A Spaceport in the Sahara
A journey back to the time of Luke Skywalker, takes Boomer and Journalist Andy Stone to Tunisia
I might not be the best person to write about this.
I mean, I saw the first Star Wars movie in 1977, when it was released. I even waited in line for an hour or so to make sure I got a great seat.
But after that, I confess, I lost track. I heard that the first movie later became “Episode IV: A New Hope.” So movie number one became Episode IV. That, I am sure, makes perfect sense to the people who knowingly refer to it as “ANH” (for, I assume, A New Hope) in the millions of Internet posts I read before starting this little item.
Clearly, I am out of my depth here.
But, as we planned our trip to Tunisia, I saw that we were going to visit the town of Tataouine and I remembered that Luke Skywalker’s home planet in that movie long, long ago was named Tattooine.
It didn’t take much research for even a non-enthusiast like me to discover that Tattooine (the planet) was most certainly named after Tataouine (the Tunisian village).
Along with that came the information that large parts of five of the six Star Wars movies were filmed in the Tunisian desert.
Fair enough.
But what I didn’t even begin to realize until we were in Tunisia was that Star Wars tourism is a thriving business.
I found out on our second day in the desert, when our guide took us to visit an abandoned set in the middle of nowhere. It was, as I later found out, the Star Wars spaceport of Mos Espa.
From the outside, the buildings look real enough — although they don’t match any other architecture in the country. From the inside, they are clearly stage sets, chicken wire, two-by-fours and spray-on cement.
And the streets are littered with left-over space trash and strange machines. The few native Tunisians who are there, mostly to sell souvenirs to tourists, wear full-length robes with pointed hoods that look like Star Wars costumes, but are actually real native dress.
The next day we drove across the salt flats of Chott el Jereid, a vast empty wasteland that served as setting for various Star Wars scenes. At one stopping point, crudely lettered signs reading “Guerre des Etoiles” pointed out to the flats. Again, bits of abandoned machinery stood out on the salt.
The next day, after another long drive across the desert, we found ourselves in a spot that was both very real and a strangely alien Star Wars setting. This was the Ksar Ouled Soltane, a centuries-old Bedouin fortified granary that was used in “Episode Something-or-other: The Phantom Menace” as a setting for the slave quarters of Mos Espa, where (it says right here) Anakin Skywalker lived as a boy.
Comparing this very real place to the invented buildings of the stage set we visited two days earlier made it clear yet again that reality is much more fantastical than anything we can imagine.
That night we stayed in the town of Matmata, famed for its underground “troglodyte” homes. Not really caves, these homes are dug deep into the earth for protection from enemies and the violent desert heat.
One of the underground homes was used in the first Star Wars movie (Episode IV, remember?) as the Lars Homestead, home to Luke Skywalker. That old home is now the Hotel Sidi Driss, a serious attraction for true Star Wars fanatics. Fair warning: By all reports, it is a truly nasty place to stay. Decide just how fanatic you really are.
The Sidi Driss is also, according to some, the site of the original “Star Wars Bar.” Others insist that this is pure rumor and that “real” Star Wars Bar is actually in a seedy little village on the isle of Djerba.
And now, for certain, I am way, way out of my depth.
In a Place so Barren, with a Life so Hard, Why Was She ...So Happy?
We were driving at the edge of the Sahara Desert in southern Tunisia on a sandy dirt road. We had just come from a surreal visit to an abandoned set from one of the Star Wars movies, ancient mud buildings that, on the inside, turned out to be concrete sprayed on chicken wire and two-by-fours — real Hollywood, authentic inauthenticity, the genuine fake.
We had been pretty much alone there: my aunt and uncle, my wife and myself, and Dahoud, our driver/guide, a Tuareg wearing his tribe’s traditional blue robes and turban and driving a Toyota Land Cruiser.
Now we were alone still, our car the only one on the road through the desert. We rattled along in a cloud of dust and sand. In all directions there seemed to be just exactly one thing: nothing.
And then suddenly there was a young girl — perhaps 10 or 12 — standing by the side of the road, wearing a brightly colored top, a long skirt, a scarf covering her head. She was holding a baby fox in her arms, a “fennec,” the desert fox of North Africa. She stood there in hopes that a passing car of tourists would stop to admire her captive pet and perhaps give her a few coins.
Our driver pulled over and rolled down the window. He and the girl talked in Arabic. Then he turned the wheel sharply and headed off the road, across the desert sand.
We jounced and jostled for perhaps ten minutes and then stopped. At first it seemed as if we’d simply traveled the short distance from “almost the middle of nowhere” to “exactly the middle of nowhere.” There was nothing in sight except sand and a few scattered clumps of brush and rough desert grass.
But Dahoud set off walking and we followed.
And then we saw ... well, what were we seeing? It took a little time to puzzle out what it was. Then the pieces began to fit together and we realized it was the simplest of desert campsites: a tent that looked like something children would pitch in a suburban backyard, blankets draped over sticks, behind a windbreak of canvas and palm fronds; behind it, a kind of corral built mostly of palm fronds with a few bits of chicken wire; and in front, at the base of a clump of grass, a small fire with a tea kettle sitting in the embers.
As we entered the campsite, a woman stood, waving in welcome, her face, weathered and creased from sun and wind, split in a wide toothy smile. She radiated a kind of joy that was hard to explain or understand, but impossible to ignore.
She was the matriarch, this was her home. She lived here with six of her seven children; her husband and one other son were somewhere else in the desert, many miles away, with their small herd of camels, the family’s only real wealth.
She and Dahoud spoke briefly in what might have been Arabic — or some other, more obscure, desert tongue. We were given to understand that they knew each other, a tribal connection. Dahoud had been born into this same life in the desert, far from any settlement; but he had left that behind to move to a small city and find work as a driver and guide. He had managed to maintain contact with this family and had known they were camped somewhere along this stretch of road. As a favor to their friend Dahoud, they welcomed us as rare visitors.
Still smiling, a beacon, the woman, Ayesha, led us into the tent. At its highest point, it was not much more than waist high. A few blankets covered the sand. It was perhaps ten feet wide, six feet across. It was home to all seven family members.
We sat there for a moment, trying — without much success — to imagine what this life might be like. We crawled out and stood again.The corral held perhaps a dozen or so sheep and goats. A few chickens ran through the campsite. Chickens in the desert. They seemed oddly out of place.
We wandered through the campsite. There wasn’t much to see. The young girl with the fennec was there; she let us hold her pet if we wanted to. A small white puppy was tied to a clump of brush. He was, as all puppies are, excited to see anyone, desperate to have his belly scratched.
An older white dog, perhaps father to the puppy, was tied a few yards away, but we were warned to stay clear of him. Apparently these dogs live wild in the desert and though they are friendly as puppies and can be domesticated, they turn dangerous as they grow older and can be savage with strangers.
One of the sons, in his teens, brought out a battered one-liter plastic soda bottle. He held it up to show us there was a snake inside.
Waving us back, he shook the snake out of the bottle. It scrabbled across the sand, a sidewinder. The boy harassed it with a stick to keep it from escaping. It blended into the sand and virtually disappeared. The boy poked at it, steered it away from a clump of grass where it was trying to escape. He herded it back into the bottle, somehow forcing it through the narrow neck.
“Dangereux?” we asked Dahoud. Is it dangerous? He spoke French, but no English.
“Mortelle,” he answered, “Directement.” Immediately fatal.
Deadly snakes. Vicious dogs. We saw two other full-grown foxes — one a fennec, one a more ordinary red fox — tied to other clumps of brush. Life was difficult here for animals. It was difficult for people as well. There was no electricity, of course. They had to travel several miles, on foot, to get water. They were miles more from anything that could be described as even a village.
But this was home. They spent the summer months here at the edge of the Sahara. When the weather cooled, they headed deeper into the desert.
We walked back to the fire at the edge of the camp.
Ayesha sat on the ground by the fire. One of her daughters brought a round tin plate with a ball of dough on it. Dahoud held the plate and Ayesha carefully flattened the dough into a disk, perhaps a foot across and an inch thick.
She took a stick and scraped most of the embers and ashes aside. She placed the dough directly onto the hot sand and remaining ashes. Then she used the stick to scrape the rest of the embers and ashes on top of the dough.
For the next few minutes, while the bread baked in its bed of coals, Ayesha held forth, speaking a language none of us — except Dahoud — could understand.
But as she talked, she radiated that same joy we had seen when we arrived. Her eyes glittered; she waved her hands and gestured out at the surrounding desert. She clapped her hands to the sides of her face and laughed gleefully. She sang a little song and laughed again.
I have to admit that a small corner of my mind wondered if she was mad, a lunatic. What, after all, did she have that could make her so happy? And yet, clearly she could not be anything other than very sane and deeply competent. This was her family, her encampment. She was obviously in charge and they were not just surviving in these harsh conditions, they were thriving.
Time passed and Ayesha used the stick to scrape the ashes away from the dough — now baked into a round flat bread.
She tossed the disk into the air, spinning it, to cool it and throw some of the sand and ashes off the fresh-baked bread.
The she took a piece of cloth and smacked the bread again and again to remove the last grains of sand.
She broke the bread and offered each of us a piece.
It was still warm, fresh-baked and delicious.
By now, the sun was sinking toward the horizon and we had miles to go before dark. So we stood and tried, wordlessly, to convey our gratitude for her hospitality. We walked back to the Toyota. Looking back, we could see Ayesha, standing, silhouetted against the setting sun. She was waving goodbye and singing into the desert air. She was quite probably the happiest woman I had ever met.
Andy Stone moved to Aspen from the East Coast nearly 40 years ago. With time out for a short stay in Boulder, followed by three years in Spain, he has lived in the Colorado mountains ever since. Andy worked for years for The Aspen Times, first as a reporter and ultimately as Editor and Publisher. Now he still writers a weekly column for the paper and holds the title of Travel Editor.
