Day 10: Trekking

Desert plain
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A chilly easterly wind today - yes, you get them in the Sahara, as well as Lowestoft.  It gave us a new challenge to our walking today, as we headed straight into it.

A couple of hours of battling into the wind & sand, we headed into the hills & got some shelter from the wind.  A small bit of height afforded us more spectacular views of the mountains.  Although our seventh day in the desert, it didn't cease to amaze us, and every new view brought a 'wow' and a camera stop - it was ruining Mostafa's fast pace! We headed up through an abandoned quarrying area, past ruined miners huts.  Out here it created an eerie atmosphere, of a long-deserted (pun not intended) town.

Coming in to El Atrous
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The walking after lunch was a little easier for a while, following a well-defined mining track - easy on both the legs and the concentration!  Eventually Mostafa turned off the track, and followed a path round the base of a mountain.  I was intrigued as to where this was leading.  Suddenly we rounded a bend, and below was a whole ruined village, with our Berber tent just visible behind the walls of a large compound, and one of our camels tucking into a local acacia bush.  It looked beautiful.

Camping in the ruins
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Descending to the camp, it was obvious this was a popular area with visiting trekkers.  The hard stony plain had numerous tent-sized pitches cleared, so we had our choice of locations for our tents.  But the ground put up a fight.  It was rock-hard, and the tent pegs would only go in a couple of centimetres.  We resorted to holding the guy ropes in place with rocks.  This was an amazing place - El Atrous was the vilage's name.  Clearly long-abandoned, most of the buildings remained - minus the roofs - and the well was still intact. Tonight we bathed among the ruins, a little more sheltered from any unexpected visitors! We'd arrived at camp quite early, which gave us all plenty of time to savour this campsite - in my opinion one of our best.

After a day of feeling ill and eating little food, I was starving! Fortunately I seemed to have recovered from the revenge of the Sahara, and made up for lost time by eating like a horse!  Not hard to do; Omar always made sure we had more food than we could actually eat.  We may be deprived of many things we take for granted out here, but we're certainly don't have to go hungry.

At the end of our camping plain was a dry river bed, scattered with bushes and trees.  This was the 'bathroom' - entailing a long walk across the plain followed by stumbling down the steep slope to the river bed.  In the dark this meant heading off in the wrong direction, sliding down the steepest part of the slope, and almost colliding with a tree.  Then trying to find the tent again. But you got some stunning views of the night sky while you were wandering round in the dark.

Settled into our sleeping bags, we lay listening to one of the camels hopping around our tents.  They have one leg tied up, to stop them wandering off too far - but this doesn't really slow them down much.  This one seemed to be using our tents as a slalom.  Given his rather imbalanced stated, we lay there waiting to be crushed by a falling camel.