private beach...this was a beach with VENDORS! And not vendors offering you drinks and sun umbrellas. These were the "here you must have this spotted clay ashtray" type of vendors. We had not been at the beach for more than 3 minutes when some guy came up to me and said "You are the most beautiful of the women here. Your husband is lucky. I would gladly offer 4000 camels for you"
. I kid you not, he actually said this. Really, it sounded like some movie cliché. Perhaps he meant it as a complement to butter me up to buy something but, if so, he had a poor understanding of western women. Then he proceeded to harass Julien by saying that if he had such a fine wife then he would surely be buying her things. When Julien ignored him, he started telling me that French men are notoriously cheap. I don't even know what he was selling. It was some brightly colored piece of pottery like substance.
Just so our children wouldn't feel left out of the hard core sell, they had horses and camels right next to us on the beach....right next to us. This meant that when I wasn't being harassed by vendors, I was chasing Lucas away from the front end of fairly nasty looking horses and camels. Or I was chasing Seb away from back end and feet of said horses and camels. OR I was trying to keep Seb from eating the horse and camel poop that was strewn all over the beach
. I don't think I succeeded on that last bit. When Seb wasn't trying to get trampled or eat camel poop, he was trying to climb some old wooden drift wood thing that might have been designed to be a play structure but was certainly covered in splinters. So, after about 20 minutes of this, most of the sensible people from the group had retreated to the pool area. We didn't, mainly because we are both fairly stubborn, but also because I suspected that the pool would be even colder than the water and even less monitored. From discussions with other parents, I found out that I was right. It was quite a relief when we realized that the two hours were finally up.
I will say that Disney made good on this, I called and made a verbal complaint and filled out the requested comment card. Within 24 hours someone had called to thank us for providing input and to inform us our money would be refunded. Apparently, this was a fairly new excursion for them. In retrospect, I can only wonder at their choice of destination. Tunis doesn't have that much that is exciting for families of young ones. Perhaps they wanted a harbor so that we didn't have to tender but, really, I would have preferred tendering in a nice harbor with a nice beach. And voila. I would not go on this excursion again. Nor would I go on another planned excursion there, as I heard NO positive feedback about any of the Tunisia excursions. I might consider going to the markets with just Julien, but not even sure about that. In short, this excursion and port was neither worth your time or money. Stay on the ship!!
That being said, when we came back Lucas said "I LOVE TUNISIA". It must have been the camels...go figure.
Tunisia: Camels and Horses and Vendors...Oh My!
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Tunis, Tunisia
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