Day 10 - Water, Water Everywhere

The love part of the relationship with Merzouga started at 5:30 in the morning. It was recommended that I wake up early, walk up the huge sand dunes and catch the rising sun. So I did and it was literally a breathtaking experience. Climbing those dunes is not easy, as the tourists I talked to told me. They don't look that high, but they were very right with the time, it took me about half an hour to reach them, still in the dark, and at dusk, the climb (on foot, of course...) was rather taxing.

Steep...

Just in time...I reached the top when the sun was coming up and offered some unforgettable views, this is how I imagined the Sahara when a small kid.

...but very beautiful...

I met only one two fellow tourists, a young couple, who apparently thought either that I was someone trying to sell them something or out there to do some harm to them - they were scared of me when I asked what they thought was the best dune to climb.

Fellow (but very unfriendly) tourists with the moon behind them

Turning around, I spotted the longest ever shadow of my feet, being cast by the rising star, about 8 lightminutes away.

Shadow of my feet in the rising sun

I then headed back to town, where the first dromedary was getting ready to carry the tourists into the dunes. This was just one of the many activities offered, there was 4x4 jeep adventures, a visit to the nomads living in the sand and spending one day with them, buggy and ATV quad riding - I decided against all of these - and started on the last leg of my biking adventure - which was to reach Marrakesh (about 540 kilometers away).

Dromedary

I had a hearty, buffet-style breakfast back at the hotel, by this time the Australian girls were awake, we chitchatted some more, then it was time to leave. I was not too keen on backtracking, so I jumped onto a bus for the first 40 kilometers to take me back to Rissani, paying 15 dirhams. It was quite late, about 11, by the time I got to town.

A fellow passenger on the bus

Back in Rissani

I had the option of taking one of two roads heading west through the Sahara, the N10 and the N12, I took the latter - and, while I do not know how N10 would have been, it was one of the best rides not only in Morocco, but of my entire biking career...

As I had written a day or two earlier, it is very hard to put this experience into words and the pictures taken by my cellphone cannot reveal the atmosphere that was so dear to me. This stretch of road had

very light traffic and you can see and hear for miles if a car was nearing you. Nature is a great architect and it (she?) was busy forming all kinds of absurd-looking rocks, hills, mountains, it was like biking through some art exhibition the entire day.

Scenes from a wonderful day

I stopped for a late lunch in the town of Alnif (there were not too many towns till then - maybe just one other place) and had my first tagine at some hotel, the national dish. It was getting quite late, about 4 pm. There was a fork in the road, the next major town with a hotel would have been 60 kilometers away riding one direction and 13 kilometers the other way. Knowing the temperatures at night can be quite low, I went for the safer option and soon reached a rather luxurious hotel, but it being low season, I got a very good offer. My plan was to turn on the heater (yes, there was one), take a shower (yes, there was hot water), make a couple of calls through Whatsapp (hotel had Wifi) and watch TV (tick that one off, too). Well, the heater tried its best to make the room warm (did not live up to the expectations), the internet did not work in my room, neither did the TV - for that, I took a really long shower and managed not to flood the room.

The 'production' for the day was about 110 kilometers, with the terrain slightly inclining (about 360m uphill, 200 down). This is the map.