Morocco - Part two: The Sahara Desert

Sunrise in the Sahara (we are the last two people)

Things started getting a bit more interesting from there. We had a week in Marrakech and this meant we had plenty of time to look into a desert tour. We spoke to a couple of different agents to get an idea of price. There seemed to be a decent difference between what you could get price wise. Having done a lot of tours over our travels and having been ripped of our fair share we had learnt one thing (or so we thought). Always pay a bit more and get a bit more. Don’t take the cheap option.

Sugar coated peanuts... delish

Using this theory we decided on a company, Best Travel, who promised us a number of things including longer camel ridding than many of the others, showed us photos of a nice enough hotel and decent sized, comfortable looking vans and above all they were very sure in promising that they would “not do what other companies do and sell you to another company, you will defiantly be with Best Travel”. What an outright lie that was.

We waited for our van at 7am as instructed and it all started out well. That was until we got changed over to a different van just around the road. It took us a minute to realise this was a piece of crap van, a lot smaller than promised (so way less comfortable) with a mini seat – which I was left with on this first leg. Not long after we hit the road it was obvious that the company was “Sahara Travel” and not Best Travel after all. We had been sold. I knew from there this was going to bring back memories of Solar de Ulyuni and others tours from the past. I tried to brace myself for the angry I was likely to feel over the next four days.

In order to see the ‘real desert’ and not just a rocky desert you need to take a four day, three night trip from Marrakech to Erg Chebbi, almost in Algeria. So much so that we saw the border (well a few sticks in the sand).

Us at a Kasbah

The tour started off ok, as many tours do. We stopped a decent amount of times and saw a lot of things as we crossed the Atlas Mountains and descended through the valleys on the other side. Visiting a Kasbah where Gladiator and heap of other movies have been filmed that is protected by UNESCO and a few other more boring things. Things really started looking shady from the first night. The hotel was extremely cold and there was no heating in the rooms. By this stage I had all my clothes on, singlet, thermal, long sleeve top, cardie and jacket from the UK. The rooms were dirty and everything was damp and falling apart. Far from the decent (though nothing amazing) pictures we were shown when booking.

The next morning the cold was confirmed when we opened the window to get handfuls of snow. “It won’t be cold, you won’t need any more clothes than what you are wearing now – the tour salesman told us”. But it was truly snowing and freezing. The upside to the snow was it was really pretty and it was also our first semi European snowfall. It wasn’t a bad start to the day, but put some serious concerns about our trip into the Sahara for that night.

The wind was crazy as well pulled into a small hotel in the middle of nowhere. Literally it was just flat hard and dusty. It was from here that we would enter the Sahara. A mere 5 minute camel ride away and we were deep in the heart of the Sahara. Rolling hills of sand in every direction. It was amazing.

It was also freezing. The winter wind hadn’t stopped and sent sand in every direction. After about 15 minutes I was holding out to get somewhere warm, all feeling had gone from my fingers and toes and I was about as cold as I think I have even been in my life. It was mental. Even once we arrived at camp I could not warm up and didn’t warm up until I was on the road again towards Marrakech.

Our time camel riding was yet another disappointment as the cheap tour we found had an hour at night and an hour in the morning and our one was meant to have two hours – but with getting sold this was another pitfall (among many smaller things along the way).

The people are weird in Morocco. They have had European tourists for so long that it feels like we only ever see a small part of what they are really like underneath. They are cheeky, they try to rip you off more than I ever would have guessed (at least as much, probably a lot more than Asian country’s! and the costs are a LOT higher in Morocco too, so you end up a lot worse off – for example the price difference between the tour we paid for and the cheap one we were offered was about $60). An example of this ‘milk the tourist’ attitude was when we went to visit a gorge on our desert trip. There was no need for people to be washing their clothes there; there were lots of streams closer to where the towns were and better water etc but they took their donkeys miles away to this part where the tourists come and feed them some hay. Obviously people were stopping to take photos or pat the donkeys and they evidently were asking for money…. Public space anyone? When they weren’t paid the lady would spit towards the tourists. They didn’t need to wash their clothes there and if they wanted money they should have been selling things or singing or doing SOMETHING, not trying to get money because people took photos or patted their donkeys, which they clearly had only put there to try and get money out of tourists.