Beach resorts make Tunisia feel like Florida , with Europeans

Today was a complete R+R day, taking advantage of the hotel facilities. We're staying at The Hasdrubal in Port al Kantaoui, a massive, V-shaped building that encloses lush gardens and a pool separating hotel from beach.

We knew we were coming to packaged tour land, but we guessed wrong on the audience. We had imagined a lot of 30- and 40-something Brits, both parents with small children and drinkers in search of late season sun. Instead, we were surrounded by hoards of 50-something Germans, French and Russions all shuffling around the place in white bathrobes on their way to their abundant course of spa treatments. One advantage of this demographic is that it's spectacularly quiet; I barely heard anything above a low murmur when poolside.

The three of us headed to the spa first thing to make appointments. I am fairly laid back about this process, but Lisa and Hillary had been studying up on possibilities and Hillary had a diligently researched, neatly drawn up short list that made it clear she was the lawyer of the trio. It's a shame the spa receptionist did not have a soupcon more of this efficiency.

The entry to the spa is impressive: a long, marble-paved hall with windows on each side giving views of the gardens and decorations down its length with bowls of flower petals and swans fashioned neatly from snowy towels and sprinkled with more petals. You walk down some stairs and emerge into a grand, domed hall redolent of that heavy floral and spice scent all spas seem to share. The staff are shuffling around quietly in white coats, looking more medical than their trendy, pajama clad bretheren in the UK. So far, so good. Then we tried to get our appointments.

English is obviously a fourth language here after Arabic, French and German. We certainly couldn't find a common ground on which to get much detail of the treatments. And very little seemed to be available, probably as a consequence of all these Continental types here for their two and three treatment a day packages. Hillary and Lisa finally got some stuff booked for our first day; I had an appointment on our second. That much scheduling took more than half an hour.

I spent half my day at the pool and half on our hotel balcony, doing my best to follow the sun. This was a bit challenging as it rained all night and was partly cloudy for most of the day. The pool area is magnificent. The pool is a huge rectangle, with a long curved addition to one side and an artificial island planted with palms and bouganvilla in the middle. It's paved with hexagonal tiles in a vivid blue, making the expanse glimmer jewel like against the lush green foliage of the gardens around it. There's a smaller indoor pool with lots of jacuzzi jets, but it's not heated ... And I'm only fond of getting pummelled with water when it's good and hot.

A short walk through the gardens brings you out to the beach, of which you're aware when poolside because of the sound of the surf. It is a massively disappointing coast, unfortunately. The surf is rough, probably too much so for swimming on an unknown beach, even if you could ignore the fishing nets that were suspended fairly close in. The tides had kicked up a wide bed of seaweed at the high tied mark, interspersed with a lot of trash and a variety of sea urchin type creatures. This is a beach desperately in need of a Florida-style beach tractor that drags the sand clean each day. But that's obviously not something they do here. And despite the resemblance to Florida in the resort hotels and condos stretching as far as the eye could see, there was almost nobody to be spotted on the beach, either in repose or walking in the surf. With all that gunk, I suppose it's no surprise. Even I, who normally prefer to be seaside, retreated to the pool after my 10-minute foray.

We rendezvous-ed back at the hotel room in the late afternoon, where we sat on our porch, drank a bottle of wine and watched daylight fade. Then it was back to the harbour for dinner at the other recommended restaurant, Le Doraude. Much of a muchness with last night, except that we could eat outside and there was a bellydancer we could watch generally embarassing all the 50-something men in the place.