Welcome to my world!
This is the view from my little guests house about a mile and half outside of M’Hamid, Morocco. Basically the end of one of the many roads that end at the desert in Morocco.
While I was in Marrakech I was staying in a nice little Riad/Hostel in the Medina and was hoping to extend my stay a few days when I found out that they were all booked up. So, rather than spend the remainder of the day trying to find a new spot in town I decided to book one of the little package tours Kamal, at Riad Itry, offered. Aside from hitting major ruins and tourist sites in the countries I’ve been to and have failed to go into any detail here, I have generally avoided anything in the tourist-y camp. But I was out of a place to stay and tired of scrolling through listings so I took the plunge and booked myself a seat on a bus for the next day. It was a three day, two night excursion to Merzouga, the home of Erg Chebbi. The adventure deserves more than brief mention here but if I start backtracking now I’ll be back on the plane to London last July and crying about losing my Beats headphones in a Heathrow bathroom after a massive fountain pen ink spill in no time. Suffice it to say, the trip was really fun but the camp experience at Erg Chebbi was a little underwhelming.
I ended up back in Marrakesh for a few days in a new Riad where I met a couple young ladies who’d hitchhiked across Morocco and told tales of their desert excursions. I can’t say I was down to try my luck hitchhiking, but I did feel the pangs for the more remote desert experience they spoke of. So I set myself up in a coffee shop with Google maps and Rome2Rio and tried to plot out a route to a somewhere of nowhere in particular. Normally Rome2Rio is a sure thing but for some reason the site wasn’t listing some of the local buses. Fortunately I came across the CTM line and found a twenty euro one way ticket to the last stop at the end of the road in M’Hamid, which just so happened to be the jumping off point for all kinds of excursions and the main draw of Erg Chegaga – another massive area of dunes just north of the Algerian border.
I thought I’d come down here for a couple / few days and see how it compared to Merzouga. I was interested in, but not committed to, a full desert trekking experience before arriving. I just wanted to be out of the crush of the Medina and see another part of the country. The bus ride here was worth it in itself. I can’t do justice to the amazing landscapes I rolled through and my picture taking skills are so poor I should probably have my smartphone card rescinded and be relegated to an old flip phone.
After the first night in the Auberge La Palmeraie close to town I managed my way by foot through the heart of M’Hamid on my way to the Berber Camp & Desert tours. The town is maybe a twenty minute walk through and the camp was ‘only’ about a mile and a half outside of town. I figured a nice little stroll through the desert would do me well until the view from the above picture is what greeted me at the edge of town. I was never a Boy Scout and I had no idea how accurate a Google Map would be out yonder so stepping out into that arid horizon brought back memories of my arrival in Hurghada, Egypt; an ill-considered ‘stroll’ in a new and unfamiliar landscape that fortunately ended well but quite reasonably could have been that last anyone heard of the Meandering Martlet! So I sent a WhatsApp message to Brahim at the camp and got a very generous and heat stroke saving ride to the camp by his associate Mohammed.
Can’t say with any degree of confidence I would have recognized the camp from the photos!
There are a couple other camps in the relative near vicinity, but after a fork in the dirt road I could have imagined ending up at anyone them! In hindsight, of course, it’s just a straight shot across a little stretch of desert…but there isn’t a whole lot of signage in this neighborhood on the way out of town.
Mohammad showed me to my personal guest house; that’d be the one with the blue portrait in the picture below, and the rest of the facilities which consists of a main house with the shared: bathroom, kitchen, inside and outside common rooms and fuck all little else! Oh, yeah and the interior common room boasts one communal outlet for charging any electronics you might have. After a brief tour I was pretty much left to my own devices for the duration.
My hope in coming to this little charming desert oasis was to get a real feel for the desert without having to hump through dunes and rock for miles and worry about where my next drop of water would come from. And I needed to be close enough to civilization to be able to get a decent cup of coffee. My desert digs did not disappoint!
I settled in for what I thought would be a few days of peace, quiet and selective solitude. That was three weeks ago…
