I’m writing this several days after the experience, so bear with me. I haven’t had much of a chance just to spend the time to write. I do get some free time, but it is usually used for necessities, and unfortunately this blog is more fun than a requirement.

One of the things that I really wanted to do while in Morocco was to go camping in the Sahara. In fact probably the reason I chose this tour is that it showed people riding camels in the Sahara desert to go camping. So today I was pretty excited to be heading towards our base camp. Before leaving though, the day before, I got a bug, I’m not sure what kind, but I think it was food poisoning. It didn’t knock me on my butt, but it did slow me down and because of that, the trip to the base camp for the camel ride I wasn’t very good company. It’s was about a four hour drive and it’s hard to explain what was going on, but the best way is that I had the normal symptoms that you get from a slight case of food poisoning (which I don’t think I need to explain) but one major symptom was that I was super tired, so tired that I could barely raise my head and because of this I ended up sleeping in the van most of the way. We got to the base camp and our tour guide got me a room so I could lie down before we headed out.

About an hour later we were on camels for the ride to our camp. If you can imagine  the movie, Lawrence of Arabia then you can imagine the type of dunes that we crossed- large, golden mountains of shifting sand.  I still wasn’t feeling that well, but I did feel good enough to enjoy where I was and how it felt to be doing what I was fortunate enough to be doing. About time for dinner I could smell the food cooking and it was making me feel a little bit queasy so I decided to head to the side of the dune near the camp. It was kind of cool in a weird way to be close enough to be hearing what was going on with everyone else but surrounded by the darkness of the desert. I eventually faded into sleep only to be awakened by a noise off in the distance. I could see a silhouette of a man about 50 meters away, but it was dark and I couldn’t tell what he was doing. It looked like he was just stopped staring at me. I tried to shine my flashlight on him, but it was too weak. I eventually lost my nerve and got up and headed to my tent, it was then that I made out the form in the distance as a grazing camel. Okay, so I felt a little embarrassed about it, but it did make me laugh.