Succumbing to the Vast Mystery of the Sahara

Hear the word “Sahara” and a host of hazy, film-fed images drift to mind. Endless waves of wickedly hot sand. Turbaned nomads atop plodding camel caravans. Palm trees beckoning as oases float into view.

To some, riding camels in the desert may seem a peculiar way to vacation.

But for the adventurous and romantic soul, the Sahara offers great rewards. Today, as desert access improves, a two- or three-day excursion with Tuareg guides (a Berber tribe) can be an unforgettable bonus to travel in North Africa.

A continent away from U.S. soldiers and discord, my own desert voyage began at the end of a rambling month in Morocco. Wearied by teeming markets and medinas from Tangier to Marrakech, I fled across the Atlas Mountains, down the Dr’aa Valley and to the frontier town of Zagora.

Infamous for its street sign featuring an arrow and the words “Tombouctou, 52 Jours” (meaning Timbuktu, 52 days--by camel, of course), Zagora is among the last villages of note before the desert prevails. Here, under the morning’s fiery sun, I find my way to the cool courtyard of the Hotel Kasbah Asmaa and settle down to mint tea with its proprietor, a former nomad, Aziz.

In barely accented English, Aziz asks why I’m wandering alone through such desolate country. “To see the Sahara,” I reply. He rises. “Then you must sleep tonight in the desert with Tuareg nomads.”

And so, with some vague reflections on “The Sheltering Sky,” Paul Bowles’ famous novel about hip American drifters whose values disintegrate in the North African desert, I’m ushered to a gaunt and solicitous guide named Mohamed, and we set off to market for provisions.

The marketplace of Zagora is a hot, dusty assemblage of makeshift stalls and ancient Arabs squatting on blankets and under tents. Along with beads and trinkets, embroidered fabrics and milling livestock, there are piles of fresh and rotting fruits and vegetables that bake under the morning sun.

As in other markets outside the tourist crush, you’ll find jewelry of antique amber and intricately designed Berber daggers, often heirlooms sold to raise money for food. We, however, settle for tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, squash and onions for tonight’s tajine, the ubiquitous Moroccan stew. Mohamed, having seen enough tourists to know the score, slips two packs of cigarettes into the bag. I pay.

Like anywhere in rural Morocco, a trip to the local butcher is an experience that can be hard to stomach. Hanging from metal hooks in a hot stall are a selection of cow parts quite foreign to those with only American supermarket experience. After asking my approval (and what could I say?), Mohamed orders a kilo of the stuff, and the butcher hacks off the end of the nearest piece. Romance, I tell myself, think of the romance.

I also grab two bottles of water, and we head out through the palm groves of the oasis Amezrou to where our camels await three miles outside of town.

The first thing I notice about the oasis is how much it resembles the storybook image in my mind. Lush foliage sprouts from the sand. Pink flowers blossom along streams. Mud and thatch dwellings called ksour look like crumbling sandcastles in the sun.

Yet all is not paradise. Incessant flies, unhealthy water, a lack of electricity and refrigeration and even the inhabitants’ sparse teeth underline the poverty with which they live.

Still, children run and laugh. Women in colorful caftans talk as they bundle hay or spread wet clothes on the rocks to dry. Turbaned men relax in the precious shade, sipping mint tea by the hour and waiting for the blazing sun to pass.

Mohamed explains that people here are content. Without thoughts of career and competition, the focus is on food, shelter and family. Life is slow and methodical--a half-day may be spent riding a donkey to the well or traveling to market to barter for supplies. A glass of tea is the daily reward, and men share in it equally.

Soon we arrive at the campground and I meet Ahmed, another Tuareg, who packs food, firewood, pots, glasses and a kettle into large fabric pouches. These are connected with ropes and draped, along with water jugs, over each camel’s back. Woolen blankets on which we’ll sleep are used to pad the bony humps. Finally, ancient wooden saddles are lashed on and we’re ready to depart.

Riding a single-humped dromedary camel is a bit different than riding a horse. A combination of hisses and taps persuades the animal to kneel for mounting. You then vault up behind the hump, meeting the saddle with legs spread gymnastically apart, and quickly clutch the saddle’s knob as the camel lurches back then forward then back again to a startling height several feet off the ground. Throughout the trip, constant jarring requires frequent adjustment of the derriere.

Mohamed speaks Berber, Arabic, some French and, fortunately, a bit of English. Ahmed, a true desert dweller, speaks only Berber and Arabic. I speak English. Off we go.

Depending on the time available (several hours to several weeks), your endurance and special interests, the guides can explore this desert gateway following a variety of routes. For families and groups, there are standard half-day, dinner and overnight trips. But upon request, journeys are customized to traverse scrub desert, luxurious palmeries, boulder-strewn cliffs or the undulating dunes of desert dreams.

A hopeless romantic, I ask for sand, and, with only two days, Ahmed chooses a route leading to the modest dunes about 10 miles from Zagora. With a few more days, the journey could lead to exotic casbahs and inspiring drifts that make Hollywood location scouts drool. In fact, scenes from David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” and other desert classics were filmed on location around the Dr’aa Valley.

Though the early May weather is hot, the low humidity and desert breeze keep the heat bearable. Remember, though, that desert trips are not a great idea during July and August, when ground temperatures can reach 150 degrees.

To protect my head and face from sun and blowing sand, I am offered a long, sheer strip of indigo-dyed cotton. Ahmed wraps it around my head and over my mouth, ears and nose. The Tuaregs also wear long, loose robes called djellabas and timeless leather sandals.

In an hour or so, the staccato Berber chatter dies out, and I’m left with only the stunningly barren landscape and the camel’s rhythmic plodding to occupy my senses.

We leave the trail and head into unmarked desert. The ground is scattered with small, colorful stones and tufts of succulents that the camels insistently stoop to munch. Clusters of tiny, yellow flowers occasionally appear out of the colorless earth. These are startling, and seem fragile and helpless against the rest of nature.

The Sahara desert spreads over more than 3 million square miles of Northern Africa from Morocco and Mauritania across the continent to Egypt and the Nile. Contrary to our fantasies, the towering oceans of sand, known as ergs , comprise only one-fifth of the Sahara’s surface.

Most of the desert is either dry, bare plateaus of sheer rock known as hammada or vast plains of scattered stones and stunted vegetarian called regs . Unexpectedly, several Saharan mountain ranges, including the Ahaggar in Algeria and the Tibesti in Chad, receive abundant rainfall--in contrast to the barren, wind-swept ergs where a year may go by with no sign of rain.

After a time, the novelty subsides and the reality of the desert settles in. The heat, the stillness, the sweeping panoramas and immense distances. I am lulled into thoughts of nomads spending entire lives traversing the hostile sand.

It seems amazing how often this land of vast emptiness has provoked fierce battles and aroused the greed of foreign powers. While we now quarrel over oil, gas and minerals, for centuries the greatest prize was control of trade, specifically shipping lanes and trans-Saharan caravan routes.

Since the fall of Carthage, a trail of conquering armies, in constant struggle against the shifting sand, would each claim this unwieldy patchwork of ethnic and tribal groups. Taxes on cargoes of gold, ivory, salt and slaves enriched empire after empire. But only the Berbers, the true natives of this land, have managed to endure thousands of years within the equally independent Sahara.

After several hours of rhythmic riding, we dismount. Evening is approaching and a fierce desert wind kicks up. The sky is cloudy and threatening, and, even before the first drop of rain falls, I am disappointed that I will miss a highlight--the spectacular nighttime star show. We busy ourselves unloading and hobbling the camels to keep them from wandering, then assemble saddles, blankets and rocks into a protective circle. The gusting winds whip the sand into swirling torrents that are soon mixed with a cool splattering of rain.

I am assured by Mohamed that rain never lasts more than a few minutes on the desert, and I decide not to press the point even as it continues for over an hour. It occurs to me that rain is probably a great blessing to people of the desert, and I imagine an exultant gleam in the Berber’s eye.

As Mohamed goes about slicing vegetables for the tajine, Ahmed demonstrates one of the most engrossing culinary customs you are likely ever to see: baking bread in the sand. Bread, the oft-mentioned chubz in Arabic, is the mainstay of the nomads’ diet. But with no ovens and limited fuel, desert ingenuity was needed to devise a method for baking it. Typically, the nomads turned to their greatest resource, sand.

Setting the dough aside to rise, Ahmed digs a hole in the heavy sand in which he builds a blazing fire. Small stones are then carefully placed into the hole.

When the wood has burned down, Ahmed flattens the dough and lays it directly onto the glowing rocks. He then fills the hole with sand and starts another fire on top to provide a hot insulating layer for the bread baking below. The site is left alone for a couple of hours while attention is turned to the tajine --the main, and only, course of this desert meal.

Later, the stone-encrusted bread will be dug from the sand. The stones are pried away and (most of) the sand scraped off with a stick. Chunks torn from the resulting mass of chewy, crusty, somewhat gritty bread provide a surprisingly tasty utensil for spooning up the spicy meat stew.

Any adventure into the desert calls for at least one night spent lying on camel-scented blankets under the open sky, together with thousands of nomad brethren throughout the Sahara. If you prefer a comfy sleeping bag, you’re welcome to bring one. You might also consider a warm sweater or hooded jacket. It can become quite chilly at night.

As darkness sets in, Mohamed scrubs the pots with sand (which is also used for washing the body, for massage and, I’m realizing, for an impressive number of daily needs). Ahmed, meanwhile, scrupulously sifts our campsite for rocks and spreads out the blankets. The rain is intermittent now, though the air is not particularly cold.

I rewrap the cloth around my head and face, and in doing so find that the insistent particles of sand have penetrated into my hair, ears and nose as well as my clothes, my knapsack and throughout my supplies. It is as if the sand were claiming me, smudging out my foreignness and initiating me into the family of the desert. I had wanted the sand, and now the sand wanted me. Fulfilled and exhausted, I stretch out on a large, faded blanket.

The three of us stare into dense blackness, and I remark on the beauty of the night. Ahmed, speaking his few words of French and performing much pantomime, indicates that he loves the desert, that it is his life and that he will never leave it. Then the silence becomes absolute.

At 5:30 a.m. I am wakened by a gentle tap on my shoulder. The sky has cleared, and Ahmed is gesturing toward the east, where blazing rays of light begin to stream over the horizon. Atop a hill our camels kneel, motionless. The air is fresh and cool, and while the guides roll the blankets and brew the tea, I scramble up to the sharp crest of a nearby dune to collect a small bag of orange desert sand.

We have several hours of riding back to the oasis and set off on a meandering route across pebbly, sandy plains. We stop to water the camels at a well where women and young children load jug after heavy jug of water onto their scrawny donkeys’ backs. Ahmed and Mohamed drink, then wash their heads and feet under the pump.

Later in the morning we rest under a lone palm tree that sits picturesquely in the absolute middle of nowhere.

By the time we reach our destination, the sun has once again grown scorching and oppressive, I am gritty and a bit sore and I slide off the camel onto wobbly legs. The Tuaregs immediately go about their task of removing saddles and unloading gear. They seem to have forgotten about me entirely. I totter out of the pen and start back toward town thinking only of a long shower and a cold drink.

But, turning for a last look at the steaming desert, an idea takes shape. In the modern world, hard work can lead to status and comfort. Here, when the work is done, the desert people are satisfied with shade and tea and rest. It’s a way of celebrating survival, the sole reward their harsh world allows.