Daily Photo: rockin the casbah.

It’s mostly impossible not to sing “rock the casbah” while you’re here, in the actual casbah, regardless of how rockin’ it is.

The trail.

Wind picks up speed, pushing sand in drifts, spilling it over the backbones of the dunes and shifting it over the surfaces of the desert. It lifts up, into the air, up to us, high on the camels, and peppers our skin with the grains.  The dunes and the sand are orangeish, flecked with dark brown and the surface is patterned with lines like those at the bottom of the sea.

Our trail is visible before us in the sand, not because there are footsteps left behind from other camels or other people, no those have long blown away, but because the trail is made of round brown pebbles; camel poo. The poo lines the trail, is blown into pockets along the trail, blown over the dunes to roll along nearby, the only lasting mark of the camel trains that daily make the route here, through the desert.

We consider what it must have been like hundreds of yeas ago, riding camel caravans through the dunes, navigating the shifting dunes, coming across the tracks, the poo, of other camel trains. Hamid leads us ever onward, looking just the part. But no matter how exotic the trip is, how interesting it is to try to re-live, or gently re-experience history, the modern world is never far behind. Hamid is a smart boy, young and lean, he looks just as his ancestors who have inhabited this part of the word for thousands of years have looked, but under his robes he wears cammo jeans and an orange tee shirt. He carries a mobile phone in his robe pocket and it rings several times as we walk. Sheepishly, he stops the camels and answers the phone, sounding exactly like his teenage counterparts in the United States. Except that he is speaking his traditional Berber.

We are heading toward the biggest dune we can see as Hamid explains to us that at every big dune in the desert there may be a Berber family living in huts. The big dune offers protection and often access to water, deep underground. Hamid points to the horizon to the left and says that just 30 kilometers away is the Nigerian border. “Let’s go!” Alex says, “I’ve got my passport,” and Hamid laughs. After an hour of riding, slowly plodding and listing on the ships, we circle a small rise and come to the base of the big dune. There, under its shade is a collection of tent circles made of oilcloth and carpets.

Hamid leads our camels to one of the circles and tells the camels to sit down. With a small amount of grumbling, each camel bends first at the front knees, drops halfway, then drops his back legs, and finally settles his belly down in the hot sand. Holding on as the camel descends is the hardest part of the whole journey, and I have no choice but to trust that my camel is not bucking me off, as it feels, but simply settling down for the night.

 

Daily Photo: desert rider.

Into the Desert

We rode the ships of the desert into the Sahara, the dunes undulating around us in every direction, like waves. The wind blows the sand over the dune ridges, whipping it up like spray. Hamid, our guide, walks ahead in his green robe and white turban, pulling on the camel’s rope. Alex’s camel is first, we’re told he is the crazy camel, but he is fast, and so first. Alex rides like a pro, her back is straightened her hands sit unbothered at her sides. She rocks and leans with the listing ship she rides, without any complaint.

Matt rides second on his camel, tied to Alex’s. He wears kakis, sandals, a white dress shirt and a black and white fedora. He looks formal for the occasion of riding into the Saharan dunes by camel. From behind, as I watch him on my camel, his wide legs straddling the girth of the camel’s belly and his position on the far back of the saddle make him seem as though he is a fraction of a second from slipping right off the back. As if he is losing ground on the blanketed saddle, and his legs unable to stop him from slipping, but that is nowhere near the case, Matt is soundly on and he’s up there telling jokes and chatting with Alex and Hamid about the desert, about the dunes, about the ships we’re riding out into the sunset.

My camel, tied to Matt’s, is not very sure footed. As we go up or down, the camel stumbles, lurches and I teeter on top. My camel is also strapped with baggage so my legs cannot grip the camel as you would when riding a horse, and so I rely completely on the metal handle of my saddle to steady myself.

Behind me, tied to my camel, is Michael who rides the stubborn camel, he is the camel that takes every step under pressure from the camel in front of him. This camel has neck is outstretched so that it’s rope is taunt.

As we walk along Michael’s camel makes gurgling noises in its throat, noises that sound like burping or farting, like the camel is affected greatly by gas. But it is my impression that the camel is simply talking, perhaps he is expressing his intolerance in walking, his grumbling about each step sounds to me like something from a Star Wars alien, like Chewbacca or an Ewok. So as the camel groans and gurgles, right up to the back of my camel, I turn to it and murmur, petting it when it gets close enough on the cheek and calling it Ewok. The camel rumbles at me despite my attention and we continue deeper into the dunes under thin, passing clouds.

Daily Photo: Alex in the desert.

Daily Photo: hot sheep.

Meet the camels.

So we set out the front doors of the compound and walked into the sand. The heat hit us quickly and each of us exclaimed something riddled with curses that expressed how amazed we were at the scorching heat. Matt said, “I can’t last! If I was left out here I wouldn’t survive fifteen minutes.” We all agreed. A small touch of the sand burned our feet and we danced into the shade as fast as possible.

We found our way to the corrals and introduced ourselves to the camels, a quiet bunch munching hay and sporting big bangle nose rings.

They mostly ignored us. They had no shade and no water, but seemed fit enough. A herd of sheep wandered nearby, eating scraps and seeking shade.

A movie prop sat under a tree and a water tower sprung up from behind the compound walls. Michael climbed the tower and photographed the surrounding desert as I looked on, dizzy just watching him at the height. All around us stretched desert, dunes, sand and heat.

In a few minutes we were spent from the sun, blazing red and sore from hot sand. We retreated to our courtyard and jumped in the pool for a soak. We would not repeat visiting the desert in the heat of the day again. We’d learned our lesson: only camels can survive.

Daily Photo: edge of the Sahara.

Daily Photo: the moustached cat.

At Heaven.

We arrived at the desert oasis after a long night-bus trip. It was like arriving at heaven. We were picked up before dawn at the bus stop and were carted off to the hotel another hour drive into the Sahara. After a nap to let the sun rise, we parked ourselves on chaise lounges in the shade in front of the pool by eight in the morning. We alternated between dipping in the pool, napping on chairs, reading and making plans. In the comfort of the courtyard of the adobe outpost that we called home that day, we were comfortable.

Comfortable enough to suggest leaving the shade and having a look around the compound.

We wanted to see our camels, the ones we’d be riding later that day, which we saw for a moment on the way in. Our driver felt is was necessary to demonstrate the capabilities of our four-wheel drive vehicle and so did not just drive up to the front gate of the hotel, but instead circled it in the sand, showering the car with sand. “A dog and pony show,” said Matt when we realized the unnecessary-ness of the display.

But it meant that we’d seen the barn in the back and the water tower and the corral with the camels.