10 April Erg Chebbi

It is very nice here, our room is very large with a king sized bed. Supper last night was amazing, it was an enormous self-service buffet. The table was heaped high with plates of delicious vegetables, all in lovely dressings, broad beans, stick beans, cauliflower, courgette, potato, and lot of other really nice food. We still have a couple of bottles of wine left from Essaouira and we had one of those. I think we have only one left so I hope we will be able to stock up again when we get to Fes. John phoned the man there tonight to arrange for us to arrive the day after tomorrow.
We couldn't work out how the hotel gets its electricity supply as we couldn't see any cables running in. We learnt today that it is solar power during the day and a generator at night. The hotel also gets all it's water from a bore hole in the desert nearby. The atmosphere is very relaxed, in fact it is a very relaxing place to be.
We decided to take a trip organised from the hotel today, otherwise we would just have taken the Logan back over that corrigated piste and then down the surfaced road to Mergouza and back. So we went in a Land Cruiser with a very nice young man called Ashraf on a four hour circular trip into and around the Erg Chebbi dunes. I took so many photographs, I've thinned them by half already and must do some more editing before I decide which ones to keep. Unfortunately the skies have been overcast today. It was a bit cloudy when we left and a wind got up, blowing sand about, which further decreased the visibility.
As well as driving to panoramic spots, with views over the dunes and the surrounding desert we also visited a Berber family home. Obviously it is all contrived for the sake of the tourists, but it gave us quite an insight into their way of life. I thought the nomadic Maasai had a primitive existence but this was, to my perception, worse. At least the Maasai grazing lands usually offered some form of shelter amongst trees, and they would usually construct simple constructions which they could return to. Shelter for this family was a cloth cover draped over sticks in the ground, so I assume that when they moved on there would be no trace of their existence. They had built some mud brick structures nearby where cooking and other domestic chores took place. The elderly woman (a grandmother of four, I established)  also showed us how she carded the goats hair and twisted it to weave the blankets and carpets.
We stopped for lunch at an establishment run by some people who came originally from the Sudan, interestingly they were referred to as 'the black people, where we had madfouna, or Berber pizza, it was a very spicdelicately spiced beef pie, with a flat griddled base. We also listened to some traditional Sudanese music, for which they are evidently renowned.
Ashraf also took us to a place in the dunes where lots of fossils are found and we saw large rock faces of a black stone with some lovely fossils in it, sea creatures and ferns, another reminder of when the Sahara was a deep sea. We visited a lake, which is sometimes inhabited by flamingos, but they were over the other side today, and we were also shown a small farm, where the land was divided into plots with irrigation channels, much as we used to cultivate in Greece and now, with the lack of water, on the allotment.
It was a good trip and one we are pleased to have taken, we would never have found any of those places on our own, and an added bonus was the time spent talking to Ashraf, himself from a local Berber family, about health care, education, social provision. I learnt that in fact there aren't any camels here, these are all dromedaries. Camels have two humps and are found further south and in Sudan. Maybe that's why all the people we have seen having 'camel' rides have looked so uncomfortable, instead of being comfortably wedged between two humps they are perched precariously on top of just one. We were fortunate to have an intelligent young man as our driver, who, although he occasionally struggled with his English, was keen to speak it and had sufficient command to communicate effectively. We were even treated to one or two jokes which either didn't translate well from the Berber, or we missed the humour.
A reminder of the dry heat here, I washed out my underwear and a long sleeved cotton shirt before we went to supper and hung them out on a lone strung up between two trees outside our room, and when we got back they were all dry.
After another wonderful supper tonight, the vegetables were so amazing I had a vegetarian meal, we are settled down in our lovely room with the remains of our last bottle of wine, getting ready to move on to Midelt tomorrow. Auberge du Sud has been a lovely stop over, I mean to contact Rough Guide when we get home, it should be checked out. I could just chill out here, of course, I do love the desert.