Morocco trip 2023: Part 2
Days 2-4 to the Sahara desert
I booked a 3-day trip out to the Sahara desert on a van. It turns out, I am too old to be on a rickety van on bad roads for that long — approximately 26 hours of driving over 3 days. It was weirdly exhausting. I booked the cheapest trip, at about $200. (I could have paid for the same trip at $100, but the +$100 upcharge paid for private sleeping accomodations.) Some trips were up to $1,000, but I think paying $400-500 would have gotten me a better experience during the drive.
This is the difficult thing about visiting developing countries. You take things for granted, like shock absorbers. Your mind is opened to new ways things might be broken or avaricious opportunitists might try to make a buck. Live and learn.
Here’s the path we took, more or less.
Below is the bus seating situtation. I grabbed a single seat right next to the door, which has a big open space in front of it, which helped me with getting car sick.
There was a bar that would jam into my knees (I’m tall), so I had to sit in all kinds of weird positions.
Atlas Mountains
First we passed through the Atlas Mountains, a range south/west of Marrakesh. I didn’t get any wide shots of the mountains, but there were many villages where people lived. Berbers, they’re called. The driver stopped so we could take pictures of these houses.
I like the satellite dishes in the collage photo (above right).
See the woman hanging blankets on the roof?
Ait Benhaddou
Ait Benhaddou is a city where many films were shot. Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, Gladiator, Game of Thrones, Kingdom of Heaven, and so forth. Hundreds of movies.
There’s also a film studio near here, Atlas Studios, where sets are built out that fit the Moroccan vibes. Like this Egyptian one…
We didn’t stop at Atlas Studios though, just drove past. You could see a lot of it from the road.
Ait Benhaddou was great though.
Here’s a billboard in one of the buildings that show the movies filmed there.
People used to live in these old buildings, but I believe they said 90% of them have moved to the newer buildings across the street. I naturally wrote “street,” which is funny, but I meant river. That’s a dried up riverbed between these building groups.
Night 1: Small scams & cuisine
We stayed overnight somewhere I got no pictures of. It was about 15 minutes off the highway, in the Atlas mountains. The room was good… nice textiles and a comfortable, well-pillowed bed made it feel somewhat luxurious. The bathroom, however, was bare minimum. It’s like if you went into Walmart and bought a $10 shower, a $10 toilet and a $10 sink. I’m mentioning that because the contrast is funny, not because it bothered me. I was grateful just to shower.
Before I got my room, we ate a group dinner. I was exhausted during this dinner and started to get a migraine. I went to bed early and slept through the loud Berber dancing and music they were doing. Several of the hotel people hassled me about going to bed early. “But you don’t want to stay up for the party?” Fortunately, “I have a headache,” didn’t provoke much argument.
However, rewind: immediately after dinner, they gave us a big talk about what we were going to do the following day. They must have overbooked the trip, because they went down a list and asked about 10 of us, person by person, if we’d be okay sharing rooms with other people. And, they didn’t say it like that; what they said was:
Jaimie and Jasmine, are you okay sharing a room?
So you’re put into the position of being the rude one, who objects not simply to sharing a room, but sharing a room with Jasmine, who is sitting right next to you. This sort of thing deeply annoys me because I know many people aren’t comfortable saying no, and will go along and be put out, when they paid for something different.
I told them no.
But Jaimie, if you don’t share a room with Jasmine, she’ll have to get a room in another building and she won’t be with us. Do you really want to kick Jasmine out of the building?
Yes! This is not my problem! It’s you who didn’t plan correctly!
So, I got my private room. (And Jasmine did survive the walk in the dark.)
The next morning, we had our Moroccan breakfast. Moroccans eat a sugary, carb-filled breakfast. Not a lot of protein, not for tourists. I was dying for protein, so I bribed a waiter to bring me an egg. He brought me a 3-egg omelette, and, out of an abundance of gratitude and relief, I tipped him $5 (in Moroccan dirham). (And $5 goes a lot futher over there.)
I’m sure eggs are readily available in other Moroccan joints; I think we were just being nickled-and-dimed on this trip. It starts to get exhausting when this happens. You feel like you’re being squeezed for money and you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
During this 3-day trip, we were also being stopped at a few vendors and offered things for sale. It was the same when my mom and I went to Egypt in 2017. This is what touristy places do. I accept it, but it’s wearing in a way you can’t prepare for or easily mitigate.
Ouarzazate
The next day, we stopped in Ouarzazate. I love all of these photos. The architecture and housing is so fascinating to me. How they run wires over the walls. The cracks in the mud brick. The tile. How the dirt dries. How the shadows fall.
Then we walked around on the outskirts of the city. Honestly, beyond the cool architecture, there wasn’t much interesting about this place and I think we were all wary of getting tired out. Many of us were exhausted from the previous day’s Ait Benhaddou trek, and it felt like they were trying to exercise us like dogs.
Actually, it felt like they were inventing walking tours for us as income for the guides (who would ask for tips at the end).
Women in Ouarzazate, washing clothes in the river.
We ate lunch somewhere, and then descended from the mountains for the last stretch of road to the desert.
I wish I had taken pictures of the transition. I trawled around on Google and found 2 that do it some justice.
As we descended from the mountains, the topography initially was like the left photo. You can see the fuzzy sand dunes in the distance, on the horizon, on the left. Then, as you got closer, you realized how massive these sand dunes were next to the line of buildings in front of them (the right photo).
It was surreal; it reminded me of a Mario game. Rows of lumpy, giant sand dunes. You imagine the Sahara desert will transition in a flat way. But the stark effect of those rows of hills on the horizon, like mountains of sand; it isn’t far off from a 2D scroller.
The Sahara desert
After we parked, our guides helped us wrap our scarves like Bedouin.
Then we got in a 4-wheeler and drove about 15 minutes out to the camels. (We packed an overnight bag for the desert camp, taken separately.)
Again I’ll use the word “surreal.” It was surreal walking through the sand when the sun was still somewhat high. The world was reduced to two shades of color: orange and blue. The only variation was the gradients or shadows in each — the ground having more gradients than the sky. A picture doesn’t do this justice; you have to imagine seeing these two colors everywhere, all around. It’s like walking through a painting or cartoon.
When Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia said he liked the desert because “It’s clean,” I’m fairly sure he was being insincere and avoidant. But in the visual sense, I did find it clean.
The guide took a ton of pictures of us on the camels making various cheesy poses. In our group, we had about 15 people. Only 3 of us went to the luxury camp, so there were only 3 of us in this troup.
Later, we dismounted and watched the sun set.
Desert camp
Our camp was lovely. We had dinner in the main tent and I enjoyed the room to myself, sans argument about it. The wind was whipping all night, rasping at the plastic window covers. I had a dream that men were coming out of the desert, opening my window covers, peaking in on me sleeping. (Funny how I remember this a year later...)
I didn’t take a photo, but the inside of the tent looked more or less like this (below).
There was a private shower/toilet/sink, with signs about reserving water.
This desert camp was the best part of the tour, by far. Maybe the best part of the trip. I wish I had spent 2 nights there.
The camp offered more music/dancing, but I was exhausted and sore after 1 hour on the camel, and went to bed.
The trip back
We woke early, at sunrise, to ride the camels back to the bus.
Our Bedouin guide, waiting for us. When we walked up to him, he scooped sand into a souvenir bottle and gave it to us. We tipped him for that. I purchased a nicer bottle for the sand in Marrakesh, and I still have it — it’s sitting a few feet away from me as I type this.
Once we boarded the bus, it was back to Marrakesh — with a day of straight driving. Nothing eventful happened. Except, we passed a truck that had overturned in the Atlas mountains. Its cargo, watermelons, had gone all over the road. Some had burst open with incarnadine splashes. Berber people parked their cars and gathered them up, bearing them off on their shoulders.
In another village, our driver stopped for dates and passed a tray of them around the bus. He said the village was known for its dates.
I got back to the Riad around 7pm and met up with the writing group.
Exhausted. I really should have planned a rest day in here, but I had no idea the Sahara trip would be so strenuous. I thought sitting in a bus would be somewhat restful. But, all the bumping and shuddering took it out of me.