Sidi Bou Saïd
Sidi Bou Saïd is a village on a cliff above the Gulf of Tunis, twenty kilometres from the capital, painted white with blue doors and blue window grilles by decree — a decree of 1915 obtained by Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, the painter and musicologist who built himself the palace of Ennejma Ezzahra on the hillside and wanted the village around it to match. It was a place of pilgrimage before it was pretty: the mausoleum of the sufi Abu Said al-Baji, who died here in 1231, gives it its name and its saint's day. Today one street climbs from the little station of the TGM light rail to the Café des Nattes at the top, where the mats and the pine-nut tea have not changed in a century, and turns along the cliff to the Café des Délices, whose terrace over the water and the ruins of Carthage was made famous by a song. Below, a marina and the beach of Amilcar; along the coast, Carthage on one side and the beach town of La Marsa on the other.
The traveller takes the TGM from Tunis Marine — thirty-five minutes along the lagoon and the coast, past the stations of Carthage — and walks up from the platform through the bougainvillea; drinks the tea with pine nuts on the mats of the Café des Nattes, buys a jasmine posy from a boy at the door, looks at the studded blue doors and the people photographing them, and reaches the terrace of the Café des Délices for the hour when the gulf turns pink; visits Ennejma Ezzahra for the baron's rooms and the concerts of Arab and Mediterranean music, and Dar el-Annabi for a house as it was lived in; goes down to the marina for a swim at Amilcar or lunch by the boats; and combines the day, going or coming, with the hill of Byrsa and the Antonine Baths of Carthage, three kilometres down the line.
The Guide's honesty: Sidi Bou Saïd is small and famous, and on a summer weekend afternoon it is a queue in blue and white — go on a weekday, early or at dusk, and it is the village again; the cafés charge for the view and the view is worth it, but the tea is better and cheaper on the mats than on the terrace; the bambalouni doughnuts by the station are the right snack; the TGM is cheap, slow and honest, and a taxi from Tunis costs little more if the meter is on; the climb from the station is steep and cobbled — flat shoes; the coast road to La Marsa is a pleasant walk in the evening; and the blue is a rule, not a tradition — a French baron's rule — which takes nothing from how well it has aged.