Tunisian Adventure Continued

The next day we woke up early as we had still quite a few places we wanted to visit before heading back to Tunis. We hung out for a couple of hours in Tabarka spending most of our time exploring a cool fortress that is not normally open to the public (one of the people working on the renovation of it gave us a tour).



After that it was off to the main destination, the Roman ruins of Bulla Regia. At this point since the jeep had successfully navigated around 70 miles on a combination of very rough roads and later on a highway at high speeds we had assumed that it had made it through our little adventure unscathed. Unfortunately, we were wrong.

About an hour into our drive to the ruins (and about 10 miles from the Algerian border), the Jeep's transmission skipped. Soon after that as we were driving through the main road of a tiny one-road town called Babouche when we noticed smoke coming from the hood of the car. We immediately stopped both vehicles and when we opened the hood we saw flames shooting out from the engine of the car. Without a fire-extinguisher handy Matt and I just ran back and started dumping all of the bottles of water we had accrued during the trip onto the fire in the hopes it wasn't oil based (which it fortunately wasn't) until we had the fire out. After we no longer were worried about the immediate risk of the flaming car we then focused on the pool of pink fluid leaking from under the hood of the car which Matt correctly guessed to be transmission fluid.

Needless to say this flaming car caused quite a commotion and we were soon surrounded by half the town with everyone looking at and being quite amused by the silly Westerners. Fortunately, our entertainment value only lasted for a short while and after about an hour the crowds had dispersed.

At this point everyone basically decided that our adventures were over so we gave up and called to have the Jeep towed back to Tunis (3 hours away). During the 2 hours we were sitting around waiting for the tow-truck we cracked open a couple of bottles of wine which was a good thing for Katherine and Matt since it helped them sleep on the way back to Tunis while they were stuck in the cab of the tow truck, whose driver was happy to take twisting turns on precarious mountain passes in a fully-loaded tow-truck at much faster speeds than we were comfortable with in the lowly Isuzu.

At the end of the day we made it back to Matt and Laura's without any further incidents and we spent the evening eating enchiladas and reliving our little Tunisian adventure.