Where to stay

Dar Bibine The perfect hideaway, owned by a Belgian lawyer and her architect husband, this place has five beautiful designer rooms in the old Jewish village of Erriadh. There’s a small cookery school that does periodic three-day courses for guests. From £100 for a double. Rue Abdel, Wahab 7, Erriadh, 00 216 7567 1196, http://darbibine.com

Dar Cherif Guest House (and the private home) of a Tunisian art gallery owner. There’s a separate house where artists and artistes stay for free and a gallery space with exhibitions. From £100 for a double. Rue Taïeb Mehiri, Houmt-Souk, 00 216 7562 0374, http://dar-cherif.com

Dar Dhiafa Enclosed menzel of about ten rooms and four suites set around little courtyards in an Erriadh backstreet. Cosy and very friendly. It isn’t luxurious, but it’s smarter than shabby-chic. Good food. From £85. 4146 Erriadh, 00 216 7567 1166, http://hoteldardhiafa.com

Travel Information

Currency is the Tunisian Dinar (£1=2.39 TND). Djerba is one hour ahead of GMT. In general, the climate is mild with very little rain during the year, with the temperature rising to around 33°C in the month of August.

GETTING THERE
Thomson Airways (http://thomson.co.uk/flights) offers flights to four Tunisian cities from airports across the UK. From Tunisia you can get an internal flight to Djerba.
Tunisair (http://tunisair.com) operates five flights per week from London Heathrow to Tunis international airport. From here, there are four connecting flights to Djerba a day.

RESOURCES
Djerba Tourism (http://djerbatourisme.com) has extensive information to help you plan a trip to the island, including several maps to download.
The Tunisian National Tourist Office (http://cometotunisia.co.uk) website provides information on all aspects of Tunisian travel.

FURTHER READING
Sahara by Michael Palin (W&N, £20). The esteemed adventurer-explorer takes an epic tour across the region.

Where to eat

Dar Ali Carola Anana, married to a Tunisian, is a mine of information on Djerban cuisine. Her small hotel’s restaurant on the fringe of Midoun is typically Mediterranean, but cooks a range of authentic Tunisian dishes too. From £25. Sidi Mahrez, 00 216 7575 8671, http://darali.sitew.com

Essofra No compromise for tourists, alcohol-free, authentic Djerban cookery in a restaurant that’s packed with island bygones. You can see the kitchen where patron Lazhar Hadj Hassen’s wife does the cooking: anything from cleaning out intestines for a kind of haggis to stewing dromedary. Rue Taieb Mhiri, Houmt Souk (next to the Office of Finance), 00 216 9828 1049

Haroun Yes it’s touristy and crowded, but this seafood restaurant in the Port of Djerba serves fresh fish, authentic couscous and a good selection of mezze. La Marsa, Houmt Souk, 00 216 7565 0488

Food Glossary

Bouka

An alcoholic fig grappa.

Brik

(or brick) Wafer-thin fried brick pastry stuffed with egg and other morsels.

Gargoulette

Meat slow-cooked in a clay gargoulette pot.

Glaya

Fried lamb dish made from sun-dried, salted lamb.

Harissa

Hot chilli paste.

Lablabi

Breakfast chickpea soup.

Mechouia

Finely chopped roasted Mediterranean vegetables.

Merguez

A spicy sausage.

Mloukhieh

Meat braised with Jew’s Mallow.

Osban

Stuffed chard with tripe.

Qadid

Dried lamb.

Sahlob

A sorghum based pudding.

Shorba

A fish soup, usually with added barley.

Tabouna

A flat bread baked in a clay oven, similar to naan.

Tajine

A vegetable frittata (also the ceramic dish used to present couscous).

Zgougou

A cream made from pine seeds.

Food and Travel Review

Tunisian Djerba floats on the Mediterranean Sea, a small flake adrift from North Africa’s skin. Carthaginians settled on it. Greeks traded here. Romans built a road mooring it to the mainland. Berbers farmed it. Jews built a temple. Arabs, Ottomans, Spanish and French fought for it.

The midday glare gives a harsh edge to the dry landscape. Sparse palms, spiky aloe vera and clusters of olive trees grow in dun, harrowed soil. Mud hedges mark out property boundaries. Around the coast, lagoons reflect a glassy sheen. Car and quadbike tracks scar the sand flats. Signs on the main road pointing to the Tourist Zone imply what they mean.

Quit the main drag connecting airport to beachside hotel palaces at Midoun, and Djerba shifts its shape. Traffic stops for the weekly sheep market outside the village of Erriadh. Its name approximates to ‘small Jewish community’. Jews have lived in Djerba for the past 2,500 years and the synagogue, El Ghriba, at Hara Seghira, contains the oldest Torah in the world.

It’s also an island of wells and mini-mosques built to celebrate the finding of water. In the shadow of one such mosque near the pottery centre of Guellela, a straw-hatted Berber woman loads her horse and cart with kindling and forage. A mile away, shoppers in the local supermarket, some bare-headed, others wearing head scarves, hesitate before deciding whether to drop another jar of Nutella in their trolleys. Djerba is an island of contrast.

At Houmt Souk, the largest town, café gossip is of the arrest of the late dictator Ben Ali’s nephew, Kais Ben Ali, on the run since last year’s revolution. At one table, the men dunk their morning croissants in their cappuccinos. At another they puff on shishas. Conversation in Arabic switches seamlessly into French. Everybody speaks it, even barefoot 80-year-old Ali Berber hustling dinars from the tourists at his pottery.

With the old regime gone, Djerbans have new fish to fry – figuratively and literally. Trawlers in the port land cases of silver dorade, grey and red mullet and sea bass, perhaps the odd mérou, grouper. It’s the star ingredient of a seafood couscous, poached in a sweet pepper broth. Chef Neji at Haroun says the trick is to take the fish out of the stock before simmering the vegetables and add it back just before serving. His other wheeze is to mix some of the cooking liquid with the semolina grains while they steam, and stir in an extra ladleful at the last moment.

When Michael Palin visited the island on his round-the-world jaunt he went octopus fishing. On the far side of the port, behind the mocked-up galleons used for excursions to Flamingo Beach and yachts moored in the marina, lie pyramids of rotund clay pots. Fishermen drop them offshore in fleets and leave them overnight. When they haul them in they can collect the octopuses curled up inside them.

The jars – functional, unadorned and marked with the fisherman’s number – come from Guellela. Here, they fashion pots, salvers and amphorae that haven’t changed for millennia. Ali’s pottery workshop is a relic, a clay pit covered by a 500-year-old beam roof. Its eponymous guardian scuttles through its crannies barefoot. He is keen to share his history; to have us capture it on film. ‘This is where they dug the clay – photo.’ ‘This is where they fired the kiln – photo.’ This is where they kept the pots – photo.’ Outside, after a whistle-stop tour in semi-darkness, he lifts his ancient carcase into a red clay oil jar and tells the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves: ‘Photo!’

Catching cephalopods in crocks (or ‘old crocks’ catching vacationers) isn’t the only fishing skill unique to Djerbans. In the shallows, they plant arrow-shaped fences from palms that corral the small fish swimming in on the tide into traps. These end up at the ‘Office Nationale de Pêche’ fish market for sale at auction. The auctioneer, seated on a sky blue chair, holds up a string of maybe a dozen grey mullet and sells them to the highest bidder.

Whizzed up for shorba they make a rich, tomato-coloured soup that would match any soupe de poisson from Marseille. But with a difference. Cooks stir in enough fine-grained barley to add a shiny, lightly thickened texture. And on special occasions, they may perfume it with a chouille (a hint) of saffron.

Pass by a shop selling poultry and chances are there will be live chickens in cages for customers to inspect. Pass a butcher’s with a dromedary tethered outside the door and it isn’t there for transport. Lazhar Hadj Hassen, patron of Essofra, next door to the municipal finance offices in Houmt Souk calls it a local form of advertising: ‘The butcher leaves it there for two or three days to let everyone know that he will soon be selling the meat.’

It’s also on his menu in a Djerban dish of mloukhieh. The name refers to Jew’s mallow, a plant with the taste of well-cooked spinach. Braised with the meat, it turns the accompanying sauce ink-black. Essofra isn’t registered as a tourist restaurant because it doesn’t serve alcohol, but Lazhar’s wife dishes up recipes that are rarely found outside the home: glaya, for instance.

Its basis, he says, is sun-dried, salted lamb, qadid: ‘Many families make it during the Muslim festival of Eid because it is traditional to kill a sheep then.’ Dusted with turmeric and fried, it has a crust just like freshly baked bread, crisp and moreish. Djerbans also pot-roast lamb in gargoulettes, the same pots they use for catching octopus.

She also makes little parcels of stuffed swiss chard packed with chopped meat, herbs and peppers, a couscous accompanied by a spicy haggis that would cause a Burns Night sensation and, for dessert, a chocolate-coloured cream containing no chocolate that has the suggestive title: zgougou. ‘It’s made from the black seeds of a pine and it takes a very long time to wash and grind and get out their juice,’ explains Lazhar.

Harissa is the flavour that defines the Tunisian diet. It’s the ketchup that binds street food to the most refined cookery. At the Midoun Golf Club, the rich dip their snack of fried Fatima’s Fingers in it. In the souks no tuna salad baguette is complete without it. By itself in a quenelle, it makes an eye-watering mezze. No two versions are identical. Ground, hot, dried chillies are the base note, often smoked, more often not. The preferred flavouring is coriander seed. Caraway is popular, cumin too and there’s a little oil to hold it together.

At the fast food outlet, Brik Belgasem in Houmt Soukt market, it’s the final touch of the Tunisian soulfood, lablabi. This has its own ritual. You give an order and get a soup bowl with half a baguette in it. You break it into little pieces and hand it back across the counter. Mohammed, or whoever is serving, ladles spiced chickpea gruel on top, adds a sprinkling of salt and a slurp of olive oil. Then he breaks a soft-boiled egg on top before asking you how much harissa to put on. You hand over your dinar (40p), retrieve the bowl and mash up the contents before tucking in.

Around the corner another snack bar has its own take on egg and chips. Hidden under the egg is a mound of mechouia, a ratatouille of roasted vegetables diced small and on top, a harissa sauce.

Sitting on the terrace of the Prince Café where sweet mint tea comes in a glass and an espresso costs about 20 pence, it’s tempting to mistake Djerba for an older, slower North Africa. But it’s not. The heritage museum opposite is less than ten years old. Artisan House, next door, was once the site of a well. Baguette sandwiches and croissants are recent imports that have supplanted older breads and pastries. These are now hard to track down. A stranger walks past the lady with the straw basket in the souk without guessing its contents. She is carrying flat discs of tabouna, bread baked over an olive wood fire.

At Dar Dhiafa, a small hotel in the Jewish village of Erriadh, you have to order ftira a day in advance. It’s a stretchy puffed yeast cake that’s fried and then sweetened with liquid honey.

Olive oil is timeless. It’s so important to Tunisian life that the new government has fixed its price at 3.6 dinars a litre in the shops. This is cold pressed. But there’s none of the nonsense about acidity levels or single estates. Those with their own trees take the ripened black olives to the mills and pay a nominal amount for pressing.

Without it briks (or bricks) wouldn’t have the pale gold, brittle shells that makes them, to all intents and purposes, Tunisia’s national dish. Shaped like pasties filled with soft-yolked eggs, they wrap assorted goodies from onions and potato to shrimp. More substantial than its Moroccan counterpart, it isn’t a snack for men with beards.

The local ‘tajines’ could also lead to confusion. On Djerba the word refers to a kind of frittata, containing cooked vegetables and flavoured with mint, parsley and dill. Even so shops and restaurants use or sell the familiar ceramic tajines designed for couscous.

Ever since Ulysses landed here on his Odyssey, Djerba has been identified as the Land of Lotus Eaters, a place where people lived in an alternative state, a kind of waking dream world. It could never be that. Far less is it like the mythical country described by Tennyson where ‘…the slender stream Along the cliff to pause and fall did seem.’ No cliffs, let alone streams!

Instead it’s a busy island where yellow taxis queue outside the Turkish mosque in Houmt Souk. Its countryside is dotted with snowflake white menzels, white farmhouses, built Islamic-style around inner courtyards that remain cool in summer, warm in winter. Artisans weave textiles. Craftsmen work wood. A new generation of incomers is regenerating run-down villages, buying property and restoring unique architecture.

When the sun rises, though, and the sea is so still that it’s impossible to tell where it ends and where dry ground starts, it is possible to imagine Djerba as an island mirage. You have to pinch yourself to be sure it’s for real.