I've been wanting to visit Tunisia for quite some time after I heard people say that Tunisia is a very beautiful country. Unfortunately I went there with high expectations but came home disappointed. I agree that their natural landscapes are quite pretty but I found that their tourists industry is not up to par. Their so called 4 or 5 star hotels do not deserve the rating. Their service people are not friendly and some are downright rude. The food served at the hotels' buffets either tasteless or tastes weird. Their desserts may sometime look pretty but don't expect too much in the taste department :(
There were so many things that went wrong in this tour:
First, Tunisair Express for flight to Tunis from Malta overbooked their seats, so the 3 of us (out of 15) had to go on a roundabout flights Malta-Djerba (Air Malta) Djerba-Tunis (Tunisair Express) instead. We were scheduled to reach Tunis at 1.40pm but the 3 of us ended up reaching Tunis at 6.30pm. The Tunisair Express plane was so old that I felt like kissing the ground after we landed safely!
My fellow travellers that made it on the original flight were not spared the "drama" either, out of 12, 8 lost their check-in luggages! The luggages were left in Malta. They only got back their luggages four days later.
Second, my brand new travel luggage was a casualty in this trip. I don't know what they did but 2 (out of 4) of the wheels were almost ripped off the bag! Their airport baggage handling either in Djerba or Tunis or maybe both were simply deplorable. If I'm not mistaken, one other tour member's bag was also impacted.
Third, not all places mentioned in the itinerary was covered. Too much time was given for shopping and so little time was given for the most important place of visit, Roman amphitheatre at El-Jem. Imagine being given 1 hour to tour the place and do your prayer at the nearby mosque.
Fourth, we had a lousy Malaysian tour manager. Instead of taking care of us his customers, he behaved like a tourist himself. I think he shopped and took pictures more than the rest of us. We were in transit for seven hours in Istanbul and he didn't even bother to tell us where and when to meet up after we had our morning prayers. So we ended up loitering and waiting for him to eventually showed up. He didn't even know that we can claim some meal vouchers from the airlines and neither does he knows that he can't bring liquid in bottles more than 100ml on the plane. A weird behaviour for a so called world traveller if you ask me.
Fifth, if you are not a great bargainer and are used to fixed pricing environment, be very careful when you buy stuff there. Their traders will not bat an eye when they fleece you. Imagine I bought the same silver (so they claimed) bracelet for TND10 at one place (the original price they quoted was TND20). Then thirty steps later, another shopkeeper offered it for TND5. A few days later when I went to their bazaar, another shopkeeper offered the same bracelet two for TND5. A few minutes later, one of the fellow tourists told me that she bought the same bracelet for TND2 each!
The saving grace for me is that this tour is combined with Malta. Malta is a bonus country for me. Never expected to set foot on it. It is not even in my travel list but I am so glad that I was given the opportunity to visit the country. My first impression of Malta (form the air) is "white and dense". The buildings are typical Arabs squarish houses. Nothing impressive. But after visiting for three days, I find that I like Malta a lot. It is a very cosy country. Quite expensive since their pricing is in Euro. I like what they served for breakfast, a lot of desserts and they tastes heavenly :) Our local Malta tour guide was also very sweet. When she found out that we love putting lemons in our dish, she gave us lemons from her own backyard :)
This tour (25 March - 6 April 2015) was organised by Safir Go Travel. The price per person on twin sharing basis was RM10600. Frankly I'm not impressed with the service provided by this company, so I doubt that I will be joining them in the future.
Our itinerary was as follows:
25 March 2015 Kuala Lumpur - Istanbul
26 March 2015 Istanbul - Malta
27 March 2015 Malta
28 March 2015 Malta - Gozo Island
29 March 2015 Malta - Tunis
30 March 2015 Tunis - Kairouan
31 March 2015 Kairouan - Gafsa - Tozeur
1 April 2015 Tozeur - Chebika - Temirza - Douz
2 April 2015 Douz - Matmata - Gabes - Sfax - El-Jem - Monatsir
3 April 2015 Monatsir - Sousse - Nabeul - Tunis
4 April 2015 Tunis
5 April 2015 Tunis - Istanbul - Kuala Lumpur
6 April 2015 Kuala Lumpur
I've uploaded 450 photos for your viewing pleasure. You can access them at my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/mkhasha.n.travels/. Go to the photo albums.
Njoy!!
