Sahara Expedition - Days Two and Three

When I got down to breakfast on the second day of our trip, Scotty greeted me with a serious face and said, "We have a problem." A thousand possibilities flashed through my mind. "The Italians took our seats," he continued. UGH - it was worse than anything I could have imagined!! We definitely had the best seats on the van - the first row behind the driver meant that we had a good view and more legroom than anyone else. The Italians getting these seats meant that they now had a total monopoly on good seats, since they also had the very front seats, next to the driver.

I scurried out to the van to scope out the situation. Those dastardly Italians had even left one of their men standing guard by the van, smoking and giving me smug looks. They had reserved the good seats with a variety of jackets and snacks. Darn them!! Determined not to be relegated to the very back of the bus, we sat down in the next row back, in the seats formerly held by the Chinese. We discussed the possibility that the Chinese would get upset, and hoped that they would so that it would give us better standing to reclaim our seats from the Italians.

No luck - the Chinese boarded the van and took new seats without any comment. RATS. We were left in our new seats, our knees pressed against the seats in front of us, our view less majestic than the previous day.

We set out and drove for a few hours, finally pulling over near some farmland. This man (in the picture) opened the door of the bus, popped his head in, and enthusiastically told us to get some water as we would be walking through the fields and our driver would meet us with the van in the town.

We were mostly befuddled at first, since we were used to being dropped off in locations with no explanation and only a time (given in Italian) of when to be back. This tour guide took us through some farmland, pointing out various family plots and talking about some interesting topics like their irrigation systems and how they harvest dates and olives. It was an interesting tour and very nice to have an English-speaking guide. Still annoyed about the seat-stealing, I also was glad that the guide seemed generally annoyed by the Italians, mostly because they refused to walk as fast as everyone else and were constantly lagging behind.

After our farmland tour, we walked into a small nearby village and went to the house of a nomadic family. (I'm aware that nomadic families shouldn't have houses - I think only some of the family lives there, or only part of the year.) We learned about traditional methods of producing Berber rugs. We all got to try carding wool and learned a bit about the different colors and styles of rug. These rugs are produced from sheep/lamb's wool, camel wool, and cactus fiber. I would have liked to know a little more about the cactus fiber production but sadly we didn't talk about it much.

Here is a beautiful handwoven rug, marred slightly by those smug Italians smirking in the background.

After the lesson on rug weaving, our host of course tried to sell us some of the rugs and it was VERY TEMPTING - I'm glad I can tell myself BOTH that I can't afford it AND that I don't have anywhere to put them, because if only one of those things were true, I probably would have left there with enough carpets to cover a football field.

Once we left the Berber house, we went and wandered around a gorge for a bit. Then, our friendly tour guide saw us off, informing us that we would stop in about an hour for lunch and then had a three hour drive to the desert, where we would ride camels to our camp. Since this was more information than we'd been given about any aspect of our itinerary up to this point, we were very grateful to him.

In the afternoon, we stopped for a few more photo stops. Here is proof that I am in Morocco:

We drove and drove and drove as the landscape got increasingly flatter and more barren. Finally, we pulled off the main road and drove along a dirt road for a while before finally arriving at a compound. A Berber man greeted us and seemed in a huge hurry. He told us we could only bring one small bag or backpack, so there was general scrambling as everyone tried to stuff things they thought they'd need into their day packs. Then we were herded towards the camels:

They gestured that we should go choose a camel, so I picked the one I thought was the cutest. They were all laying down, so we climbed on easily, and then once we were on, they would clamber to their feet. Each camel was tied to the camel in front of them so we didn't have any way of controlling them. I named my camel Pedro. All Pedro wanted was attention from Scotty, who was on the camel in front of us. (We named Scotty's camel Horace.) Here is what Scotty saw every time he glanced back:

Pedro <3 Scotty:

Once we were on, it became clear that there weren't enough camels for everyone. One of the British girls and all the Chinese were left camel-less, and one of the Italian girls got scared of her camel and they put that camel away. They told us they would get camels for them and they would be right behind us, so the ten of us with camels started off into the desert.

We were treated to a beautiful sunset at the beginning of our trek:

As the sun went down, we suddenly heard cheering and the roar of an SUV, and looked back to see our companions sitting on the roof of an SUV, waving and shouting at us as they went passed. Apparently they had not found camels for them, but they seemed pretty excited by their dune hopping.

The sun went down within the first half hour of our trek, and when the sun goes down in the Sahara, it gets DARK. It got darker and darker until we couldn't see much around us. The guide pulled out a flashlight - the girls in front said that he was constantly looking for rocks and shrubs which marked the route. We rode the camels on and on as the stars came out - an unforgettable experience to be lurching along on a camel, gazing at the bright blanket of stars above you. It was a new moon, so there was really nothing around us but stars and darkness.

After more than an hour, I began to get paranoid that we were lost and would never arrive at camp. There were no lights on the horizon and we just kept climbing one dune after another. Finally, after about two hours, we reached the camp and the guides settled the camels in for the night. We were escorted to a large tent where we hung out and chit-chatted for a while. The British girl who hadn't gotten to ride a camel told us that the camel guides told her that we were TWO HOURS late arriving at camp, and they had started putting camels away - which explains both the lack of camels and the wandering the desert in the dark. Another victory for our excellent driver.

Here's part of our group hanging out in the large tent, waiting for dinner:

We were fed dinner in this tent - I couldn't tell you what we ate for dinner except that it was served in large tangines and we got no plates. Everyone ate out of the communal serving dish and we generally created a mess, which was happily cleaned up by a cat who apparently lived at camp to serve this sole purpose. The food was some sort of meat/rice/vegetable dish and it was pretty good, especially since the camel ride had gotten quite chilly at the end.

During dinner, they asked for volunteers to take the SUV back in the morning, since we didn't have enough camels in camp for everyone. As much as I enjoyed my camel ride, it was not very exciting when compared to horse riding, and I wanted to make sure that those who hadn't gotten to ride one yet got a chance, so I agreed to take the SUV back in the morning. This also meant getting to sleep in for an extra hour or so.

We were escorted to our tents after dinner - small, multi-person tents filled with carpets with small mattresses around the edges. There were stacks of blankets and I immediately secured three big wool blankets for myself, as well as an extra pillow.

The guides started a small fire and brought out some drums, and we had a good time dancing around the fire. More and more stars appeared overhead as the night went on, until the sky was filled with thousands and thousands. Eventually, I retired to bed, falling asleep to the drumbeats from people still around the fire.

I woke up a couple hours later absolutely freezing. I readjusted my blankets and tried to warm up, but my feet were SO COLD. To give you an idea of how cold it was: I had taken my three wool blankets and folded them in half, so I basically had six heavy blankets between myself and the air... and it might as well have been a thin sheet. I kept convincing myself that I only needed to arrange the blankets correctly and I would warm up, so I tried to shift them around but it didn't make that much of a difference. I wound up curling into a small ball and getting some more sleep, though I woke frequently and spent the coldest hour of the night just laying in bed shivering.

Scotty had to get up early and leave with the camel group, so I didn't see him first thing in the morning, but when we got back on the bus, I asked him if he was warm enough, and he related his ineffective method of dealing with the cold: "I woke up in the middle of the night and was so cold, I put my spare pair of underwear on... my head." Ah yes, the warmth of a boxer hat.

In the morning, the tents stayed incredibly dark, but we were eventually roused from bed by one of the Berber guides, who came in and ordered that we get up and go watch the sunrise. The camel group had already left, so it was just me and... THE ITALIANS. Interestingly, it was all six Italians - the four that were our arch-enemies, as well as the two nice guys. Apparently, camel riding is just not an Italian thing to do.

I hiked with the two nice Italians to watch the sunrise:

Giant sand dunes - that palm tree at the base was not small:

The morning light created gorgeous shadows on the sand:

Surveying the desert landscape:

When the sun was fully risen, we returned to camp. Here is one of the tents in the daylight - a blue table with the "bed" next to it.

There were probably about ten small sleeping tents in the camp, in addition to the larger eating tent:

Here's more desert:

We sat around being bored for a while. Secretly I was thrilled by this. Scotty and I had strategized the previous night about how to get our seat back, and as the minutes ticked by and all the Italians were trapped in camp, I became more and more certain that Scotty and the camel group would arrive first, meaning the seats would be ours!!

I helped one of the guides fold all the blankets in the tents. One of the nice Italian guys discovered a snow board and decided to snowboard down a dune. This went about as well as you might expect:

Finally, the SUV arrived to convey us back. Everyone put their backpacks inside and climbed up onto the roof. There was a basic roof rack on top and we sat with our legs dangling over the side, holding the bar of the rack. Here is our shadow:

We zoomed along, going right up and over the dunes. It was so fun!! The ride was mostly incredibly smooth since we were driving through soft sand. Sometimes we would go over the top of a dune and be tossed in the air and scramble to grab the rack again. Other dunes were so steep that we would all slide either forward or back on the roof.

You can see some of our tracks here:

The Sahara - it really just keeps going:

When we arrived back: VICTORY!! Scotty had secured our seats, and the British girls also got good seats, so life was good. We set off on the road again, sustained mostly by Pringles.

For some reason, this Pringles can made me think of Trevor:

The rest of the day was a long, long drive back to Marrakesh. This picture pretty much sums up the entire day:

When we arrived back in Marrakesh, first order of business was to shower and try to get rid of the sand. We were back at the same hostel we had stayed at previously. Showers felt great and we then went and got dinner and reminisced about the trip. We agreed that the past three days had been totally unforgettable, for both bad reasons (THE COLD, the confusion, our awful driver/guide, being ridiculously cramped all the time) and really good reasons (incredible sights, trekking in the desert, seeing the amazing stars, dune hopping, camel riding). 

We have currently continued our journeys and are now in Essaouira! Blog entry about here is going to be guest-written by Scotty so get excited!!