Camel Trek, Part Two of Two

Hi, everyone. Yes, that goombah with the Berber headress and the too-big glasses with a line of camel riders and the Sahara desert behind her is me! (One of my famous self portraits.)

When I last left you, I mentioned that we had crossed alot of Morocco, making our way from Rabat to Merzouga, near the Algerian border.

We arrived at what the owners could reasonably advertise as the "Last Hotel Before Thousands of Miles of Desert!" where we were able to change into clothes suitable for riding camels, have our desert headscarves tied for us in the traditional way by our guide Hamza (a native of Merzouga) and take unnecessary stuff out of our backpacks.

With the help of camel herder Mohammed, we selected our steeds, saddled up and then lurched upward with our camels as they stood, probably sitting about 10 feet above the ground. It's a delightful sensation, really. I felt totally comfortable and safe up there. (As in horseback riding, they use the gentlest animals for these treks. We had no bad mannered spitting camels, only burpers and cud-chewers.) We headed straight into the dunes (which were about 50 to 75 feet high), adjusting our bodies to the slow, rolling gate of the camels, and hearing not a sound except the slight plopping noise of camel feet on sand, the instructions of Mohammed to the lead camel, and some indigestion from a number of our beasts. The sun set within 40 minutes or so, but we kept riding into the darkness, with only starlight, for another hour or so, until coming upon various fires and campsites of other groups. It was quite beautiful, and great to see the Milky Way again.

At the campsite, there was more lurching as the camels knelt for dismount, and then an extended stumble through deep sand in the darkness, until we arrived at our large camel-hair tents, with a long rug, table and large propane lamp (mais oui!) in the center area. Amazingly, we were fed a rather elaborate Moroccan meal (a tangine, which I mentioned back in a previous blog). Afterwards, we had a bit of drumming from Mohammed, accompanied by a teenaged Berber boy who lives in the desert with his father as he guards the campsites.

Sleeping arrangements were simple. All six of us crammed into one long tent, using small mattresses and staying warm with lots of oily wool blankets. It's hard to explain how strange this all was without any lighting, and without bathrooms and pajamas 'n stuff. (We used God's great desert to do our duty, and buried our Kleenexes behind us.)

One of the people in our party has quite a snore, so she was the only one who slept that night! In the morning, bleary eyed but resolved not to be cranky, we climbed an enormous dune (incredibly soft red sand, so quite breathless) to watch the sunrise.

Then another lurch up, and back we headed on our camels. The ride back was simply spectacular. We left at about 7:00 AM, so the light slanted across the dunes in a really amazing way. I have lots of pictures of our camel/people shadows, of Hamza's desert visage, and of the tiny tracks of desert mice and beetles in the sand. (Naturally, we took some sand from the Sahara to display in little Moroccan bottles.)

Anyway, after breakfast at the hotel, the ride back was long. However, it was enlivened by a visit with Morocco's Barbary Apes (or more properly, Macaques). These are tail-less monkeys native to Morocco, and living across the cedar forests of the Middle Atlas.

Last weekend, the same group of us travelled to Fes and Meknes, but I don't have time to write that up now. People are kind of in a hurry to see all that can be seen here (as most will not stay for as long as I'm staying), so we're on a rather crazy schedule! This weekend we're going to Marrakesh, and the following (long) weekend to Egypt to see the Pyramids.

By the way, the ranks of volunteers keeps thinning, so I'm now a hot property at the orphanage, with nurses fighting over me. Today I was pulled away from the yellow nest and into the blue nest so that the nurses could have their break. I peformed a solitary rendition of the hokey pokey in a playpen of one-year olds for about 20 minutes. Can you imagine?

B'salaama. Will try to write tomorrow, so that I get the adventure and blog in synch.