Sahara

Sahara is known for being the biggest hot desert in the world! With 9,065,000km2, it is equivalent in size to Europe or the USA. The name results from a transliteration of the Arabic word (in a writing that I cannot reproduce) which in turn is the translation of the Tuareg word tenere (desert).

But it's not the characteristics of the Sahara Desert that I want to talk to you about...

It would be approximately 40 degrees, around 6 pm and I began to see the gateway to the Sahara, Merzouga. Small town with a few houses lined up next to the road, in ocher and orange colors as appropriate.

After a few minutes we stopped and the landscape in front of us was made up of immense dunes of golden sand, the famous Erg Chebbi. When you do a 360º turn and on your horizon you see only sand, the feeling emerges that the world ends there.

It had arrived..

The reason for my trip was to step on the sand of the Sahara, to sleep under the starriest sky I have ever seen, to dance around a fire, to hear the scream of the desert in the throats of Berber women... it was for one night feel NOMAD.

It was part of my teenage imagination when I watched the Paris-Dakar races on television, at a time when the mythical rally race still started from Paris and ended in Dakar.

Those images gave me a feeling of freedom...

And then my imagination filled my imagination with stories about the Tuareg, the desert men with blue turbans, the attacks on caravans that ventured across the desert, the fights fought for Western Sahara and tribal logics that I never understood, but which fascinated me... .

There, before me, was the realization of a dream...

And dreams are truly to be lived… we crossed the dunes on a camel ride, arriving after an hour at the camp that would serve as our shelter for one night…. We ate and danced to the sound of Berber desert music, Gnawa, which with a relatively soft rhythm takes us into a kind of trance, around and around a bonfire, under an immense blanket of stars.

The Sahara illuminated by the light of the moon, full, high up, protecting travelers… I found myself thinking how good it is to live our dreams…