Morocco Day 3: Dates and Desert
The next morning we drove less than an hour away and took a tour of the Ziz Valley which is a (the?) major producer of dates for Morocco. It was beautiful. Very “Jurassic Park” feeling in that there were these huge rock cliffs as background but this lush green center full of ancient-looking palm trees. We started the walk by going through the village of 25 familes (I forget the number of people but somewhere under 1000 I believe, maybe even just a few hundred). It was your usual brown rocky hovel teeming with boys. Some people on the tour gave them pencils and we were subsquently mobbed. It was very cute if you like kids, annoying if you don’t. The tour group was split about evenly into the two groups, so far as I could tell. Maybe a few more on the ‘like kids’ side. I always carried a stash of stickers for kids, but didn’t usually give them out in potential mob scenes, only if there are one or two kids around, especially if they were being loud on a bus somewhere. (Guess which camp I fall into).
We had a really nice walk through the valley afterwards, though the walk lasted a little longer than some of us would have liked, due to the wanderings of others. I volunteered for role of “sweeper” to keep everyone together, mainly because when I get pissed I can be just about the biggest bitch on the planet. It’s a useful skill to have. It worked until there was a photo op with a donkey and then I met my match — and lost.
We had lunch at our guide’s house. It was a large building (several branches of the family lived there) and we were served in the guest room which was very large and could accomodate our group. The room is used only for guests, never for sleeping or anything else, no matter how crowded the rest of the house may get. Our hosts were extremely nice and the food was very good. A lot of the food were lentils, chicken, french fries and other “peasant food” which guests would normally never be served, but our tour guides had asked specifically they serve us because we would like it — and we did!
Next we drove some hours to get to Merzouga in the Sahara Desert, about 50 km from the Algerian border. By this time there are at least 5 in the group very sick and at one point we even stop on the road on the way because one person was uncontrolably ill. While waiting, we took bets on how hot it was outside the van (I have a thermometer on my backpack) and it topped at almost 103 degrees, but it seemed hotter.
When we get to the hotel, the plan originally was for everyone to take a 2-hour camel ride into the desert, stay overnight in a berber tent, then take a 2-hour sunrise trip back. Now this had been advertised as part of the tour, so I knew what I was getting when I signed up, but it was the last thing on the world I wanted to do. I was dreading every moment of it. Good news for me so many people were too sick to go that staying at the hotel that offered the camel-riding services became an option. It would cost the same as doing the whole camel-thing, but if you wanted to do a sunrise camel-ride in the morning instead, that would cost extra.
SCORE!!! Not having to go into the desert on a camel, not having to sleep “under the stars” in a berber tent, AND getting to stay in a posh hotel — the Kasbah Tombouctou — instead is about as fabulous a trade as I ever could have hoped.
We moved into our room, but were not there 5 minutes before my roomate was violently ill and became sickie number 6. I knew we would both be miserable if we shared a room so I went to the tour folks and offered to pay for each of us to have our own room. It was such a nice place, I really wanted to enjoy it and for $50 it was well worth the expense.
A little more than half the group opted to go into the desert, most riding camels, one uber-athlete walking. I gladly took photos of them and wished them well, heartily happy I was not among them.
After doing some laundry in the fabulous bathroom and going for a swim in the surprisingly cold pool, several of those who stayed behind but were not deathly ill met for a very nice buffet dinner. One of the two brits on the trip made friends with a Danish couple at the hotel and we joined them for dinner. I don’t know if it is a gene that british folk have, but J was certainly able to make new friends everywhere we went. He was a blast to be around!
Several of us opted to do the sunrise camel-trek into the desert the next morning, and that involved being at the camel site at 4:30am, so it was not a late night for many of us.
Tags: Africa, Camels, Merzouga, Morocco, Travel
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