Possibly there may be some logic that in the heat of their summer noone is awake and wanting to do anything during the midday when the sun is at its hottest, but during the months of January to April when it their cold months I feel that the daytime weather would be cool enough to allow them to roll back the starting time and thus they could ensure that a guest could do both a daytime and an evening tour, however my views were clearly not shared by the management who plan it thus.
With no internet in the hotel, no map of the local area and the sky looking very cloudy and grey I decided not to stray too far from the hotel but instead just book a half day tour and then do my best to make the most of it when it arrived. My wanderings took me a few blocks from my two star hotel where I was staying, at a cost of 350 dhs per night ( which anywhere else would be expensive but here it was actually quite cheap ) and I found that I was in the rough area of the city where not much was going on and so I just found an internet place and did my best to bash out some super quick emails and see if there was anything going on at nighttimes worth visiting that the hotel didnt know about.
As it happened, l ike in most of the cities I have visited, I feel that there is a serious lacking of arranged things to do for single travellers at night. Whenever you do a search for things to do at night the most frequent hits are bars, nightclubs and restaurants with an occasional lucky hit being a general online ticket website which will give a few more choices like sport or music concerts, just not this time.
Not intending on going on the pull, and never having had a strong liking for wasting good travel money getting blotto night after night, ( in fact I could probably count the number of nightclubs I have visited on this trip on both hands but being honest I couldnt remember where the last one was ), and knowing that arabs are not overly big on drinking I wasn't even sure if there would be a half decent watering hole within walking distance.
For some reason most big cities around the world have a couple of Irish Bars, but not all, and yet finding those bars can be like finding a needle in a haystack and being almost exclusively for expats few of the locals know where they are or how much the drinks are likely to cost.
As it turned out the internet was so slow that it wasnt really helpful in the searching department, so I gave up and headed back to my hotel to kill a few hours til my lift started.
The itiniary for the trip of my desert extraveganza was first off dune bashing, with beefy 4x4 offroad jeep followed by a choice of camel riding, quad bike riding, light snacks, henna tattoo's and sheesha hubbly bubbly for those for a taste of it before a proper barbeque meal and belly dancing.
First off our driver arrived about 3:45, a fraction later than planned, and then I shared my jeep with a female only russian family and a slightly older russian couple, none of whom spoke English ( nor surprisingly did the driver, but he did speak Russian ! ) and so my choice of conversation was not the best but the ride was only about an hour til we reached the pickup point.
There we had fifteen minutes to take a leak, buy some souveneirs and take a few pre-ride photos while the drivers all let down the tyre pressure just enough to give them better control over the dunes, before loadings us back all up and then headed down the road to the meeting point, where around fifty jeeps from the various tour agencies all met up for a big rally.
Of course, none of the cars stalled as the control of the various drivers were all exemplorary, each following each other on slightly different vectors, all takings bends, humps and drops with terrific wheel spins and slides, at times coming down almost sideways and trying to take clear photos or even ride without holding on tight was a real challenge.
To extend the ride without going miles out of the way we were never really going more than about 40mph for long, so it never felt like you was racing, unless perhaps you were in the lead jeep, but taking turns skidding and bashing the dunes for all the horsepower the jeep could offer was still a big thrill.
My two clearest memories is watching the freshly kicked up loose sand dance and skip across the dunes ahead of me, like some clever special effect artists piece-de-la-resistance, and also when we went over a hill too close ( or maybe the perfect distance ) to the jeep in front and the sand that its tyres kicked up splashed and washed down our windscreen and just for a second I was too confused to even take a photo as it resembled so close to golden water that I actually held my hands up to my face to ensure that I stayed dry.
Our little jaunt lasted almost an hour, with a ten or so minute break in the middle to take a rest, take photos and admire the endless dessert dunes far out from the city, and then we headed deeper into the dessert to where they had a camp for us all to kick back and where we would share the rest of the night.
With the camel riding or sand dune surfing free for those who wanted it, and a small extra charge for anyone who wanted a quad bike, it should have been great but during the ride over the sun had already passed sunset and so by the time you had decided what to do it was too late to safely to most of the other activities outside the camp, and further reinforced my idea that they should have started it earlier during the day, and so most of the guests from all the various groups all got together and sat around eating, snacking, dressing up like arabs for photos or getting a henna tattoo done.
I myself got a lovely scorpion henna tattoo that was going to take a couple of hours to dry, and with classic silent movie expense build up and them comic let down I had several near misses of a heavy rain downpour and some pushy locals queueing up for food, where it narrowly escaped being smudged, only for its neat perfection to come to an end right at the end of the night as I leaned over too close with my left arm to buckle up my seat belt, ironically specifically using my left not my right so that I wouldnt do exactly what I just did. Thankfully I had enough wits left not to slap my forehead in self disbelief, though I dearly wanted to, yet within seconds I managed to get henna all over my other hand, on the inside of my jacket and down my travelling pants as well.
The belly dancing was also great, as the dancer had great control of her body, but this act too suffered as it was too late at night by the time she started her dance, around 8pm, and though the area was vaguely lit by floodlights it was too dark to take any good photos or vieo footage and very few of the guests from either group bothered to buy the cd video of the days events for much the same reason, being that most of the activities were done in such darkness that they could barely be seen when replayed.
The night came to a rather abrupt end when the clouds that had been threatening and pretending to rain all evening finally got bored or waiting and came down hard enough for the belly dancer to give up her efforts, as did the music, and so we all piled back into our jeeps and back headed on back to our hotels.
All in all it should have been a magical experience but for me I felt that it was lacking something, and i think that the reason for this is two fold. Firstly is the piss poor timing issues that meant too many things were done in near darkness and secondly was me. I have been travelling to so many destinations and doing the highlights of each city for so long without a proper break to get bored or fall into a routine that now I feel the amazing IS the norm.
I suddenly got an half insight into the minds of adrenalin junkies, and maybe even drug addicts, where once you have experienced such an intense rush of emotion and energy that everything from then on feels a bit more mundane and if you keep repeating and upping the thrill to try and recapture that first buzz your body and mind slowly raise the bar on what gets a reaction from you, to the point where even doing things that a year ago would have had you whooping and screaming with joy now barely even register as an blip on your own excitement-ometer.
I am not trying to sound ungrateful, ( I do truly understand and appreciate how fortune and lucky I am, especially as I have seen in many cities the locals too poor to afford food, clothes or even a safe or dry place to lay down for the night ) and it is not homesickness that makes this say this, I am just trying to write down how it feels and explain that to me this is another indicator saying that it is time to calm things down and settle for a bit so that my body and mind can reset its levels so that once again I can feel satisfaction and enjoyment from lifes small and delicate things.
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