Our final destination in Tunisia has been a bit of a shock to the system – the pretty cliff-top town of Sidi Bou Saïd, to the north of Tunis, is tourist central.  It’s a beautiful village full of narrow lanes, whitewashed buildings with cobalt-blue doors and window grills and amazing views of the Gulf of Tunis from its situation, high on the headland.  I’ll come back to the iconic blue doors in due course…

In the 13^th Century the Sunni saint Abu Said ibn Khalef ibn Yahia Al-Tamimi Al-Baji, (Sidi Bou Saïd) taught Sufism on a nearby hill and, after his death, the settlement was named in his honour.  It does feel like a little bit of an accident of fate that Sidi Bou Saïd rather than other villages we’ve visited, such as Hergla, has garnered such fame.  It may partly be down to its proximity to Tunis, which meant that, during the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, wealthy European expats lived here rather than in the bustling centre of Tunis.  It has certainly attracted the attention of many European artists, including the French-American businessman and amateur painter, Baron Randolphe d’Erlanger, who built the amazing Dar Ennejma Ezzahra here in the early 20^th Century.

D’Erlanger was a musicologist as well as a painter and is credited with bringing about a revival in traditional Tunisian ma’luf music in the early 1930s. The palace is now a museum, housing the Centre des Musiques Arabes et Méditerranéennes as well as proffering an insight into in an Arab palace.  The house is certainly beautiful inside but incredibly ornate – perhaps a little too much like, “this is what a European thinks an Arab house should look like”, with ornate carved panelling everywhere, much gilding, and a ‘traditional’ bathhouse built on the first floor.  I was rather taken by the library, though (top left in the picture below).

It’s good to see what lies behind one of the more ordinary-looking blue doors on Rue Habib Thameur, so we also visited Dar El Annabi, a private museum set in an 18^th Century family home. The house was redeveloped in the early 20^th Century as a summer residence for Taib El Annabi, son of a local Mufti or Islamic jurist, and is on a more human scale than Dar Ennejma Ezzahra but still very comfortable. The two internal courtyards are large enough to hold full sized trees and the living rooms, with their lattice-covered balconies, are set around these; there is always shade and space for the sea breezes to blow through. Sipping black tea in the courtyard was the most atmospheric part of the afternoon for me, though wandering through the beautifully tiled rooms came a close second.

To be honest, the main take-away is that, if you are rich enough to have the space (and probably the household help) you can live very comfortably in the heat of a Tunisian summer even without air conditioning!

Do we regret Sid Bou Saïd after having spent so little time amongst other tourists until now?  Not a bit, but I’m glad we’ve got to see more of Tunisia than this.  Even here, most of the people enjoying the beach by the port are Tunisians out for the day – maybe their equivalent of South Shields!

There were several culinary highlights of our time in Sid Bou Saïd, despite our initial fears. One was our meal at the lovely restaurant ‘Au Bon Vieux Temps’ at the very top of Rue Hedi Zarrouk. It’s more formal than anywhere else we’ve eaten on this trip but both Martyn’s kabkabou (fish cooked in a sauce with tomatoes, capers and preserved lemons) and my vegetable couscous were delicious, and beautifully presented. It was our first chance to enjoy a little of the famous Tunisian rosé wine.

But I also have to admit to a sneaky satisfaction in having found us a well-hidden restaurant called El Barkoun selling traditional Tunisian food for our evening last meal here, solely on the basis of its Arabic sign: أكلة تونسية تقليدية. The salads and Ojja there were very tasty and the staff could not have been friendlier. Finally, there were the breakfast treats from the Boulangerie Bou Saïd, five minutes walk from our apartment.  I went for a ‘healthy’ looking bagel covered in sesame seeds the first morning, only to discover it was more like fresh brioche, and I’m afraid my wish to experiment with breakfast breads stopped there!