My Time in Morocco

A Weekend Desert Tour

This past weekend I traveled nearly 700km from Rabat to Zagora Desert which is part of the Sahara. It was a crazy adventure! Two friends and I traveled to Marrakech by train which took about 3h30 to 4 hours. In Marrakech, we join an organized tour group called Marrakech Desert Trips who basically took care of everything for us. We were with 5 other people; 3 greek men in their 40s, a Japanese man and a quiet American woman. We left Marrakesh at 8:30 and began the drive to Zagora through the Atlas Mountains with Jamal our driver. The mountain roads went up, down and around the mountains with so many curves and roads right next to steep drops. There is no way I would ever be able to drive those roads but Jamal did it with ease. For lunch, we stopped at Kasbah Ait Ben Haddou a UNESCO world heritage site located in Ouzarzate province and is described as “a perfect synthesis of earthen architecture of the pre-Saharan regions of Morocco”. At around 4 pm after a 2 hour stop, we got back into the van and arrived in Zagora at around 7:30 pm. We were then put on camels and led to the desert camp. The camel ride was about an hour long and while I enjoyed every minute of it, the reality is that camels are very uncomfortable. Once at camp, we settled in and had tea on the dunes with our guide Youssef who led us by camel through the desert. At around 10 pm we were served a dinner of Tagine chicken and watermelon which was delicious. Then at around 11:30, the guides made a campfire, got out their drums and began to sing.

Youssef and the other guides are Berbers or Amazighs which is what they call themselves meaning free people. They are an ethnic group of several indigenous peoples of North Africa who predate the Arab invasion. The Amazighs do not have their own country because when colonizers divided Africa, they created borders straight through their lands meaning that the majority of the estimated 30 million Amazigh are divided across North Africa. 

We went to bed in our tent at midnight knowing that we had to be up for our 6:30 am breakfast. As you probably know the desert is really hot! During the day it was +45 degrees and in the night it was a cool 30. It was an absolutely brutal night because I had to keep drinking water (which was so hot it could have been tea) and try to sleep as beads of sweat rolled down my body. The desert is an eerie place especially at night because there is no sound. It is not a peaceful silence like you get camping in Canada because there is not a rustle of trees, birds or any other sound. It’s like a void. Any sound you make seems to travel so even whispering sounds loud. It was also a full moon so the entire desert was illuminated so you could see everything and didn’t need a flashlight to travel between tents. It was like a huge blinding streetlamp. So as you can imagine I didn’t sleep very well and maybe got 3 hours.

In the morning, we had a small breakfast of toast and tea before taking some last photos and getting back on our camels. After a short 30 minute ride we got back into our van with our tour group and Jamal and began the long drive to Marrakech. We left at around 7:30 and stopped in Ouzarzat to have another tour and for lunch stopping once again for about 2 hours. Then we got back into the van. We finally got into Marrakesh at 7pm where we jumped out and ran to catch a train to rabat. After another 4 hours of travelling, I finally made it back t my apartment at 11pm feeling gross from all the sweat, sunscreen, and sand on my body but also incredibly happy to have see and experienced something so incredible.