Day 4 of Moroccan Vacation: Sahara Desert Tour Day 3 on February 8th, 2017

Third and last day of our three-day Sahara desert tour from Marrakech.

The plan of the day was first camel ride out of our overnight camps in Erg Chebbi Desert, followed by a whole-day’s car ride back to Marrakech.

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Last night, our local Moroccan guide told us that the camel ride would commence at 0630. Nobody would oversleep as it was freezing cold during the night in the desert, especially when it’s February.
What’s more, I was constantly reminded of the fact that I was sleeping on blankets that they presumably never washed. Who could sleep soundly with that?

So before sunrise, it was my long-anticipated camel ride, which was a much more civilized way in and out of deserts than the reckless 4×4’s last night.

The less-bumpy less-scary camel ride meant I could use my hands to operate my camera along the way, although it wasn’t stable enough and the majority of my photos were blurred.

It was still very cold in the morning, as I had to take turns to put my hands in my pockets to stay warm. But the sunrise glows that morning was spectacular.

So after riding the camels for more than an hour, we were at the edge of Erg Chebbi Desert and in full sunshine. We finished our breakfast in a nearby building. It was only after our breakfast that we found we were actually at a hotel. Obviously breakfast made up more of their business than actual lodging.

After that, it was a full-day’s long and tedious ride back to Marrakech, in the narrow inhumane Ford-Transit seats. I almost got sick of it at the end of the day.
It was also possible to hire a Grand Taxi from Merzouga to Fes, also a major tourist city of Morocco, and about the same distance as going back to Marrakech. However, we booked tickets out of Morocco from Fes, so this didn’t make sense to us.

The most gruesome part of the journey was towards the end, when we crossed the Atlas Mountains. There was a part of the route with back-to-back hairpin turns, and unlike the first day of the desert tour when everything’s new and fresh, and the sun’s shining brightly on the snow-crested mountains, it was near sunset and the mountains were in shadows, it was after a long day’s drive and everyone’s barely conscious, it’s downhill so the driver drove relatively faster, we didn’t stop for photos, all recipes for a disastrous journey.

So at a little bit after 8pm we arrived back at Jemaa el-Fna in Marrakech. In theory, we should be able to make the last train bound for Casablanca. But we planned for a better night’s rest at Marrakech, together with some celebration of coming out of Sahara Desert alive, with a toast just along the magic Jemaa el-Fna.

After that, we went back to check into the hotel we left two days ago, and found our left baggage in our room. End of the three-day Sahara tour.

END

Day 4 of Moroccan Vacation: Sahara Desert Tour Day 3 on February 8th, 2017 by Huang's Site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.