Sometimes the best experiences happen by pure accident. That’s exactly how one of my favorite travel memories started out.
It was the second day of a four-day desert trek with Authentic Morocco tours. Authentic Morocco Tours creates custom desert treks depending on what interests you and your group size. We loved our specialize tour and decided to cut out some of the stops along the way to the desert in order to have as much time as possible in the dunes.
We had really exhausted ourselves with trying to do so much in such a little amount of time and each of us were really looking forward to sleeping in our Berber tent in the middle of the Sahara.
But that night wasn’t going to be about sleep.
Right when we were getting comfoy in the Berber tent, a nearby group of about twenty or so loud Argentine students on a weekend getaway started a drum circle and chorus line. Our isolated and quiet deep desert trek in Morocco’s Sahara desert wasn’t really as quiet as I envisioned. I think it was around the time they started singing American Pop music (Katy Perry’s ‘I kissed a girl’) at the top of their lungs, that my group gave up trying to sleep and we all emerged, grumbling, out of our tents.
We couldn’t sleep- there was just no way to drown out the noise that the other campsite was making.
Exhausted, we sat down outside the tents and starting talking about the most random things, casually starring into the dark black sky. Our eyes easily adjusted to the sky and quickly we could make out the Milky Way that was dancing across the sky. The stars seemed brighter than in America, or at least that’s what we told ourselves as we started pointing out constellations.
The Big Dipper is actually quite big and the free show we were getting in the African desert was better than any movie I’d ever seen in Hollywood.
Our conversation had shifted from life events to now only about the sky- yelling out each and every time we saw a shooting star. Imagine four adults, all spread out on the hand woven rugs in the center of the camp site, screaming with delight to be the first person to call out the next shooting star. There wasn’t a meteor shower that night and I’m pretty sure we didn’t see any cosmic fireballs or super novas. We just witnessed normal stars on a normal night in the Sahara desert, only for us, for the four of us who had never been there before, this was magical and the most special night of our entire Morocco trip.
We weren’t tired anymore; in fact we stayed up for hours watching the sky. I lost count of the shooting stars that we saw light up the sky above us. We also started finding it really funny all the songs that the other group knew by heart (you know, now electricity in the desert, so they were playing all the songs on drums and just freestyle singing). Listening to all these American songs really made me feel how connected our whole world is, even if at that moment we were across the Atlantic from the US.
Maybe we would have slept a few more hours if the noise hadn’t kept us up that night. But, I’m so happy I lost some ZZZ’s in order to experience that night with my friends.
This experience is why people travel. And this experience is one of many reasons for booking a trip to Morocco.
Sponsored by Morocco Tourism