We pulled in at 0800. There was a strong smell of smoke in the air. We wondered if they were burning trash somewhere nearby. The marina is absolutely enormous, filled with floating finger docks. We were directed past all the finger docks to a prime spot on the sea wall. There were two crew waiting to help us tie up. It is a good thing we had help, because it took some effort to get Kosmos properly situated. This is yet another marina with two mooring lines, and getting the length of the mooring lines just right and the dock lines just right is kind of a delicate balance. The crew guys were super nice and seemed to be totally happy to help, and didn’t seem to mind our lack of experience making us so slow at getting situated.

As soon as Kosmos was finally tied up, the crew guys whisked Eric off in their little dinghy and took him to the officials, all located fairly close by in a building farther down the quay. The first stop was immigration, where he had to fill out a couple standard forms. Someone asked Eric if the poles on the side (meaning our paravanes) were to pick things up off the bottom of the ocean. That is one we haven’t heard before.

The second stop was customs, where there was only one form. He was told to take it to the marina office to be copied, and then return it to customs. Of course, while at the marina office, he checked in with the marina. The guy checking Eric in accused Eric of lying about the length of our boat. Eric showed him the registration and the guy said it is the biggest 13 meter boat he had ever seen. He also asked why we have three masts.

When Eric was done at the marina office, he went back to customs. The customs agent came aboard Kosmos, quickly looked around, and left. He didn’t ask any questions or look inside anything. We had heard a comment somewhere that the customs guys in Tunisia seem to like to see the boats more out of their own curiosity than inspect them. It may be true.

While Eric was taking care of paperwork, Christi surveyed the surroundings. Dangerous. Very dangerous. Our spot is literally 3 steps from a gelateria/crepes stand. Eric is a gelato addict and Christi loves crepes, so it is a bad place for both of us. To make matters worse, there is another ice cream place 12 steps away in both directions.

So, it turns out Yasmine Hammamamet is a tourist city. It is exactly what Marsa Alam, Egypt will be when it is finished. According to the brochure they gave to Eric, the resort complex is 278 hectares big, with 44 hotels, theme parks, casinos, ice skating rink and numerous spas. The scores of stores, coffee houses and restaurants were “specially selected to enrich the marina with the charm of an urban village”. You can even buy a beautiful apartment or townhouse with your own private boat dock.

We walked around some. Directly behind the marina there are small bungalows that house shops and restaurants, and behind them are the above mentioned apartments and villas.

To the south of the marina, it is row after row of hotels, with the ground floors inhabited by restaurants and tourists shops. You can’t see it in this photo, but there is a nice beach across the street from the hotels, just beyond the grass and trees you can see in the photo.

Most of the restaurants are virtually identical “snack cafes” serving crepes/paninis/gelato, with filling choices for the panini and savory crepes being salami, tuna, cheese and/or egg. Even “The Lucky Bamboo”, with its Eastern Asian décor, serves the same menu. Most of the shops have similar inventory. Seeing the never ending identical stores and cafes made us feel like we have arrived in “Ground Hog Day”. To be fair, we did see three “real” restaurants with full menus, including a Tex Mex restaurant that doesn’t have one single Tex-Mex dish on the menu posted in the window. And there are a few shops that sell different things, like a grocery store.

We are disappointed about our choice of this marina. Don’t get us wrong, it is a beautiful resort town. But we are traveling to experience the local cultures, not to see beautiful resorts. We generally try to pick marinas or anchorages as close to the heart of the city as we can get, and when we read about this place it said it was in the heart of the city. We just hadn’t realized it was a tourist city, not a genuine city made by the locals for the locals.

Since it was well before the lunch hour, we had lunch at one of the snack places. Being as it was still ungodly hot outside, we spent most of the day sequestered in the boat with the air conditioning on. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a tourist guide for Tunisia, so we have arrived with no clue as to what there is to do here, or how to go about doing it. We are both planners by nature. When we don’t have a plan, we flounder. We spent our air conditioned day looking up things to do on the internet.

As a side note, a phrase Christi used to say all the time on hot days (and actually still says once in a while) was “It is Africa hot!”. Eric has been teasing her all day, saying over and over “It’s Africa hot!”. Christi can’t believe he didn’t tease her about it when we were in Egypt.