Merzouga was just what I needed. I arrived around 5 or 6 in the morning, after chatting in stilted English much of the way with a Moroccan who had been in Fez for a guide job. The guy at Auberge Mohayut was incredibly helpful; when I decided I wanted to do the camel trek the first night, he still gave me a room to rest in until we were to leave later that day. And all the rooms were going to be taken, so it wasn’t even that the room was going to be empty for me anyway.
I was a little wired, though, after the long bus ride through the crisp night. I had had those slightly nauseated shivers that I get with the unfortunate combination of exhaustion and cold, but I was too awake to sleep and too tired to shower. So I started to take a walk.
I met a Berber man on the dunes behind Auberge Mohayut, and he told me it was better to walk the dunes barefoot. I tried it, and he was wrong. But then, I got the mad skills at walking funny, so it may have just been me. The sand was so very fine, and it stayed cool, at least in the morning and evening sun. The sand seemed just slightly more coarse than the beach sand in Zanzibar—the kind of sand that miraculously doesn’t get into all the places you don’t want it. It felt coarsely smooth, like dupioni silk.
Also, scarab beetles are incredibly entertaining. Their footprints look like the designs of an incredibly gifted henna artist, and, if that beauty weren’t enough, it’s entertaining to watch them move.
After a walk and a nap and a shower, I was read to face the day. More or less. I ended up on with a group of Australian women who had all come to Morocco in the same tour group.
Camels heave and jerk whenever you mount or dismount them. It’s a little disconcerting the first . . . all the times it happens. But, in a line, tied one to the other, most of them aren’t terribly interested in escaping. We asked the guides questions, like do the camels have names (they don’t, except for whatever reason, mine was named Jimi Hendrix) and whatever else. They didn’t speak a ton of English, but that was ok, because our guide spoke Spanish.
Well, it was okay by me, but none of the Australians spoke any other languages (kinda like many Americans) and while some of them seemed to think it was funny, as I tried to translate what we were talking about and the ribbing we were giving each other, a few got annoyed because we were cracking each other up. I think it felt exclusive to some of the people.
I love speaking Spanish with another Spanish-as-a-second-language speaker. It removes so much of the pressure about grammar and vocabulary and whatever else. Plus, someone who has to think about what they’re saying speaks more slowly and clearly than does someone who doesn’t have to think about it at all. It’s just incredibly entertaining.
There’s something about speaking in Spanish for me. When it’s clicking, I feel like my whole brain relaxes. It’s as if all the sudden my brain has slid easily onto the track it’s meant to be on. I don’t get that feeling from English. If someone can make me laugh in Spanish, everything is twice as funny.
Several of us scrambled up a nearby dune, slipping and clambering and slipping some more through the cooling sand, so we could be closer to the infinite stars. Running straight up a steep incline decreased the amount of treadmilling like coyote when he chased roadrunner off a cliff.
The next morning, we got up, had tea, and headed back to the hotel for breakfast. I spent the morning and evening walking through the dunes again, and swam and computered through the hottest hours of the day.
Transport out of Merzouga requires many more steps than transport in, especially since I was going to Marrakesh and not Fes, but luckily I met up with an American couple from New York who let me catch a lift as far as our paths coincided when they left the next day.
