May 2025
There’s a big blue lake in the middle of the map of Tunisia called Lake Djerid or Chott de Djerid. I noticed it when I first started planning for a trip to Tunisia & I looked it up. It’s a salt lake which can’t be all that blue!
Then I discovered most organized tours to the desert involved this lake and the town of Tozeur. So on our second day in Douz/Sahara, we drove out to Djerid.
It is the largest salt pan in the Sahara Desert at 1.7 million acres. There’s a 70 km causeway across the lake that links the desert and Tozeur, and we took that road to see the lake. Huge!
Tozeur is an Oasis town with about 40,000 people. It’s well known for the palm groves, mountain oasis, and the Star Wars movie sites. I was curious about the mountain oasis, but it required driving up some mountain roads & that seemed a bit much for our men folks who were driving that day.
So we just walked around the medina, the old town center, which was filled with uniquely designed brick buildings.
We decided to try a fancy restaurant in this town. Le Minaret Ferkous offered a 3 course meal for 70 dinars – about $23.
Nicely decorated place and beautifully presented food, but we thought it was a bit over priced since we got the same level of satisfaction from $17 meals. I know: $17, $23 – not a real big difference there. But 50 and 70 dinars sound different, right?
Tozeur and Douz areas have several different Star Wars movie sets that people love to visit. For some reason, movie sets don’t motivate us to drive extra miles. May the force be with us even if we didn’t step onto the movie sets!
I almost chose Tozeur as the base for our Sahara excursion, but the longer drive of getting there from Tunis changed my mind. In hindsight, I think Douz was a better choice because of its proximity to the desert.
Small Wide World 