Can the desert call to people? I know the sea can call to people, but can the desert? Don't most people want to escape the desert? Not us. For us, the Sahara beckons. Well, I should be more specific. the sand dunes of Erg Chebbi beckon.
These aren't just sand dunes. These are the grandmother of sand dunes. They span an area of 50 kms by 2 kms, and are 300 meters tall in places. This is the sand box to beat all sand boxes. <I wonder how you could use buckets and water to make a huge sand castle.....>
However, to get there, we must drive through the rest of the High Atlas, then through date country, then through warrior tribe country, then through the Anti-Atlas before we reach the town of Merzouga, where we can play in this giant sand box.
We wanted to do 3 things on today's trip. 1) Eat fresh dates, 2) See the warrior tribe people walking around with the scimitar knives, 3) Go and see petroglyphs.
1) Operation fresh dates. There is suppose to be some place near a town that we drove through that has amazing dates and date tasting. The catch is that it is by appointment only... and they apparently only speak French. As a result, they couldn't direct us. Not to be detoured, we decided to try to find the place using just our eyes and our hope. Hope failed us! I don't think our eyes did. Regardless, we were dateless. We then tried to find a stop by the side of the road next to a tree that was low enough for us to just pluck said dates. This tactic also didn't work. [Insert sad face here], No dates for us.
2) See warrior people with scimitar knives. Success!! We ate at lunch in the town where Lonely Planet says you can see these people and we did. All one of them. Tragically, he was right next to us, and we didn't want to be completely rude tourists and try to take a picture of him. Still we saw him, and the whole group of men sitting around us saw us. They had an innocent curiosity. They were so curious that when we left, they all had looked to see where we had gone and waved at us when we drove by!
3) See the petroglyphs. Lonely Planet said that near a certain town you could see 5000 year old petroglyphs. What Lonely Planet didn't say was that you had to go on a complete rock (and by rock, I mean, HUGE rocks surrounding all the little ones) road to get there. Obviously we didn't take extra insurance with us on our little sedan that is not made for off-roading. We went as far as we dared and then we chickened out and returned. We failed petroglyphs, but we definitely got an A for effort.
The drive was beautiful, albeit, however, it was more about the people than the scenery. People here look completely different. These are desert and warrior people. The people wear brighter clothing. The men wear those desert style turbans were there is a little piece of cloth that comes down and can be used to cover their face. The women wear a long, bright, colorful head covering that is more about keeping cool than it is about religion.
We couldn't wait for the long drive to finish. We finally made it our hotel, set an alarm for sunrise to see the sun rise over the dunes, which apparently are just 5 minutes from the hotel, and called it an evening.
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