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<\/p>\nThe morning of our second day of riding in Tunisia was spent at a spectacular ancient Roman ruin: Dougga.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There seemed to be no-one there except us and an army of caretakers restoring old walls.\u00a0 Dougga is on top of a hill and as you enter the site you hit the very well preserved Roman theatre.\u00a0 But there\u00a0are a lot of good Carthaginian related remnants as well.\u00a0\u00a0 Beyond the temple, next to a tethered donkey, was a big Temple of Saturn-Baal with its large front columns and stone structure and floor slabs intact.\u00a0\u00a0 An interesting mixture of gods! \u2013 Saturn the Roman god of the harvests and Baal, the supreme god of the Carthaginians.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Then we curved back to the centre of the site past more temple ruins, a gathering of feeding sheep whose heads were invisible because they were shoved inside a bail of hay (quite strange), the remains of the forum and also dozens of houses and shopfronts along paved roads, with their lower walls heavily restored but still standing.\u00a0 Peeping over the top of an olive grove there was also an impressive tower like mausoleum, described as in the ancient Libyo-Phoenician style.\u00a0\u00a0 A great way to start the day! But we had to get going, partly because we hadn\u2019t had breakfast yet!\u00a0 That was causing something of a minor panic and there wasn\u2019t much around to be eaten \u2013 or at least not that we could find quickly and easily.\u00a0 We ended up with that spicy mixture of fresh tomatoes and chiles on bread and a bowel of olives.\u00a0 It was served by a man with few teeth, who showed us his black gaps when he was warning us to be careful eating the olives.\u00a0 One of my teeth fell out into my cereal on the trip so I considered comparing my hole to his but thought better of it.\u00a0 After that challenging breakfast, we cycled on a little warily.<\/p>\n
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The theatre at Dougga<\/em><\/p>\n The Temple of Saturn-Baal <\/em><\/p>\n Libyo-Phoenician mausoleum<\/em><\/p>\n These last days on the road felt very good, partly because of the new landscapes we were enjoying.\u00a0 The countryside in Tunisia is like being in the middle ages and reminded me of those delicately painted scenes that you can see on paper room dividers in Asian houses where one man is in the field scattering seeds, another is riding up a track, a couple are on the balcony of their wooden house, to the left of them, a river running through a wood.\u00a0 That was what the landscapes were like in Tunisia \u2013 lots of simultaneous activities were visible from the seat of the bicycle that looked like they should have been happening a thousand years ago.<\/p>\n We also felt happy because we were coming to the end of our epic.\u00a0 However amazing the trip, ten weeks is a long time and the prospect of home and being still for a while was very appealing.<\/p>\n But the action wasn\u2019t over yet.\u00a0 Near the town of Siliana, adjacent to Zama, the police took an interest in us and escorted us into town in their green and white jeep and then tried to make us continue riding towards the next town that was a good 15 km away, when all we wanted to do was stop, rest and have a drink.\u00a0 There wasn\u2019t a lot of logic to their argument except the insistence that further on was much nicer than Siliana.\u00a0 Ben politely conversed with them in broken French for a while and we managed to extricate ourselves. <\/p>\n In the end, our visit to the last important part of the Hannibal story, the battlefield of Zama, was very memorable.\u00a0 Zama, or Jama, is a little village about 140 km south west of the city of Tunes that is thought to be on the site of, or at least near where the Battle of Zama was fought.\u00a0 This is the historic battle Hannibal lost to the Roman general Scipio, ending the Second Punic War with Carthage surrendering.\u00a0 It was very strange to be gazing over this battlefield after thinking about it for a couple of years.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t really have any expectations about what it would be like when we got here \u2013\u00a0 the dusty farmland, olive groves and mountains in the distance seemed to fit the bill.\u00a0\u00a0 But I don\u2019t think any of us have ever heard a donkey, sheep, chickens and a dog all making noise at once.\u00a0 Zama is the battle that changed the course of history, but the battle changed little at Zama.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The locals were still riding donkeys and seemed to own a few scattered cows and little else.\u00a0 The cluster of white houses were dusty and without windows.\u00a0\u00a0 Water was fetched from a fountain down the hill.\u00a0 Little children chased us and laughed us past.\u00a0\u00a0 You felt a world away from Europe, but only a few hours away in a car another name that belongs to the past, Carthage – described by Ben in the last blog –\u00a0 was now a wealthy suburb of the capital with palacial houses that you would see in any prosperous Mediterranean city.\u00a0 The contrasts were really stark in Tunisia.<\/p>\n The battlefield at Zama?<\/em><\/p>\n The Jama locals<\/em><\/p>\n This is being written from a comfortable chair in the sitting room of my Granny\u2019s home in London.\u00a0 The trip seems like a dream.\u00a0 But we are back from something real, and it was great.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Attack dog or escort?<\/em><\/p>\n Final day of filming with cameraman John and Hamet our Tunisian fixer (in white)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The morning of our second day of riding in Tunisia was spent at a spectacular ancient Roman ruin: Dougga.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There seemed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3,4,6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-carthage","category-cycling","category-filming","category-hannibal","category-history"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/Media\/Default\/BlogPost\/blog\/2009\/12\/Wood-Brothers-Sam-and-Temple-of-Saturn-Baal.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"\/Media\/Default\/BlogPost\/blog\/2009\/12\/Wood-Brothers-village-of-Jama.jpg\")
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