Morocco: New Years in the Sahara Desert

DAY 5 (continued...)

Finally we made it to the long anticipated Sahara Desert! Luckily for us, it was sunny with only wisps of clouds in the sky. The sand was a beautiful orange and gold color. It was also so fine and soft; it felt so good between your toes and wasn't really sticky or dusty, which was cool.

Brad got to ride the camel at the front of the line and was thriving. His camel was really foamy at the mouth. We later learned that the camel is horny if they are foamy at the mouth. We don't know if that's really true, but everyone found that entertaining. My camel kept pooping.

It was truly an amazing experience to ride camels in the Sahara Desert. I can only hope that the camels are treated okay -- maybe that's unrealistic and wishful thinking, but I still do. It seems like they live a rather bleak life...just walking back and forth on the same path from the pick up point to the Berber Camp...but I didn't see any mistreatment while there at least. I did see one camel making this terrible noise and struggling to get up -- it made me feel so bad. However, the people didn't force the camel to go up after it refused or couldn't get up -- they didn't beat it so...like I said, wishful thinking.

We road for about 15-20 minutes in the warm sun. It felt a little like riding a horse but a bit more bumpy I'd say. That could have been due to the sand and the uneven surface though. When Brad's camel knelt down so he could get off, he hit the back of his head on my camel's head. It was so funny and he claims it didn't hurt that much. We got off at the bottom of a sand dune and trudged our way up it so we could go sand-boarding! We went down twice and had a blast! The first time, Brad was hollering and screaming, meaning he got sand in his mouth haha. The second time, we went down a slightly longer and steeper part of the hill and this time Brad didn't get sand in his mouth. Although it was so fun, we didn't go again because we didn't want to walk up the hill again! So we sat at the top and watched other people board and talked to some people.

The Berber camp was on the other side of the sand boarding hill. So after we got our fill, we made our way down to the camp.

Later, we watched the sunset with Jo (second picture -- cutie!) and other people from our van. Even though we couldn't really see the sun set due to the clouds, the sky still looked really amazing!

That night was a fight for dinner. We were at the camp with 3 other groups, and it was not organized at all. Thankfully, Brad and I were paying really close attention to the food scene and got our food rather quickly (well, compared to other people). We were also able to move our stuff into a tent. We were with two people from our bus, Daniel and Sonny, and two other people who I really liked on our trip named Mary and Alex. There were other people in the tent who were Alex's friends, and others we didn't know. But we were glad we got a tent with great people! We were sleeping on a long, wide mat, 5 people per mat. We each got a pillow and a heavy, wool blanket which was surprisingly very warm.

That night, we danced with the rest of the camp and ventured a little further away from the camp so we could stargaze. Because the moon was so bright (some people said it was a super moon, and that's why there was this light ring around it), we couldn't see as many stars as we thought we would have. But we still saw so many, even Orion's Belt! As the clock counted down towards midnight, the camp started to count down. There were fireworks and bunches of wood set on fire at midnight. We even saw fireworks from other camps in the desert. Both Brad and I were really tired from the day, and we knew we had an early morning wake up call because we wanted to see the sunrise, so we retired "early" and went to bed before the other drunk people were done partying.

We spent New Years Eve in the Sahara Desert and it was probably the best one yet.

DAY 6

We woke up bright and early for the sunrise. Like the sunset though, it was also marred by clouds, but there were still beautiful colors and camera shots to take (like above). We took one of our heavy wool blankets with us to the top of the sand dune hill and watched the light spread out over the desert.

Because so many people had stayed up so late, breakfast was much calmer as a lot of people weren't awake as early for breakfast or just skipped it completely to sleep. We rode the camels back out of the desert. This time, I hit my head on the camel behind me when my camel was kneeling down to let me off! Our group laughed, pointing out that Brad and I really must be a couple since it only happened to us.

Once back in the van, we started our longest leg of the trip to Fez. We stopped and saw monkeys at the Azrou Cedar Woods. Brad was really into it and went monkey hunting, trying really hard to get the monkeys to like him and approach him by coaxing them with food.

We saw a baby monkey too, which was too cute! I remembered the aggressive monkey experience I had in Bali and wasn't as into it, but the baby monkey was very, very cute.

We finally arrived at Fes very late at night. We were served the most organized dinner of them all and it was so good. Despite napping for so much of the ride there, we were exhausted and slept like rocks that night.