Camel Trekking in Erg Chebbi, Morocco (Feb 2008)

We are not being hard-bitten, savvy travelers, going across the world on 27 cents low to the ground, moving with the locals. Today we are being stereotypical tourists paying the nice man to take us into the Real Live Sahara on Real Live Camels. We are pretty comfortable with being giggling tourists with cameras today, after a long slog on a bus pulling out of Tenerhir at 5am. Our heads are not modestly covered, we are smoking, and our arms are bare. The only things that can really be said in our favor here are that we are not bucking 4-wheelers across the dunes, like the hundreds of French tourists that arrived in a cavalcade two days before, and we are not dumping trash on the dunes.

We are, however, irritating the crap out of the Canadian tourists who are on this camel ride with us. While we are giggling about camel spit and the fact that Debi is once again taking copious travel pictures of my ass, we are being occasionally shushed. We are ignoring the shushing—if she wanted a private camel trek into the middle of the dunes with no one around, she damned well knew better than to book a one-night trip into Erg Chebbi from Merzouga. We occasionally sight another train of camels loaded with teetering Japanese tourists, their faces split with wide grins and cameras snapping even faster than ours. These dunes are not isolated, although it’s the closest you’ll get without packing in for three or four days.

It’s winter here, so the temperature is a comfortable 80 degrees Farenheit or so and the sun is headed down to the horizon in the west, behind us. Watching our shadows thrown before us, we slowly giggle ourselves out and shush ourselves. The roar of the 4-wheelers has faded behind us as we crest dune after dune. The last graffiti tagged on a dune, with “Pierre aime Sabine” scratched out in dragged footprints, has been left behind an hour ago. Now it’s quiet. There’s a small breeze, not enough to throw sand in our eyes and mouths although I’m glad I have sunglasses. The camels take slow, solemn steps. They are following the camel man, wrapped in flowing robes with a scarf twisted carelessly around his head. He has bad teeth and speaks Arabic, Tourag, and only a little bastardized Moroccan French. So far we’ve communicated with gestures. He is taking slow, solemn steps into the dunes, a rope trailing behind him to my camel with the other camels following behind.

I cannot fathom how he is navigating. The dunes crest and twist, shadows throwing into sharper relief as the sun falls lower behind us. There are small white flowers amidst the sand ripples from time to time, and I see loose camels silhouetted between the dunes ahead of us. The sand is ridged in parallel lines like an optical illusion. I can watch them shift ever so slightly as the breeze blows by, minute changes in miniature cartography. The camel man leads us on what seems to be a very specific path, around the edge of this bowl of sand and along the ridge of that one, moving at precise angles on the slope. Every now and then I can hear a soft “ssssh” as the wind shifts the sand from the top of a dune, a tiny waterfall of sand affecting the smallest of changes to the outline of the dunes.

The camel man stops, and the docile camels stop with him. I say docile, but the whole time they are making alarming, glutinous phlegmy noises, and I can’t tell because I’m the lead camel but I suspect there’s some noisy excretions going on as well. My camel seems to be in a particularly bad mood. Maybe it’s because he’s a different kind of camel; he’s the only white camel and the camel man told me he’s from Mali, while the other three are from Morocco. We’ve stopped so the camel man can recalibrate the slope of this particular dune. He drops the lead line and stoops, scooping sand down the dune in a “ssssh” ing sound, making another step so that our camels can ascend this ridge that has perhaps gotten just a little steeper since the last time he led them up.

We continue on. We’ve almost entirely stopped snapping shots of the dunes around us. It was mostly random flailing anyway, in hopes that one or two representative images would result from this featureless landscape, something that might show the subtleties of the color playing on the sand as the sun glows duller and redder, the tinyness of those little white flowers in a sea of sand. It is like nothing so much as an ocean, and I still cannot figure out how the camel man is navigating. At least sailors had sextants and compasses to lead them across, or the stars.

We come around another mountain of sand and there are loose camels again, much closer. Now I can see that they’re hobbled, not wild camels after all, at least not these ones. These were the supply camels send ahead of us to stock the campsite, and now I can see the long, low Berber tents set up in a circle. The camp residents will prepare a tajine for dinner tonight, but first we hold tight and lean back as our camels collapse wheezing to the ground, kneeling on knobby knees and nearly pitching us over their ears. Maybe they are tired, although we’ve been walking so slowly and patiently. I climb off the camel saddle and try to imagine being a Berber nomad hundreds of years ago, crossing months of sand in slow, solemn steps, following unmarked paths through shifting landscapes to a camp, an oasis, a trading center, a town. To water, food, shade.

Today I’m a tourist. The camp is already made for me, and a smiling man is coming towards me with a battered silver tea pitcher on a tray and a small tea glass. Would I like sugar in my mint tea?