Wow ... back to civilization. As you may have inferred from the recent lack of posting, I have been away from internet access for the last couple days. On Friday, our goal was the dunes of Merzouga. We left Azrou in the morning by bus, but for some reason there was no bus. Instead of a bus that day, the bus company was running a painter's work van south. We sat ON THE FLOOR of this van packed with EIGHTEEN PEOPLE for the 5-6 hour drive to Er-Rachida, all for no reduction in the usual bus fare of 65Dh. It really was hell because once you sit down, your legs fall asleep and it's impossible to re-adjust due to the number of people sitting around (and on top of) you. Also one woman got sick from the up and down of the mountain road and was discretely puking into a plastic bag behind her veil. At the first rest stop, I had enough of sitting on the floor so I bought an empty crate (30Dh) from a fruit vendor for use as a bench. From then on, I was riding high -- It was really my finest hour.
The other funny thing is that we kept getting stopped by cops, like at least half a dozen times along the way. The cops are just standing there in the highway into or out from a city and every time they would wave us over to the shoulder. The driver kept a wad of bills on the dash to pay these guys off with, I guess it was because there were too many people in the van or something. When we finally arrived, instead of stopping at the bus station as per usual, we just pulled into an alley on the
other side of town just to avoid the cops!According to the driver, all this hassle was because of us three! I guess tourists aren't allowed to travel this way.
But we weren't at our destination yet. We met these two guys who allegedly work at a hotel in Merzouga and shared a taxi collectif to Rissani, where the hotel 4x4 drove us off road to the hotel. We hadn't picked out a place to stay there yet, but it was convenient to just give in and stay at their place. The reason is this: if you look at the LP map of Merzouga, you see the usual cluster of hotels on the town's main road. But, the scale of the map is about 1 inch == 20km! In fact, the hotels are in the middle of the black desert and about a 20 minute walk from one to the other! Since it was already dark, we just checked in.
The nice thing about this hotel topography (if you're the hotel owner) is that you can charge whatever you want for food and water because you're customers are stuck there in the desert and cannot buy these essentials anywhere else. The basic price for accomodation (the number printed in the LP) is very low -- 20/30 per night to sleep in the tents/a room, but the food is very expensive. Where they really make their money though is the camel excursions into the desert. We decided to do one the night we arrived, before realizing that the dunes were only a 15 minute walk away.
All the hotels and the town itself is located on the black desert, which is flat and rocky and sprinkled with a heavy layer of black sand, hence the name. But the reason tourists come here is for the fabulous dunes. The night we arrived, we didn't realize that the black mountains we saw in the moonlight were actually made of sand. They're exactly like what you expect the "real" desert to look like from the movies -- huge dunes hundreds of meters high made of fine sand, with a rippled texture like in the shallow shore at a beach. And the movie connection is not a coincidence because they film many movies here, most famously
The Mummy.
Anyway, the next afternoon we left on our very expensive camel ride/desert camping trip. The camels are pretty cool, but it really hurts your ass to ride them despite the mountains of blankets they pile on as a saddle. You hop on while the camel is kneeling, then you're bucked first way forward then backwards as it unfolds its legs to stand up. The camels made a lot of gurgling and belching sounds, as if they were filled to their throat with water. You could hear it sloshing around inside as we slowly walked along.
We arrived at the camp site in time for the sunset, and climbed to a high dune for the best view. Walking in the sand is hard but interesting. If you have sandles on and are walking flat you can avoid sinking in, but otherwise each step is a big effort. Also, by the end of the day, the sand is really hot on one side of a ridge but cool on the other. In the early morning, walking barefoot up the dunes is painful because the sand is so cold. Finally, if your walking disturbs the top of a ridge enough, a huge sheet of sand will start to slide making a really cool sound.
For dinner we had the best meat tagine so far on the trip. It's funny because we also had the best couscous on our Rif trek. The best food seems to be cooked outdoors by your guide. In comparison, the restaurant food is crap. After dinner, we sat around listening to our guide tell bad jokes, which was quite hard because of his difficulties with English and French. Abdul was a Bedouin, had just turned 20, had never been to school, couldn't read or write, had never travelled beyond Rissani (40km away) and had learned all his French and English from working with tourists. During the summer, when there are no tourists because of the heat, he works digging up the fossils that everyone tries to sell you around here. He also said he has a girlfriend in Austrailia that his father won't let him marry because she isn't a Bedouin.
In the morning we got up early for the sunrise, and we were supposed to try sandboarding down the dunes but none of us could try it because we didn't have the boots. So we just headed back again on the camels who had just been sitting there in the exact same position all night long, making their grumbling noises. (They tell the tourists that the coughing and rumbling sounds are from smoking too many Camels har har har)
We wanted to leave as soon as we got back to the hotel but it was impossible because of the (Aid El Kabir?) holiday. Every family slits the throat of a sheep and spends the day (and possible the next, and the next) eating it. So the hotel was deserted because all the staff had gone home to their families and even if we could get back to Rissani, no busses would be running.
To pass the time, I read my friend's copy of
On the Road, the quintessential travel book. This, along with swatting at flies, playing with the many cats and eating more bread than I have in my whole life up to this point, took pretty much all day.
Today at 8am we finally got out of there by 4x4. I should have offered the guy $20 to let me drive across the desert because it looked pretty fun. From Rissani, we took a minibus to Erfoud, and from there I squeezed into a group of Australians' taxi collectif to Er-Rachidia where I would have a better chance of finding a bus to Marrakesh. So that where I am now, alone again because my friends aren't in such a rush as I am and will catch the slow bus from Erfoud. It's really weird how you can travel with people for so long, then just leave them with a blink of an eye decision. Hopefully I'll hear from them by email since I want a couple pictures they were nice enough to take of me.
The plan from here is Marrakesh bus at 6, then Rabat, then back to Spain and bus it to Paris where I'll spend whatever time is left.
