Moroccan Gazetteer: The Sahara

Sometimes, it’s important to remember that Morocco is mostly desert. When I look around at the green and the rain in my town, it’s easy to think that I live in Oregon (or what I imagine Oregon to look like), and even easier to wish that I didn’t, which is why I took myself on a little vacation through the more overtly desert parts of Morocco.

The “Sahara” (put the emphasis on the “sa” and rush through the remaining “hara” to get a little closer to the Arabic pronunciation) is not quite as uniform as most souvenir postcards would lead us to believe. My experience has led me to three different types, rocky desert, sandy desert, and technically-but-not-fulfillingly desert, something along the lines of your xeric shrubland or shrub-steppe, which are beautiful in their own right, but not the subject of today’s story. Concerning the rocks and sand, there are two famous routes (within the Peace Corps travel zone) that can meet all of your desert-seeking needs: from Erachidia to Merzouga and from Ourzazate to M’hamid.

There is no real describing the feeling of crossing over the mountains and into the “desert.” The Ouarzazate route follows the Dra’a River through a series of stunning valleys. Red and purple mountains tower above the road, which hangs over a never-ending chain of deep green oases, a stark contrast between barren rock and jungle-like lushness. Ancient kasbahs of red clay are scattered throughout – many long-abandoned and some still inhabited – and everything in between is filled with as many date palms as physically possible.

I never made it all the way to the sandy desert at the end, but I got close enough to stage some sand dune photographs in Zagora. I stayed in Tinzouline for the most part, and got to finally become Indiana Jones. My group and I set out first thing in the morning heading directly west into the desert with only our determination and an unpaved road to guide us. We’d been told that there were some ancient 3000-year-old rock carvings to be found beyond the stony wasteland about seven kilometers away. There are, and we found them. It took about four hours of walking (there and back) and about ten bottles of water, but we reached the cliffs scattered with animal drawings, Tiffinagh etchings, and horse-mounted warriors. Neither we nor the guide book could tell you exactly why they were there, but we weren’t too overly concerned. The highlight was crossing the burning desert and discovering this place that had no guides, no gift shops – not even a fence to keep people off the artifacts – even if we did have to call a friend to tell us exactly where it was.

The sand came much later. The road from Erachidia to Merzouga doesn’t have the same canyon-like feel of the Dra’a Valley and there are long stretches that are nothing more than broad expanses of yellow. It’s worth the journey, though, to make it all the way to Merzouga. Unlike Tinzouline, Merzouga is one of the centerpieces of every Morocco tour. The surrounding towns are packed with fake guides (and real ones) looking to take you out into the dunes and help themselves to your dirhams. Fortunately, we have a volunteer friend who lives in the general area, so we gave him a call and he set us up with a guide that he knows and, more importantly, knows the Peace Corps. He met us in Rissani, tossed us into his 4x4, and it wasn’t until we were well out off the road that he told us the plan: we were going to one of the desert’s edge hotels, hoping a camel train out into the dunes, watching the sunset and eating dinner in traditional nomad tents, sleeping, waking up ridiculously early, and trekking back in with the sunrise.

That’s just what we did. Don’t get me wrong, it’s about as touristy as you can get, but it also just one of those things you have to do. Later, when we were back north, a sandwich master asked us if we ate out in the desert. “Of course we did,” we said, “but it was awful.” The tagine was about as bland as imaginable, the tea was burnt and weak, and – the greatest insult to our culinary sense of decency – they served it all with plates and silverware. Our friend couldn’t believe it. The Saharawi are known for their cooking, and they’re pretty much the gold standard of Moroccan tea. Then again, the tourists don’t know that they’re getting slop, and the guides aren’t eating that. One of the benefits of being a volunteer and speaking the language is that we get to chill with the locals. The tea we drank was excellent.

It also didn’t matter (to me at least) what our food tasted like by the time we’d reached camp. We traveled with an Italian couple, their two young sons, and two other Spanish girls, which had the added benefit of making us leave later than we’d hoped. By the time we were up on the camels, the sun had pretty much already set, which was beautiful, but also allowed us to complete the hour-and-a-half journey by the light of the full moon. Every so often someone who offer some observation or comment, but it was otherwise completely silent. There was none of the heat and oppression of the desert sun like in Tinzouline; it was a sort of communion with nature interrupted only by the rhythmic plodding of the camels. I have never felt so much in awe of the world. Even the next morning’s sunrise, which was absolutely gorgeous, could not possibly match the profundity of the desert at night.

Before you run off and join the caravanserai, though, let me tell you about the downside: camels. Camels are the foulest of nature’s monsters and living proof of a Vengeful God; the tragic reminder that survival of the fittest can as often as not be a pyrrhic victory. They make sounds that only a Hollywood sound effects mixer could love and emit a stench to which it would be impossible to acclimate even during the 52-day journey to Timbuktu. There’s a reason the guides walk in the front, and I don’t think it’s strictly so that they know where they’re going. It’s said that camels were once the most beautiful of single-celled proto-organisms until they were cursed for a trillion years by Natural Selection for their vanity. If you offered me the choice between riding a camel and participating in a ritual castration, I’d have to get back to you about it. Ultimately, though, you don’t really have a choice. No matter that you won’t be able to walk for a few days, nor that you won’t want to for a few more after that, as a friend of mine said, it’s just one of those things you have to do in your life to make yourself a badass.

I’ve been thinking about it now for a while, and I’m going to say that despite how much I loved being in the desert, I think I prefer living where I do. It’s not that I need the trees and cold so desperately or that I’m so particularly worried about the scorpions (the only ones I’ve seen in Morocco have been less than five kilometers away from my house). It’s more that I’ve never before experienced that harsh majesty of nature in such an overwhelming way – the sun and the moon; the red, purple, blue, and green – and I would hate to think that I could take such grandeur for granted.

Of course, it was raining when I got home, so I might be tempted to risk it.