Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Day 44: Sa-here-ah


Day 2 of the 9-day trip. 
Plan: Erfoud to Merzouga to Desert Camp


Today started with some explosive diarrhea. 6 of the 12 of us (including Si Ron) got sick from something we had for dinner last night. I spent 7 - 9 on the toilet and then purged myself the rest of the morning by sweating it out in the hot tub for an hour and lying in the sun for a half hour. Being able to wear shorts/board shorts has been great!
We left for Merzouga at 11, but had to stop in "downtown" Erfoud to pick up medicine and water. All the towns we've been passing through are date palm oases and look exactly like something out of Indiana Jones movies. We drove through Rissani, where the royal family is from, and got to Merzouga at like 2:15.


Our hotel, Kasbah Tombouktou, is like a more desert-y version of the Xaluca but without a jacuzzi. We had a couple hours to relax after lunch before we climbed onto our dromedaries at 5:30 to head out to the Sahara. We each took a backpack and met our rides right behind the hotel on the edge of the dunes. Mine was named something like Asmahan but we renamed them after Aladdin characters, so his name was really Robin Williams as The Genie.


Riding the dromedaries was soooo uncomfortable. Our two hour trip was both a blessing and a curse. The red dunes were beautiful and magestic and there was a nice wind so it wasn't too hot; however, your groin and your ass get KILLED by the saddle. I had to shift my seat and my poorly-wrapped head scarf every two minutes. I joked that I spent 70% of the riding trying to get comfortable and 30% of the ride trying to figure out where we were!
We got to our oasis campsite in the shadow of the biggest dune at 7:45. The dune was over a thousand feet tall. They had some old skis we could use, but my size 12 feet were way too big. Elle, Meredith, Marissa and I climbed up the dune as the sun was setting anyways so that Elle and Meredith could ski. It was like walking straight up hill, except every step you took, you slid 6 inches back and you went up to your ankle in the sand. I was pretty happy I didn't have to carry skis and boots too cause I would have died. We were dead tired after a half hour of climbing, but Meredith and I left marissa and Elle a couple hundred feet up and made it to a crest on the side of the dune. We took some cool silhouette pictures and then rejoined them. They ended up skiing down in the dark. Elle did really well but only one of Meredith's boots would click in so she had to ski on one ski! I had fun bounding down the slope though and we ultimately concluded it was worth the effort. 


Meredith on the dunes
We drank some wine when we got back and had dinner at 9:30. Afterwards, we took the bottles of wine we brought with us and carried them a little bit up the dune to watch the moon rise. We had a full moon, the biggest one of the year according to NASA, and could see a ton of stars too. We sat on the dune for two or three hours and then went to bed in our tents at 12:30.

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