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True Travel Tales

Adventures and misadventures as we travel the world. Are you a traveller looking for a home for your stories? Your true travel stories are welcome. Ask to become a writer.

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The Ups And Downs Of Volunteering In The Sahara

12 min readMay 16, 2025

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Lauren wears a long turquoise dress and walks barefoot along the rippled sand dunes.
All photos by author

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.

Craig stares out of the bus window at a rocky orange gorge.
It was a very scenic bus ride.

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.

Welcome To The Camp

True Travel Tales
True Travel Tales

Published in True Travel Tales

Adventures and misadventures as we travel the world. Are you a traveller looking for a home for your stories? Your true travel stories are welcome. Ask to become a writer.

Lauren Winslow-Llewellyn
Lauren Winslow-Llewellyn

Written by Lauren Winslow-Llewellyn

I’ve been travelling the world with my boyfriend Craig since 2008, exploring 90 countries together. I’m excited to share our adventurous stories on Medium.

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