Some night pho­to­graphy. I “light painted” the tent with my LED flash­light. This was a 30 second exposure.

May 16, 2010 — Midday

The nights out here have been won­der­ful. Not only do we get to rest while things cool off con­sid­er­ably and Rashid sets to work on the evening meal, but we also get to enjoy the type of clear, starry sky you can only find in a dry envir­on­ment far from city lights, in the desert or the arctic. The company we paid to arrange this trek is called Caravane Mille Etoiles, the Caravan of the Thousand Stars, and the name is apt. The only thing they should work on is actu­ally telling people that it is not a camel ride into the desert so much as a relent­less death march in the baking sun.

The dunes them­selves have also been enjoy­able, even though we have only been camping among rel­at­ively small ones (maybe 50m tall). Burying one’s sore feet in the still-warm sand and watch­ing the sun set over a sea of dunes must be one of life’s great pleas­ures. The colours and tex­tures that come out of the sand are pre­dict­ably beau­ti­ful, although serious pho­to­graphy is all but impossible due to the heat, fatigue and just wanting to enjoy the last light of day without looking through a camera viewfinder.

Rashid’s kitchen.

Taking these things off is the best part of the day. Actually, we both switched from sandals to our hiking shoes after the first day or two. This is the view from our tent.

Sunset over the Sahara.

Yours truly. Photo by Laura.

Laura, int he best light of the day, right before sunset.

One of the other high­lights of our trek has been the array of desert life we’ve been lucky enough to come across. Of course living next to two huge, blun­der­ing camels has had its moments. Camels aren’t known for being shy about their bodily pro­cesses, pooping and peeing whenever and wherever the mood strikes them (includ­ing all over them­selves), and burping and farting as they spend the night just outside our airy tent. It’s like a desert sym­phony to offset the beauty of the starry sky.

Shariff and Mimoun are also natural garbeur­at­ors, eating any­thing put within reach of their search­ing camel lips. They’ll eat any­thing from food scraps like orange and melon peels (they like these a lot) to the scrub­bi­est thorn bushes in the desert. And that’s just break­fast. Shariff even ate Laura’s prized fos­sil­ized rock.

Our most common view of the camels.

These desert birds live in pretty much all of the tam­ar­ist trees.

But we’ve enjoyed other wild­life as well, includ­ing plenty of scarab beetles, red ants, a bur­row­ing owl, crows and small desert birds. This morning Laura spotted a dung beetle meth­od­ic­ally rolling his break­fast (one of Shariff’s ping-pong sized drop­pings) home for the wife and kids. We’ve also seen lizards and had fatal encoun­ters with a camel spider and snake. Thankfully, the encoun­ters were fatal for the spider and snake, not us.

Actually, the snake was prob­ably the most dan­ger­ous thing that has happened to us during the trek. Rashid was calm but stern after he spotted the snake on a nearby dune, not two minutes after leaving camp this morning. Laura and I went for our cameras as the snake slithered its way up a dune away from us, but if we went closer than about four meters, Rashid would say loudly, “Attencion! Attencion!”, motion­ing us back. When he snatched a tent pole and went after the creature, Laura and I both went into con­ser­vator mode, trying to tell Rashid that it wasn’t neces­sary to kill the thing, as the snake clearly only wanted to get away.

The Saharan Horned Viper.

But Rashid answered by hooking two fingers down­ward in the air with a quick hissing sound, in obvious imit­a­tion of snake fangs sinking into their prey. “Mort,” he said, simply. “Mort.”

So we watched as Rashid deftly decap­it­ated the snake with one blow of the tent pole, fol­lowed by several more for good measure. After some prod­ding and our usual halted com­mu­nic­a­tion, we later learned from Rashid that this type of horned snake (he didn’t know the name in English, Arabic, Berber, or French) can kill a person with one bite. The venom is fatal every time, and the victim might only have one to three hours to live after a bite. (Update: After being spurred on by our friend Christine, who iden­ti­fied this beastie as a Saharan Horned Viper, or Cerastes Cerastes, I did a bit more research. The bite is not neces­sar­ily imme­di­ately fatal, but can lead to severe com­plic­a­tions if gone untreated. Don’t believe everything you hear in the desert, apparently.)

Believe me when I say, we were very much on the lookout for other snakes after that. We were also quite grate­ful to have been ignor­ant of this know­ledge during the first three and a half days of our trek.

This snake is deadly pois­on­ous. If you are bitten, you can count your hours left on one hand.

We have one more hot after­noon of walking to go. We feel better now after eating and a short nap. Rashid says it is only about an hour more. After lunch the desert always feels more romantic and excit­ing. Our energy levels are up and we ready to set out again.

This is just one part of a six-part series on our camel trek in the Moroccoan Sahara. To read the full story, please click here.