M'hamid!

I only went to Tangier in order to take the night train to Marrakesh. Unfortunately, you won't see any photos of Marrakesh. The first time I went there I went straight to the bus station in order to get to Ourzazate, in order to get to Zagora, in order to get to M'hamid, in order to see the Sahara. The camera did not survive the Sahara, so I guess my memories of Marrakesh will remain mine alone. 

Waiting in Ourzazate for the grand taxi to fill.

The kasbah in M'hamid was old and crumbly in a beautiful way, but a surprising number of people were living in buildings I'd thought crumbled beyond habitability. Did you know habitability is an actual word? I thought I was making it up, but spell-check isn't complaining.

Camel!

After two days of walking, we arrived at the high dunes.

In the morning I traipsed through the dunes in my pajamas.

This is what the non-high-dunes part of the desert looked like.

On the way back we met a caravan of three camels, two French tourists, and several nomads. At first I thought the woman had no toes, but it turned out she actually had long toes curled into the sand. But if I ever write a story about my desert adventures, I would have to make it fiction so that the French woman could be missing her toes. Something else amusing was my conversation with the French man and the non-English-speaking nomads, which went something like this: "America? Obama! McDonald's! Coca-Cola!"

I rode a camel on the way back! Relatives, fear not, I also have pictures of me sitting on the camel. I just forgot to upload them. And I will probably continue forgetting to upload them, because I appear as an unattractive blob of blanket instead of the fierce commander of the desert I felt like.

One of the rooms at the camp where we left from and returned to.