Cycling to the Sahara: Two Coffee Cups

I arrived in Hammamet exactly the way I expect to arrive in every single town that I come to: sweaty, tired and slightly bewildered.

On arrival in any town, therefore, primary goal number one is to find a hotel, where I can stable my bicycle for the night and give myself a thorough wash down. Quite often, I’ll even pull up outside town to look at the guide book for my target hotel. It doesn’t look cool to be head-in-book in a strange new town (for the importance of looking cool, see yesterday’s shabaab story).

This is all preamble, to introduce you to primary goal number one: find a hotel. I shall now go onto demonstrate its tragic flaw, by means of the parable of the two coffee cups, a true story.

Arriving in Hammamet, sweaty, tired, slightly bewildered, I’m heading for the Dar al-Shabaab, the Maison des Jeunes, the Youth Hostel. Everything is going fine (except the bit where a shabaab gets down on his haunches to tinker with my brakes – I have no idea what that’s about). Quite according to form, I zip straight past the youth hostel and cycle on for about a mile (up hill, into headwind) before realising. But eventually I do find the place and – it’s full.

As I slink back to my bicycle and my uncool guide book, a young Tunisian woman of about eighteen approaches me and suggests I try the tourist information office: “They have a list of all the hotels and how much they cost,” she tells me. “Thanks very much,” I say, trying to look cool, “but I have a guide book.”

She shrugs and crosses the road to a café, her mother now in tow. I note the address of another cheap hotel and start to wheel my bike into the road. Then the young woman approaches me again: “Would you like to join me and my mother at the café for a drink?” I obviously look uncertain, because she feels compelled to add: “Just to talk a little.”

Now my immediate reaction is negative, standard social anxiety. I push against this snap-reaction: social anxiety is exactly the reason I should say yes – go where the danger is! But my brain wrestles back: No, primary goal number one, remember? So I say to the woman, in my blunt French: “I want to find a hotel.” She says “Okay” and returns to the café. I last see her sitting down at the table, looking over at me.

It doesn’t take me long to realise that I’m a chump and I really should have said yes and hang primary sodding goal number one. How many more times on this trip is a young Tunisian woman going to ask me to take a coffee with her and her mother? Never again, most likely. And it’s only three thirty; I could just as easily have found a hotel at four thirty. And what’s the worst that could have happened if I’d said yes? She and her mum might have ganged up and raped me? Seriously! Chump.

But anyway, I cycle on, find a hotel and take a shower. I’m wonderfully clean, but still a chump. So I hasten back to the café, thinking up words of schoolboy French to reintroduce myself. My excitement mounts as I draw closer, mind working up scenarios of hospitality and good humour.

But all in vain. By the time I get back to the café, only half an hour after leaving them, all that is left are two empty coffee cups.

I took a photo to remind myself: never leave two empty coffee cups, leave three.

Gone.

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David

David Charles is co-writer of BBC radio sitcom Foiled. He also writes for The Bike Project, Thighs of Steel, and the Elevate Festival. He blogs at davidcharles.info.

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