"Nebeur" Nebeur by maykal

Being kidnapped always adds a bit of excitement to any journey, one finds.

One of Nebeur's bustling streets

Yasser kidnapped me to Nebeur, an isolated village in the mountains north of Le Kef. I had no passport, no toothbrush, no change of clothes, no iPod, no phone...but my kidnapper and his family did make me eat lots of Tunisian home cooking and let me have the odd hot shower, and of course I was allowed to wander round nebeur a bit, dashing from cafe to freezing cafe in the biting cold...yes, there was even snow on higher ground.

Lac Mellegue

One day, Yasser found the keys to an ancient Volkswagen Beetle that just happened to be sitting in his family's garage, so we made a trip out of Nebeur. We got to the main road, and looked at the signpost to Jendouba. We both thought "Bulla Regia" at the same moment, but then Yasser remembered he didn't have a licence or insurance, and didn't want to risk being stopped. So instead, we took a rough track out the other end of Nebeur to Barrage Mellegue, a local beauty spot...the dam forming Lac Mellegue. It was bitterly cold, and snow was visible on the mountains by the Algerian border.

After two days, something secured my release, I'm not sure what, but maybe it had something to do with my clothes looking increasingly grubbier, so I was released and put on a Le kef bound bus.

• Pros:Being fed until I burst, Tunisian hospitality, getting to know a rural Tunisian town
• Cons:The cold...being unprepared for it, and unable to escape it.
• In a nutshell:There's no real reason to head out to Nebeur, unless you have friends there, but it is a chance to see a town that tourism has bypassed