May 8, 2012
Morocco episode 2: the desert, yalla yalla!
After 3 nights in Marrakech, we set off to the Atlas mountain / desert tour. The tour was 2 days drive to the Sahara desert with bunch of stops, ride a camel out for a couple of hours, then spent a night in a camp, and then back to town on the last day. We were the last group to get picked up so we ended up sitting all separately, which is not a big deal because we all made new friends! There were all sorts of people on the tour – koreans, greeks, spanish, french, americans, italia, austria; some people were on vacation, some people had been backpacking for 8 months already (2 crazy korean girls!), and I sat beside the Korean dude who’s beem travelling for 2-3 months along the Europe coast then down to Morocco.
We drove through some of the craziest mountain pass I’ve seen from Marrakech to Sahara desert, totally initial D, and our driver was super speedy and rude. We made bunch of stops on the way for scenery pics, he always said “Take phoootooo!”, and then when we had to be on our way he honked the van and yelled “Yalla yalla!” (lets go lets go!) There were always people selling souvenirs at these photo stops, and they were literally middle of nowhere, I still wonder how long it took them to bring all the goods out to the highway. We saw all sorts of cool oasis like villages where there’s a forest and a small clay village, and absolutely nothing around it, and that’s where these “berber” people lived. Main stop for the first day was this village I can’t remember what it was called, but it was where they filmed part of the Gladiator movie – the first time Maximus had to fight in some outskirt town. To give you some sense of their culture, when we went to see this village, we had to cross this small river, where bunch of sand bags had been placed for people to step on. There were these kids just hanging around, when they saw us coming they all came up and held our hands (or tried to) without us asking and helped us cross the water. When we finished crossing the kids would stick out their hand and asked for money. Some people just gave them 1-5 DH, while I refused to give any, then the kid just kept harassing me, asking me for candy, whatever he saw on my backpack, even asked me for my flip flops. Some kids just left if they couldn’t get anything, while others said nasty things. It was pretty sad in some sense.
Anyway it was an awesome sight to see still, and we ended the night in some funky small hotel right next to a river and mountain, the type of place I thought would be pretty sweet for camping. Next day we visited a local berber village, saw the local’s way of life – donkeys transporting insane amount of goods, people carrying stuff on their head, villagers trying to sell us hand made carpet and get as much out of our pockets before we leave, the usual stuff. We also stopped at this super pretty gorge where apparently it’s like rock climbers heaven, but I saw no rock climbing, the river water was definitely refreshing though. The driver got pretty annoying cause it seemed that we were going to be late for the camel ride, so he started to constantly rush people. We finally got to the desert entrance around 5pm I think, which was a place I thought it was kind of funny because it was like the gate to the desert, one side flat land, other side desert, in between a line of hotels.
Riding a camel was a lot more uncomfortable than I expected, I felt like I was going to fall off to all the time, but it was still pretty sweet, with everyone and their sand turban on. I was joking with my korean buddy on the bus that seeing a sand storm would be an awesome crazy experience, and just after 30 minute on the camel trek, we saw some massive gray clouds building up behind us. Another 20 min we heard thunder, then crazy wind that blew sand in our face, then crazy rain thunder wind sand that felt like Storm’s hail super on my face, arms, and legs. It got so bad we had to stop and everyone put on these massive heavy blanket to cover, meanwhile I was trying to capture a video of how crazy the weather was, and take picture of the sunset in the storm. When we finally arrived at the camp site it was almost dark, everyone was cold, soaking wet and tko’ed, we went inside our tent only to find no light (or candle), wet mattresses and blankets, couldn’t get any worse. Good thing for modern technology, my cellphone turned into my flashlight for the night, and we ate dinner in this central tent. The desert guide cooked us this beef stew with rice, and it was probably one of the best meal we had on the whole Morocco trip oddly. After dinner prerty much everyone went back to their tent and crashed, and I think I was the only person who was still up and about in the pitch black. I ended up hanging out with the guides for some time; drank some mint tea and spoke some broken English, then I sat outside for another 30 min or so just looking and taking pictures of stars by myself… So I thought. When I got up to go to bed, I saw a shadow in the dark and I just stood there and stared really hard into the blackness thinking, wha, I didn’t hear anyone come out… But someone was sitting at the next table! Turned out it was the Italian girl in my tent and she came out to look at the stars too lol, had a good chat with her before I went to bed. And I just have to say, it was one of the worst sleep ever as well. Our door didn’t close properly so when there’s strong wind, I felt sand built up on my eyes and lips, so I ate some sand while I slept… And then there were holes on our tent so I also got raindrops on my face occasionally. GG.
Next morning we woke up early and I caught a glimpse of the sunrise. Someone found a snowboard woth broken binding so we were trying to do ghetto sand boarding, while the Austria girl actually brought her skis and geared up, but because of the rain the sand was super slushy (or whatever the equivalent term for that sand condition as snow), she skied about 5 seconds and stopped, she did get some cool pics though. The camel ride back was 100x better cause it was nice and sunny, and my seat was 100x more comfortable. We got back to the hotel rendezvous point, and ate breakfast for about 15 min and then we got yalla yalla’ed by our driver. Except no one listened lol, we were supposed ti get time to relax ,eat, and shower, but pretty much only the eating part happened. Hence ended the epic desert journey and a long long ride back to Marrakech.
Overall, despite all the ridiculous crap we went through, I still think it was one of the best part of the trip, I just wished we had a camp fire around the desert camp, and our driver wasn’t such a random jerkface – he randomly put on loud music, talked super loud on his cellphone, and on the way back he even made a random stop and bought some meat for himself! Besides, part of the desert will always be with me because there are sand stuck in my lens :-( don’t worry still usable, but my poor Canon definitely went through some hard time.
Almost done, last episode, Fez – Andy defeated!?
