The journey back from Sidi Bou Saïd began on a light rail metro that connects Tunis to its northern suburbs. Some kids were having fun prying the doors open and hanging out of the train, or getting off at each station and then running back in once the train began to move again.
On the short walk from the light rail station to the inter-city train station, I caught a few more glimpses of Tunis, a city I’ve now been through three times but have yet to explore in any depth.
But apparently it has hipsters.
The train trip back to Sousse began uneventfully right around dusk. An hour later and about halfway home, however, the train died without warning. The engine shut down and the power went off. It was dark out and there were no lights or signs of settlements outside the train. The emergency lighting was feeble, just a few faintly-glowing bulbs that collectively put out fewer lumens than a bathroom nightlight. There were no official announcements of any kind, no conductors walking through the cars to check on people.
And so we waited while the temperature in the car climbed.
The people in my first-class carriage were in a jovial mood. I was traveling with one of my Amideast colleagues, David Thompson, who struck up a conversation with some of the people seated around us. Of course, being from America in this part of the world is a great conversation-starter. I was tired from the day of sightseeing and wasn’t in the mood to chat, but I listened in the dark, trying to follow the flow of Arabic, French, and English. The German man seated behind me was drawn into the conversation. I heard a question posed to him, one I’ve heard more often in Tunisia than in Asia or the US: “What religion are you?”
The German man said he really didn’t have a religion.
This provoked expressions of surprise from his interlocutors.
“So what do you believe?” a young man asked him. “You can’t just believe in nothing!”
I was glad when the conversation turned to other topics.
After about an hour, a rumor swept through the darkened carriage, namely, that another train was coming to take the Sousse-bound passengers to their destination. Though I was skeptical at first, this turned out to be true. We gathered our belongings and made our way to the platform between cars to disembark. The darkness outside was disorienting, as was the one-meter drop from the carriage onto the tracks. Again, there were no railway employees to be seen and no step-stools to make getting down onto the rocky ballast easier. A young Tunisian man and I volunteered to help a plump woman out of the carriage. As she stood sideways in the doorway, the other guy reached up and grabbed her around her waist in front while I grabbed her from behind. On three, we lifted her out of the carriage and set her safely down.
The rescue train had electricity, lights, and air conditioning. As we settled into our new seats, a woman in our new carriage began to wail and sob uncontrollably. I never did find out why. That dampened what had been, up to that point, a pretty upbeat mood among the passengers.
A few days later, I heard a tale from a colleague at work that some people on our train had been robbed while we were stalled on the tracks. The story was that a group of guys walked through the darkened carriages and took people’s luggage from right under their noses. Was that why the woman was sobbing? Given my own experience with theft aboard the same train, the story didn’t seem impossible, but I was never able to verify it.
We finally got back to Sousse about two hours late. Even with the hassle on the train ride home, it was a fine trip.
I love taking virtual trips with you. Thanks Jim!