Sand and Stars (Morocco, Part 2)

I have always loved feeling like a tiny spec in an epic landscape. I never thought I would have the opportunity to go to the great sprawling sand dunes of the greatest desert in the world, the Sahara. There are few things that I have seen in the world that compare to it. But let’s start at the beginning.

We paid a ridiculously cheap price to be driven out to the desert in a minivan over the course of three days, and we saw some amazing things on the way.

 

 

The first day we drove up over the Atlas Mountains, taking a mountain pass that was very picturesque. Along the way we saw several small villages. These were made out of mud and hay blocks and very extremely basic, the inhabitants mostly sheep herders. Some were perched on mountainsides and looked like they had been there for thousands of years. These are the homes of the Berber people.

 

In Morocco there are two peoples. First, there are the ‘Berbers’, the natives to the land. The other are the Arabs, those who ventured across from the middle east preaching Islam. They now live together, pray to the same god and talk the same language, but there is no way a Berber is going to let you think he is an Arab.

From the mountains we came down to the outermost reaches of the Sahara, a rocky and gravelly plain that extends one way to the foothills of the snow-capped atlas, and the other to an oblivion of a moon like landscape. I couldn’t believe we could see such a contrast in scenery in just a matter of hours.

In the desert we saw more berber villages, usually built around a small oasis of palm tree’s. It was almost cartoonish in how cliché it looked.

We came across one large oasis that was unforgettable. The landscape surrounding was bone dry and rocky, an endless covering of brownish orange. But right there in a valleyed trough, a forest of palm trees was growing. There was even a small water course from a natural spring, and the locals had initated some cropping, which promoted the development of a small town. Here we saw women washing clothes in the stream water, wander through their cabbage and alfalfa plantations, and took in the bizzare scene of a forest sprouting out of a desert.

 

 

One town we came across happened to be the nicest and most ordered town I had seen in all Morocco. It was called Ourzazate, and I was surprised to learn that its wealth comes from Hollywood. Its natural desert beauty has been the backdrop for a bunch of movies, and there is a movie studio, a film museum and several nearby ‘locations.’  (Gladiator, Game of Thrones, Kingdom of Heaven, Lawrence of Arabia, etc). The town itself also had a nice old medina, or Kasbah, made out of mud blocks.

 

 

But the real reason we were out here was to see sand. Dunes and dunes of it.

 

The first hints came when we saw small rises of dunes no higher than me, spotted with camels (of course). Then suddenly, in the distance, we spotted the sharp rise of a giant sand dune, with several more behind it. As we drove into the town at the foot of the dunes, they loomed large behind it.

I’ve seen some epic landscapes in my day -  Mt Fuji, Grand Canyon, Uluru – and these sand dunes were every bit as awe inspiring.

We got on camels and rode for an hour and a half as the sun lowered casting shadows on the dune depression, and then finally set. The dusk washed over the landscape and soon we were riding in the dark with the first stars coming out above us. The endless dunes and the way they charnghed colour as the sun went down met my high expectations of the beauty of the desert. The whole time I was wide eyed, trying to breathe as much of the scene into my eyes as I could.

That night we slept in tents on dunes while the local berber men cooked us up a feast of targine – the best meal I’ve had in Morocco. After, we climbed our way to the top of a nearby sand dune and could see the headlights of the border patrol in the distance. The Algerian border was only 35 kms away and there are desert pirates all through that country (and it’s no secret Al Qaida is active in North Africa – there was a tourist targeted terrorist attack in Marrakech in 2010 which I thought about whoever I was in a busy area).

 

If the desert itself didn’t blow me away enough, the stars above sure did. I now agree with all the clichés about the desert having the best conditions for star gazing. The night sky out there was brighter than any sky I have ever seen. It was as in-your-face as objects millions of light years away can be.

It also happened to be Rins birthday, and the group of us sang happy birthday as we rode the camels in the dark.

 

That night Rin and I couldn’t take our eyes off the sky because we knew we would probably never see stars that bright again. It took us a while to get to bed because we kept telling each other ‘just one more minute.’

I will remember the desert and those stars for the rest of my life. That night I told the universe that I was sated, that I have had far more than one person deserves from it. 

Everything from here is a bonus.