Riad du Sud - Kasbah Hotel Tamsahalte

... 16h. Mais cette fois, nous dénigrons les dunes pour la partie rocheuse à l'est du camp. En effet, même si nous dormons au milieu des dunes, nous ne sommes pas encore dans le Sahara. Il n'y a ici que "quelques" dunes posées sur le socle rocheux et lunaire de la région. Les transitions dune-rocaille sont donc assez courantes. PS : l'appareil photo nous a lâché en début de matinée... plus de batterie :p

... trouvé de terrible. A la sortie des gorges, vers Alnif, la piste devient très vite monotone... mais c'est un mal nécessaire pour traverser le Jbel Sargho. Heureusement notre chauffeur nous fait remarquer de petits détails du paysage. Après Alnif, nous bifurquons dans les plaines désertiques ...

... Arnold's" of Happy Days fame. Teen guys hung out joking around with the hard working owner. We ordered the special: an egg sandwich and then called it a night. The hotel room had a weird stench when we walked back in. We weren't quite used to the stenches yet at that point. Mike, ever the chemist, set out to find the source. He's been quite busy fixing everything that's wrong with our Moroccan bathrooms: leaky sinks, broken toilets, strange smells ...

... the gorge, we met a local Berber family living in the rocky cliffs. Their home consisted of a burlap tent, a rock-walled enclosure to house their sheep, and a small hand-dug cave to which the family retreated during periods of rain and flood. Amazingly, the cave was dug out of the side of the rocky cliff by the father with the aid of a sharp rock. He had a long way to go since Paul barely fit in the small enclosure that had been dug so far. The burlap tent was a simple open ...

Touching the Sahara is just one of those things that has to be done here. And it really is only touching the Sahara - Morocco only has one, relatively small erg (mass of slowly moving sand dunes). Still, a small erg is pretty damn big, and once you're a 5 min walk into it the rest of the world disappears. This ...

We leave Ait Ben Haddou in the late morning. The scenery here has made the area a favourite with movie producers, with large movie studios popping up in the semi desert, like Atlas Film Studios. It means the locals are doing rather well financially. I am at the wheel today, fully insured. It is so strange just to drive a car as I have not been at the wheel for 10 months. But as for driving on the wrong side of the road ...

What a crazy few days! We made it to the Sahara as planned after another marathon bus journey... only 8 hours this time but quite possibly the worst one in my travels so far! Think zero leg-room, packed bus, scorching dry heat and desolate landscapes. In spite of sipping from my water bottle every 10 minutes I must have been dehydrated as all I remember is fading in and out of consciousness to a backdrop of ...

... price - much cheaper than the souq in a city, and it was nice to pay the person who had actually made it (about a week's worth of work). The walk we did in the afternoon was up a nearby mountain, and we probably set a record for the descent speed. It was so cold and windy that we nearly ran down the entire way.

Today was a day walk to Bab'n Ali, and then a return to the same camp as last night. Bab'n Ali (Gates of Ali) is a pair of unusually shaped rock formations that are the most well-known in the Jbel Sahro area. This was the hottest day of walking of the entire trip. It was definitely worth the hike, both for the views of the rocks and from half-way up the Bab'n ...

The real trekking began today. We walked across a rocky area with very little vegetation, and there was no real elevation change despite small ups and downs the entire way. Footing was treacherous due to the rocks, which was typical of every day's trek. The few areas where somehow there is water were a striking colour of green. We encountered sheep and goats tended by a nomadic family who at the time were living in a nearby cave. They owned quite a few camels so apparently ...