Tunisia was the ideal destination for our honeymoon.

It had it all: the sun-soaked sandy beaches and resorts to spoil us, the historical sites – Roman and Arab and Berber – to feed our sense of wonder, and the infrastructure so that if we wanted to get away from the tourist hordes, we could easily hop a bus or 4×4 (or even camel) and run away into the desert. We were planning our upcoming getaway, and this last point interested me the most, for while my bride-to-be Nazma raved about all these great things, I was harbouring secret ambitions.

I was three years old, and very impressionable, the first time I saw Star Wars. In later years, I discovered that several Star Wars movies had been filmed in Tunisia. With its arid landscapes and bizarre “troglodyte” homes carved into the ground, parts of Tunisia are so alien that standing in for a desert planet (in a galaxy far, far away) was really no big stretch. And many of the sets were still standing.

So as Nazma gushed, I was smiling and nodding and figuring out train schedules.

* * *

After our first week in Tunisia (spent at a nice hotel on the Mediterranean coast, in the resort town of Sousse), I was champing at the bit. I had convinced Nazma of the merits of traipsing around the country looking for abandoned filming locations. With our guidebook and dusty backpacks, we left the sandy beaches and air-conditioned rooms behind and set off.

Our first stop was Matmata, 4 hours by train south of Sousse. The Matmata “troglodyte” homes are underground warrens dug by the indigenous Berber people hundreds of years ago to escape the scorching heat. An open pit 5 to 10 metres wide and about as deep forms a home’s courtyard, with smaller white-washed caves leading off the sides. Anyone with a basement during a heat-wave knows just how effective this is, but no one ever did it with such drama.

One pit dwelling in Matmata, made famous as the interior of Luke Skywalker’s home in Star Wars, is now a hotel open to flocks of day-trippers and those few (like starry-eyed me) who want to stay the night surrounded by futuristic-looking vinyl pipes and door jambs (most of the set pieces are still in place). Tired but jubilant, I dumped my backpack in our room and ran off to poke around the hotel. Poor Nazma, who was just tired, followed reluctantly.

This was no Hotel Vancouver (or even a Motel 6), and certainly no place to spend a honeymoon. Some of the mattresses had anonymous and enigmatic stains. The common washrooms were hosed down daily by the staff but that seemed the extent of the upkeep. I didn’t care! We were going to have breakfast where Luke drank blue milk and whined to his uncle about going off to the Imperial Academy!

At this point, Nazma was not only questioning the wisdom of agreeing to this fool’s crusade, but probably wondering whether there was a clause anywhere in our iron-clad vows that would get her out of this.

* * *

Clear on the other side of the country is a town called Tozeur, known as a centre for date cultivation and, more recently, as a tourist-driven desert resort. With its huge oasis and nearby hilltop forts, we could see why. For me, though, it was the setting-off point for two very important movie sets.

30km north of Tozeur lies Mos Espa, an entire desert town and “spaceport” built for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. We came over a rise to the east and there it lay, squat and dilapidated in the desert sun.

A lot is made about movie magic. You’re supposed to believe that the tall white towers somehow collect moisture from the desiccated air of a desert planet. In the film, the huts and domes of the spaceport housed people from a hundred different worlds. But holes have already been torn in the crumbling brown plaster shells of houses. White paint from the derelict towers had begun to strip away, revealing the plywood and cracked plastic underneath.

We’d read that the film crew had spent four and a half months building and filming, all for 12 minutes of footage. As one of the more recent sets, it is still in fair condition but, sitting abandoned now, the eroding sands and blistering sun will slowly raze the artificial city.

As we wandered around this ghost town in the middle of nowhere, the exposed wooden ribs, peeling whitewash, and baked, embrittled styrofoam reminded me that as much as Star Wars was part of the country’s history, it was just that: history. The actors in woolen capes sparring and sweating in the desert heat had come and gone, much as the Romans and Arabs and Berbers had done in the past, each leaving their own distinct mark on Tunisia’s long history. And tourists like us would come and marvel at these sights, but also eventually depart ourselves.

* * *

We had arranged a 4×4 from Tozeur to take us out to Mos Espa. Now we turned south and sped into the Chott El-Jerid, a vast salt flat where the occasional mound of harvested salt still indicated a centuries-old livelihood. Somewhere in this expanse was the last stop on my fanatic’s tour of Tunisia; Nazma was thrilled.

It took some time to find the small structure in the cracked, barren flat. We started down a faint set of tire tracks but quickly had to turn back to the edge of the Chott to ask for directions. Finally, as we raced in, a blip on the horizon grew into an igloo-like structure that had served as the outside of Luke Skywalker’s home. (The hotel in Matmata, several hours to the east, was the inside – how’s that for movie trickery?)

There was something especially evocative about this little hut. The other locations had had touches of reality: the hotel was a working business (with sporadically working toilets); Mos Espa was in disarray, and a fraction the size it was in the movie. But this dusty igloo, sitting alone in an endless, alien plain, looked exactly as it did to a mesmerized three-year-old boy in a darkened theatre 25 years ago.

There is a scene in the first movie, where Luke Skywalker charges out of the house after a argument with his uncle and perches on a small rise beside the house. The music swells as he contemplates his future, watching the twin suns of his homeworld setting in the background. It is bar-none the cheesiest moment in the film.

We were leaving Tunisia in a few days to return to our jobs and the familiarity of Vancouver, and as melodramatic as it sounds, I was totally feeling what Luke felt. The honeymoon was almost over; the uncertain prospect of a sedentary, suburban existence stretched out before me like the Chott.

In a fit of poignancy I stomped out of the igloo and up to the little ridge – still there after all these years. My vigilant and ever-loving wife had the digital camera on me the entire time. If you watch the video clip, you’d almost mistake me for a cargo-pant-wearing Asian Luke Skywalker.

* * *

We travelled by overnight bus to the relative modernity of Tunis, the capitol. Our flight was leaving the next morning, and we sat on a curb on the French-colonial main boulevard in the warm evening and watched the marauding packs of male machismo strutting by.

The sleeplessness on the bus had given me time for the last two weeks to sink in. Tunisia had been the perfect destination for our honeymoon after all. We’d had our days on the beaches, and visiting the filming locations had been the fulfillment of a childhood dream. The intrusion of reality, though a little sobering, turned Tunisia from a sci-fi movie backdrop into a much more compelling and memorable experience.

And it made for an excellent chance to bond with my new wife. I mean, if our marriage can survive a honeymoon-cum-quixotic-Star-Wars-pilgrimage to Tunisia, it can survive anything.