الصحراء

Thursday night, 2 a.m., and we all boarded yet another tour bus, our weekend bags in hand. Destination? The Sahara. Time it would take to get there? Fifteen hours. We drove and drove throughout Thursday night and Friday day, people sleeping in all imaginable positions, aisle space included, and listening to iPods in all their various forms. The time passed surprisingly swiftly, periodic stops for photos, meals, and gas station bathrooms the only signs that anything was in fact changing.

As Friday afternoon continued, though, we arrived at our hotel in Erfoud, where we did our best to cleanse ourselves of the grime of a day-long bus ride before climbing into a fleet of SUVs and heading out to the desert.

The barren flatlands soon turned to dunes, and as we stopped to take a picture, the sand between our toes (if only metaphorically, as I was wearing sneakers), it began to rain. In the Sahara. So that was bizarre.

Then we continued on our way to the campsite, where we put our stuff in our tents and hung out in the main building for a little while, after which we wandered a bit and spent some time talking with one of the many men who sell tourists fossils from the desert (which, after all, used to be a sea).

(feet, or africas? toes, in order: morocco, algeria, tunisia, libya, egypt)

As it got dark, we returned to the main building for dinner – couscous, yum – during which time I may or may not have accidentally let my napkin get too close to the open flame of a candle, catch on fire, and have to be put out by Adam's bare hand, thereby causing burn wounds (but thanks to him, not the incineration of the entire Sahara). So that was unfortunate.

Anyway, we hung out a bit and then went to sleep, dragging our mattresses from the tents into the courtyard so it'd be a bit cooler. Sand would occasionally blow everywhere, caking my eyebrows by morning, and it also began to rain the middle of the night, but it was a really neat experience regardless. And it's not like we were sleeping for that long: 5 a.m. saw us gathering, sandy and sleepy-eyed, with a group of camels and their drivers. Our goal? Ride them up to the top of the dunes in time to see the sunrise. So James and I mounted our camel, who he named Salah al-Din, journeyed across the desert with the rest of the group, and yeah, watched the sun rise. It was pretty spectacular.

We headed back by camel again, ate breakfast, and headed back to the hotel in Erfoud, where we slept and hung out for a while before getting on the bus once more in order to return to Tangier.

So that was a pretty cool weekend.

I've been to the Sahara!