Quit our jobs, sold our home and everything in it, gone riding...

[Lightcycle]

We stopped for lunch in Rissani and had some trouble finding gas. This was not an isolated problem. We often gas up in the late afternoon before stopping and the local pumps always seem to be out of fuel. However, the larger multinational stations like Shell are always in stock, you just have to find one.

I'm not sure why this is, whether the local pumps just stock up enough for a single day?

Riding through the gates of Rissani

When we're riding, I prefer following instead of leading for a couple of reasons. I like taking pictures with Neda riding, it makes for a more interesting photo, and it also stops me from worrying excessively if I can see her all the time instead of checking my mirrors every so often.

However, we do take turns leading, and during my stint in the front, I checked my mirrors one time and my heart skipped a beat when I noticed Neda wasn't behind me anymore. I panicked because normally if she's slowing down or stopping she'll radio me to let me know. I frantically tap on the communicator. The beep tells me that we're connected and I call out to her to ask if everything's okay, but all I hear back is silence - she's not responding.

This is very concerning. I pull over to the side of the road and wait. 5 seconds. "Hello? Neda? Hello?!" Troubling silence over the communicator. 10 seconds. She should have caught up to me by now. My heart is racing and my mind is thinking all sorts of horrible things. It makes no sense. The road we're on is perfectly straight. There's a little bit of a cross-wind that moves our bikes around, but we've faced much worse. Was she blown off the road at speed?

I quickly make a U-turn and start looking for her. About a km away, I see her parked bike at the side of the road. It's upright and I'm instantly relieved, but she's nowhere to be found. I park behind her and finally notice that she's walking around in the ditch and it looks like she's searching for something. She's still not responding to the radio, so when I get closer to her, she points to the empty spot on her helmet where her communicator should be.

Her radio had fallen off somewhere and she was looking for it on the side of the road!

My relief that she's okay slowly turns to annoyance that we've lost another piece of our equipment. Everything is falling apart on us! This is so frustrating. Neda says she saw the communicator in her mirror bounce away from the bike and into the ditch. It's been 15 minutes and we are both walking up and down that same area that she went back to, but the search is proving fruitless.

I'm ready to give up, and in my mind I'm already trying to envision what traveling is going to be like without being able to communicate with each other. The comms were such an essential part of our kit. What makes it even more frustrating is that I know Neda's communicator is still working because I'm still connected to it. It's just that it's not connected to a microphone so I can't even play Marco Polo with it. Neda's communicator is lying somewhere on the ground tantalizingly transmitting its quiet background hiss into my earphones. It's driving me crazy!!!

By some stroke of luck I FOUND IT! We make sure that Neda's communicator doesn't escape again

Even though we're angry that our stuff is all falling apart, I still have to sing some praise for these Sena communicators: They take a lot of abuse (like bouncing down the highway) and still keep working. The only weak point is the base clamp kit that connect them to the helmets. The pins on my communicator have bent and I have to jiggle them often to make a good connection. The plastic tab that clips Neda's radio to the base has become worn and now the communicator comes loose with just a nudge.

I also have to mention that someone from Sena sent me an e-mail about a month ago. They saw our blog and asked how our communicators were doing. When I aired my concerns, they replied "No problem, we'll send you new units". Wow! Cool! This was totally unsolicited and our communicators have been out of warranty for a long time. They really stand behind their products! So we do have new units waiting for us, we just have to figure out *where* to send them to...

Standing on the pegs trying to minimize the vibrations from the washboard gravel road

So with our comms patched up, we head off the highway into the final stretch for the evening. Our stop that we've booked for the night is actually in Erg Chebbi, which is right on the western periphery of the Sahara Desert. This means that the last 15 kms or so is off-road as we negotiate the poorly marked gravel pistes running parallel to the sand dunes that represent edge of the Sahara.

SO COOOL!!!!

The washboard roads have worked Neda's drybag loose. Thankfully I'm following.
If I were leading there would be more swearing as we would have sacrificed more equipment to the desert

I radio Neda that her bag has fallen off her bike. Because I'm closer, she asks if I can give her a hand. You probably already know me by now, so when someone asks me: "Can you give me a hand?", in my head I hear "Can you take lots of pictures?"... Neda narrows her eyes and shakes her head as she stomps angrily towards her fallen drybag. *kikiki* [click] [click] [click]

 

[Lightcycle]

As we head deeper into the desert, the gravel piste turns into stretches of deep sand

I don't do as well as Neda

I don't want to blame my bike, but the weight is piled so high and so far back that I feel like I'm balancing a bowling ball on top of a broom. The motorcycle's front wheel weaves worryingly on the deep sand and on one stretch, I can't control the speed wobble and take a tumble onto the soft sand.

There's no way I'm getting this baby back upright by myself. I radio Neda, "Can you give me a hand?"

Neda: [click] [click] [click]
Gene: Really...?!?

Just for good measure, a couple of kms later I dump the bike on the other side as well...

Not that we're keeping score, but it's 2-0 for Neda. She's too well-mannered to point this out, but when she taps on the communicator and asks, "You okay?", all I hear in my head is "The score is 2-0 for me, bee-yotch".

Despite all the wobbles and falls, we are having a really good time. The scenery here is phenomenal: dark reddish-orange sands as far as the eye can see, that get deeper in colour (and depth) as the sun falls lower in the sky. Now this is what we thought Morocco would be like and we're not disappointed one bit!

 

[Lightcycle]

Lost in the desert.

From all the maps that I've looked up on-line, our place should be about 15 kms from the highway. At this point, my odometer reads 20 kms and we're still lost. We don't know which building is the right one, they all look the same and there are no signs whatsoever.

I have the GPS co-ordinates, but the pistes don't line up and it looks like we're just circling around where our stop for the evening should be.

Neda: "Let's stay in this one. They have camels!"

And then out of nowhere, Lawrence of Arabia pulls up on a motorcycle!

This guy worked at the place where we are staying. When they are expecting guests, they send search parties out into the area to help guide them in, since it's so confusing out here. We follow him back, and I'm wobbling all over the place, eying his small and nimble, light cycle ahead of me with envy.

Our place is right on an oasis...? Oooh, fancy!

I can't believe we're at the edge of the Sahara Desert. In Africa! On motorcycles! It's all so surreal! We're surrounded by massive sand dunes. I can't wait to go exploring tomorrow!!!

 

[viper84737]

I don't mean to hijack this twice in two days with another anecdote, but it's pretty relevant given your radio story: In 2011 I crashed helmet-onto my Sena SMH-10. It and the rest of my body took the brunt of the damage from the impact (the helmet itself never even touched the ground, just the radio). To this day it still works like the day I bought it. Not even the plastic casing was cracked by the impact somehow.

If physically robust radio units ye be seekin, then an upvote for the Sena SMH-10 I be givin ye, arr.

 

[homme de fer]

Awesome, just awesome!

 

[Lightcycle]

Thanks!

 

[Lightcycle]

Updated from http://www.RideDOT.com/rtw/213.html

This is a close-up of the hotel we are staying at at the edge of the Sahara Desert. You can see the pistes that we took to get here yesterday. Funny, they seem really well defined from above, but when you're actually riding them, they criss-cross and seem to go all over the place. Thank goodness the GPS kinda pointed us in the right direction. Kinda.

So this entry is pretty much going to be about all those sand dunes you see right outside our back door.

This was a bivouac situated on the dunes outside of our hotel

We made it a point to wake up an hour before the sun was supposed to break over the horizon to trek out to a spot in the desert where we would be surrounded by sand dunes so we could catch a proper Saharan sunrise. We're told the colours are just magical at this time of day. It turns out you don't have to go too far to get full immersion - there are a couple of huge sand dunes nearby and the minute you go around the corner you could just as well be in the middle of the Sahara instead of a mere kilometer away from the edge.

I brought my GPS on our morning hike just in case, but we didn't really need it because we didn't get very far in.

About a km away from the hotel - Sand for as far as the eye can see in all directions.
It could've been 300 kms in!

Amazing patterns sculpted by the wind

We were in awe of all the different shapes of the dunes and the patterns that the winds blew the sands into. I found the ridges very fascinating and we trudged a haphazard path around the desert trying to find a nice sharp edge that was just the right angle against the sun, had an interesting curve to it and bonus if it had a cool pattern on the windward face. And of course, all the time trying to approach the dune from the right direction so we wouldn't dirty the sands with our footprints.

It turned out to be a fun game which distracted me just enough for me not to notice that we were doing A LOT of hiking.

"Be vewy, vewy kwayite. We're hunting doones..."

 

[Lightcycle]

Amazing, amazing, amazing! The colours, the shapes, the patterns. Glad I brought a spare battery for the camera...

I would love to watch a time-lapse video to see how these patterns are created!

Having such a good time out here!

Part of me wishes we could just hover over these dunes. Partly because I don't like disturbing the sand with our footprints, but mainly because I'm just lazy...

Field of cool patterns. I have literally 100s of more shots of the desert...

 

[Lightcycle]

Heading back to the hotel. You can see a little of the oasis up ahead

Upon our arrival, we returned some stuff to the desert that we had borrowed

Moroccan the Cats-bah

Moroccan the Sheeps-baaaaah

These sheep were running away from huge worms lurking underneath the sands of Erg Arrakis. Actually, they were being chased away from our hotel by the staff. Turns out there are some really tasty plants on our patio, which are meant more as decorations for the guests, not as a snack for these sheep...

This 4x4 was having a great time making runs up and down this massive sand dune outside of our hotel

The largest sand dunes in Morocco can be found here at Erg Chebbi, rising up over 150 metres in height. "Erg" is the Arabic word for dune field, and Erg Chebbi is about 200 square kms of dunes. They say that the orange colour of the sands here are particular to this one place only, which makes it a very popular spot for tourists.

 

[Lightcycle]

While hanging out on the patio, we heard the sound of dirtbikes. So we came out to investigate.

Giacomo, on the right, runs a company that offers motorcycle tours of Morocco. Here he is with a very lucky customer, Gianluca from Italy, who got some intensive one-on-one training with the former off-road racer. They just happened to stop at our hotel to come in for a quick snack, so we got to talking with them.

One of the items on our bucketlist is to ride sand dunes on a dirtbike, so we asked Giacomo if he had any spots open in the next few days. I could sense he was holding back much scoffing and laughter as he regretfully informed us that he was booked for the next couple of *months*. Dammit. Sometimes it's great just showing up and going with the flow, but for other things, it seems like you actually need to plan them out well in advance.

We took Giacomo's e-mail address and we will be using it in the very near future.

So Jelly!!!

We watched with extreme envy as the dirtbikers suited up and remounted their four-strokes and they braaaped off into the sand dunes. My camera chased after them like an excited dog, until they were well out-of-sight.

*sigh* We SOOOOOOO wanted to do this, and in the back of our minds we thought we could just show up, rent some bikes and have a great story to tell at the end of the day.

But instead, we booked a camel tour of the sand dunes, with an overnight stay in a Berber tent...

Later on in the evening: Camels! I just need to get them to stand up so I can get a picture of their feet!

Neda turned to me quickly and lectured me sternly, "These aren't camels. Camels have two humps. These are dromedaries. They only have one hump. So you're not going to be making any dumb camel toe jokes on the blog!"

Hrmph. We'll see about that, Neda!

Neda made a new friend. I can already tell by the look in her eye that
she is mentally calculating how much space she has left in her tankbag....

I can't even imagine what this dromedary is thinking about Neda right now...

Unfortunately, I didn't get a lot of shots after this because dark clouds rolled in fast from the south-east. We had nervously checked the forecast beforehand and although it predicted rain, we thought: hey, we're in the freakin' Sahara Desert, ain't no rain gonna follow us here! But the skies darkened ominously and the winds picked up anyway, a sure sign that precipitation was imminent.

We looked at each other, then at the line of camels in front of us. We really didn't want to go trekking out there in a downpour, not get any pictures of a Sahara sunset (which was the main reason we booked the tour) and also spend the night sleeping in a cold and wet bivouac! How do we gracefully back out of the camel tour that we had reserved?

*sigh* So here we are in the freakin' Sahara desert. Supposedly one of the driest places on earth. And we've brought rain with us...

 

[Riceburner]

And we've brought rain with us...

hahahahahahahahahaha.....cough....cough.....hahahahahahahahahaha

 

[Chhai]

That is absolutely beautiful. I will have to add the Sahara to my bucket list thanks a lot!

 

[Lightcycle]

Updated from http://www.RideDOT.com/rtw/214.html

Average rainfall in the Sahara Desert 2.5 cms per year. Which they got all of last night...

When we asked to cancel our reservation for the camel, er dromedary tour, the hotel wasn't that happy. They tried to convince us into heading out into the coming storm. But they were more than accommodating when we told them we were merely postponing our trek till tomorrow, thus guaranteeing an extra night in their expensive desert resort. Suddenly everyone was smiles again...

I did some research and while the whole of the Sahara only receives 25 mm (about an inch) of rain a year, it's mainly the eastern region of the desert that gets even less than that. The western section where we were staying gets about 100 mm annually, which explained the presence of the oasis around our hotel.

So we're not heavily cursed by rain, only just slightly jinxed...

Two Germans that were booked on the same dromedary tour that we were supposed to be on last night arrived back this morning. Although they had a good time, they told us that they didn't see a desert sunset and they were wearing rain clothes the entire trek. I'm so glad we have the freedom to adjust our schedules this way, it's such a luxury!

So today the weather is looking much better. There are still residual clouds from the shower last night, but we're hopeful we'll catch a nice sunset. This is only an overnight tour, and the path that we're taking is not far from the hotel, maybe a little further than where we hiked the morning before. But it's all about being on a camel, er dromedary! There are bivouacs set up just on the other side of the huge dune outside our hotel, and we're told it's a short dromedary ride around the corner.

There are some camel treks that take you three-days into the Sahara, but from what we saw yesterday morning, whether it's three days or one hour, you can get a pretty immersive experience either way.

Alice the dromedary has one hump...

Said, our tour guide, also works at the hotel and he brought out the same dromedaries that we saw yesterday. He gave Neda the one that she bonded with the day before, which was really nice, and we headed out into the desert, just the three of us. It was pretty cool not having to share the tour with anyone else so we could stop and take lots of pictures.

Said sends signals to the dromedaries with a series of clicks and noises made with his tongue

We found out that the dromedaries are rented by the tour guides from a stable around the corner. They are all trained to respond to the same clicks and noises so everyone who takes them will know how to give them directions. Either Said didn't know the language, or our droms were very hungry because every time he let go of the reins, they didn't listen to his commands and would wander off to the nearest grass tufts to dine.

 

[Lightcycle]

Riding a Drom is like riding a motorcycle:

Neda is hanging off her drom, trying to get a knee down.

Lowside! You get on and off camels when they are kneeling down.
You have to hold on tight during mounting/dismounting, or much Droma ensues...

We told Said that we liked to take lots of pictures and he responded that it would probably be better to ditch the droms and go hiking instead to spots where camels couldn't reach. He said we looked to be in fairly good shape, so he showed us where the highest dune was in the area and said that we could catch a great sunset at the peak.

A little Dragon Ball Z action in the desert

I named my steed Des. Short for DesmoDromedary. Because it was CAMelshaft-driven.

Good reception out in the desert!

Said was born in the Erg Chebbi dunes and is descended from a long line of Berber farmers. He lives in Erfoud, which is 70kms north of the Erg and he comes in to work for the hotel and to teach tourists about the Berber way of life. When we told him we liked to take pictures, he changed the tour around to accommodate our interests.

Just like in motorcycle stunting, the Berbers also have their version of the "Jesus Christ" pose

Said brings the droms back to the stable in style, and we begin the long hike up the tallest dune.

 

[Lightcycle]

In the distance Said meets up with a fellow tour guide taking more tourists to the other dunes

Hiking up to secure our seats for the show. You can see the bivouacs where we are staying tonight below us on the left

We had to take many breaks on our way up, the view gets more magnificent the higher we get

In the distance, the other tourists that we saw earlier hike a smaller dune. Haha! We win!

The hour before sunset and the hour after sunrise are the best times to experience the Sahara!

Although the colours of the Sahara are quite a sight during the day, they are washed out and there is an absence of contrast on the dunes because of the overhead sun. The shadows cast by the scalloped sand domes as well as the orange colours that are set aflame during sunrise and sunset are absolutely awe-inspiring by comparison!

 

[Lightcycle]

Neda takes some amazing shots of the sun falling behind the distant horizon

This is just one of those magical moments, made even more special
because we were sharing it together up here on this peak.

After the awesome sunset, we ran/slid down the dune, each step causing mini-avalanches on our way to the bivouac. Much easier and more fun going down than up!

At the camp, we had to get rid of all the sand in our shoes once again.

Sneaking a peek into the kitchen bivouac. Smells delicious!

We joined another larger tour group in the bivouac and shared our experiences of Morocco. They were a friendly bunch of Canadians and Germans and a few Australians who were traveling by tour bus. Listening to their itinerary, I couldn't help feeling a bit smug about seeing the country on our schedule and choosing our own path.

After dinner, Said and the other tour guides brought out the Moroccan drums for the nightly entertainment
The heads of the drums have to be heated up for them to sound better and be softer to the hands

 

[Lightcycle]

Listening to the Berbershop Quartet perform by the campfire

There was much drumming, chanting and singing by everyone, which was surprising since there was no alcohol involved. The merriment continued into the night, but since Neda and I are old, we retired early into our bivouac. Although the temperatures in the desert reach the freezing point overnight, the heavy fabrics that covered the tent and our mattresses kept us quite warm. We were still wearing every piece of clothing in bed though...

5AM wakeup call. While I am bleary-eyed and groggy, Neda is a morning person
so she is the least popular person in the campsite as we all get ready to mount our dromedaries

We are woken up just a few short hours later by the tour guides who shoveled all of our lethargic ***** onto the droms to catch a desert sunrise. Well, almost everyone... Said pulled us aside and said he would take us to a better spot for picture-taking, but we would have to ditch the droms again.

I like this special treatment!

While the rest of the tour group is below us on the right, we hiked to a higher peak to get a better vantage point!

Playing around while waiting for the sun to rise

The sun slowly begins to peek up above the horizon and the dark sands begin to glow like embers being stoked

 

[Lightcycle]

We stand as if the National Anthem were being played, in an effort to be as tall as possible
to catch the sunrise as soon as possible!

The warm glow of the morning sun envelops us as we hike down to join the tour group

After bragging of where we were and what we saw, we bask in the BusPeople's envy in addition to the warmth of the rising sun. Haha!

See the two empty dromedaries up front? We were hiking back separately from the group so we got to take some great backlit shots

Reflecting on such an amazing experience!

Dromedary Toe.... dammit, Neda!!!

Okay, so I didn't get to make a dumb camel toe joke. You win this time, Neda...

Jokes aside, it was interesting seeing how fleshy and padded their feet are. These are very heavy creatures and the extra surface area stops them from sinking into the sands.

 

[mmmnaked]

Gene, how many kilometers total so far? Curious

 

[Krime]

Awesome photos, thanks for sharing as usual. I flew over the Sahara when travelling to Africa in 2013, and was mesmerized by the dunes and the scale of how vast it was from way up above. Would love to experience it like you guys someday.