Linda and I woke up extra early this morning to head out to the desert for two days. After coming back and getting the ticket we needed haha, we finally headed out. We were excited to get away from the city, even though we had only spent one day there. Just the smell alone made us want to get out. We were ready for some open space with fresh air, even if we had to go to the desert to get it haha. After we made it out of the city during rush hour, the scenery started to change. We drove through the Atlas Mountains, stopping several times for photoshoots and restrooms. Eventually we made it to Ouarzazate, a cinema town, so we checked out their studios for a few minutes. Many Egyptian movies are filmed here, although it's on the wrong side of the continent haha. Soon after we stopped for lunch at a restaurant with quite the view. We all enjoyed the traditional Moroccan food before heading out again. After stopping several more times in the huge desert, and many hours later, we finally made it to the camels that would take us to the campsite. We loaded up our bags and hopped on. Getting on wasn't as tough as I thought it would be, but riding is a different story. Luckily I was in the back, so no one saw me constantly flail like a rag doll. 15 minutes in, my water bottle fell off, and being stupid, I didn't yell to stop, I was kinda in shock and didn't really know what to do. I spent the whole camel ride literally laughing at myself (also a good reason I was in the back) at how inept I was. It was so funny. And of course I'd lose my ice cold liter of water 15 minutes in. Luckily I had about a quarter of my small water bottle left, and we were only there for the night time. But ya so that's how my desert adventure started for me... We got to the campsite, dismounted and headed to go drink some tea, or Moroccan whiskey as they call it haha. We met our guide, Salim Sahara, and quickly learned that he was an interesting character. He was super nice, but said Sahara after every sentence. Kinda like Bonsai Boy for any Sionian readers out there. Yes Sahara was his word. Everyone we encountered that day understood French way better than English (a rarity!) and so I got to use my French a lot more than expected, and it made me feel so much for comfortable speaking comprehendible French rather than broken English. Yay la francophonie! We took lots of pictures with the camels and on the dunes with the group- we were finally starting to get to know each other, I think we were all pretty tired during the drive. They were all awesome and so so nice, we had a great time together :) Soon it was dinner time, and we had lentil soup and a turkey tagine to share, it was very good. For dessert we had cantaloupe, and I've never been more happy to have fruit for dessert- cantaloupes are full of water. I don't think I was actually that thirsty, most of it was in my head knowing that I had an extremely limited supply... Plus I had really hydrated the days leading up, so I was fine, and every was really nice and offered their water. So yes, I felt a lot better after having three slices of cantaloupe. After dinner we took some more group pics (oh also one of them is a professional photographer in London so that rocked). Then we gathered around the campfire for some traditional Berber music. We joined in and had fun pretending to be cool. Soon people were ready for bed, but a good chunk of our group stayed up and laid out on the dune looking at the stars. The sand was so soft and clean it was amazing. I definitely rolled around the most- I hadn't seen sand in so many years. It was so nice!! Plus the only bugs we encountered were ants and beetles- no wasps or mosquitos- so I really enjoyed just laying out and not having to worry about anything biting my skin. Once we started to get a bit chilly and tired, we headed inside the tents and fell asleep. At about 2am a pack of wolves or coyotes or dogs that really liked to howl woke me up. This was pretty much my worst nightmare- whenever I sleep outside in always woken up by dogs jumping on me somehow, even though we own zero. So this time not only are the dogs coming to jump on us, but they're coming to eat us. This would be how I die. Ya luckily that was just me thinking of worst case scenarios, but the thought of dogs, and human-eating ones at that, was not a pleasant thought in my mind. Thankfully we all woke up alive haha and we told to go outside and watch the sunrise. The sun rose past 6am, way way way later than Stockholm and even later than France. It was beautiful, and bright! We watched the sun set the day before over the dunes, and the sun rise over the mountains. Pretty cool. Soon we loaded back onto the camels and were headed out in order to get back to Marrakech before the sun went down. It was very nice to spend the high heat of the day in an air conditioned van. We stopped at Ait Ben Haddou, a popular filming site, now a UNESCO world heritage site as well. There's a photo with a list of moves (Indiana Jones included dad). We didn't really realize what all we were getting ourselves into when we got out of the van, so I didn't bring any water (not that I had any anyways) or put on sunscreen. It was HOT. And we were doing a lot of climbing. We were so so so happy to finally get to the lunch restaurant which had big bottles of ice cold water. By this point we were all running out of money- we didn't expect all the restaurants to cost three times as much as the ones in town, so we were all sharing or just having drinks and bread. We headed back on our way home, passing a scary accident on the way. And that was before the rain. Luckily we saw no more accidents, so that made the rain enjoyable. Everyone outside was scrambling to get dry, it was kinda funny.