CAMEL RIDING IN THE SAHARA

Riding a camel is a lot like riding a mechanical bull.  I think. My time spent on a mechanical bull was pretty short and a long time ago after a few beers in a Country Western bar near Boulder CO in the 70s. But from what I can remember, sometimes it’s kind of fun but other times it is just plain terrifying. Nonetheless, after taking my one and only camel ride in the actual dunes of Erg Chebbi in the Moroccan Sahara, I still recommend camels as the best transportation vehicle for the monster dunes of the Sahara Desert.

For one thing, camels don’t take a lot of fuel to go many miles. For another, you don’t need to pack spare tires; their feet are leathery pads with two toes that spread out on the sand, easily overflowing a standard dinner plate. Unlike other four-footed animals, camels move both feet on the same side forward when they walk so riding one is like sitting astride an overturned kayak on a sometimes stormy sea. Camels have huge doe-shaped eyes with long lashes that either make you think they are the ‘soulful’ animals of Lonely Planet’s musings on the 'Desert of Dreams', or remind you of some cartoon. Camels seem to be a bit self-centered and stubborn to me, but they eventually follow the lead of the camel herder and provide the function they have provided for millennia – taking wanderers across the great expanse of the mother of all deserts – the Sahara.

When I headed to Morocco, I already knew I would miss the Royal Cities to the north, choosing instead the wide open barren spaces to the south. I have an addiction to wide open spaces having lived in the USA’s Desert Southwest for nearly 35 years. If the choice is between desert and city, I’ll most always opt for desert. And that is where I headed, the day after my plane landed in Marrakech.

My first stop was Boumalne Dades and Tanghir, the subject of another post. That far south in Morocco, even though Boumalne is in the Dades Valley, just south of the imposing High Atlas Mountains, the land is already dry and scrubby, looking not unlike my own desert, the Sonoran Desert, but with different vegetation. The contrast of the verdant and well-tended gardens along the rivers in the valleys coming down from the High Atlas to the scrubby hamada is striking. But then it seemed everywhere I looked I could spot incongruencies like this that added to the surprise of Morocco.

As my hosts and I traveled from Tanghir even further southeast into the desert, the hamada became even more sparse and empty. We saw camel herds and camel herders on the hills. My hosts pointed out what looked very much like the top of ancient kivas but turned out to be underground watering holes (think ‘rest stops’) for the Amazigh (Berbers) living their nomadic lives in this dry, inhospitable country. The further south we drove, the smaller the villages became; autos often replaced by all manner of wagons and carriages drawn by donkeys and horses.

Finally, Erg Chebbi, one of the two enormous dune systems of the Moroccan Sahara and looking just like it did in the 2005 movie Sahara, appeared. I could not take my eyes away. Here was the stuff of my travel dreams. I so wanted to stick my toes into the Sahara sands. I’ve climbed some pretty impressive dunes in my own Desert Southwest and I know what climbing mountains of sand can do for unused muscles. I just hoped the dunes weren’t quite as high as they looked from my window at the Kasbah Hotel Tombouctou, one of the beautiful Moroccan Xaluca Hotels.

This trip was supposed to end up with a 4WD ride up and over the dunes to a Amazigh encampment for two days but because of the real threat of a sandstorm (even the camel herder who sleeps with the camels in a small shack mentioned that sandstorms are the least favorite part of his job), an overnight stay in this beautiful hotel with a sunset camel ride and walk into the dunes was Plan B. Not a bad Plan B at all.

After settling in and having tea (you are always offered ‘tea’ here in Morocco and you should always accept – it’s just polite and the cookies are generally quite good), we met our camel herder in back of the hotel at the base of the Erg. I wasn’t too concerned about mounting the camel. The camel was cushed (lying down) and my camel was the smaller of the two. To mount a camel, you literally throw one leg over the saddle and pull yourself up onto it. The saddle has no stirrups but does offer a smallish ‘rod’ tied in the middle to the saddle directly behind the camel’s rather large head. This operates as your ‘saddle horn’ and believe me, you are going to use it as a drowning man hangs on to his life ring buoy.

The camel herder then shouts camel-type commands to the camel, the camel responds in kind (although it seemed my camel was saying “nope it’s late and I’m staying right here jerk”) and this continues until the camel herder wins. Or at least mine did.

Remember that little rod? It is going to keep you from tumbling over the camel’s head when the giant beast pushes off the ground with his back legs to stand up. Your entire body is suddenly vertical to the ground and your feet are desperately hunting for the afore-mentioned missing stirrups. But in the end, you are up in a pretty comfortable saddle feeling pretty good about not making a complete fool of yourself. Until you realize your legs are further apart than they ever were when you birthed your firstborn.

The camel's front end goes up a bit easier; this movement will bring the saddle parallel to the ground, a much more comfortable position. And then, your ‘ship of the desert’ (called so because of the rocking motion of your camel as it moves both legs on one side forward) begins its slow plod up and into the erg.

A camel going up into the dunes isn’t too bad. The camel’s giant dinner-plate feet are perfectly designed for walking in sand. I could feel my core muscles moving and reflected on how much more fun this was than pilates. Yet, once up a dune, the other side usually goes down. This means that occasionally a camel has to go down too. Once more I had the notion of impending tumbling over the camel’s head-except from a higher plane. I tightened my grip on the rod and gripped with my inner thighs, inwardly thanking my fitness trainer for those thigh strengthening exercises using one of those inflatable exercise balls.

After riding the camel for what was all too short a time, we were several dunes back into the Erg and ready to climb up to the tallest dune around for the sunset. Getting off a camel is pretty much the reverse of getting on one. Same feeling of insecurity, same sense of the imminent foolishness of tumbling over the camel’s head onto the soft, forgiving (thank god) sand.

Climbing your way up a dune entails a good amount of work. But once on top, we could see the massive Erg Chebbi with its continuous flow of dunes all the way to the horizon in three directions. I nearly cried. I had asked my host to leave time for me to give thanks to the Maker and closed my eyes so I could affect a graceful and grateful posture and listen to the sound of the sand constantly shifting around us.

Almost before I had enough time to express my gratitude, sand started providing me an unwanted microdermabrasion. Fortunately, my host had stopped in at a roadside ‘strip center’ in order for us to purchase the necessary length of cloth from which to make a Berber turban.

Following his instructions, I had wound my turban around my head, leaving a ‘tail’ I could tuck into my turban’s folds in case the sand got there before we got down from the dune. That ‘tail’ quickly found its way across my face.

There is something incredibly unique and mystical about sitting on top of a giant dune at the very beginning of a sandstorm. We stayed just a bit longer, watching the orange-red Sahara sun slide slowly down over the hamada to the west, until the camel herder and my host felt we really needed to leave because of the blowing sand. It is quite easy to lose your sense of direction in a sandstorm. But if you are ever provided an opportunity to safely experience the swirl of sand around you on a darkening dune before riding your camel back to civilization, it is an experience that I can truly say might just be once in a lifetime.