Tunisia is Rome, Carthage and the Sahara in one small country — El Jem’s amphitheatre standing almost intact in a farming town, the blue-and-white lanes of Sidi Bou Said above the Mediterranean, the mosque city of Kairouan, and in the south, salt lakes, Berber granaries and the desert where Star Wars was filmed.
Star Wars Locations & Roman Ruins — 8-Day Tunisia is a 8-day private tour of Tunisia, run on your own dates with a private guide and driver. You stay in 4-star hotels and riads with a desert night in the south, travelling by private vehicle with 4×4 for the Sahara legs.
Prices are per person and drop as your group grows — from $1290 per person for two travellers down to $840 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
8-day Tunisia itinerary
Met at Tunis and into the medina, which is UNESCO-listed and still a working city rather than a museum: seven hundred monuments, and the Zitouna Mosque at the centre of it, founded in 698 AD and one of the oldest in the Muslim world. The souks are organised by trade — perfume here, gold there, the chechia hat-makers in their own square, as they have been for centuries.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Carthage — the Antonine Baths, the Punic ports, the hill Rome erased and then rebuilt on — and the Bardo, where the Roman mosaics of North Africa are gathered in an Ottoman palace and are quite simply the best collection in the world. Sidi Bou Said in the late afternoon, blue and white on its cliff.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
South to El Jem, where a Roman amphitheatre for 35,000 people stands in the middle of a modest town — the best preserved in Africa, and you can go down into the chambers under the arena floor where the animals and the condemned were held. Overnight in Sfax, a working port with a walled medina almost no tourist enters.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Matmata, where the Berbers dug down instead of building up: a courtyard sunk into the ground with rooms cut into its walls, cool in summer and warm in winter, and lived in for centuries. Lucas filmed the Lars homestead in one of them in 1976; it is now a hotel and you can have a drink in Luke Skywalker's kitchen.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Douz is where the tarmac ends and the Grand Erg Oriental begins. You go out on camels in the afternoon, sleep in a desert camp, and the silence and the stars are the entire point. There is nothing between here and the middle of the Sahara.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
The ksour: fortified granaries where the semi-nomadic Berbers stored their grain, built as honeycombs of vaulted cells four storeys high. Ksar Ouled Soltane is the best of them, and it is what Lucas used for the slave quarters of Mos Espa. But they were real, and they were in use into the twentieth century.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Chenini is a Berber village clinging to a ridge, with a white mosque above it and cave houses below, and it has been inhabited for eight hundred years. Then across the causeway to Djerba — the island Homer's lotus-eaters supposedly lived on, with one of the oldest synagogues in the world at El Ghriba and a Jewish community that has been there, without a break, for over two thousand years.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
A transfer to Djerba airport for your flight out. End of our services.
