Sahara

I slept some of the best sleep of my life last night. By the time we got to our hotel and into bed, it was 1:00am. I have no idea how many hours I had been up for, but it was too many. Way too many. And thankfully, the hotel turned out to be pretty nice (Errachidia is not a big town, so I was looking at websites with little to no English and booking by email).

After some breakfast, we met our driver for the trip out to Tassilli Luxury Desert Camp. How long is the drive? Great question! Are we stopping anywhere along the way? Do we switch vehicles when we get to the sand? Yup, I was also wondering.

Our driver picked us up in a 4×4 SUV, and we head off toward Merzouga. We stopped along the way a few times to take some photos of the towns that spring up in the oases – the landscape is otherwise pretty barren. This space reminds me of the Bonneville salt flats – mountains in the way off distance, but otherwise, lots of flat space.

We took a short break in the town of Rissani to stroll through the Sunday market. Everything from handmade sandals and hand-carved wooden bowls to live chickens and cows are for sale here. Our driver bought us some oranges to snack on – whatever we get in the US might look nice, but it tastes only a fraction as good as a more wild orange!

Lunch was at Cafe Nora in Merzouga. A “salad” consisting of a mound of white rice and some stewed peppers and vegetables (with olives!). A Berber pizza, made of sautéed vegetables and cabbage, small nits of either beef or lamb (we couldn’t tell, but I gave mine all to Luke regardless), seasoned with amazingly aromatic curry, and all wrapped in a dough sort of like pizza dough but sort of not. It was delicious, regardless!

Around 3pm, we finally made it to our Sahara camp. Tassilli Luxury Desert Camp was really quite luxurious, with indoor plumbing and some absolutely amazing food! I had signed us up for the sunset camel ride through the dunes, so we read (and napped) a bit before mounting up.

The dunes are really amazing. Nature’s ability to create gorgeous geometric patterns in the sand is awe-inspiring. We rode out for about half an hour, walked to the top of the dunes for the views, then rode back. I am pleased to report that these camels were actually well-trained and docile – no fighting this time! They are also fuzzy, which is cute (and once the sun set, I understood why they need those wooly coats).

After a delicious dinner we listened to some singing and drums around the fire. By 10pm, it was bedtime, partly because we were tired and partly because we were absolutely freezing. Temps overnight were only 1 or 2 degrees C.