I still don’t like riding camels, but the Sahara is serene

This morning we packed our bags, jumped in the van, and began heading to the western edge of the Northern most part of the Sahara desert. With some stops along the way, the trip took about 5 hours.

The plains between the Middle and High Atlas Mountains continue to remind me of the American Southwest and show that cultures continents apart will still evolve similarity and use similar techniques. The adobe and clay house structures are evident everywhere here, as well as similar trees (Juniper) that thrive in hot high altitude climates, and underground aquifers. There are even some regions with cliff dwellings (but that’s more up in the High Atlas Mountains).

Along our route, we followed the Ziz riverbed and transversed it’s windy path a few times. This river bed floods annually and brings water to the vast plains for agricultural (date palms primarily) and civilization. At the top of a high pass we hopped out of the vehicle to walk along the highway for a few hundred feet and really get to appreciate this panoramic scenery.

Our group has kind of gotten our tour leader trained to the fact that we don’t always like being forced to eat at the pre-selected restaurants and would like local street food or specialties when possible. As a result, Khalid was gracious enough to let us out in the city of Erfoud, harass some locals about the best place to find a local lentil and beans dish, and then take us there. We ended up at a small hole in the wall restaurant where there was enough space for the cook and his kitchen inside and a smattering of chairs and tables outside. The lentils and the white beans were great. We finished our meal off with some chicken tangine and the entire thing, enough for a light lunch for three of us, was about $4. 

Entertainment for lunch came in the form of watching another patron tell the owner that his food wasn’t spicy enough and watching the fall out. The owner brought out a red chili, which the patron preceded to bite a huge chunk off of. As we watched, his face got redder and redder and he started grabbing all kinds of the wrong drinks to help cool his mouth down. We were kind of snickering and when Khalid asked why, we told him about the pepper and how adding water to the fire wasn’t gonna help the guy much. So Khalid relayed to the man that he needed milk or something creamy. The guy gets up and wanders down the block and we see him downing yogurt 10 minutes later.

The end of the road for the day was La Source hotel in the tiny town of Hassi Labied. The town is part of the bigger settlement of Merzouga, but about 3 miles from the center, thus not really walking distance in the heat. Merzouga is the gateway to the Erg Chebbi sand dunes, which sit at the northern edge of the Western Sahara Desert. An erg is a vast sea of shifting wind-swept sand that form into picturesque, undulating crests and valleys. These ergs started about 200 meters from the front door of our hotel, just across the dry riverbed. Out here, surrounded by sand, nomads, and adobe buildings, with few modern marvels in sight, you can almost convince yourself that you’ve traveled back in time or are discovering a new frontier.

We arrived in mid afternoon when the sun was blazing and had to wait a few hours for the temperature to cool down some. The hotel had a pool, but the color was a little off putting and we weren’t staying the night so it seems cumbersome to find clothes, swim, change, and repack in the common room/restroom. Instead we wandered the tiny main square of town (a block square) and then melted into puddles on the chaises of the hotel lobby (no AC or fan to be seen) until the temperatures dropped from a blistering 106+, to a mere stifling 85+.

Around 6:30, we left the hotel lobby and ventured across the riverbed to our transportation to the nomad camp, where we’d be spending the night. Our transportation was disinterested, smelly, and about as uncomfortable as we remembered; dromedaries are so not my favorite way to travel. I do though get a perverse pleasure from how much more Em hates then than I do because she’s afraid of then slipping down a sand dune or chewing on her leg. Her camel was particularly attached to my camel (or me) and kept wanting to have its face right next to my leg.

Our caravan of camels were led into the sand dunes by a local nomad, one of the many that run the camp we stayed at for the evening. One of the modern Moroccan kings recognized this area as their land and therefore the nomads are the only people allowed to build/live/operate tourist venues on it; which is pretty cool.

Our guide toured us around the smooth red sands (the sand is decay from the Atlas Mountain sandstone) as the sky went from brilliant blue and sunny to increasingly dark and brown, a sand storm was coming. At first, I think the guide and Khalid thought we could finish our camel walk before the storm hit, but that turned out to be far from possible. First we tried to venture through the storm, still on camelback, and then eventually got down and huddled behind the bulk of the dromedaries to try and block out the increasingly stronger winds. 

I was never so happy for an impulsive purchase as the $5 cotton head scarf I’d grabbed earlier in the day when we’d stopped at a look out point. The scarf easily covered my head and face, while still allowing me to see a bit and breath through the material. Even though the storm got worse instead of better, our group eventually crawled away from our camel shelter and ventured to the top of a high dune to view the town from afar (when it eventually reappeared from the wall of sand it’d been hidden behind). 

The storm lasted a good hour, left my skin fully exfoliated from the pelting it received, left me filthy with sand in places it had no right to be, and my camera may have been an expensive causality (Khalid said there’s a shop in Essaouira may be able to properly clean the sand out of all the nooks and crannies), but it was a great experience. After the first 15 minutes or so, everyone just gave into to the fact that we were staying out in the storm and started taking pictures (our cell phones fared much better than our real cameras) and attempted the stare at the storm. 

As the winds died down some and we climbed the dune (this was so much more taxing than it had any right to be and I was tempted to just stay perched half way up the dune), we enjoyed watching the other tourist groups that had also gotten caught out in the storm. Some of their guides were crazier than ours and continued to walk their rides around through the pelting sand. I’m glad our guide wasn’t that nuts…although for him, this is probably a weekly occurrence.

Once the winds died down a bit and town was visible once more, we headed to camp. Camp was a series of tents pitched about a quarter of a mile into the desert from the hotel. Khalid said they used to have the camp pitched further into the actually valley, but the government disallowed that practice because they said it was harder to track the number of tourists out there (I guess too many illegal tour operators sending people to the camps without the government getting their cut). We were the only tourists present for the evening, which wasn’t bad, but kind of sad, as Em and I had hoped to meet some other people and swap stories. Our group is so small, sometimes it’s nice to meet others. Even without new temporary members, we had a good evening with some delicious veggies and turkey tangine, salad, and fruit. I am seriously going to gain 20 pounds on this trip.

The tents for bed soaked up the desert heat and radiated them back 10 fold, making it less appealing for a place of rest for the evening. I grabbed my pillow and headed to the central courtyard, where I promptly claimed a bed under the stars. I think the local nomads were a little surprised to see me there, but probably understood, as one grabbed another bed under the stars, and two other carried mattresses outside the camp to the desert to sleep. For all the laughing Em gave me for refusing to sleep in the oven, she wandered out and joined me about an hour later. Unfortunately, about 1 am, water fell from the sky and we were force to retreat back to the oven, which had only cooled fractionally. 

When our 4:45am wake up call came, lets just say we were a tad grumpy. Being, hot, dirty, and with literal gritty eyes, will do that to a person. The pre-dawn wake up though came with a purpose; we were going to ride our camels back to the dune of the previous evening, to hike it and watch the sunrise over the Sahara. The hike to the top of the dune was just as taxing as it had been 10 hours previously, but we accomplished it and were meet with the brilliance that is the calm of a waking morning. 

Without a sandstorm, we could see for miles: black and red sand plains on the town side, and beautiful, shimmering peaks of sand on the desert side. We even watched as an escaped camel went on a solidarity walkout about a half mile from our perch. Camels in Morocco have been fully domesticated and therefore this guy was an escapee on a meditative journey. Khalid said that sometimes it takes days to recover a camel if it takes too long to notice they’re gone.not sure who I’m rooting for in that situation.

After the sun crested the distance peaks and the temperature began to climb, we slid down our dune and clambered back atop our mounts for the slow ride back to town. While the entire experience was majestic and a highlight (especially with the unexpected sandstorm), I can’t help comparing it to our desert Bedouin experience in Jordan and finding it a little lacking. I guess that’s one of the pitfalls of being lucky enough to travel to many different places; you invariably start comparing them to one another.

After a delicious breakfast (more bread and cakes, but with the addition of fried eggs and yogurt), we said goodbye to the Sahara and headed to Todra Gorge.