Kathleen5/20/2013 – Merzouga
We arrived at Merzouga after a 7-hour journey through the Atlas mountains and the edge of the desert. The landscape was stunning, switching from dry desert nothingness as far as the eye can see to Oasis villages, where palm trees cover the entire flood plain of the river and a ribbon of green dotted with Kasbahs made of mud bricks and straw can be seen in the midst of otherwise stark stone cliffs and rocky, barren lands. The newer Kasbahs are built of bricks covered in concrete, but often the concrete is colored to match the timeless brown of the older dwellings made from mud. Sheep herders and goat herders abound and the landscape is dotted with the herds moving to find greener pastures. Driving is a bit third-worldy. You share the road with buses (a very loose description), trucks, which by law must occupy at minimum 2/3rds of the road, livestock ranging from chicken through cow, bikes, mopeds (seemingly a six passenger vehicle), rickshaws, the odd lowly pedestrian and modes of transport that fall squarely in the “other” category. Speed limits are also a bit of a mystery. As far as I can tell, in an effort to save on sign post costs, they are entirely omitted in favor of having police officers spaced out every few miles along the road. If they decide you are traveling too fast, they wave you over and explain this to you while writing you a large fine….a system elegant in its way. I took about a million pictures from the moving car, as the landscape seemed so foreign and new, but most are a bit blurred…..I will post a couple of the better ones.
Merzouga is a village in the Sahara Desert in Morocco, on the edge of Erg Chebbi, a 50km long and 5km wide set of sand dunes that reach up to 350m. Most people are here to take a camel safari into the dunes, and to get a taste of remote (tourism-influenced) Berber life.
The local population is mix of Arabs and Berber, and generally welcoming and friendly.
The hotel we stayed at, Riad Taureg, seemed a bit rough at first, but grew on us quite a bit as we shook off the travel dust and tenseness from the day and as the sun went down. This Riad seems to mostly be frequented by Moroccon visitors, but I guess the story was different until the last couple of years, in which the European economy has had such tough times. Apparently, the most common tourists from abroad are French, Dutch and German, but there was only one other guest in residence during our stay. The manager, as per usual in the Riads, was friendly as could be and they made us a delightful dinner of macaroni with meatsauce and meatballs (although the Moroccan food is very good, we are actually getting a bit tired of the Tagrines, which most places serve, it is a heavy dish and something a bit lighter and more familiar was welcome).
The next day we took a hike on the dunes (right outside our door) and then lazed about (or worked) until evening, when our camels arrived to take us for our overnight Saharan adventure. Our seemingly short, 1 1/2 hour trek was beautiful in the setting sun, but oh my goodness, did it hurt my derierre. Seriously, after about 10 minutes my rump was extremely unhappy and it was all but excruciating after an hour. Curiously, Steve did not experience the same problem, so I am at a loss to explain it. If anyone knows why someone with considerably more cushion would get sore-butt alot quicker, I would be fascinated to know….anywho, the rest of it was great….when we finally got to camp, we ran out to take a seat on one of the dunes and watch the finale of the sunset…..it was a little windy, so we completely saturated our clothes, hair, eyes, ears, etc. with sand while this was happening, but it was completely worth it to have such a rare experience. After the sun went down, they served us dinner in the big “restaurant tent”, which was actually quite good but very drawn out after a long day. We think the point is to let the different tourists get to know each other, but unfortunately, there was only one other pair of travellers there, two young arab(?) women and they either didn’t speak English or weren’t interested in chatting with Americans, because they were pretty unfriendly, a change from so many Moroccan and French folks we have met thus far that have been fantastically friendly….oh well.
The other thing we really wanted to get out of this tour was a fabulous view of the stars at night, as we have read we could expect in some other accounts (I must say, after camelling accross the dunes for 1.5 hours, we were suprised that our tent camp was right next to a road…..the dunes are very narrow at that point and we essentially went all of the way across). We didn’t get to see much of a star show, however, not really because of the road (there was really nothing else on it except for another tent camp every mile or so) but because we have this amazing ability to plan star-gazing trips during a full moon. Oh well, we still have high hopes for the future (we are planning to go to Madagascar after-all).
Anyway, dunes very cool, camel ride fun but painful, moon annoying, sunrise breathtaking, all-in-all a pretty great experience. Oh yeah, the extremely nice folks at the hotel also let us keep our baggage in our room and take showers when we got back the next morning plus breakfast so huge kudos to them for that….definately would recommend!
