Journey into the Desert

I look back on this event - this adventure into the desert and still find it amazing that we did it. Riding a camel across dunes that have been the subject of many books, epic tales and movies (Lawerence of Arabia, Secrets of the Sahara, etc) was truly not ever on my life list of things to do. But, I am so glad that we had this opportunity.
These trips are set up to leave the starting point (several different desert hotels along the edge of the dunes) late in the afternoon. For us, the distance to our encampent for the night was about 90 minutes at a camel's pace. The winds had finally died down to be replaced by intermittent light rain. Our family and four visitors from Spain all left from Hotel Yasmina but in two groups. We gathered our few things to take with us - a change of clothes and our cameras and walked from the patio to the waiting camels.

Notice my head gear. Jenny and I decided if you are going to ride a camel, we must dress appropriately. There is an art to this head gear AND one must wrap according to need - if you need to cover your face, you wrap one way, if you don't, you wrap a different way.

Some of us rode double.

While others manned their camel all alone.

                                             Will chose to ride alone as did Pops.

And .... we were off. Our guide was Ahdid (that is probably not spelled correctly), and I apologize. He was wonderful. He spoke at least four languages, most of which he said he learned from the guests he took out into the desert. He was very attentive, helping us with everything:

1. Getting onto the camel (which you try to do like one would mount a horse. The camel is lying down and you try to throw you leg over and get on. However, the camel is still pretty tall, so you throw you leg over, lay forward on your stomach and then pull yourself up into a sitting position. Sorry, no pictures of this, thank goodness.)

2. Rescuing fallen objects that you lose as you bounce along - water bottles, pacifiers and shoes (Donovan and Pops).

3. Rescuing fallen people - ok, so Philip didn't fall off, but almost. As we climbed the first dune (and it was a small one), Philip began to slide backwards off of his camel's back. We were all laughing so hard, no one got a picture, but you can see that he rode far back on this poor camel, which contributed to this situation. Our guide ran back and offered Philip a push back up therefore preventing an actuall "fall from camel" event.

4. Photographer - he took many of our pictures for us.

5. Actual guide duties - giving us information and getting us to camp!

It rained on us on the way to camp and the sky was gray, but it was still great. We saw other caravans of desert visitors close by and off in the distance, but we were the best looking group!

About 90 minutes later, we crested a dune and saw our home for the night.

We had a dining tent, a cooking tent, our individual sleeping tents and a bathroom tent.

Layers and layers of rugs and blankets everywhere! We ate and slept very well. The food, tea and company were great.The night was very dark and very quiet. The weather cleared during the night and we were awakened early in the morning to go outside and watch the sun rise.