Day 12: Hammamet

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Ahoy Mateys

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Today started off well. We were up early and having a buffet breakfast. Rice Bubbles for Billy was great, as he hadn’t had a great deal of proper food lately.

We decided to go for a walk around ‘Yasmine Hammamet’. This is like a large complex full of European resorts and is where our hotel the ‘Tunisia Lodge’ is located. Out of all our shoes our thongs and Dunlop volleys are walking the world!!

We had briefly looked at some of the excursions, and when we were approached by a guy representing one of the pirate ship cruises (and offering a better rate than the hotel) we decided to go ahead with it. The cruise wasn’t until 2pm, so we had some time before then.

We had a quick look in some of the shops, however, most things were not much cheaper than in Australia (if this is bargain basement prices then the Europeans must love Oz). We went for a walk on the beach, which was quite nice…apart from the piles and piles of what appeared to be camel dung being bulldozed around on the beach…very smelly and very bizarre. It didn’t really make us want to spend any time on the beach, so we wandered around the block and back to the hotel. We are yet to figure out exactly what they were doing or why they were doing it, however, we believe anything green around here is probably encased in camel poo. Kimmy reckons we should bag it up and ship it back to Bunnings in Australia.

Camel Dung

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A quick dip in the hotel pool, some lunch, and then we went to the Pirate Ship. Problem number 1: Somehow we had lost our ticket. This really isn’t like us as we are generally very organized, so we were both a bit annoyed at ourselves. We got to the ship, and failed to find the guy who sold us the tickets. I went for a bolted back to where we bought them from, and lo and behold, he was still there selling more tickets to passers by. I spoke to him, gave him the 2 Dinar I owed him and he said he would come by and sort it out.

He came by shortly after that, and after heated exchanges in another language it seemed we weren’t going to be boarding the Sultan II which we had bought tickets for. He then hurried over to the other two pirate ships both leaving at the same time, and got us onto the final one…this turned out to be a blessing as the other two were packed.

Fire the Cannons

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The cruise was great, pirates dancing to music (Chicken Dance, Hokey Pokie, Titanic!?!!), playing up and posed photos at 5 Dinar each (we bought one). We certainly wouldn’t have thought yesterday we would be cruising along the Mediterranean in a Pirate Ship! A BBQ lunch and lukewarm lemonade were eaten, as we lowered the anchor just outside of the Hammamet Medina. Here we stayed for about an hour, with people jumping in and swimming and having a lot of fun. It’s very strange to see dark skinned people doing their best to get a tan and fall out of their bathers, we are obviously way behind. We were also referred to as Americano (probably Stupid Americano as we lost our tickets…haha), it was too hard to bother trying to correct them. On the sail (well actually it was a Diesel engine) back we were dancing with the pirates and doing a conga line around the ship.

Hammamet Beach

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After that, another quick swim followed by slacking off by the pool before dinner. Billy was asleep during dinner and after some very spicy sausages and sardines on board the ship we weren’t feeling like eating a fourth meal, so we headed for an early sleep. We were asleep about 8:00pm, hopefully tomorrow we can adjust our sleeping somewhat.

Tool of the Day

The Tool of the Day is definitely us for losing the tickets, as well as the captain/tosser of the Sinbad II for refusing to let us on. The whole thing was a shambles, but hey, we had a great day and fabulous cruise.