Road of Tajines_3

2008.10.07

As expected, we were waken up by desert flies. This was indeed a good thing. Before breakfast, we walked towards the dunes of Erg Chegaga again (a). We didn't climb to the top as the day before, but managed to walk far enough to get surrounded by sand dunes. HC, MC and I were busy taking pictures. At one point, we indulged ourselves making funny gestures to cast shadows on a faraway sand dune (b). As the desert warmed up, so as the flies (c).

After breakfast, we made our return trip to M'hamid. We had lunch at a local restaurant and boarded a bus for Zagora at 14:00. The 2 hour bus ride turned out to be the harshest experience of public transportation in all my journeys over the past few years. It was way over-crowded with people. The air was stuffy, humid and extremely hot. Before departure, the locals hopped on and off to greet each other and yielded to each other on seat arrangement. Half an hour was gone and the bus had no sign of moving. We sweat from hair to toes but the operable windows were in no way operable. We were cooked for about 40 minutes until the bus finally crawled out the village. After dozens of stops along the highway where people get on the bus from nowhere, at last we reached Zagora.

There was still 4 hours of bus ride to reach Ouarzazate, our destination of the day, but we had no idea if there was any bus available at Zagora. At the end, we decided to pay some extra money to hire a shared-taxi to make up the time and comfort. The 4 hour bus ride was cut to 2.5 hour, thanks to the vintage Mercedes. All four of us squeezed into the back seats, while 2 more locals took the front passenger seat. As evening approached, we drove through the magnificent Draa Valley, the road of Berber villages, ancient kasbah, oases and mountain valleys (d). We drove by sharp turns atop some rocky hills, where Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu filmed the scene in Babel, in which Cate Blanchett was shot at in a tour bus with Brad Pitt. We reached Ouarzazate in late evening and took the last quadruple room at Hotel Royale.

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.