Day 5: Ksar Hedada, Tataouine, Chenini

The next day we headed south to the Ksour. There are many Berber hilltop villages in the mountains of Southern Tunisian. The villages we saw are covered with houses that seem to be rock houses that edge up to the mountain and often include a cave in the mountainside. These villages include a ksar that is usually at the highest point in the village and was once used to store food and other valuables. Many of these villages are named Ksar XXXX, so when mentioning them one refers to the “Ksour”.


The first village we stopped at was Ksar Hedada. The Ksar in this town was used in one of the Star Wars movies. It was obvious that parts of it had been redone for the movie while other parts of it were quite rundown. I was told that this Ksar had once been a hotel… it seems like it would have been pretty uncomfortable. I’d have to see it to believe it.


We went to the town of Tataouine for lunch. Tataouine wasn’t very exciting, but it is the town that a planet in Star Wars in named after, making it very exciting to several kids in our group. I took my picture next to a road marker that says Tataouine on it in the next town we visited—just to prove that the town does really exist!


The next town we went to was probably my favorite town of the trip. It was Chenini, a beautiful Berber village. I couldn’t tell if it was a mountain made of houses or a bunch of houses made out of the mountain. The views were absolutely stunning. It was crazy to find that some people still live in some of these mountain homes. However, a majority of the inhabitants of Chenini seem to live at the base of the mountain.



We had been planning on going to another one of the Ksour before heading to Gabès for the night, but unfortunately there had been lots of heavy rain we were afraid that the road to Gabès, which was currently under construction, was washed out. We headed on an epic trip down back roads through the mountains of Southern Tunisia. We left at 4 pm and arrived at 10 pm in Gabès. Granted, we did stop for dinner, but this was still one of the craziest parts of our voyage. We plunged down small, unmarked roads in the fog and pounding rain and made some great friends at an unexpected rest stop.