Between Snow and Sand

Our next stop: the Sahara. We leave Boulemane and the Middle Atlas - with all its wind and snow - behind us. On the road through Midelt we are once again reminded of Switzerland. Or rather of the Thurgau. Almost every roundabout is decorated with art and this is almost exclusively some kind of apple. Why not?

We stop near the Hassan II dam where we find a spot among date palms and olive trees. It's finally getting warmer again, at least during the day. The cold of the previous days is soon forgotten. We hardly meet any people in this place. A family is having their Sunday picnic next to us. A shepherd drives his herd of goats, which sound absurdly human, past us. A man from the neighboring premises says hello and that he would like to have tea with us the next day. And he wants to bring us something to eat. Which he then does. Just after dark, there's a knock on our bus and Said stands there with bowls of vegetable rice, bread and dates from his property. The next morning he comes by again and drinks tea with us and brings us Berber pizza. He doesn't want to accept payment, but he does accept one of our headlamps. 

Heading south we stop at a viewpoint. The sight of the ZIZ valley opens in front of us. In the middle of the brown landscape, the earth rips open and in front of us lies the green stripe of an oasis. This valley stretches along a river and the yellow-colored deciduous trees give it a colorful picture that we would not have expected at all.

But a few meters along the street there is a radical break in style. Suddenly everything goes black. The valley experienced wild fires last year and the traces of the devastation stretch past us for miles. Most date palms stand like black, charred matchsticks in their gloomy surroundings. You can only guess how fertile it once was. It is all the more astonishing that a new leaf sprouts from almost every palm tree. Nature recovers quickly, even from such disasters. Humans take longer to do this.

It reminds me of a sentence that was said to me recently: We don't actually want to save the earth with climate protection. The earth is changeable, it recovers, it adapts to the circumstances. What we really want to save is humanity. Because before extinction we are threatened if we make the planet "uninhabitable". Uninhabitable for us. It shows us this so clearly here. It's the people who suffer, not the scorched earth. It is people who fear the future, not the date palm that, despite days of fire, is beginning to sprout again. It's probably the first time on this trip that we've faced climate change so unfiltered. It shows us how destructive we are currently dealing with the planet. We drive on thoughtfully.

Orange Horizon

On the horizon we soon see the first orange sand dunes. They seem so unreal and out of place and yet there they are. Here, right in front of us. Since centuries. We stop in the village before Merzouga. Hassilabied consists almost entirely of campsites and hotels. We choose any campsite with a relatively good rating and arrive just before sunset. We are the only ones. We can park our bus almost in the sand dunes themselves and enjoy the sunset in the desert. Of course that's not cheesy enough and a camel runs past the horizon. The view leaves us a bit speechless, the warm sand runs through our hands. The fact that the landscape changes so quickly that we can immerse ourselves in such a new environment from one moment to the next - we just haven't grasped that yet. We need time to process this and prepare for a relaxing evening in the sand. And then everything turns out differently than expected...