More on the Moroccan desert

What ideas did you have about Morocco before you started reading my blog? If you imagined deserts, sand, camels, and nomads and their tents, you weren't alone.

As I hope my blog has illustrated for you, though, Morocco is a geographically diverse country. I didn't see any camels until I had been here for a few months, and my recent trip to the desert was the first time I saw a landscape that I thought might be described as "stereotypically" Moroccan or North African.

The transition to a desert landscape really begins south of Midelt. The mountains are always close by, but the land slowly becomes dustier, and the vegetation becomes more sparse and scrubby.

There was an unexpected number of hotels along our route from Midelt to Merzouga. Some of them were shockingly (and, we all agreed, too optimistically) grand. As we drove by these hotels, we saw that the vast majority had virtually empty parking lots.

We had originally made reservations at such a hotel (although not nearly as new as the one pictured to the left) in Erfoud. It was such a depressingly outdated and empty place, though, that we quickly ditched it for a smaller and grubbier – yet less deserted and more comfortable  – hotel.

The way people look changes, too, as one approaches the desert. Skin gets darker, and by the time we got to Erfoud, we hardly saw the faces of any women, most of whom were covered from head to toe with abaya-like black garments, some with brightly colored embroidered patterns on them. The Rough Guide to Morocco says that Erfoud gives one "a first, powerful sense of proximity to the desert, with frequent sandblasts ripping through the streets." We arrived in this normally dusty town during a time of unusually strong winds, and the coating of grit that quickly accumulated on my body, along with a  constant sense of impending danger to my eyes, made me immediately understand the benefit of full body coverage.

Between Errachidia and Erfoud, houses and cafés, barely distinguishable from the surrounding earth out of which they were built, line the road. The dry and dusty landscape is split in half by the surprisingly wide and green oases of the Ziz River valley.

It is in this area that Morocco's dates are grown. Tata, the guide who was supposed to take us to the sand dunes on Saturday night, was scheduled to give a tour of a Ziz Valley palmery to a group of American students on Saturday morning, and he let us tag along. Despite the fact that we may have gotten food poisoning from the lunch his family served us, we still enjoyed our tour of the palmery.

Between the date palm, pomegranate, and fig trees – often on communally shared land – people grow crops such as fava beans, wheat, and lettuce, and they irrigate them with water from the Ziz River. Tata told us that no chemicals, and only natural fertilizer, are used to grow the crops.

As we drove from Erfoud to and then past the even smaller town of Merzouga, onto nearly nonexistent dirt roads, visibility became worse. We could just barely see the beautiful Erg Chebbi sand dunes, and the land surrounding us appeared – to me, anyway – ugly and barren.

As evening approached, it became obvious that an overnight trip to the sand dunes

would be both ill-advised and not much fun. Feeling defeated and embarrassed, we offered to drive Tata to the desert home he had recently purchased.

Tata's "neighborhood"

Because our camera was pretty coated with sand by this time, I don't have any good photographs of Tata's house, but it was interesting to look at and think about how the environment affects architecture in this part of the country. The key is to build your house so as to keep out as much wind, sand, sun, and heat as possible. The first thing you need to do is build a wall around the area where your house will be. This wall – like the walls of your house itself – needs to be very thick. Your windows will be small and high, possibly made of a tinted glass. You will not carpet your floors, of course, since a great deal of sand will enter your house – no matter what.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we went to our hotel (the other potential cause of our food poisoning) a night early. This hotel is literally right on the edge of the sand dunes. We were delighted by the manager's hospitality, by the large and comfortable rooms, and by the adequately functioning air conditioning.

Brian and Sara outside their hotel room.

Brian and T looking at the sand dunes right outside our hotel's pool area.

Desert picnic, anyone?

That evening, as we sat drinking Moroccan tea with our feet in the pool, we reflected on how our trip was going thus far. The four of us have gone on a few trips together, and never has any diverged so much from what we had planned. But I don't think we had ever had so much fun together, either.

I think we all agreed that it was fun to see the sights, but what we were really valuing was our friendship and our time together.