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Published: February 29th 2008
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It was a fun experience sleeping in a tent in the desert and the optimists in us say that not too many people will have slept through rain in the desert; however we were both glad that we were only there one night.
We woke to our alarm at around six and we dressed hastily in order to catch the sunrise. We were a bit annoyed that our guide didn't wake us but it didn't actually matter because it was too cloudy to see much anyway. We climbed a dune behind our camp and looked down on a small nomadic village which was just beginning to wake up. We saw people walking in the distance and decided to have a look around ourselves. We walked towards the sunrise and saw some untouched sand which too us was just as exciting as untouched snow and we just had to ruin it. We continued in this manner until we saw that we were being beckoned back towards camp. The initial itinerary was to eat breakfast in the desert and head back for ten, but the Germans had their chauffeur waiting for them, so we left to return for nine.
Rob was
complaining yesterday of aching from the camel and this morning I could empathise. Neither of us particularly wanted to get back on our camels, but we did. It wasn't especially enjoyable because it is pretty painful and less tolerable after extremely little sleep. Eventually we did arrive back at the hotel and we were there before any of the staff. Our backpacks had been moved so we couldn't change, eat or wash. We sat around for about forty minutes before we were ushered into a dark room for our "breakfast". We had one flattered a dish of butter and some dairylea, not the best breakfast.
We had to ask for a bedroom which we were shown to by someone we had never seen before. We were promised a hot shower but the water was ice cold. It was around this point that we decided we didn't want to stay another night. We nipped next door to see how Anthony's trip had been and it sounded better than ours. He was leaving on a minibus but told us that the minibus that brought us would come back at three if our hotel booked it.
We rented two snowboards from
Hotel L'Oasis and headed out into the dunes. For the smaller dunes that are near to the village we climbed them and then sat on the boards to sled down again. This had mixed success; sometimes we would slide several meters, other times we would fail to move. After finishing on the smaller dunes we moved onto larger ones but equally angled with similar success rates. Once Steph was convinced of her abilities we managed to tackle a steeper slope and progressed to standing on the board. It was only bigger and better from there on; the only draw back came from having to walk up the sand dunes each time, which is very tiring indeed. Much fun was had by all, until all our energy was expelled.
Eventually we conceded defeat and made our way back towards the hotel. We were shattered and sun burnt and ready to move on to the next step of our journey. At the hotel we grabbed our bags and sat outside and waited for the bus to pick us up. We had plenty to keep us amused as there was a Renault rally on with one Thousand cars driving right past the
hotel and beeping their stupid novelty horns. We waited till well after three for our bus and eventually the guy from our hotel told us that as a gesture for forgetting the vegetarian meal he would get somebody to drive us to Rissani. We didn't have any choice but to accept seeing as though the bus had gone so we settled in to wait for the driver to return from driving someone else.
Eventually we got our lift to Rissani but we had to wait so long that it would have been quicker to get there by bus. It turned out that it made little difference because we could only get the CTM bus at eight in the evening. We left our bags in left luggage and turned around to see Anthony. The three of us grabbed lunch where we were served the smallest salad, followed by the smallest tagine but Rob made up for this by eating every last piece of bread.
The journey was long and cold and because our stop was in the middle of nowhere, we couldn't ever actually relax. We arrived in Azrou at three in the morning and were beckoned off the
bus whilst most other people were sleeping. We thought we were in for an easy time with the time and the size of the place. We stepped off the bus and immediately two boys approached us asking if we wanted a room. We told them we had reservations and whilst we were mid discussion two gendarmerie men came over and engaged them in a conversation. They gestured that it was ok to follow the guys so we did; albeit rather reluctantly.
Hotel Salame was disappointing to say the least and it was made worse by the fact that the two guys stayed around asking after commission even though the hotel owner asked them to leave. We just wanted to collapse into bed but we had forms to fill in and pointless conversations about hot water and toilets etc to endure.
Eventually we made it into the safety of our hotel room and discovered that we had the least comfortable single beds on the planet. We chatted for a while but we were both so tired that we fell sound asleep.
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irene
non-member comment
referring to 'monopoly-Death of a Kaiser' entry
Blimey! your mother is going a bit OTT isn't she, spending as much as 50p on that Monopoly! Ha Ha Ha. Lol! xxx