Member-only story
The Ups And Downs Of Volunteering In The Sahara
No toilet? No problem
The Long Journey To The Sahara
My boyfriend Craig and I made ourselves as comfortable as we could on a bus that offered an array of broken seats to choose from. We were on our way to the small Saharan town of M’hamid, to volunteer in Morocco’s Sahara desert.
The red gorges and rocky desert scenery soon vanished from the bus windows as darkness took over. The bus terminated in the village, which also marked the end of the road, just 24km from the Algerian border.
It was 9.30 pm when we were greeted by a chap named Ahmed, who would be our host while volunteering at his desert camp. He was wearing a large, khaki shesh (turban) and led us to what he called ‘The Sahara Taxi’, but what everyone else would call a tuk-tuk.
We quickly left the tarmac and flew into the air as the ‘taxi’ dropped down a big ledge off the tarmac and onto a dirt track. The dirt soon turned to hard sand and we watched the village lights fade into the distance and stars begin to fill the sky.