The New Years in Merzouga

It has been brought to my attention that I am a little behind on this blog thing. I could enumerate all the excuses I have but I think I’ll just get to writing instead.

Lets start with New Years. It is hard to believe that New Years was two months ago already! To celebrate I went with a group of volunteers to the Merzouga Desert.

Merzouga is seven hours from where I live, on the edge of the desert, in the southeastern part of Morocco. We took 4X4s from a nearby town to get there. As they weaved between one another, at high speeds, my stomach was filled with butterflies. It felt like a race and as we would pas each other’s cars we would stick our tongues out or wave. When we stopped we were close enough to the dunes that we could walk into them and enjoy the cool sand but not far enough in to get lost.

We slept in Berber tents very much the way I did at the music festival in Mali a few years back. The tents had three walls with the open sides facing a campfire. They were connected in a rectangle, which created the feeling of our own little commune.

To send out the year 2009 we walked into the desert and watched the sunset. At the very moment the sun was setting, the full moon was rising from the other side. The place that we were staying prepared us a fantastic Couscous dinner and served us mint tea (both staples in this neck of the woods.)

We couldn’t send out 2009 without being slightly Hshuma (something between inappropriate and shameful) So we got out the champagne (or more accurately Jack Daniels,) danced around the fire, got lost in the dunes and passed out in time for at least a couple hours of rest. Despite roomers, no Pagans were involved and there were no sacrifices of virgins, although there may have been attempts. The sand did manage to eat my shoes among other things but who needs shoes anyway!?

The next morning we all got up and did a camel trek into the dunes to watch the sunrise. I just walked along and spoke Darija with the man leading the camels since I got my camel fix in Egypt this summer. My feet were frozen by the time the sun rose, due to the lack of shoes but I couldn’t have asked for a better way to bring in 2010.

After breakfast we got back in the 4X4s that lead us out to the desert and raced back to town, a couple hours away. Needless to say we were all less lively and enthusiastic about the race out of the dunes than we were during the race into the dunes.