Morocco - Part 2: Road to Marrakech

Seeing these camels was a truly surreal moment and a kind of validation for the rest of the entire voyage. We were actually in the middle of the Sahara under the most vibrant and beautiful display of stars I had ever seen in my life.  We were in Canada only a week before and Ghana would be coming up the week after, all of this was actually happening and that is the point where it finally sunk in for me. All of the other students and I grabbed our bags, left the bus and stood next to our respective camels.

Now for all of the horror stories you hear about camels -they're ornery, they spit, they smell, they're violent- ours were pretty docile, gentle  and even regal creatures. When we first approached them they were sitting and had kind of folded themselves into a manageable size in which you could just swing your leg over and sit down, standing up was the interesting part. Camels don’t stand up as much as they just unfold step by step, back legs first so you are left holding on for dear life at a 45 degree angle forwards. Then the front legs come up and you equalize at a pretty sizable height off the ground. Just when you thing you are done they almost double in height again and you are sitting about 8-9 feet off of the ground.

We trekked under the stars  to a small Berber camp about 40 minutes away where we were treated to another dinner of chicken Tagine, learned from our guide how the Islamic religion made it's way into Morocco. After the meal we were part of a quick, interactive drumming demonstration during which I thoroughly embarrassed myself before we decided to spend the rest of the night sitting on the dunes of the desert with our hosts.

We talked about everything, played music, sang "Hotel California", dug our feet under the cool night sand deep to where it was still warm from the harsh afternoon sun before finally retiring to bed around two or three in the morning.

We woke up the next morning at sunrise, washed up, ate a quick breakfast of bread, butter and honey with mint tea to drink before beginning the trek back to our bus and continuing on back through the route that brought us from Casablanca. We stopped to buy cactus fruit which tastes a lot like watery watermelon with about 50 times more seeds. We stopped above a valley that was absolutely filled with palm trees as far as the eye can see and we made a detour through one of the Kasbahs, Moroccan forts with walls made of clay and straw that have stood for hundreds of years before we made it to Marrakech in the evening.


On the way to our hostel, near the main square of the city, our guide told us to have our bags packed and everything ready to go when we stopped. A few minutes later we pulled over on the side of a busy road and rushed out of the bus as quickly as we could. Our guide then lead us directly into the swarm of people lining the road as we made our way to the hostel. Merely walking peaked your adrenaline, people accosting you buy their merchandise, motorcycles whizzed through the packed crowds and human traffic was headed in every direction. In the end, we finally made it to our hostel in Marrakech and passed out for the night