Adventure Post: Sahara Excursion

After Marrakech (or was it during?), we did an excursion out to the Sahara desert. Our hostel advertised it for 968 Dirhams each, which was about 33 USD, so we figured why not. Turns out, we booked through the right people. The way the excursion worked was a bunch of people met up, were divided into vans, and then each went on their own tours based on the amount they paid. We paid less than most people on our van, so we stayed at "lesser" accommodations, which were more than adequate for what we paid. Outside of accommodations, it was the same tour all around.

The first day we went out to Ouarzazate and Aït Benhaddou, known as the "door of the desert." Aït Benhaddou is a fortified village that has been occupied since at least the 1000s A.D. and is strategically located along historical trans-Saharan trade route. To get there, we had to cross the riverbed. Had we come in the rainy season, there would have been a wide river! The Ouarzazate area is a popular filming location (think Gladiator, The Living Daylights, The Mummy), with Atlas Studios, the largest movie studio in the world by physical size, located here, and is, as a result, a popular tourist destination.

From here, we went to Taferdout, a great viewpoint for the surrounding mountains, before heading to our hotel for the night. We got a lot of really cool pictures and videos from this raised rock.

The second day, we went to a traditional Bedouin village which still adheres to its traditional way of life (more or less) to this day. Our guide showed us the fields where each family has a plot of land where they grow their crops and feed for their animals. He also taught us how the families barter (temporarily) their land with each other to support each other in the community, which was a really cool concept. The villagers there made their money by making carpets. Beautiful carpets. Some of them take a week to make from cheaper materials while others take upwards of a year from better materials.

Something that stood out to us both was the abundance of electrical and phone lines strung across the village. Our guide explained to us that the current King of Morocco was making it a point to bring basic 21st Century services to outlying communities in an effort to preserve Morocco's traditional and historical culture and heritage. Our guide told us that this initiative has allowed people to live in areas which they would have long abandoned had these services not been brought to them.

From the village, we went to a beautiful canyon for some cool sightseeing and picture taking before heading off for our camel ride into the desert.

Our camp for the night was about an hour or so camel ride into the desert, and what a beautiful ride it was! We got to watch the sunset as we ambled along on camelback into the increasingly dark desert.

A note about camels: unlike horses, they don't wear down. They will simply give up when they've had enough, and that happened on our ride out to the camp. A man from another tour was thrown from his camel when it decided to just lay down for the night. Nothing our guide could do would get it back up again, and the man had to walk the rest of the way. Luckily, he was a good sport about it.

The next morning, we split up: Jo opted to take a jeep up to the top of the sand dunes, watch the sun rise over the Algerian mountains, and sandboard down to the bottom while Jack opted to ride his camel out from the desert. We both had some great experiences and views that seemed to be straight out of a movie (and the colours turned out BEAUTIFUL on the GoPro!).

Once we were out of the desert, we got back in the van, made our rounds to pick up the rest of the tour (we went to different camps overnight), and started the very long, 10-hour drive back to Marrakech.

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