AISHA BOUKARI

My husband and I had a wonderful experience hiring Aicha Boukari as our tour guide during our stay in Tunis in July, 2016. Aicha is knowledgeable, flexible, resourceful, and fun to spend time with.

We had stayed with extended family near the beach and toured some sites, including some in Carthage on our own, but wanted to have the experience of a guide to more fully understand what we were seeing. At that point we only had two days left on our trip. Our plan was for further touring of Carthage and to see the Tunis medina on the first day and to see the ruins of Dougga on the second. Aicha did a terrific job: she arranged transportation for us by taxi around all the Carthage ruins, explained the historical and political background of the various sites and pointed out many things we had missed in our earlier tour of the Carthage Museum. We followed our Carthage tour with a taxi ride to the Tunis medina, which we had not seen before. Aicha showed us all the facets of the medina beyond the tourist area, explained Tunisian customs behind the various items for sale, found a wonderful restaurant in the medina for lunch, even pursuaded a construction worker to allow us inside a renovation they were doing to one of the old houses in the medina. When taxis were scare, she accompanied us on a bus back to our hotel.

The next day, she gamely met us at 6:30 a.m. at our hotel for a day trip to Dougga. At her suggestion, we stopped by the small town of Testour, which turned out to be one of the highlights of our day -- with its beautiful and historic mosque, round loaves of bread fresh from the oven and interesting scenes of life on the main street of the small town. Dougga was fascinating (and hot!). Thanks to our well informed guide, Aicha, we saw all the highlights of the ruins -- enough to satisfy my history buff husband, which is a tall order. Aicha's crowning accomplishment though was assisting us in getting to an obscure WWII battlefield (Longstop Hill) that my husband wanted very badly to see near Medjez El Bab. Aicha communicated with the police and local folks in a nearby village – and found us the dirt road to the top of the mountain, then helped the driver scout the difficult path back down to the valley. If we are able to visit Tunisia again some day, we will certainly look for her as a guide. Susan and Wayne Purdom