Desert Weekend

Sorry for the length of time since my last update - I've been down and out with a nasty bug for the past few days.  :-(  It really sucks, I've missed three days of my volunteer placement over these two weeks - the main reason for coming here in the first place!  That's definitely a bummer.  Anyway, here is an update from last weekend and I'll try to catch up soon.

Friday afternoon I began an amazing journey with four other CCS volunteers (Erin, Hanna, Alex and Monty) to the edge of the Sahara desert.  We had a FANTASTIC guide named Hamza - he was so wonderful - and a funny driver we nicknamed Abdu.  Friday afternoon we drove for about 5 hours, stopping along the way to see some of the sights.  The landscape in Morocco is beautiful and varied - from the Mediterranean climate of Rabat to the desert of Merzouga with forest, pastures, and mountains in between.  Saturday consisted of another 6 hours of driving and sightseeing before we reached the desert dunes.

One of our first stops was to feed some monkeys in a forested area - they were so sweet!  They came right up to us and took bread from our hands.  I was so excited feeding them that I didn't get many good pictures.  :-)

Each town in Morocco has, somewhere, the Moroccan motto spelled out in the landscape. We saw this in a few towns - it reads "God, Country, King" (from right to left).  I was trying to think of the U.S.' motto - is it Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness?  Or Land of the Free, Home of the Brave?  What is it?  (my patriotic knowledge = FAIL)  Morocco is a royal kingdom and something interesting I learned is that it is illegal for Moroccan's to speak badly of the King - you get jailed, for a long time, if you're caught. It does sound like the current King (Mohammed VI) has actually done quite a bit to improve the lives of Moroccans, particularly women.

Here is a big pile of goat and sheep skins on the side of the road, waiting to be taken to the tanneries in Fez.  Plus a few other really cool sights we saw on our way to the Sahara! 

Hamza took us into the bowels of a kasbah - it must have been 100 degrees outside (miserable heat), but when we went through the halls of the kasbah the temperature dropped considerably.  The walls are made of a mixture of mud, straw and water.  We actually got to go into someone's home and have tea in a real Moroccan's living room!  It was very cool. 


We finally made it to the dunes of Merzouga in the late afternoon.  It was so ridiculously hot - Hanna has an alarm clock/thermometer device and it was about 103 degrees inside our van while driving down the highway with all the windows open.  Uggh!  We had some tea to relax before learning how to tie our turbans and heading off into the desert on the camels.  The turbans were quite helpful - you leave a long piece of cloth loose to protect your face from the sand (when the wind gusts) or to protect your skin from the searing hot sun.  We also found it helpful to keep flies from going into our mouths.

The camel ride was surreal - I mean, come on, I rode a camel in the Sahara desert!!!  Such a crazy and unexpected experience!  We rode on our stinky, snotty camels for about an hour and a half across the dunes to a Berber camp.  The camp was actually really nice and comfortable - they had very sturdy tents with small mattresses and sheets for each of us, a nice table with comfy cushions for us to relax.  But watch out for the yellow sand!  ha ha ha

We climbed one of the dunes near camp to see the spectacular sunset and hung out with each other and Hamza, enjoying the lovely evening.  We were served a tasty dinner and then treated to some traditional Berber music - the three guys who run the camp played trance-like drums and sang songs to us while we relaxed under the bazillions of stars in the sky.  It was an amazing experience.  We all pulled our mattresses out of the tents and fell asleep under the stars of the Sahara desert.

So that we could see the sunrise, we woke up at 5:30 Sunday morning and got back on the camels to head home.  It was breathtaking!   The rest of Sunday was spent in the van driving back to Rabat (about 11 hours).