DAY 6 Sahara Trip

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Day 6
We started our morning with a tour of a fossil mining company. We saw some lovely pieces of work that dates back some 200, 000, 00 years ago. It was a short visit then we met our guide for the morning.

We travelled to a nearby village called Risanni, where we left the bus behind and went for a very interesting walk through their town market. What a way of life, and to see what these people do 3 times a week what pretty crazy. The town people would be buying all of their produce for the next couple days, many don't have hydro so no fridges for them to keep much more than a couple days worth of food.

The fresh smells of the mint for sales was great, I purchased a stone like thing. It’s a beautiful perfumed stone....they say it should last for years and we paid 100 dirham for it (about 10 dollars) I loved the scent...but have no clue what it actually is, hope to find more about it in Marrakesh. We walked for a while, saw spices for sale, fresh meat, and lots of fresh produce. All the women are much more covered in this area of Morocco. So far many but not all have covered their heads with scarves or as they call them hijabs.
Here in Risanni the women are all covered in pretty black larger scarves, all of their head but some you can see their eyes....very interesting to see.

We stopped for a break in a Berber type carpet shop. These carpets where much different than in Fez, these where all made from camel wool. We didn't get to hear much of the info as somehow we got asked to follow the one Berber man to a small room in the back.

I had a bad feeling about the whole moment until he shows us the tradional wedding attire and asked us to allow him to dress us to show our group. Now that was fun...we looked pretty cute and we're now in everyone photo albums that are travelling along the bus tour. Good times!! lol...
We had a beautiful lunch by the hotel pool and made the purchase of our head scarves for our tour out into the Sahara desert. A local Berber man put the head scarf on for us all. AT 3:00 PM we all split up into small groups to head out in our Toyota 4 wheel drive vehicles.

It was a 30-45 minute drive to the bottom of the dunes that we were headed too. The sight was exactly what I was looking for....words don't truly describe what we had in front of us. We arrived and got out of our Toyotas and walked over to our camels....OMG!! we laughed and laughed, a camel is a lot higher than any horse and trust me, when they stand up and sit back down it's quite the experience HOLD ON TIGHT!

Our camel named Abdul! Our camel took us up to the top of the sand dune for a beautiful sunset. Breathe taking.

The man that walked our camel up the dune had a blanket for us to sit on, all the women sat on the blanket and he pulled us down the dune, kind of like a sled down a snow hill...screams the whole way down!! Good times!

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Photos

A stop along the way
She was making a carpet that would take her about 6 months to complete.