Camel back and mountainous sand dunes

As soon as we drove into M'hamid, our small car, which we named Gorgeous George, had been surrounded on all sides with some people offering us tours and others telling us we weren't allowed to drive on the street any further. We turned around and went back to the first expedition group we saw, led by Brahim. He proceeded to clean us out, but we did sign up for an amazing overnight adventure in the desert. Since we emptied our pockets for him, he promised us dinner that night. The wait for food took 2.5 hours, and all the time, Brahim told us lengthy stories in detail, and for all the build up the punchline or moral was always a let down (a bit like this blog). Every five minutes, Dan would translate a sentence from French into English for Nachi, and it always seemed like all the characters were different already.

At night, Brahim and his companion took us out to the campsite. We sat and listened to more stories over some tea, and then looked up at the most amazing sky -- full of stars and constellations. Laying in the cool sand with winds blowing from odd and changing directions and looking up was certainly one of the highlights of the trip. Nachi wanted to grab some torches and walk into the desert, so we explored our site and realized we couldn't find the way out. We felt stupid and went to sleep.

The next morning we took off camel back on Dromaderies -- Brahim wanted to show us the old M'hamid (the real one). Nachi's camel (which he named camel) didn't really want to go anywhere and would try to grab food while walking: he was also a bit of a rougher ride. Dan's camel, named Barry (same as Dan's bag), seemed a bit younger and liked to poop a lot. People in the old M'hamid were very kind: they showed us into their homes freely. It was obvious the people here were poorer than in the newer M'hamid.

For the afternoon, we took a 4x4 out into the desert. On the way out, we saw fields of Dromaderies -- with maybe a couple hundred. We stopped at sand dunes which were shaped like mountains. The shape comes solely from the direction of the winds, and our tour guide drew the possible wind patterns and entailing shapes in the sand for us. We rolled down the sand dunes, and Dan's camera almost broke as a result.