Blorf

Well, I’m a bit behind on blog posts, on account of getting a wee bit sick. Thanks to strong empirical testing, I can report that many hours in a car on Moroccan back roads, followed by a couple hours bashing dunes in a Land Cruiser, is not a great fit for an unsettled stomach.

Let’s rewind a bit though, back to Wednesday. Morocco is a fossil hotbed, and we could come to somewhere with interest geology without diving in a bit. The Lonely Planet guidebook had mentioned a guy named Mohand who you could email to arrange a fossil hunt. Mohand turns out to be a fascinating guy, with a passion for educating about geological history and the important fossil record of Morocco. He runs a fossil store, and is working to build his own fossil museum.

Mohand is based in Alnif, a small town about an hour and half away from where we were staying in Todra. We all piled in and set out around 8:30. We met up with Mohand, and he lead us out to our first fossil site. This involved some serious off-road driving, of the sort that probably wasn’t on the mind of the Italians who designed the Fiat Doblo. The sounds coming from the bottom of the car can only be described as “thank god we got full coverage insurance”.

The first fossil site dates from the Ordovician time period, when Morocco was underwater and somewhere near the South Pole. The rock was very soft mudstone, which you can basically crumble with your hands. It’s absolutely packed with trilobites. We spent an hour or two finding them on the ground, and pulling them from the walls. The real skill of someone like Mohand is the ability to extract the fossils in one piece, or barring that, to collect all the pieces and skillfully reassemble them.

After the first fossil site, we looped back to Mohand’s house, workshop, and future museum site. We started with tea and a tour of the museum in its current state. He’s hoping to get some government funding to build it out in the future. Then he showed us how he prepares fossils, using a tiny air hammer and a delicate touch.

Mohand prepared us a lovely lunch, using some ingredients from his extensive gardens. The tagine was maybe the best yet – vegetable heavy with quince!

After lunch, we went back out to visit a Devonian site. This is a later time period, with different varieties of species. The rocks are also much harder, so you’re often searching for a tiny hint of a fossil inside a rock, which can be taken back to the workshop. We dug around and filled our pockets with rocks, and Mohand helped us decide which were worth keeping. Then it was back to the workshop for more discovery.

By around 5pm, we needed to get on the road to make it back to Todra for dinner. By the time we got back to Todra, I was feeling pretty rotten and went to bed early. I woke up feeling a little better, and we packed up and set out on our drive for our desert stay. Two bad things happened on the drive. First, about three hours in, I went from “not great but I’ll make it” to “oh no time to puke”. Second, in my slightly less focused state, I’d set our GPS destination as El Mhamid, instead of Mhamid. Two towns, both in the same region, but not very close. Dan took over driving so I could focus on puking, but we only discovered the GPS error as we reached El Mhamid, wondered where our friends in the other car were, and discovered we had another 3 hours of driving to do. Thankfully the folks hosting us in the desert were flexible (“this has happened before”) and so we didn’t miss out on anything.

After getting to Mhamid, we transferred to a Land Cruiser to go to the desert camp. The ride was a little bit bouncy (or maybe a lot bit bouncy) so I spent most of it puking. But, it was very pretty! I crawled into bed immediately on arriving. Thankfully, I woke up feeling a lot better. I’ve been taking it slow today, resting, drinking wanter, and easing my way into food.

The rest of the gang has been able to enjoy the camp more fully though, so I’ll hand things over to Kat to describe the rest. Photos will come once we’re out of the desert.

We all woke up early to watch the sunrise over the dunes before enjoying a breakfast of eggs baked with an herby tomato sauce in a tagine.

Our scheduled morning adventure was a jeep ride over the desert to visit a nomad couple for tea. The first stop, however, was the local community well where travelers and locals get drinking water. There were even tadpoles, frogs and little crustaceans living in the tiny puddles near the well. A few hundred yards away was the nomad camp. A dry stone structure (without mortar), a tent and a few structures made of twisted acacia branches formed the homestead. A donkey and cat caught our attention until we realized each chicken was followed by three fluffy little chicks. Patch decided she would not leave without catching one. We were called in to share tea and dates with our host who was extremely interested in my knitting project. He and his wife lived near the permanent water source and kept livestock in the surrounding land for the local village.

After tea, our hostess treated us to “sand bread”. She placed a large flattened disc of dough on a bed of ashes then covered it with hot coals and sand. Without a modern timer, the baker knows the bread is ready by watching for it to rise and inflate the pile. After thanking our host and hostess, we returned to the main camp for a full lunch. Folks then either napped or wandered off into the dunes to play in the sand.

Our scheduled evening activity was a camel ride around the dunes and a view of the sunset. Unfortunately it was extremely cloudy so there was no sunset to be seen, however I had an excellent time rolling around making sand angels. There were mixed reviews on how folks felt about riding camels, especially considering some of the camels were more willing to be ridden than others. However Lara and I agreed that we would both enjoy more time spent with a dromedary. We finished the evening off with a beef tagine dinner and singing around the bonfire before heading to bed.