Erfoud and Tafilalt Oasis

Merzouga, part of the Sahara desert, was the backdrop of a wonderful sunrise camel tour. After getting up at 4AM, we drove into the desert on incredibly hard packed ground. Arriving at our location, the stars were still visible in the sky above. We got on our camels and rode off into the sunrise, which was a spectacular view. Our tour guide showed us the beetles that live in the sand and eat the camel poop - or as he liked to call it "the chocolate of the desert".

This weekend we stayed in Erfoud, a town in the Meknes -Tafilalt Oasis  An oasis is a completely man made location, not a natural phenomenon like most people believe. The Tafilalt Oasis is one of the largest in the world and when viewed from above looks like a river of palm trees through the gorge. To much surprise, sometimes within the oasis, it is possible to forget that you are in one; not everything in this area is green - in fact there are many places that look almost like the desert. What makes this location an oasis is the fact that there is growth here where without human intervention there would be none. Khettara feed much of the oasis with water; khettara is an system of subsurface channels which bring water from aquifers at the base of the Atlas Mountains and from shallow water tables. 

One interesting story from this location was about a US Army Corps of Engineers project which implemented new canals in the area, but caused massive social implications. In one village in Erfoud, a canal system was put in place to bring water closer to the village, but the canal did not enter the walled boundary of the village. In a very conservative village such as parts of Erfoud where almost every woman wears a burqa, the job of collecting water had to be passed from the women to the young girls, because the women could not leave the confines of the walled village. Because the young girls had to spend so much time walking back and forth to get water, even with the new system, many had to leave school in order to ensure their family obtained water. Erfoud and the Sahara region in general is a well known location for fossils. I got the chance to see some of them being cleaned in order to be sold. The fossils that come from this region were incredibly neat to see.