Dan's World Nomads journals

“Pouvez vous marché un peux plus loin?” implored our guide Nasser, during lunch on the first of three days’ march through the Sahara Desert. I tell him that my wife and I would be happy to put a few more kilometers under our feet before pitching camp. After all, how difficult could walking across sand really be? Pretty tough, it turns out.
While not as lofty, nor as steep as the mountains where I live in British Columbia, the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert in southern Tunisia are just as beautiful, and almost as daunting. For one, they are soft. Really soft. Saharan sand is some of the finest I have ever seen, and I wrote my Masters dissertation on sand dunes. With every step, the golden sand yields and you sink up to your ankles. A 3-meter-high dune is like climbing a full set of stairs. After several hundred staircases, I regret not starting a fitness regime prior to starting out.
Our desert trek began in Douz, a sleepy frontier town in southern Tunisia, surrounded as if besieged, by sand dunes. Early in the morning of our departure, I wander through the village square, empty save for a cobbler kneading pieces of leather. “Cow moooo, donkey eeeeyaaahn, camel uuuuuurghbbbbbbbbbbshhhh!” he exclaims, mimicking the sound each animal makes, while pointing to the part of the shoe that each animal contributed to. Surprised by his braying lips so early in the morning, I hurry on, anxious to find a shop to buy water. An hour later, I feel as though I’ve wandered onto the set of Star Wars which, incidentally, was filmed here. Our taxi motors through a gate and we leave the walled quasi-urbanity of Douz, and enter the endless expanse of the Sahara, painted golden by the rising sun. Our cabbie unloads the burlap sacks full of provisions and a young man approaches us, leading two camels – or so we thought. Every child knows that Alice the camel has two humps; Ali Baba the dromedary has only one. Introductions are rushed and we are soon walking through swarms of dunes, interspersed with gravelly flats and shrubs with tissue paper flowers.
Some hours after lunch, Nasser holds up his hand and parks his dromedaries – the signal that we have arrived for the night. For want of a table, Nasser picks up one of the blankets that act as a saddle, gives it a quick shake to remove the sand and ungulate hairs, and begins the repetitive, hypnotic motions of kneading a dough. Twenty minutes after covering the dough with embers and sand, the smell of freshly baked bread seems out of place in the middle of the desert. Dinner is a flavourful stew, mopped up with the crusty bread, a Saharan specialty that reminds me of the quick-cooked matzah that the Israelites baked during their exodus from Egypt. A cold sandy wind picks up, and we crawl into our tent, satiated but exhausted.