Again, a taster of travels this time in Tunisia, to contrast with the blog on Tokyo!

I would love to hear of your experiences of this country and the Bedouin people

I had a few translations, books to read and presentations to prepare for uni in my bag over the next few days, but 'Inshallah', the speaker said, we would now be landing in Tunis. The pilot had sounded as if he was saying something very heated and angry when speaking in Arabic but the same phrase sounded much plainer in English. I had been invited to Tunisia by my good friend Alejandro and had got straight onto a plane.

Alejandro's rent was made slightly cheaper by living directly opposite the Russian (Orthodox Jewish) embassy in this Arabic country, but otherwise had a stunning morning view from his terrace of children lining up for school and mosques reaching into the sky. I was quickly introduced to spicy dish Chicha. Night falls instantly in the desert, although when it was time to 'hit the sand' wrapped in several blankets, we were kept awake- partly by the brightness of an amount of stars you would never have imagined existed, so bright they still seem to shine when you have your eyes closed; and partly by a loud and appaently common symphony of camel farts, and luckily so, because soon after we were visited by a couple of harmless-looking but very poisonous snakes which our guide lept up and dealt with nice and casually. He showed us the drop of venom which would have been enough to 'say goodnight' and went back to stirring his herbal tea. Bizzarely, another danger in the desert appeared to be the possibility of losing your group of travellers.

We later met a man who had been roaming the desert for 3 days on a motorbike searching for his family. At night it is unfallibly cold so that you feel less guilty about making your camel carry so many blankets, but at day hot enough to make you shed almost all your layers and bake bread by burying dough just beneath the sand.

We approached a town that seemed to be kicking up a lot of dust the next as we had come across a Saharan wedding. Everyone was invited to take part and gathering round seemed proud that we had stumbled upon their town on this day to see. You cant help thinking that the day would have been a little less memorable for the bride, who following tradition was kept inside her home for the entire ceremony. The rest of the women sat cross-legged in beautiful colourful dresses looking like a bed of flowers as their men began to dance in butterfly shapes in front of them and drink the beer.

People have an amusing and quite astounding mix of modern and more natural concepts of living. Our Bedouin guide in the desert was an amazingly intelligent and internally peaceful person. He would seem simple and unamused by any talk of things from western culture but then intimately sensitive to our environment and instantly able to explain changes in wind, temperature and the footprints of tiny insects imprinted on the sand. When asking for a picture of the Unesco World Heritage Site town of Exmouth on my phone he knew more about arranging this than me- 'You can Bluetooth it to me if you like' he said, in perfect French. But would rebuke, when talking about the costs of living in diferent countries- 'L'argent... quel idee'. When asking how much we were to pay him for being our guide over the Sahara for the past 2 days he shrug his shoulders and to pay what we could.

We were quite sandy and sticky after these few days (and tired; the bubbles constantly ppearing in one of the camel's mouths meant that he was far too randy for Alejandro to sit on him) so thought we would recover in a Hamam. This is a public bath where you should check which sex it has been designed for first so as not to provoke shrieks from Tunisian women like we did. The intensity of heat in these places is instantly quite overwhelming. You can hardly see what is going on from the steam and dont feel as if you're breathing as you go from one hot room to another, praying and scrubbing yourself in between.

The last thing to do is to have a scrub from the 'masseur' in the corner of the baths. I didnt catch that I would first get a jug of hot water over my head. He grunted at me to turn over and, wearing what looked and felt just like a good old scouring pad, didnt hold back in getting all the dirt I didnt know I had out of my pores. There is a terrible saying you can hear in English that goes 'dirty Arab' for some reason. But it was well known here that the Westerners that come to use the Hamams are always going to be the dirtiest customers and it took us far longer than the other people to get scrubbed down, the man using both hands to scoop all the brown playdough together onto my stomach and rinse it off as the locals pretended not to watch. I well and truly had a lot to learn!