sand trap

by emily bittner

• • •

The Land Rover raced along the western edge of the Sahara desert. Gilles, our well-traveled French guide, rode shotgun. Tanned, with blue eyes that sparkled confidence, he craned his head around to reassure me and my friend Laurel in the backseat.

"But we'll get your bags back.''

Our luggage had vanished into the Sahara.

Gone were the photocopies of our passports and credit cards, Laurel's asthma medication and our clean underwear.

Gone were the bags of ballpoints I'd brought to hand out to Moroccan children, who entreat tourists for pens or dihrams, the local currency.

Gone were the flip-flops, bathing suits and beach towels for our last five days of vacation, to be lazed away on the Atlantic coast.

All that remained was the sandy clothes we had worn camping out at the foothills of the mountainous Merzouga sand dunes. Only four days into our two-week Moroccan tour, we had plenty more barren desert, imperial cities and medieval markets to visit.

• • •

Historians call Morocco an island, bound by the Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea and Saharan mountain ranges. With its heady mix of Occidental and Arab cultures, the country is known for gilded cities and rebellious desert tribes. It is among the often defiant people of Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony annexed by Morocco in 1975, that Birmingham native Margaret Tutwiler will face one of her most pressing challenges if she is confirmed as ambassador to Morocco.

The Algerian-backed Polisario Front independence movement disputes Morocco's claim to the phosphate-rich region, which runs along its southern border and also is hemmed in by Mauritania and the Atlantic. The United Nations recently extended until November its peacekeepers' mandate there in the hope that the countries will agree on a referendum on the region's future.

But Laurel and I had a less dramatic calling. Along with 20 other American students studying in Paris, we signed on to the trip seeking Morocco's adventure, romance and the exotic. Our hopes were fulfilled, the night before we lost our bags, at the Merzouga dunes.

The setting sun painted the dunes tan, gold, auburn, and even scarlet — a new hue each instant as daylight dripped below the horizon. As the last colors drained out of the dusk sky, a sense of timelessness swept over the razor-sharp summits.

Centuries hadn't changed the velvet grains of Sahara sand that slipped through my fingers; from as early as the days of Herodotus, gold and spice traders had traversed this same sea of dunes on the backs of camels, their ships of the desert. Laurel and I lost our bags the next morning, after watching the sunrise. Still overwhelmed, enchanted and starry-eyed after daylight on the dunes, we neglected little details, such as the safety of all of our personal belongs.

When we returned to camp — late as usual — it was time to leave. We handed our duffles to the first turbaned baggage handler we saw, hopped in a Land Rover and headed off through the roadless desert. At our first stop two hours later, the mistake was obvious. We had hefted our bags on top of someone else's vehicle.

Our mission: to stop the other Land Rover group at any one of the popular mausoleums or markets bordering the sands before our luggage headed to the other end of the desert. For the mad car chase, we commissioned our driver, Ahmed, to pilot his relic of a Land Rover. Over his plaid Oxford shirt, our chauffeur sported the traditional blue robe of ancient Tuareg tribes.

Ahmed spoke little French and no English. Laurel and I spoke no Arabic. Our grim smiles communicated all that needed to be said: We would come across a nomad snowball fight before finding our bags.

Ahmed jerked to a halt every five minutes to ask shop owners, pedestrians and every passing motorist if they'd seen the other group. The sinking feeling of surrender swelled in the pit of my stomach. His conversations with the locals stretched longer and longer, and their uproarious laughter grew louder and louder. I could only imagine his explanations, in Arabic.

Hey, Hassan! What's up? Say, I have a favor to ask. These two American brainiacs threw their bags on the wrong Land Rover, can you believe it? You haven't seen any other Land Rovers around, have you? Only 100? Yeah, hopeless... So how's your mom?'

Two hours and zero bags later, we relinquished our possessions to the Sahara sands. We rejoined our group and hit the road, headed south for another desert journey. As our tour bus barrelled through the moonscape of southern Morocco, our friends welcomed the challenge of clothing us. Eric, tall and broad, suggested we share his oversized T-shirt for pyjamas. Eleanor, half my size, insisted we take her jeans.

But we never benefited from our friends' collective wardrobe. Around 8 p.m., less than 12 hours after the luggage had vanished, our bags appeared the hotel lobby.

Laurel and I clutched hands, as eager and anxious as two children on Christmas morning, when we spied the two black bags. She dropped to her knees, touched her forehead to the ground and began to weep.

• • •

Spending the afternoon on his cell phone, Gilles had bullied all of his Moroccan contacts, from government officials to hotel owners to caravan leaders. Our miracle-worker tracked the bags down to a hotel 300 kilometers away and had them shipped to us on the next inter-city bus.

The hunt flouted conventional wisdom about Morocco — we got our bags back, and quickly. But the next two days of our desert trek confirmed that a deliberate, though demanding, life still dominates the North African desert.

A group of 30 smelly, belligerent camels carried us on the next stage. They spit. They peed on themselves. They howeled in gruesome agony each time we climbed on. Aback these steeds for five hours, we covered — at best — 10 miles each day between the town of Zagora and a desert mountain pass.

I christened my querulous mount Baby, after all the children I will never bear following two painful days astride his unyielding vertebrae. Poor Baby was only an adolescent, and he whined constantly. Mating season had just begun, and there wasn't a single female camel in our herd to sate his camel lust.

About a dozen Berber men, sporting Teva sandals and well-worn robes, led our camels by their muzzles. Even in the charred desert, the energetic caravan leader, Idir, jogged up and down the line to check harnesses.

Gilles credits Idir — humble, sinewy and sapphire-eyed — with saving his life. They met in the desert seven years earlier, when Gilles was a young man and Idir only about 15. A wind storm had buried Gilles' tents under six inches of sand and Idir, who was born in the desert, led his party to safety.

Like a growing number of Moroccans, Idir's family lives on money he earns in the burgeoning tourist trade. Although he has never enrolled in school, he speaks five languages, studies astronomy and runs a profitable caravan business. With others like Idir in mind, the Moroccan government recently announced plans to quadruple the number of annual tourists to 10 million by 2010.

• • •

The caravan journey set off from an emerald oasis. A half-mile-wide line of palm trees defied the barren desert rock for the first hour of the trip. We passed ksours, or mud fortresses that crumble away after 50 years, and irrigated communal gardens. The marked path soon petered out and the paradise faded to a forgotten mirage. Sun scorched the landscape, and vegetation vanished.

Water stops were frequent — not for the camels or guides, but for the pasty-faced Americans. Most times we dismounted, stretched our legs and drank bottled water. (Before buying water, we always checked to see if the bottles had been used and were being resold with tap water.)

Once, we stopped at a well — really a hole in the ground with a two-gallon bucket suspended above. Not one plant sprouted nearby. Several boys and a few men were drawing water to fill tubs the size of oil drums that they heaved onto donkey-drawn carts. I gaped as they took turns guzzling from the well's plastic bucket. Ignoring every precaution about "tainted third-world water,'' I tugged my own bucket from the well. They cheered as I gulped the clear, sweet liquid — the best water I have ever sampled. In the arid wilderness, even our plain dinner was mouth-watering.

We gobbled the baked potatoes, carmelized onions, peeled tomatoes and long carrots with chunks of bread and our hands. Moroccans traditionally avail themselves only of their right hand to eat. The left has other traditional, less appetizing functions.

Just after dinner and long after nightfall, the guides baked "sand bread'' for our breakfast. They buried the dough under a mound of sand and swept flaming palm fronds over the makeshift oven. (The bread turned out filling, if a little dry.) As quickly as the palm cinders faded into the midnight darkness, the Berbers' drums appeared.

Thump-ada, thud, thud, thud. One guide on the edge of the semi-circle laid out the bass line with a plastic barrel. Ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting. A teenager sitting beside me rapped a high-pitch, turtle-shell drum with his pinkies.

On wooden goat-skin barrels, a half-dozen others folded evolving rhythms into the melody. Then the singing began, instinctively. Floating above the drum riffs, the men's voices and laugher echoed off the valley walls.

The teenager at my side raised his eyebrows, an invitation to race his delirious drumming. I tried to keep up, slapping my palms on my thighs. The musical dervish swelled faster. The pounding rumbled in my ribcage, spine, fingertips. I lost.

Eventually the drumming slowed, lulling some of my friends to sleep. While they slumbered at camp — a few mattresses and rugs splayed across the desert floor — the valley's empty hillsides lured me to star-gazing. Alone there, my suburban heart grappled with the appeal of a more simple life.

Footsteps crunched behind me and broke the reverie. Idir was checking on our camels, whose front legs were bound together so they wouldn't wander away. He sat beside me, explaining the meaning of the songs, now barely audible below.

They belong to a Berber marriage ritual. The families of the bride and groom sing back and forth to each other during gatherings that linger on for three days. A time to celebrate families, nature and friendship. Happiness, said Idir, lurks in such simplicity. Behind the black silhouette of his turbaned head, six shooting stars streaked one-by-one through the diamond sky. I rested my cheek against the cool sand, closed my eyes and inhaled.

Nothing happens quickly in Morocco. Everything worthwhile takes time.

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