Road of Tajines_2

2008.10.06

I sat by the window and watched the sun rose as the bus drove by Berber oases and arid landscapes. We entered Zagora early in the morning. We called the desert tour operator and a taxi was sent to pick up us onwards to M'hamid. At M'hamid, the village where the road ends and the desert begins, we began our desert tour with HC's old friends, the camels (a) (b).

It was a cloudy day in the desert, although according to our guide, there hasn't been a drop of rain in the area in the past 10 years. We switched from camels to 4x4 after 1.5 hour of slow riding, and the camels behaved well. At midday, we stopped at a tiny oasis where our Berber guide made lunch for us.

It was late afternoon when we reached our camp, right by the dunes of Erg Chegaga. Immediately we set off to the dunes by ourselves and decided to conquer the biggest dune in the area, the Erg Chegaga. It wasn't an easy climb and it seemed quite overwhelming from below. We walked along the ridge like ants and slowly climbed to the top in about 1/2 hour. The view on the summit was rewarding (c). We relaxed ourselves on the top (d) and waited for the sunset. A magnificent spectacle of sunset was never a promise as great amount of clouds clustered near the horizon, though the sun did descend low enough to change the hue of the dunes from yellow to orange before it disappeared behind the grey all together.

At the camp, we chat with other fellow travelers, enjoyed some good food prepared by the Berbers, played with a cute cat, played some card games under an oil lamp and as night fell, each of us grabbed a blanket from our tents and set up ourselves to sleep outside in the open area next to the tents. Although there were some clouds but we still had a good time of star glancing. HC was the first to fall asleep. SH and I had some glimpses of shooting stars as the night deepened.