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Published: October 2nd 2009
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Sorry for the delay, travelling with other people means that you have to really find time to get to a computer... also no time for editing or spelling checks. sorry!
cont.
The sahara: Evocative little name 'aint it. It conjours up great hocking gobs of images of rolling sand and the endless sky, people struggling along on lonely yet majestic desert voyages and a wilderness so dauntinly beautiful that it has retained a certain sense of mystery all throughout the world.
Nothing can really prepare you for the Sahara and even its arrival is can come as quite a shock.
We had been driving for five hours already and the landscape had been gradually changing. Slowly left behind were the stone lined hills and arid feilds only to be replaced by sandy groud and those evocative date palms on all those tacky postcards that i had been seeing so many of. And, ss soon as the land changed to sand i was in Africa.
So much of Morocco feels positvely european; a dirtier, more chaotic, poorer Europe, yes, but still lined by cafes, flanked by restraunts and surrounded with an overall sense of first world awareness
of itself. As soon as the soil fell behind and replaced with sand everything changed. It was Africa. Inescapable, terrifyingly, Africa. It is everything that i had seen in thousands of documentaries and such when i was completing my International Relations degree. Non existent shanty towns; Flys the size of a one dollar coin; people sitting on the road, by the road, around the road, everywhere looking literally like they were dying. For the first time in this country i felt unsafe. I felt in danger. I felt totally out of control. For the first time i was truely aware of my privilage. I was a rich, white, very very lucky man surrounded by people who literally lived for a week off the money i just paid for a bottle of water. It was shocking- and this was a reasonably well travelled tourist road!
It was a shock when, ten minutes down the road we came across western five star hotels, tourist infrastructure and other incredibly out of place mod-cons.
Another contrast was the Sahara itself. Even though the landscape had been changing, it was still a shock to see it. The Sahara, at least from this road,
didn't become over a long period of time. Quite literally we were rounding a palm edged corner when, out of nowhere, there it was. In the distance, across a long plain, was the desert. The Sahara.
There right in front of us, no more than a twenty minute drive, was the western most edge of the actual Sahara desert, rising up exactly how i thought it would look. Just there. Right there. It was a moment of mutual surreality for myself and my co travellers. The hotel where we would set off on our adventure literally extended into the desert itelf. Front gate, reception, rooms, pool, camel stable, desert. Surreal!
Ahh the camels! Those freaking bastard camels. First suprise, camels are huge. I mean really you see the pictures and the people on them but my mind just didnt make the mental calculation about them. Their head is the same size as my torso. And, much like my mother always said, they really do have absolutly giant, sexy, flaunty eyelashes. Also they are compactable, something about the knees means that they can litterlly just make them dissapear when they want to lie down. So when wse arrived we
where met not by the huge mode, but by these sort of sauashed, legless hump things. I was warned by several people and several guidebooks that riding a camel is a painful, painful experience, and by gum where they not wrong. Oh the first fifteen minutes is lovely! Sit on the hump of the lying camel, hold on tight as it rustly lurches about two metres into the air, then look at the amazing scenery as the beast slowly plods along in a sort of melodic rhytmic back-and-forward, side-to-side dance. Very soon however, this dance becomes some sort of Irish knees up and the rythumn greatly resembles a beginning violin player. Oh god the pain. No really, for about two hours you are clutching on for dear life as a lumbering animal with a hump up your arse stretches your legs like your doing the splits, whilst simultaniously veering back and forth left to right just to make sure you are only comfortable for about three seconds at a time.
I complain now, but in reality it was an amazing experience. And in good time we arrived at our destination, a small, impossibly well furnished Berber camp in the
middle of the desert. Our beds where proper matresses, sitting on top of the Sahara, our tent was a real Berber tent, which, despite only having three sides, worked amazingly at keeping the wind out. And the food, it was absurd. Want a tajine, a coca-cola, perhaps some beer? It is all here for you, My pre-paid friend! And darnit screw cultural authenticity, when presented with the opportunity for a beer and smoke after a two hour pounding i say YES!!! They even had a flush toilet. IN THE DESERT! IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT THERE WAS A WATER PUMPING FLUSH TOILET!!! Crazy!
Watered and fed we all left the camp and sat around 100 m away with some of the Guides that Abdel knew from previous trips. There with nothing so much as the stars, perhqps even more beautiful then the previous night to light ourselves, we where treated to an all night drum and Berber instrument extravaganza. Why does all Middle Eastern music seem to sound like a cat being slowly tortured? Hmmm, also i can lead people to do insane things. We agreed, in our Vodka haze, that it would be a great idea to
wake up at five thirty and climb a little sand dune to the back of our camp to watch the sunrise. Cue three hours later...
In the POST vodka haze, it was revealed that this little dune was a motherfucking giant! Everyone except Rueben and i bailed from the idea of a cold, grueling, pre-dawn struggle up a huge loose surfaced behemoth. I was a little reluctant myself, but the opportunity to see the sun rise over the Sahara was as sweet as Moroccan tea. And it was amazing to see perhaps the most beautifully created for silhouette landscape in the world -all peaks and great winding dips- awake from its nightly slumber.
Now as i told you the camel trip to the camp was bad, i will leave you to imagine just how painful the two hour trip BACK the next morning was :-S
That is all from now, i have a backlog of these to write and i will do so ASAP
love you all!
Also we went to Todra Gorge and the road to Marrakech which was a crazy series of winding road and overtaking on thousand foot up roads.
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