For future reference, check the time difference.

We set out before the sun the next morning, trudging through the shady streets to find our tour, only to discover a dark and deserted office without a soul. We quickly began to get worried, frustrated, and angry, thinking we had missed the tour, were at the wrong place, were scammed, or any number of endless possibilities. We stood there for a good twenty minutes debating about what to do, finally deciding there was nothing to do and it wasn’t good to hang around the dark deserted streets any longer. So we started heading back towards the hostel when I turned to Leah and said “are we SURE there isn’t a time difference between Morocco and France?” After asking a lady on the street, we discovered it was not 7:30 AM, but actually 6:30 AM, thus half an hour remained before our tour was to meet. What a sense of relief mixed with stupidity. So we sat on a bench and had some bread we had brought for breakfast and tried to blend in, lol. Our attempt at blending in consisted of pulling our hoods up, because many people in Morocco have these cape type things with pointy hoods, reminds me of the Jedi Knights on Star Wars.



We spent the rest of the day doing a good deal of driving, making stop here and there for drinks and bathrooms and lunch. We stopped in one really cool town where we took a donkey ride across a little creek to see the village on the other side, which apparently is where they filmed Gladiator (the residents were quite proud of this fact). We thoroughly enjoyed soaking up the sun, because just a few hours earlier, we had driven through the Atlas Mountains, which had a good deal of snow and wind and it was quite cold there.

We finally reached our camels close to dark, mounted, and off we went. Let me just say, for those who are wondering, it is nothing like riding a horse. They are quite painful. You can feel practically every vertebrae of their spine and we were all a bit sore the next day. Painful, but fun : )


We rode in the dark for a good hour or so, could not see a THING. Pitch Black. Then all the sudden, Bam, there’s our tent and a nice Berber man to greet us. He welcomed us to the tent and to Morocco, and then we proceeded to share some tea together (Morocco has the BEST mint tea. And orange juice. It’s really fresh. I think I had about 6 or 7 glasses all in all) and partake in some Moroccan music of drums and guitar and singing. Good times. We sang and sang and talked, until finally about 10:00, when we ate : ) I don’t know if I was just hungry or what but the food was really good, it was like steamed vegetables and couscous (of course) and bread and meat for those who wanted it. Afterwards, we all had to go to the restroom at some point, obviously, but where do you go in the desert? There are hardly trees to shelter you, so you do what you must. You go on the dunes hehe : ) Boys on one side of the tent, girls on the other. Oh the moments we’ll remember… Afterwards, we settled in for the night, you grab a mat on the floor and there’s your bed. Then the Berber man came in with this HUGE armload of blankets, tossing them around and Leah and I were like, I think one or two will be enough but thanks. But in the middle of the night, we both woke of freezing, and started groping in the dark “where did that Berber man put all those blankets…” Found the blankets, threw them over us, and back to sleep we went as the wind and sand whipped around us. We woke up the next morning before the sun, Leah and I, so we got out and took pictures and played in the dunes before having breakfast and heading back out on our camels. That was such a fun morning, I think the best morning of the trip.