May 16, 2010 — 7:30 pm

Forget everything I said before. This place is not romantic. It’s deadly, unfor­giv­ing, and miser­able. Full of pain and agony.

Okay, maybe not that bad, but right now Laura and I are in low spirits. We’re tired. We ran out of mineral water, and can’t help but remem­ber how Rashid care­lessly drank some, and used some more for dishes and washing on our first day. Rashid can drink the well water, but we can’t for legit­im­ate fear that the bac­teria and microbes will make us sick. We’ve put some treat­ment pills in a bottle of well water, but have to wait two hours for them to do their work. We’re very thirsty, and have aches and pains through­out our bodies. Rashid said it would be an hour from our lunch spot, but it’s actu­ally been about three, and the heat is the harshest we have exper­i­enced. My little travel compass/thermometer maxed out today at an unbear­able 50 degrees Celsius.

We’re at Erg Chigaga as I write this, finally, but rather than feel proud or excited by this unique place, we feel hollow and taken advant­age of. The man in Zagora who sold us our camel trek, Mohammed, was very friendly, with a sin­cer­ity of laughter that bespoke of a straight-forward and honest busi­ness man. So when we asked him ques­tions about how long each leg of “the ride” would be, and how long we would be “on the camels on any given stretch”, his answer of three to four hours sat­is­fied us. Yet here we are. It’s the end of our last day in the desert, we’re at Erg Chigaga, the great 40km expanse of dunes on the Algerian border, and we haven’t been on a damn camel once. We walked 60km through the Sahara Desert to get here, and we’re feeling too beat phys­ic­ally and men­tally to climb the great 300m dune that’s just right over there.

We asked after the camels again when we arived. Rashid’s response was the same as usual: apres, apres, “after, after.” This time we pushed him. “After what, Rashid? After we set up camp?”

“Wahha, wahha,” he said. “Okay, okay.”

But then, before we knew it, he sent the camels off into the distant plain to feed. We can see them now, from where we sit atop a small dune. They’re at least 4km away and the light is failing fast. There’s no way we can muster the energy to get out to them, and no way Rashid can collect them before sun down. We simply can’t under­stand why he won’t let us ride them. Laura is very dis­ap­poin­ted and upset. I can’t blame her, either. She never rode a camel while she lived in Saudi Arabia. During  her one oppor­tun­ity she was too young and scared to give it a go, and her hopes of making up for it by spend­ing three days on one have been sunk. Riding a camel was one of her main goals coming to Morocco, and we thought we had it all but cinched when we booked our tour.

At this moment, right now, we are in one of the lows that make the highs of travel feel so amazing in com­par­ison. It sounds like a small thing, riding a camel, but after the beating heat and strain of walking 60km in the desert, that small thing is the whole world to us right now. We’re pissed off, frankly.

One of my goals on this trip, and in my life, is to “live without expect­a­tion,” what the Hindus call “relin­quish­ing the fruits of your labour.” While I can’t claim to be there yet, I am trying. But it’s not easy. This trip was not what we expec­ted. We’ve decided to take it up with Mohammed when we see him after. For now, I’m not sure my tired legs can even get me up one of the bigger dunes to watch the sun go down. My ankle is swollen like a base­ball and each step is agony.

Epilogue

That was my last entry in my journal from the dessert. It’s a sour note to end on, and one I’m happy to say didn’t last long. Within five minutes of that entry, we had purged the neg­at­iv­ity from our systems. Me, through writing it down, pretty much as you’ve just read it, and Laura through telling me how she was feeling and shed­ding a few stressed-out, tired, tears. We enjoyed a hug and felt some of the excite­ment and chal­lenge come back to us. Aching, dehyd­rated, tired to the bone, we egged each other on and raced up the dunes, toward the highest peak of Erg Chigaga. The sunset was coming on fast. We could see several other vis­it­ors sil­hou­et­ted at the top of one of the lesser dunes, watch­ing the sunset we had sought for four days through the desert. No doubt they had been brought out that after­noon in the rel­at­ive comfort of a 4WD, and the thought of them enjoy­ing what we had earned while we sat and moped buoyed us on further, until we were panting and gasping for breath as our tired legs carried us up one, then another of the big dunes. Soon we were on the ridge leading to the top of the biggest. The 4WD crowd were no doubt too lazy to bother climb­ing it, we told each other, laughing.

“Good,” we declared. “We earned it. Those bas­tards couldn’t get through the desert. They prob­ably have air-conditioned tents down there.”

And although we made the top moments after the sun had dipped below the horizon, the effort had redeemed us. The sunset didn’t matter. Being here didn’t really matter, either. But the effort of just getting here did, camels or no camels. That last sprint redeemed us, and it redeemed a desert trek that will live with us always, stand­ing out among months of travel as some­thing unlike any­thing else we’ve ever done.

It also didn’t hurt that we ran into Mohammed that night. The next morning, Laura got her camel ride after all.

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

May 14, 2010

The dusty streets of Zagora feel very far away and very long ago. It’s hard to believe it was only yes­ter­day. The con­trast between the desert and even a small town like Zagora couldn’t be more pro­nounced. When the wind dies down out here, it is per­fectly still. Perfectly quiet.

We are about six to ten kilo­met­ers from the camp where we spent last night. It is about 30 degrees Celsius in the shade right now, and we are passing the hottest part of the day under a desert tree. Our young guide, Rashid, 28, tells us it is called Tamarist in French, “Lit-luh” in Arabic, and “Tashwoodth” in Berber. He doesn’t know the English name. Rashid is himself Berber, des­cen­ded from the desert nomads who once lived off the land in this area, but who have mostly settled down in nearby com­munit­ies since Rashid’s grandfather’s time. He speaks only slightly more English than we do French, which is very little indeed, but we’ve been getting along well regard­less of lan­guage dif­fi­culties. Hand ges­tures and our own search­ing French do sur­pris­ingly well, as we try various syn­onyms of what we want to say in the hopes of hitting upon the half-forgotten vocab­u­lary of long-ago French classes. Although it is now just the three of us making our way into the desert, last night we enjoyed the company of four or five other young Berber men, most of them Rashid’s age.

The bivouac encamp­ment we stayed in is design for some 20 to 40 vis­it­ors at capa­city, but we were lucky enough to be the only two. It is just past the high season around here, a time when the desert starts to get too hot for most. The camp includes several heavy wool Berber tents for sleep­ing, a per­man­ent squat­ter toilet out­house, and a com­munal tent for pre­par­ing meals and relax­ing among rugs, cush­ions and low tables.  Our mouths were water­ing as we sat in the com­munal tent (named, without a hint of irony, The Restaurant), smelling the tajine stewing in the next room and enjoy­ing tra­di­tional Berber music. Tajine is prob­ably Morocco’s most sig­na­ture dish (along­side couscous), and you can find it on menus through­out the country. A good tajine can be made from pretty much any­thing you’d put into a stew, and the best tajines use only the freshest local ingredi­ents; oil, carrots, pota­toes, onion, yams, almonds, dates, lemon, olives, and peppers are all common, though seldom found alto­gether in the same tajine. It can be a veget­arian dish, or include beef, chicken, fish or lamb. Really, any­thing goes, but what makes every tajine a tajine is the conical ceramic cooking dish, or swaoui, a proper stewing time of several hours, and the inclu­sion of the typical Moroccan spice medley: saffron, paprika, cumin, ginger, salt and pepper. The night’s tajine was served with bread, com­munal style in a large  swaoui in the middle of the table, and was very deli­cious. We were sur­prised to get desert as well: a heaping plate of watermelon.

The music was a perfect way to bracket the meal, as our Berber com­pan­ions began to “jam” while the tajine was just getting started, and picked up where they left off after dinner. It impresses me deeply whenever I am exposed to a culture or family with such integ­ral music tra­di­tions. Although music is very import­ant to me, and I was a musi­cian myself some years ago, I was not raised in a par­ti­cip­at­ory music tra­di­tion, and its not nearly as wide­spread in our culture than in many places in the world. In the West, musi­cians are spe­cial­ized indi­vidu­als who perform their trade for the enter­tain­ment of others. Among the Berbers, and cul­tures with similar tra­di­tions, every­one is a musi­cian, and music is not some­thing to watch or listen to so much as to make together. These tra­di­tions will always be stronger in a culture where indi­vidu­als must depend on enter­tain­ing them­selves and each other, rather than being enter­tained by elec­tronic mass media.

But making and sharing music is uni­ver­sal; every culture in human history has folk music tra­di­tions. I think our easy access to pre­pack­aged enter­tain­ment in the West has trained us away from the instinct to simply go for it.

Anyway, Laura and I did our best to simply go for it, taking our turns clap­ping along, as well as playing the cymbals, beating the drums and dancing. I also tried the lute, but with a foreign tuning scheme, ten strings and no frets, I found it far more dif­fi­cult than guitar, and could only manage a few feeble notes. The Berber songs typ­ic­ally used a call-and-response singing struc­ture and although the words were unin­tel­li­gible to us, most of the songs were lam­ent­a­tions. The sor­row­ful wails in Arabic and (I assume) the Berber dialect of Tashelhit seemed to speak of tra­gedies and injustices borne out of the distant past. These were occa­sion­ally offset by more upbeat melod­ies, with the pound­ing rhythm of make­shift tam tams (drums) thump­ing into fren­zied finales. Other songs were instru­mental, led by the lute player, and seemed to include impro­visa­tional ele­ments based around a tra­di­tional song structure.

After some encour­age­ment Laura and I were induced to share the only piece of Canadiana that would come to mind, although I’m not sure “Barrett’s Privateers” has ever been accom­pan­ied by such African-influenced per­cus­sion. And I, for one, choose to believe it was that relent­less rhythm that drove the lyrics clean out of my head, forcing us to repeat the first verse four or five times before begging off at last in an awkward ending that seemed to leave our new friends unsure what to make of it all. They didn’t ask us to sing again after that, which was fine by me.

I’ve been in other situ­ations where the ease with which those present share and par­ti­cip­ate in music has humbled me, and each time it forces me to ask myself: “Where are my songs?” On T.V.? The radio? The punk rock clique I was into as a younger man? The other music cliques and genres I could have fallen into had I made dif­fer­ent friends? The folk music of cowboys? Of the mari­times? I enjoy these things but am neither cowboy nor mari­timer. Where are my songs?

These young men know every word, can join in and impro­vise on a dozen or more tra­di­tional songs, passing the main rhythm drum and other instru­ments back and forth at will, sharing singing duties as needed. For them playing together is a daily routine, some­thing to be savoured whenever and wherever they can come together in one place and time. These songs and the exper­i­ence of sharing them are central to what makes them Berber.

Where are our songs?

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.

This is the first part of a six-part series on our camel trek in the Moroccan Sahara. The addi­tional entries will be posted each day over the next week. After that, you can see all six here.

May 13, 2010

As I write this we’re only about two hours into our great Sahara adven­ture and it’s already the high­light of our Morocco trip. We’re in the back of a grand taxi—one of Morocco’s inter­city shared taxis—speeding toward the small village of Tamegroute, where we will hope­fully meet our desert guide and hop into a 4WD to head into the dunes.

After scour­ing the over­priced tours avail­able in Marrakesh, we decided to simply head to the desert on our own in the hopes of arran­ging some­thing on the ground. That has proven to be a good decision.

In Marrakesh we found several travel agents, who prac­ticed varying-intensity ver­sions of the hard sell, most of which we found in dirty, hot offices. One of them seemed to offer an excel­lent service, but at some-9,000 Moroccan dirhams for four day/three nights, was way out of our budget. Nine thou­sand dirhams is equi­val­ent to about 900 Euros, or about $1,150 CDN. We hoped to spend less than half of this.

Anyone seeking a Sahara exper­i­ence in Morocco has to make one big decision: go to Erg Chigaga, near the village of M’Hamid, or head for Erg Chebbi, near Merzouga. Erg Chebbi is the common choice, and has a bit more tourist infra­struc­ture and more oper­at­ors, but tends to also be a bit more over run by vis­it­ors, which, accord­ing to The Book (Lonely Planet’s Morocco) can spoil the romantic des­ol­a­tion of the desert. As such, I was fairly set on making the slightly more dif­fi­cult voyage to Erg Chigaga in the south. Our plan was to take the bus from Marrakech across the Atlas Mountains to Ouarzazate (“War-za-zat”), through to Zagora, and then finally into M’Hamid, where we would spend the night, find a trek oper­ator, and head out into the desert.

The scenery on the long bus ride from Marrakesh to Zagora was unlike any­thing I’ve ever seen before, at times like the American desert in the Southwest, at others like pic­tures I’ve seen of the Nile river, but mostly wholly unique. No written descrip­tion can evoke the sense of awe we felt in cross­ing the harsh and rugged Tizi’n’test Pass, the road lit­er­ally perched atop a moun­tain ridge falling away for hun­dreds of meters on both sides. Words can’t capture the abject terror of peering down 1000-foot drops from the cramped seat of a swaying bus while the driver seemed more intent on beating his own pre­vi­ous record of passing on blind corners than in actu­ally ensur­ing his cargo arrives in one piece, or the wonder of the lush green palmeraie (palm grove) growing like a miracle along the length of the Draa River Valley.

About eight hours out of Marrakesh we dis­em­barked with relief in Zagora, rather than going the addi­tional hour and a half all the way to M’Hamid. The bus ride had been long, at times fright­en­ing, and very dif­fi­cult for Laura, who was suf­fer­ing from some car sick­ness, and we figured (cor­rectly) that there would be more options for acco­mod­a­tion and tours in the much-larger Zagora.

Zagora is a small, dusty city that ori­gin­ated as a launch­ing point on the desert caravan route across the Sahara, was of some import­ance as a French colo­nial outpost during the pro­tect­or­ate and now seems almost wholly ded­ic­ated to getting tour­ists into the desert. We were beset imme­di­ately by a friendly but per­sist­ent tour oper­ator named Younes, who insisted on walking us to our hotel and made a some­what heavy-handed effort at booking us on one of his desert excur­sions. We spent the night at a budget hotel, with plans to rise early to meet Younes and check out the other options in Zagora. After con­sid­er­a­tion and some pre­lim­in­ary bar­gain­ing, we politely declined, and even­tu­ally booked with a much more laid-back oper­ator named Mohammed, who not only beat every­one else we scoped out in price and friend­li­ness, but also offered to extend our plans by one day at no addi­tional cost.

For 4,000 dirham (about $500 CDN), we booked a 5-day/4-night camel trek, includ­ing a brief tour of the local palmeraie, as well as an old Jewish Kasbah where skilled artis­ans still create jewelry using the tech­niques of the long-gone Jewish res­id­ents. Mohammed walked us through these places this after­noon, explain­ing that many people, himself included, still call this 300-year-old fort­ress home. Tonight we sleep in a Berber tent in the desert, in order to be able to leave first thing in the morning on our trek. As we under­stand it, we will rise each morning with our guide, pack up camp, and mount the camels for a three or four hour ride (sup­ple­men­ted with some walking), before stop­ping for a long mid day break, and then doing a similar trek in the after­noon. Our goal is the great 300m dunes of Erg Chigaga, some 60 km into the desert from our base camp. After the crush of the tourist hordes in Marrakesh, we are actu­ally thank­ful that our plans don’t include air-conditioned coaches or loud tour groups.

So this is how we’ve come to find ourselves in the toasty and cramped back­seat of what has to be the sor­ri­est old station wagon I’ve ever been in. Our fellow pas­sen­gers are three Moroccan men, who along with the driver, have said exactly zero words since we left Zagora. Some Saharian music is blaring through the taxi’s tinny, burnt-out speak­ers, a mix between upbeat Middle eastern techno, African drums and call-and-response singing in what I assume is Arabic. We’re lucky to not be sharing the back­seat with two other pas­sen­gers, as it is not uncom­mon to fit six in a grand taxi. As it is, my legs are basic­ally in my own lap and Laura and I are hunched over to avoid hitting our heads on the low roof with each bump of a very bumpy road.

We are cur­rently ascend­ing one of the last passes over a rocky ridge of jebels before we enter the Sahara proper, and the feeling I have right now is one of the reasons I wanted to travel. It is an intox­ic­at­ing mix of anti­cip­a­tion, excite­ment and curi­os­ity, with an added sense of accom­plish­ment for decid­ing to come out to this remote place, and actu­ally doing it; getting past the touts, sales­men and shoddy oper­at­ors trying to snag as many dirhams from each tourist as pos­sible, and making it this far.

Of course, thou­sands of others have made this journey before us, but somehow that doesn’t matter one bit. All that matters is that in a couple more hours we’ll be away from everything, on the edge of the Sahara desert, with only the stars and the sand, and a guide who sup­posedly even speaks some English.

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