Sands of the Sahara

Taking an 8 hour bus ride, through some incredibly scenic valleys & mountains, we arrived at the small town of Mhamid which sat right next to the start of the Sahara Desert. Exhausted from the long ride, our guide Mohammed met us and brought us back to his okay for some light snacks. As it was incredibly warm in the sheltered mud-huts, everyone just slept outside in the open and this was where i first saw the sky completely lit up by stars. When i say this, i literally mean hundreds and hundreds of stars were on display. It felt like the entire galaxy was painted in the night sky! A pleasant night was followed by a harsh morning as we were woken up by the hot sun rays and sand flying in our faces (takes bit of adjustment to get used to it). After all the preparations, we headed out on our Sahara adventure with our guides. The first part of the journey was done on Camels which was a new experience for my brother, i had my first experience last year in the Gobi desert. It was pretty cool seeing the dunes progressively get larger as we headed deeper into the desert. We broke for lunch by a shady tree and rested during the excessively warm part of the day (reached bat 42 celcius that day). Sleeping arrangements that night was pretty cool as we literally slept in the middle of nowhere HAHA! More accurately, we slept in between two dunes, under the stars once again. The next day we rode the cables to a rest-point where we swapped camels for a 4 by 4 car and drove all the way to our desert camp deep in the Sahara. We reached around 4pm and we finally saw the magnificent, 300 meter dunes. The dunes were NOT easy to climb as the sand was so fine that it was hard to walk upwards, but we did eventually make it to the peak. THE VIEW WAS SUBLIME and i will let the photos below do the justification 😉

The desert camp we stayed at was built for 50 people but we had it all to ourselves! (two of us, two guides and the lad running the camp). The evening consisted of food, drink and playing an arabic card game till 4am HAHA (needless to say the stars that night were the greatest i have ever seen). The following day we drove back to our start point and chilled with our guides tilll our bus back to Marrakech. Hats off to my brother for planning the entirety of this incredible trip and for finding our guide, who was so kind and chill, that became friends and asked him to visit Singapore in the future 😀

After reaching back, we had a day to chill in Marrakech before splitting ways with my brother heading to Amsterdam and with me heading back to Milan! (This was where my 24 hour wait at the airport began……)