I knew I had arrived in Tunisia because my bank card stopped working. Tunisia runs on cash, not credit cards, and for the first time in 2024 I needed to pull out my ATM card and plug it into a machine to get some of the local currency. And as soon as I did my bank immediately locked it down and sent me a fraud alert. It wasn’t a problem — I just used a different bank card and clicked through the phone alert to unlock the original — but it reminded me of where I stood.

I only needed to get through the night, so I had booked a cheap hotel in Tunis. I overpaid for a taxi¹ and checked into my room. I should have wandered out into the city but I was up at 4:30am to catch my flight so I took a nap until dinner and then met everyone in town for the larp I was attending. I still wasn’t feeling it — the buffet didn’t have anything I wanted to eat, which would turn out to be a recurring problem — so I cut out early and went back to my room.

In the morning I gathered my stuff and met the bus to the larp at 10am. And so we all got onboard and started the eight hour ride down south, to the Sahara Desert and the larp.

There’s a lot of sand in the Sahara. You probably know that. I thought I knew that, but then I got there on a particularly windy day and I realized I didn’t. Imagine as much sand as you can possibly imagine, then double or triple it. The day we left for the desert the weather app for my phone reported “Sand” accompanied by a small icon of swirling winds where it would normally have said “Rain” or “Sunny.”

I mention all this because once we got to the campsite the experience of sand was overwhelming. I had thought the Sahara would be hot and it was, but only midday and only really in the direct sun; we had plenty of shade.² I thought it might be cold and it was, especially overnight. But when it was windy — as it was when we arrived and when we left — the sand got picked up by it and blown every which way. The sand in the Sahara is very fine, almost grit, and when the wind is high it gets into everything. I realized it was going to be a problem when I first stepped out the jeep and immediately could feel sand crunch between my teeth.³

You could watch it build up on the tables in the tents over the course of a few minutes, and it was literally pouring through the holes in the roof in a constant stream. We didn’t have showers in the Sahara⁴ so the entire time we were there I had sand trapped in my hair and beard. Multiple people pointed out I had become blonde.⁵ We had left most of our luggage back at the hotel so I only had a backpack filled with my computer⁶ and a change of clothing for the final day. I didn’t touch either because I didn’t want to get more sand in everything. I slept in my costume. I think most people did.

Everyone was relieved when the wind died down, a few hours after the larp started. You’d still get back to your tent to find a fine layer of sand over everything: mattress, blankets, suitcase, backpack. But it wasn’t a continuous assault and we didn’t have to sleep with it slowly burying us overnight. For all that it wasn’t exactly unpleasant,⁷ just relentless. You got used to it. The wind finally picked up again the morning after the larp as we prepared to leave.⁸ It was a relief to get in the jeep and to head back to a hotel when we did.

My experience with the Saharan sand turns out to be a global phenomenon. The dust kicked up in the Sahara enters the atmosphere; there was a warning during the month I spent in Portugal for Saharan dust clouds causing respiratory problems the entire length of the country. And it travels farther than that, changing weather patterns and supplying iron to phytoplankton in the Atlantic and phosphorous to the Amazon river basin, just another way in which the world reminds us we are all interconnected.

Sahara is a destination larp produced by Chaos League based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft which had the rather ingenious idea of having the destination be a landscape rather than a landmark. Rather than a fancy castle you’re playing in the middle of the Sahara desert. The game’s set in the 1930s, where a group of scholars and adventures are setting off on an expedition to find the fabled city of Zerzura.⁹

The characters were written in full Lovecraftian pastiche. This was wonderfully evocative — instead of saying “Your parents died when you were a child” you’d have something like “It was in your twelfth year when the first whisper of tragedy entered your life, in the form of a car accident which tore your mother and father from you” — but it was also rather a pain to wade through when you were trying to double check information.¹⁰ The backstories were filled with the sorts of elements you’d expect from Lovecraft: dark cults, unsettling hints of psychopathy and madness, glimpses of horrifying worlds beyond the veil.

The larp began with workshops at the hotel on Thursday¹¹ and the game proper started that evening with a two-hour reception before the adventurers left civilization. The next day we all got into our desert costumes and were ferried the hour’s drive to the camps where the game kicked off in earnest. It didn’t end until late Saturday night. During our time in the desert we were camping in traditional Berber tents: thick woven blankets supported by stout sticks which weren’t tall enough to stand up in.¹² They blocked the sun but not the cold and had enough gaps that drafts were an issue if you didn’t position yourself carefully. The food was similar to what we found in the rest of Tunisia, mostly tomato-based soups and stews with occasional roasted meat on the side.

We were basically playing two games running in parallel. The metaplot¹³ was focused on finding the lost city of Zerzura, and involved a whole lot of departments working in synchronicity to explore various sites located a short walk from camp, return with artifacts, and then decipher or transcribe or interpret the resulting information to lead you to the next site. This felt a lot like Odysseus, in that you’d have teams of researchers — I was the head of the “History and Literature” department so we were tasked with translating cuneiform — each solving particular puzzles and submitting the results to a central command on a timetable.

Within that structure you were expected to play out your personal story. All the characters were vaguely unhinged and primed to go completely mad by the end of the game. My mother had been sacrificed to a cult¹⁴ and as the story unfolded around I could start to see the connections between my personal story and our obsessive search for Zerzura. I had a few strong scenes where I talked with people about our mutual revelations.

But there wasn’t any real way for your personal story to influence the metaplot. We had been assured that we weren’t required to do our assigned tasks; we could just turn in whatever we managed to do and it wouldn’t affect the game. This was good but further reduced our ability to influence events. Even if the map team submitted the wrong coordinates it was pretty clear we were going to arrive at the gates of Zerzura anyway. We were locked in for the ride.¹⁵

I was hoping for a good, creepy mood but it rarely got there for me. Part of it was the daylight; the sun was dazzling and cheerful¹⁶ and that’s never the best time to whisper dark secrets to a confidant. There was also some tonal creep. The puzzle hunt leading to Zerzura felt a lot like Raiders of the Lost Ark and many people seemed to be taking their fashion cues from Casablanca. It ultimately felt like we never consistently got that constricting feeling of dread you get from the really good Cthulhu stories. Things ended appropriately for a story involving the Elder Gods, and I was glad things wrapped when they did. I thought we had pushed things about as far as they were going to go.

I think it’s a great game if you’re interested in Tunisia, or conversely it’s a great vacation if you wanted to take a few days out to attend a larp in the middle of it. It’s well-designed and well thought out. But I didn’t get very emotionally invested. I’m still looking for a really visceral horror game, one that doesn’t rely on jump scares or external threats but on the breakdown of the self so common to Lovecraft’s writing. I’ll keep looking.

After the larp I had signed up for a 5-day tour of Tunisia offered as an add-on by Chaos League,¹⁷ which ended up being a mixed bag. On the one hand I got to see a lot of the country I wouldn’t have otherwise seen, and I got to do it with a bunch of the larpers from Sahara.¹⁸ On the other, we didn’t have much control over what we were seeing and what the schedule for it was. The schedule was a big problem. We had a day of doing nothing in the hotel in Douz when the larp ended. The following days we left at 8:30am, 6:30am, and 6:30am.¹⁹ The hotels we were staying at were very nice, but we were always arriving after 7pm which coupled with our early departures didn’t give us any time to really relax in the evening.

The food in Tunisia was also a bit rough. Breakfast and dinner were invariably from some hotel buffet, and while I thought the buffets were of pretty high quality the options as a health-conscious vegetarian were lacking. There would be a salad selection, most of which had meat in it. The remaining salads would often just be shredded carrots or shredded beets or shredded cabbage, maybe with hard-boiled eggs and with oil and vinegar on the side. There were trays of plain rice or couscous but minimally seasoned and designed as a base for whatever goat curries or roasted lamb or baked chicken they were serving alongside it. There’d be an omelette station for breakfast — eggs were really popular and showed up in a ton of dishes — and a pasta station for dinner which typically featured spaghetti bolognase.²⁰ You’d inevitably have to buy bottled water for your meal; otherwise water wasn’t provided. The one bright spot was the dessert station, which had a fantastic array of pastries and cakes and puddings, all of which were delightful. I did my best to avoid them. I mostly succeeded.

Lunches were more interesting, since they were arranged while we were out sightseeing and so we’d get some samples of what the traditional cuisine was from some local restaurant or Berber village. It was always massive, easily twice the food I’d normally eat and accompanied by soups and salads and bread. The main dishes consisted of the same kind of tagines we’d had elsewhere, although the first lunch did feature camel.²¹ Everything came unsalted, for some reason and the food struck most people as rather bland.²² But the food was also inevitably served with harissa and that was downright fantastic; by the end of the trip I was adding it to nearly everything. I’d take it over ketchup any day of the week.

Our travel itinerary took us to the medina of Tozeur, to the film set for Mos Espa, to a Berber village near Tataouine,²³ to the Hotel Sidi Driss,²⁴ to the island of Djerba, then up to the Roman Ampitheater at El Jem, before heading up to a farm near Hammamet. That probably entailed at least 20 hours on a tour bus over three days. And the farm was a very nice change from the resorts we were staying at²⁵ but it was the first time we didn’t need to be up very early and I had actually been looking forward to hanging out with everyone in the hotel bar. And all the salads had tuna on them and the main dish was pasta with shrimp. It was close to the best food I saw all week²⁶ and I ended up eating olives and bread.

I made up for it by hitching a ride into Tunis at 8am and heading to Carthage before catching my flight out. Right now I’m waiting for check in to open — ITA Airways won’t let you check in more than three hours before your flight and I couldn’t check in online for some reason — so I’m annoyed and out-of-sorts and a little strung out from all the travel. This will be my last jaunt through the EU for a bit, as I’ll have exactly one day left on my Schengen time when I leave. I genuinely thought they’d have sorted out my residency visa by now. but it’s looking like that’ll be late summer at the earliest.

I’d come back to Tunisia. I’d even consider taking a tour; it’s probably the best way of seeing the southern half of the country, although I’d spend more time scrutinizing the planned route. It felt a little like Morocco and a little like Senegal and a little like something all its own. And I really am going to miss the harissa.

Next: Rome (FCO) to Berlin (BER)
Prev: Paris (CDG) to Tunis (TUN)

Footnotes

¹ You can order a cab through Bolt although you still have to pay cash when it arrives. I tried, and was quoted 17 dinar for a ride downtown, but I couldn’t figure out where the car was trying to pick me up. I ended up instead catching one of the cabs waiting at the airport, the driver of which offered a ride for 60 dinar but dropped the price to 40 when I laughed at them. I could have haggled them lower but I was tired and just wanted a ride.

² My costume for the Sahara larp consisted of a wool suit and it was fine for April. I only needed to take off the jacket for a few hours on Saturday and was grateful to have it in the mornings and evenings.

³ Sand is widely considered safe to eat, although too much of it can cause constipation. Breathing it is a bigger issue.

⁴ Nor toilets, for that matter.

⁵ And at least as many pointed out I was no longer blonde after we got back to the hotel and I managed a shower.

⁶ A mistake, as it turned out. My experience in Wadi Rum lead me to believe the campsite might have electrical outlets — the camp at Wadi Rum had private rooms with showers and flush toilets and WiFi and doors and windows in their “tents” — so it didn’t seem crazy to me. Instead I was terrified of taking my computer out of my backpack lest it get coated in even more sand. Even now there’s occasionally a tiny grinding sound when I plug in the USB connections which I really hope goes away soon.

⁷ Except maybe having that gritty feeling between your teeth, especially at mealtimes. It got in your coffee if you didn’t drink it quickly enough.

⁸ There were warnings of proper sandstorms and I am very relieved I didn’t experience one.

⁹ Zerzura is a real place, or more precisely a real mythical place. There were a number of expeditions looking for it between WWI and WWII.

¹⁰ There were small summaries at the end which clarified your relationships with other characters in bite-sized segments, but it was still overwhelming at times.

¹¹ We arrived by bus late on Wednesday and had an evening to ourselves to recover.

¹² The architecture looked like it could have been handled by a particularly precocious builder of couch forts, although the hooked rebar anchoring the blankets to the ground would have been a challenge.

¹³ Which for the purposes of this discussion I’m going to define as the overarching plot installed by the organizers which concerned all the players

¹⁴ It felt a bit like the only people who hadn’t lost family members to cult murders were those who were personally tortured themselves.

¹⁵ I remain uncertain whether the same held true for Odysseus. I recall the organizers there insisting that completing our work according to the schedule was absolutely vital to our success, but would they really have blown up the larp late on the first day if we had botched some mission or another?

¹⁶ When it wasn’t pitiless and oppressive

¹⁷ There was a 3-day and a 5-day option available, and I was still trying to stay out of Schengen for as long as possible. My understanding is that Chaos League wasn’t making any money off this, but was simplifying the work for their players and their local partners.

¹⁸ All told there were about a dozen of us, composed of myself, one Belgian, and the rest Polish save for a single Ukrainian living in Poland. I learned a surprising amount about how Poles vacation, or at least how Polish larpers vacation.

¹⁹ We were supposed to leave at 6am but it got changed the night before, after I was already in my room, so I didn’t know and spent 45 minutes waiting for everyone else to get up.

²⁰ Labelled, weirdly, “macaroni bolognase” at the first hotel we stayed at.

²¹ I chose the vegetarian option, natch.

²² I don’t know what it says if you’re traveling with a bunch of Poles and they all think the food is bland and dull, but it sure says something.

²³ Yes, it’s a real place. It constantly surprises me how much of Star Wars: A New Hope was apparently just George Lucas winging it.

²⁴ Shooting location for the Lars’ homestead

²⁵ It was more like a B&B. The owner greeted us and their wife cooked dinner.

²⁶ The shakshouka which served as a dip for bread beat it out, I think