Marzouga, Morocco: The Revenge Of The Disgruntled Camel
By Joel Hanson

Camels are grudge-bearing creatures, Myriam tells me. If you harm them in any way, they will remember it and seek revenge whenever they have an opportunity.

Four of us are lounging contentedly under a black tent on the terrace of a hotel partially hidden from the highway by clusters of palm trees. The hotel is surrounded by the steep reddish brown canyon walls of Les Gorges de Toudgha that resemble the colors of The Grand Canyon. An intermittent breeze—an antidote to the rising heat—threatens to transform the dark blue tablecloth of our lunch table into a sail. A shallow swimming pool, shaped like an arched Moroccan door, beckons placidly 10-meters away.

Except for the wait staff, we’re alone. My Moroccan traveling companions who’ve been conversing in Arabic for the last 30 minutes switch to English to share this perplexing tidbit of trivia probably so I’ll carry it with me, like a caveat, on our two-hour voyage into the Sahara this evening. With a smile on my face I peer into each of their faces, expecting one of them to laugh. But they don’t.

“I’m skeptical,” I say dismissively to break the silence, and Myriam smiles, playfully irritated that I don’t believe her.

“It doesn’t matter what you think. It’s true.”

“Okay,” I challenge, while wondering what precisely constitutes camel abuse and if it is indeed a chronic problem in this part of the world, “How exactly do they ‘get revenge’?”

Myriam turns to her sister Zineb for confirmation. “By sitting on people,” she asserts, as though the fact is obvious.

I can’t restrain myself from laughing at the image of an ill-tempered man too careless and slow to avoid such a sluggish trap, which irritates Myriam even more. “It doesn’t matter how much time passes,” her tone turns pedantic. “It could be 10 years. They always remember the people who harm them.”

I mull this over for a while, wondering if she might actually be referring to the camel guides and not the animals, and offer a conciliatory response: “I think people, unfortunately, are the same way."

Myriam seems satisfied with my response, or perhaps she’s no longer listening.

“But I’m not sure why you’re telling me this,” I say to her just before I return to the novel I’m reading and the conversation shifts back to Arabic and what I assume are other topics. “It’s not like I’m planning to treat my camel poorly.”

We climb into Nadir’s shiny silver Volkswagen four-door, and he cautiously steers the car three hours southeast to Marzouga through an intensifying sandstorm. The sand blows over the barren landscape and two-lane road exactly like snow over a frozen highway. In some places the visibility is less than 200 meters as swarms of dust act like an immense diffusion filter over the sun. The lemon-colored light, however, is enchanting. We pass through a series of small towns filled with people caught outdoors, shielding themselves from the relentless sand and shifting winds. The photo opportunities are endless, but we have a schedule to keep. We arrive in Marzouga around 4:30—half an hour before our intended departure.

We use the time to sip the ubiquitous Moroccan mint tea in a resort’s restaurant, stock our backpacks with the appropriate provisions, and wrap scarves around our faces before we meet our guide near a coterie of camels crouching in the sand.

Before we board, attendants place a thick pad on each camel’s back, followed by a metal-framed saddle strapped around the animal’s belly and between its legs, and topped with more pads and blankets. As I watch, I recall a brief exchange with Zineb, 24 hours earlier.

“Joel, we should buy—what do you call them—diapers for the trip.”

“Yeah,” I joke, “Then we won’t have to worry about using the toilet.”

“No,” she giggles, “because we’ll be more comfortable.”

The guide motions for Myriam to grip the metal handle jutting from the saddle and climb on.

“What is his name?” she asks in Arabic.

“His name is ‘camel,’ our guide responds flatly. “We don’t give them names.” With a sibilant syllable from the guide and a tap of his hand on the saddle, Myriam’s nameless camel props itself up on its front knees, and she lurches backward, steadied somewhat by her white-knuckled grip on the handle. The camel duplicates the gesture with his hind legs, pushing her abruptly in the other direction. Her body jerks back and forth a second time as the camel lifts itself to a standing position, but the whole process, which lasts no more than three seconds, is amusing to watch. Zineb and Nadir are next. Once I’m atop my camel, another attendant ties him with a sturdy rope to the back of Nadir’s camel, tucks a large bottle of water into the folds of my blanket-covered saddle, and our excruciating two-hour journey begins. 

Our guide leads our chain of camels into the abating sandstorm on foot. He’s wearing a sky blue headscarf and flip-flops, and controlling Myriam’s camel with a long rope extended from its mouth like a leash.

“Why is he walking?” I wonder naively. Thirty minutes later, I have discovered a valuable piece of information that was alluded to by Zineb the day before: riding a camel is positively the most punishing way to travel on earth.

For the first 10 minutes, however, the undulating ride, a slow-motion version of the rodeo bull, is painless, and the view, captivating. The gold-colored sand dunes sprawl in every direction. But it’s the glow of the sand-filtered sunset that stymies all conversation. The only audible sounds are the chronic creak of the saddle and the relentless wind. We could be extras in a scene from Laurence of Arabia.

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