Mostly the route involved a fairly decent highway, but we did pass through a few towns, and had to dodge pedestrians, motorbikes, bicycles, other cars, trucks, vans, etc., and, even, a donkey cart.
I did not want to drive into Kairouan's medina, so we parked outside the walls and walked in.
Our goal was the Great Mosque, but it was nice to wind through the medina along the way. It was incredibly hot, and the medina was basically deserted.
Unlike Tunis, Kairouan's medina's wall remains intact.
I found the colour contrasts particularly beautiful in the late morning light, and Diana made fun of me for all of the pictures I was taking.
The medina is a UNESCO world heritage site, but oddly it felt like we had it to ourselves.
Eventually we reached the square with the Great Mosque, which is one of the oldest places of Islamic worship in the world, dating to 670 CE.
For a small fee you can go inside through the entrance in the photo below, and they had a headscarf for Diana and a robe for me (to cover my bare legs) that we could borrow.
Most of the mosque's area is the large courtyard, surrounded by porticoes. Interestingly, the columns throughout the mosque are recycled from "Roman, Early Christian or Byzantine monuments," particularly from Carthage (according to Wikipedia).
[Update: on November 9, Saturday, the prophet's birthday, Diana and I were watching TV in Algiers, Algeria, and saw coverage of a service at the Kairouan mosque; the prayer hall was packed, and the Tunisian president was in the front row! It was cool to see the empty space we had seen just a few days earlier so full.]
Other than the prayer hall, you can walk around in the porticoes, which provided some welcome shade.
I have been in a few different mosques, including some very large ones, like the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, and other very old ones, like the Great Mosque of Xi'an, China, but none were quite as simple as this one. As a tourist it made the Kairouan mosque less interesting, since there was less to look at, but it was nice too, in its own way.
After our mosque tour we needed a break from the sun, so we went to the close by Restaurant El Brija, which is built on top of the medina wall.
This was the view back into the medina from the restaurant's entrance.
After lunch, on the way back to the car, we walked the other way around (more or less the back of) the mosque, where there is another square, and a nice view of one of the babs, or medina gates. Again you get a sense for how quiet (and sunny!) it was.
From Kairouan it was just about another hour to Sousse, where we are staying tonight. This is a map of our road trip over the last two days.
You took so many good pictures, I wish you would have gotten one of the donkey cart!
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