The Moroccan Sahara: where a little is enough

If I have one takeaway from my visit to the Sahara desert, it’s that I have so much, and there are people with so little. They seem to require so little to enjoy life, so why do I require so much?

I’m talking about nomadic people who live in tents or mud shacks, who survive through hard work. They know little about the outside world and don’t really care. It’s clearly a difficult life, and yet they do not seem to be suffering. They showed not one iota of bitterness. Travelers come from America and visit them as if they are a tourist attraction, and they welcome us into their humble abodes, answer our questions, and show us how they live.

Of course, there was so much more to my time in the desert than that, but that is what has stuck with me like an earworm I can’t stop humming.

We didn’t have wifi during our two nights in the camp where we stayed, so I have a ton of photos I will need to go through. I’ll share some here, and I’ll try to get caught up in the next few days.

Nomads

We visited our first nomad family on the drive from Fez to Erfoud. They were llving alongside the highway, so Abdellah asked our driver to stop, and we paid them a visit.

I don’t remember their names. Their young son was happy to shake our hands, but then got very camera shy. They have lived in the shelter you see here for twenty years.

While I was walking around, this woman was standing in her doorway beckoning us to come visit. Her name was Mina, and she has four children, but they were all somewhere else. That’s the extent of what we were able to learn from her.

We also visited a family near the camp where we were staying. Their photo is at the top of the page. The old man, Amer, is the father-in-law of Khadija. Her husband (his son), who is also her cousin, was away working as a camel jockey, giving rides to tourists. Amer’s wife died a few years ago. There are three children; the youngest conked out before I took the family photo. The older boy, Mohammed, refuses to go to school, so he helps his grandfather with the few goats and chickens they have. The girl, Fatima, does go to school; her father brings her on the back of his motorcycle.

We had the opportunity to ask them a lot of questions about their way of life. Like the other family, they have stayed at this location for a long time. Amer, who is 78, formerly owned a flock of sheep and made a living as a shepherd, but the ongoing drought forced him to sell everything and become a nomad.

Khadija is making a rug like the one hanging up at the right.

This is their light source. They have a car battery and a solar panel.

When I ask why I need so much, I’m not suggesting that living as a nomad would be preferable. But it does make me think. We say money doesn’t buy happiness, but we spend a lot of money anyway, often to buy things that serve no purpose other than to make us happy. It’s why I travel. Sure, I travel to learn, to expand my horizons, to grow emotionally and intellectually. But why do those things matter to me? Because they make me happy?

Other things in the desert that really made me happy

Fossils

In this region of the Sahara they have found fossils dating back many hundreds of millions of years. We visited a place that mines them and releases them from stone. Then they manufacture all sorts of things, from little knickknacks and pendants to tables and countertops. For some in our group this was a shopping opportunity; for me, I appreciated the paleontology and the artistry, but I didn’t buy anything.

Camels

We had quite a few encounters with camels. Of course we saw quite a lot of them as we drove around in the desert. We also had a go at milking a camel and having a taste of the milk, which didn’t taste noticeably different from cow’s milk. And we went for a camel ride, which was fun, but mostly it was the best opportunity to see the dunes of the Sahara. As it turns out, the Sahara Desert isn’t all sand dunes, Lawrence of Arabia notwithstanding.

I didn’t get a photo of my hands on the teats, but here’s the baby camel having its lunch.

A lot of the desert looks like this, gravelly with scrub brush and small trees.

Me and my camel. I named him Dopey, because he kept letting the one in front of him kick him.

This is the view of the dunes from atop Dopey.

Oasis

The oasis we visited is nothing like the ones I imagined.

I didn’t see anything remotely like this.

We visited a very large oasis that is really a farm in the middle of the desert. There is no pond. Rather, the oasis is irrigated from a source several kilometers away, using a traditional irrigation system called a khettara. It’s hard to describe, so here’s a graphic cross-section. Even though the labels are in French, I think you can get the gist of it.

The reception basin. The water is very low now, but people can come here to get water for drinking and washing. You can see one of the aeration pits, built as a small column. More traditionally, these were just holes in the ground surrounded by mounds of sand and gravel.

Here we are in the oasis. The central canal has branches off to the sides to feed fields for individual families. They take turns diverting the water.

This is one of the branch canals, dry at the moment.

Date palms are predominant in the oasis, as you can see.

Music

Having a chance to experience traditional music is always a thrill for me, and our visit to Dar Gnaoua in Khamlia was a real highlight of my visit to the Sahara.

There was got a chance to hear Ahmed, the leader of the community, and his son play and sing some traditional Gnaouan music. This is a style of Moroccan religious music originating in the 16th and 17th centuries among various West African peoples.

A primary characteristic of Gnaouan music is a short phrase repeated over and over, so songs can last a long time, even several hours. The videos below aren’t that long. And the second one, played just with percussion, reflects a modern trend of secular Gnaouan music.

The boy is Ahmed’s nine-year-old son

Our Camp

We stayed in a camp owned and operated by OAT, the tour company I’m traveling with. The tents, or cabins, were very nice, and the staff were terrific. We got two cooking demonstrations, one of tagine and one of medfouna, or Berber pizza. And after our last dinner, the staff did a musical performance for us.

Not long after dark, they turn off all the lights, and the stars are brilliant. We had just a sliver of a crescent moon, so it was a real show.

You can make out Orion in this photo, just left of center.

Once I get all my photos organized, I’ll share a link. There are so much more visual treasures the Sahara offers.

I’m now in Ourzazate, staying in the same hotel as Christopher Nolan, Matt Damon, Tom Holland, and others who are here filming The Odyssey, due for release next year. (I haven’t seen any stars yet.) The rest of the group is off visiting a family in a nearby village, but I’m taking a day off to nurse a bad cold I have come down with. While it’s disappointing, it did give me the opportunity to work on this blog post, and I’m going to try to get my photos organized this afternoon.

Tomorrow we head to Marrakesh.