Of Tents and Turbans…
Most of my travel journals are now at Daveno Travels where I am reissuing them as Director’s Cuts, with full text and previously unpublished photos. This is an excerpt from my travels in Morocco in 2017.
It’s a leisurely morning in the camel camp, and I would have been happy to stay for a few more days in this part of the Western Sahara. After breakfast, we mount our camels and say goodbye to the Erg Chebbe dunes, and head back to Merzouga.
We stop at a store that sells fresh camel milk, and are invited to the pens out back. Catherine tries her hand at milking a camel, while I watch a jealous baby camel trying to get his share. There’s a blue-eyed camel here, which Doug says is fairly rare.
While Doug and Catherine are talking shop with the owner, I step back inside and find an open door, and step through to a ‘dinner and a show’ place that has Berber tents set around the center courtyard. I snap a few shots of both the camels and the tents before we head out, which you will find on Pinterest.
We stop for lunch at a Berber tent set up along side the road. Doug introduces us to his friend Youssef, who has already ordered pizza for our lunch. It arrives and resembles a 12″ calzone but with very thin crusts, stuffed with kefte, egg and almonds.
His tent is divided in half at the ridgepole, with half of it serving as a restaurant, and the other half as a gift shop. I shoot more photos and then stop to admire the wares. In spite of Youssef’s attempts to sell me a pastel colored length of cotton, I buy a Tuarag-indigo one, and, demonstrate to my travel-mates how to fashion it into a turban, after watching Moha wind his yesterday.
I sit down and make a comment about the fun things for sale on the other side of the tent, including a silver pipe and a daggar I’d like to bring home but thought I would not be able to get it through the airport. “You can’t get anything through the airport,” Catherine responds, and everyone laughs at the reference to my still lost luggage.
Tomorrow we drive to the Todra Gorge, and then on to Kasbah Ait Ben Moro, and a carpet shop that I will be hard-pressed to leave …
Read about the rest of the day at Daveno Travels.