I ride a camel in the Sahara

This last weekend, almost everyone in the ARANAS (ARabic And North African Studies) program that I'm in took a trip to Erfoud and Merzouga in central Morocco. We left at 2:00 on Friday, right after class, and spent 5 hours driving in two giant tour buses, plus two bathroom breaks. When there are about 70 people, bathroom breaks take a long time. The landscape in Erfoud is much more desert-like than in the mountains here, but it is not the Saharan landscape one thinks of when one thinks of the desert. It was more like the American Southwest, with a lot of rocky terrain and a few scattered bushy things. The منطقة (area/region - learned this word today) is very famous for its fossils, and there were a bajillion roadside stands selling cheap fossils and minerals that were all really interesting.

The hotel we stayed at in Erfoud had a pool and a bar, so some of us stayed up late swimming. The booze here is kind of gross and really overpriced, though, but that didn't stop some people from hanging out at the bar all night. The water in the pool and in the shower was kind of salty, the way soft water is, and I didn't feel very clean after bathing in it. At the hotel, I roomed with a girl from my class named Amanda, and, despite having gone to bed at 3am, we got up around 8 (later than I have since I've been here!*) to explore the town of Erfoud. We went to the souq and explored lots of shops with beautiful scarves and shoes and clothing. I also got to hone my haggling skills. I'm beginning to wish we haggled for everything in the states, it is getting to be a lot of fun. It was also insanely hot there, someone said 42°C (107°F). If you look at the map, Erfoud and Merzouga are down by Algeria. Ifrane is northeast of Fez, way up at the top.

At 4:30 we moved on to Merzouga, about another hour and a half away. We were supposed to stay in tents on the sand dunes, but I guess whoever organized the trip neglected to tell the people just how many of us there were, so when we arrived we were informed by our teachers that we were instead going to be stayin in a hotel on the edge of the Sahara. Literally- you looked out the front door and it looked like Erfoud, you looked out the back door, and there were giant dunes. Everyone was pretty upset, but we got over it. We went for a hike into the Sahara and attempted to climb an enormous dune to watch the sunset from. About 2/3 of us made it to the top, the rest (including me) had to stop halfway up. It took us about an hour to walk the half mile to the base of this dune, and another two hours to get to the top. I discovered that walking on sand is not fun. It was hard enough getting to the dune, but once we started climbing it and discovered how very steep it was, it just got worse. For every 8 steps you took, you made one step of progress, because you simply sank back down through the sand. I still got some cool pictures, though.

There were some drummers who were out to entertain all the tourists (an identical group was at the hotel in Erfoud- they keep taking us to the most touristy places they can possibly find), so we got to dance around with them at night before bed. I was really excited about stargazing in the Sahara, because I figured there would be a lot of stars out, but the moon was nearly full, and you couldn't really see many of them. In the morning, however, we woke up at 4:00 to ride camels back into the desert so we could watch the sunrise. Since it was still dark, and since the moon had set, the sky was much better for stargazing. You could clearly see the Milky Way and thousands of other stars, but not much else on the ground. We took camels (with guides, of course) back through the desert. It was about all we could do to not fall off, especially when we went down any dunes. We went in about twenty minutes, then disembarked and climbed another steep dune by foot. We sat atop that one for about an hour and watched the sun rise over the Sahara. I have about 80,000 pictures of that. My guide's name was Hamool, and I decided to name my camel Hassan. He was pretty friendly for being woken up at 4am to carry some tourist into the desert. Hamool kept turning around and saying "you okay? You okay?" When we were watching the sun rise, he took a nap, but I suppose he sees it all the time since this is his job. We kind of communicated in a weird mix of French, Arabic, and English, and I showed off my deep knowledge of Arabic by pointing at the sun and saying شمس. He told me that the Berber word for sun is "tefilout" (or something that sounds vaguely like that, anyway). On the way back to the hotel we saw a camel spider. The Moroccans told us that they don't really live here, they're more of a Gulf thing, but apparently this one did not get the memo. I'm really glad I saw it from the back of a camel, though, and not when I was on foot. It wasn't quite as big as the one in the picture, but nearly so. I could see its teeth from my perch atop Hassan. Before the camels left, I bought a fossil (probably fake) from Hamool because he practically pulled me up that sand dune. It's a pretty sweet looking fossil, though.

On the way back to Ifrane, we stopped at the Sunday souq in some town along the way, and did a lot more shopping. Shopping is a lot more fun when you get to argue about the price of everything. Some people tried to buy two oranges, and ended up with 2 kilos of them for only 10 DH (about a buck fifty), so we had a good time handing them out to the little kids that congregated around us. Depending on the size of the souq, it can get very confusing, so I've taken to giving some kid a dirham to take me to the part of it I want to be in. They're so cute, and they always try to speak to you in French- it's irresistable.

Today for class we went to the Berber market in the nearby town of Azrou and practiced our derija (Moroccan colloquial Arabic) skills by buying the ingredients to make fruit salads, which we will make tomorrow. The one good thing about an immersion program is that you get to actually go out and practice your skills. I bought oranges, carrots, sugar, and cinnamon. The smallest amount I knew how to ask for was a quarter kilo, so that is how much cinnamon I got, but it was still less than $2. Perhaps I'll take it home with me, because I know a carrot salad does not require that much cinnamon.

Anyway, I've rambled on for long enough now. !مصا الخير



*Everyone here has been short on sleep for the past two and a half weeks. Even on the weekends I haven't had the opportunity to sleep in. Everyone has discovered that napping is a bad idea because half hour naps inevitably turn into four hour sleep fests. Yesterday at 2:30 I meant to doze off for twenty minutes before meeting this guy at 3:00 to get help putting my pictures online. Next thing I knew it was 9:00. I'm pretty sure my roommate came in sometime around 4:00 and we had one of those awkward conversations in which one person is actually still asleep and so responds to the other person with a bunch of non-sequitors. I hope she doesn't think I'm weird.