March 12, 2023
Day 25: Rissani to Hassilabied
Near Merzouga
“They even use the blinker to pass,” Rachel observes as we are seeing the most traffic than any day before. “I think I’m done cycling in the US on roads like these without a shoulder,” Patrick says. “Here the taxi drivers can be a little crazy, but most traffic is respectful. Can you imagine how this would be in the States?” as we remember being "coal rolled" by trucks in western montana riding the Nortern Tier. Not soon after complementing the local a passing car coming toward us almost runs us off the road. But that has been rare.
Today will only be a short day and when the hotel guy proposed a breakfast time of 9:00am we did not try to persuade him otherwise. Of course we are awake at 7:00 and after checking our internet posts and leisurely packing up it is still too early. So we carry stuff down the first flight of stairs to the second floor where the guy is asleep on one of the benches. He wakes up just long enough to tell his brother downstairs in the coffee shop to fix us breakfast. We continue to carry the gear down one more flight of stairs and load up the bikes. Breakfast is actually pretty good, we get tea, bread and apricot jam and a large Berber omelet in a tajine pot. We are off just before nine.
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In a round-about way the road snakes us out of town, then through quite a few miles of palm orchards. Finally, we leave the greenery behind and enter a flat feature less desert with only the mountains in the distance. We can faintly make out the sand dunes to our east where we are headed. After going east for a while, the road turns south again and parallels the dunes. We are going to Merzouga, but really, we are going to Hassilabied, a small town just north of Merzouga that lies right against the Erg-Chebbi sand dunes. We found a good deal on a nice riad-hotel on booking dot com.
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We get there at about 11:00 and it is already getting hot. The room is very nice, large, cool and an attached bathroom on the first floor so no bike hauling today. We enjoy a welcoming cup of tea, eat some bread, cheese and nutella and settle in. There is some laundry to be done, internet to be checked and making plans from here.
Cyril the Swiss cyclist we met near Telouet said Merzouga was a bit of a zoo with four wheelers everywhere. That was one of the reasons we decided to stay just outside of town. We were still expecting to be hassled by hotel and tour company touts, but to our surprise there were none. Patrick took a quick stroll through town to see if there were any tour offices, and found none open. Are we too soon? This is so different from the Africa we know when asked “you want tour” often until the Bush telegraph let’s everyone know you have booked a tour.
Our plan is to stay here tomorrow and do some kind of a tour to see a little more of the dunes and Sahara desert. Later in the afternoon things kind of resolve themselves we think. Patrick has tea with a French-Moroccan man and the hotel owner and the owner says he has an “uncle” who does tours and who will come over later tonight to give us the spiel. In short there are two things to do here: either go into the dunes by camel, foot or four-wheeler, neither of which we are too interested in. Or do a 4WD tour of the area. We would be up for that at a reasonable price. It sounds like we might be able to share the tour with the French-Moroccan guy.
Dinner is scheduled for eight so we can walk out to the dunes and the camel parking area during the sunset hour.
Today's ride: 34 km (21 miles)
Total: 924 km (574 miles)
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