One of the things that made our visit to Tunisa so fun was that we really didn't know where we were going to go until we got there. After we arrived in Tunis and finally got our luggage from the airline we took a trip to the train station to see the schedules. While standing at the ticket counter we saw a flyer that included a photo of this beautiful train going through the mountains and we said "what is that?". Turns out it was a tourist train that ran a small route in the southern part of the country from a town called Metloui. This seemed like a great place to start our tour of the country so we said why not, let's take the night train to Metloui and see what happens. We arrived in Metloui around 5am, it was very very cold outside and the small train station had no heat. Since nothing was open we just sat in the station (see photo) for about 4 hours until the Lezard Rouge (this cool tourist train) was ready to leave. The Lezard Rouge train is a series of re-furbished old train cars, one of which was owned by the Bae (ruler) of Tunisia. It winds up through rocky ravines and tunnels to a mine at the top. The train line itself is an old mining route. I love old trains so this was a very fun trip. We met a wonderful family from Tunis along the way and ended up spending more time with them later on in our trip. Metloui itself is a very small town with virtually nothing around it. It was built for mining during the French occupation and with the exception of the mines, there is literally nothing else around except some dry rocky hills and an expanse of desert. The city itself it nothing more than a few paved intersections and a lot of small houses lining the dirt side streets. Nonetheless, its not often that you get to visit such a remote place, so I found it quite interesting.