Sand Storm!!

We left Ait BenHaddou early Saturday morning and drove southeast 5 hours to M’Hamid, a small dusty town at the end of the road on the edge of the Sahara desert. There we met our guide Mohamed, and driver Abdullah (who goes by “Ali”), in front of the Gizelle Hotel. We were happy not to be staying there, as it was a “backpacker’s hotel” in which the rooms were tiny, facilities were down the hall, and toilets didn’t flush so were full of unpleasant deposits. Ugh.

While waiting to be served café au lait on the terrace, Matt parked our car in a guarded and secured storage area.

While we had coffee, the wind started to pick up substantially, but Mohamed told us not worry, so we didn’t. Soon we piled into Ali’s Toyota Land Rover to begin a 2-hour drive over 55 kilometers into the desert where we were to spend the night in a tented Berber camp.  As we drove into the Black Desert (a desolate, black, rock-strewn landscape) the wind continued to increase and our Ali somehow found his way even though there wasn’t more than 50 feet of visibility and no landmarks we could detect. After an hour we stopped at an oasis where we sat on rugs laid out on the ground behind mud brick walls and were served mint tea and stayed for an hour hoping the wind would abate; it didn’t.

We rode the final hour to our camp, and since the wind was still blowing and the visibility was limited, it was agreed that our camel tour would be postponed til the morning in hopes of better weather. We spent the afternoon in a large, central tent talking and drinking more tea.

That evening we had dinner of tagine with chicken, and after dinner there was evening entertainment of drums, hand cymbals and singing. As the evening progressed, dancing was added to the mix. An interesting cultural difference we noted, besides the fact that there were only men participating, was that in the west all of this activity would have been fueled by alcohol; here there was none. Another noteworthy point is that here in our Berber desert camp we were introduced to the only other Americans we have met on the entire trip: a man from New York with a woman from New Orleans. The many other travelers we’ve met have been European .