The Sahara

We booked a last minute Sahara desert tour for 7 days from Gabes since we visited most of the places we wanted to see in Tunisia.  We started in Matmata, a town of 1000 people.  It is famous for the underground troglodyte homes where most tourists stay overnight before heading further south towards the desert.  Our room resembled a small cave with 2 single mattresses side by side.  And you could not stand upright in the cave.  It was surprisingly warm in the evening and cool during the day.  There was a shared bathroom and shower about 20 feet away, and deeper down into the dwelling, there were more cave rooms, some large enough to serve as kitchen and dining room.

After spending a night in the cave, we went to Ksar Ghilane, an oasis in the midst of the Sahara desert.  Here is where most tour companies take herds of buffet eating tourists for a brief swim in a small hot spring and an hour long camel ride before they return to their all-inclusive resort.  There were a few independent travelers who rented 4WD’s on their own and stayed overnight at the campgrounds to enjoy the view of the sand dunes before making their way back.  And then of course there was us, the only ones to head deep into the Sahara desert for the next three days.  The campground had tons of tourists, and it was by chance that we met Isabelle’s friends from France in the huge dining room and we ended up having a great dinner with them.  The tents were military style with beds in them and were quite comfortable and warm.

The next day we were greeted by a young Arab boy named Ahmed and 2 camels.  Ahmed was our guide and the camels were our transportation.  I must admit, it was a bit scary getting on and off a camel for the first time.  They are quite tall so they must be sitting down for you to climb onto their back.  When they stand, their back legs go up first, then their front legs.  You feel like you are on the top of a very steep slide facing forward first, then suddenly the slide switches direction and you feel like you are going to fall backwards.

We started trekking into the desert with Ahmed taking the lead, then me and my camel, and then Eugene and his camel (which sucked for Eug because according to him, my camel was constantly farting and dumping).  My butt hurt like hell for the first half hour, but when I realized we were surrounded by nothing else but the desert, it didn’t hurt anymore.  The desert was not at all scary, but calm and inviting.  Ahmed and our camels fit in so well, I began to feel like we belonged too.

For dinner (no lunch was provided) Ahmed collected some dry wood, started a fire, took out a very old black pot (the handle actually fell off on the second night), filled it with water, and sat the pot on 3 rocks.  He told us to take a walk and come back in about an hour.  That was when we learned to trace our own tracks.  It’s easy to get lost when everywhere looks the same (for me at least).  We caught an amazing sunset and found our way back to Ahmed.  His cooking produced a big bowl of macaroni mixed with 5 small carrot slices, 5 small potato chunks, and 5 small green beans.  He gave us one spoon each and kept one for himself and we all ate from the big bowl.  Our dinner was finished in 5 minutes.  For breakfast he mixed some dough in a bowl and seriously just buried the flattened dough it in the sand.  He then lit a big fire on the sand and that baked the bread which he called “pain de sable” or bread of the sand.  And yeah, it was bread of the sand alright.  When he uncovered it after the fire died he lifted it out, took a big stick and banged on it a couple times to get rid of ash and sand.  That was our breakfast.  Can you say yum?!  To be honest the bread tasted pretty good, once you got past the constant crunching sound of sand as you brought your teeth together to chew.

Ahmed asked if he could sing after dinner.  After we said please, go ahead, he turned the big bowl into a drum and started singing away.  He wasn’t a very good singer but whatever he was singing and drumming seemed to fit.  Suddenly there were countless stars in the sky and the air grew cold.  He then took out two sleeping bags and laid them on the sand.  When Eug asked about the tent, he gave us an empty stare and shook his head to say ‘no tent’.  Say whaaaa?!  Though very warm in the day, the desert is damn cold at night, and with just a sleeping bag I was freezing.

We were hungry and cold at night like this for the rest of the trip, but Ahmed was super nice and did the best he could with limited resources (it was our tour coordinator who over promised and under delivered), and the desert was undoubtedly beautiful.  Ahmed’s 3 friends even joined us around the fire for the last night and each took turns singing and drumming.  We found out later that their job was to take the camels out at night to graze and bring them back the next morning in time for the tourists to ride.  That’s why they showed up late at night out of nowhere just to hang out and later sleep.  The songs these teenage boys were singing were about family, mothers, the desert, and camels.  Yeah, camels.  I guess that’s the equivalent of guys singing about their cars back home (e.g. “Rollin in my 5.0 with my rag-top down so my hair can blow”, Eug had to use Vanilla Ice as his example).  They were having a good time singing, drumming and laughing though, and as a result so did we.

The Sahara was not exactly as we thought it would be.  The sand was the finest I have ever seen, almost like powdered sugar.  There were plant-less dunes, but there was also lots of vegetation.  Occasionally we would run into an old Berber well, or Roman outpost ruins.  When the wind blew, the sound was beautifully eerie as it matched the weightless sand flowing over the dunes in ghostlike wisps.  We tried about a million times to capture this “breathing desert” in a picture but failed.  Other things we anticipated about the Sahara exceeded our expectations, most notably the sunset, the sunrise, and the constellations when mixed with the powerful serenity of the desert.  When commenting on the Sahara, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of Eug’s favourite book The Little Prince once said “If at first it is merely emptiness and silence, that is because it does not open itself to transient lovers.”  Though 3 days may seem transient to him, it was enough for us to reap the many rewards the Sahara had generously given to us.