Marriage Proposals and Sandstorms; or, the night a bug almost took my life

First of all, Jeannie's blog is here and the entry from July 9 is hilarious and, as a plus, a microcosm for pretty much everything that's happened in the past three weeks.

AND ALSO this weekend we headed out to the Sahara via long hours winding through Morocco on a bus. The trip there was fascinating in itself - there were some beautiful views and SWEET ruins that made me very excited. Seeing crumbling watchtowers along all the ridge lines was spooky. And then we got to our first hotel, some hours outside the desert, and discovered that someone had put us in a resort. What a whip-lash inducing second take THAT was. But don't worry, for all the catering to Westerners, I still was told to change when I entered the pool-side restaurant at 9 AM with a swimsuit and coverup on (no pants?!?!?). 

The trip the next day took us to a hotel where we waited in a room full of windows for the camels to ready. Through said windows we watched a sandstorm whip the bulrushes into a frenzy and, at times, obscure everything from sight. The undercurrent of worried murmuring rose and fell in proportion to how hard the wind blew.  But by go-time the wind had died down to a mere gale, so we journeyed out on our camels, in caravans of five or six, each led by a Berber guide dressed in blue. The ride out was bumpy, to say the least, but the landscape made up for it. The endless dunes made it seem like we were on Mars, and in the pauses in the sandstorm (sand in hair, eyes, teeth, mouth, ears) it was completely, positively silent.

That night we stayed in an oasis, sheltered from the wind by a dune that covered my whole field of vision lengthwise and a good three-quarters of it height-wise. I only felt hot in the tents, when the dry wind couldn't wick away my sweat before I even knew I was perspiring. That night we had the best meal I've ever had (I was starving) and danced to Berber drums. Some friends and I also had a great conversation with one of our guides, named Imbarik, who had been working this job for 9 years. 

In case you missed that, I had a conversation in Arabic with someone who didn't speak English. 

For those of you who have just joined us, I SPOKE TO SOMEONE FOR AN HOUR IN ARABIC.

Anyway, things were going great until I made the mistake of asking where "you" (plural! I used the plural!) slept at night. I wanted to know if Berbers actually used tents all the time; a very innocent question, right? Well, after that the conversation turned toward my marital status, where I was sleeping (a friend answered "Tent 55, ha ha ha!" with some speed - the tents had no numbers and there were not 55 of them), and whether I was interested in marrying a Moroccan. I made a graceful, prompt exit.

Other highlights were the sandstorm finally letting up, seeing a whole lot of stars, and a little episode  I like to call The Time I Could've Died. I woke up in the middle of the night (I slept outside my tent, like most of my fellow travelers, where it was cooler) and felt something like a prick on my wrist. I lifted it, and in the near total darkness I descried a black, evil looking thing resting below my hand. I sat bolt upright and thrashed around a little, transferring the thing from my wrist to down my shirt, from there to my mattress, from there to someone ELSE'S mattress, and then finally onto the sand. Then I started sucking on the place I thought I'd been bitten and got a lot of sand in my mouth. Then I sat for awhile and tried to figure out if my pulse was spiraling out of control or if I felt short of breath. Then I decided it was probably only a beetle and went back to sleep.

The other thing that bears mentioning is that the Berbers named their camels, and in one caravan there was Mohammed, Omar, Ibrahim, etc. The one at the head of the caravan, however, was Bob Marley 4x4.