Maybe you’re wondering why I haven’t written for 3 days now, well, try to imagine what it must feel like to be repeatedly sodomized by an angry camel. Sorry, I know that’s a pretty horrible picture, but man, my rear end really feels awful. 3 days, and I think I’m going to die...ok maybe not, but it really is a bad scene. Before I was trying to look on the good side of this situation, but for me the physical discomfort definitely outweighed any enjoyment. I guess it wasn’t so bad for Tim and Joe. I’m not sure what it is for me. Am I just bad at riding? Was my saddle bad. Maybe it was the shape of the camel’s hump, or maybe it was the shape of my ass? Who can really say, all I know is that it was an experience I have no need to ever, ever repeat.

On the third day of the trek things went awry. By lunch we were totally convinced that our guides didn’t actually know where we were going. We needed to get to a specific place to catch our ride home and our guides kept having to ask directions! But that really wasn’t the issue, neither of them seemed very concerned about that. The problems were much more in-depth than that. By this point it was pretty obvious that neither of them had any actual idea about tourists. And we really didn’t expect too much luxury either. I mean, we expected to rough it some, rich package tourists would never go on this kind of a trip, and they shouldn’t, its hard. But there were so many small things that Almaheddy and Mohammad screwed up with. They didn’t bring a knife sharp enough to cut. They didn’t have enough spoons, and only one cup, we took turns drink coffee in the morning form a bowl... They didn’t bring enough meat, so on the last day all we had was rice. Although even when we did have meat we only got maybe 2 small (maybe the size of a large coin) fatty pieces of lamb apiece. There wasn’t enough coffee, and they constantly used our water. Even though we told them right off the bat that we couldn’t drink any of the rarely found local open well water. This led to some real concern on the third day as we were told at lunch that we might have to march well into the night. The previous night when we’d tried to march in the dark the camels had literally fallen over with us on them. Thankfully camels seem to crumple fairly safely when they fall, but it still was pretty dangerous. Could we handle doing that until 12 or 1 in the morning? This conversation of course happened right after Mohammad took my Dogon blanket off my mat without asking while I was off relieving myself, dragged it through camel dung and about a hundred desert burrs that worked their way into the fabric and used it as a wind shield while he lit a campfire. This of course led to him lighting my blanket on fire and burning like 10 to 15 holes through my 20 000 CFA brand new indigo blanket ranging in size from say a dime to a fist... But I guess an apology would’ve been out of the question. And no, before you say it, it is NOT a cultural thing. If you pull that kind of shit anywhere, I mean anywhere you need to apologize. You can’t just take people’s property, destroy it and act like its no big deal. As you can see I, well the whole group of us really, were a little pissed off at the situation.

We met this old Arab guy in the desert and he gave us directions out to the place we needed to go, and thankfully for everyone we arrived around 5:00 pm on the third night. We slept in the tent outside the compound of someone somehow related to Almaheddy. And guess what, we met Momotie, the guide we’d originally intended to go with, the one we’d emailed. He was very nice and totally accommodating to us. We found some local food and camped out for the night tired out from a pretty gruelling ride.

We hung out the next day around the compound out in the desert, trying to relax, even though I felt pretty sick and even had a bit of a fever. Tim was kind of congested too, it’s really all this dry air and dust out here, it’s horrible on the immune system. I took some drugs, fever stuff, and Sippro for my stomach, which had gotten bad again from the rough food. Maybe I’d been eating too many peanuts and dates: the traditional Tourag breakfast (aka the snack food we bought you because we’re too cheap to actually spend the money you gave us for food, on food). Sorry that might have been uncalled for. Anyhow, we rested under a tree and appreciated the golden sand dunes, which we’d finally reached. Really it was just beautiful scenery out there. We spent the day reading and recuperating in the desert. It was definitely a needed break.