If you’ve ever ridden a horse, you’ll be right at home on a camel. Camels are taller, smell worse, walk slower, and are more stubborn. But other than that, it’s the exact same as riding a horse. While I’ve avoided, for the most part, doing the clichéd things on my trips, I have definitely done some. I took cooking classes in Italy, I did the “I’m holding up the leaning tower” pose in Pisa, and I rode in long boats in Cambodia. So it wasn’t too much of a stretch for me to decide to ride a camel in Morocco.
 |
The camel lot. Pick one you like, kick the tires, we’ll even throw in an air freshener for free. You’ll need it. |
Arriving at the tour location early in the morning, I saw a dozen camels standing, laying, and otherwise loitering, waiting for the day’s passengers. It was a parking lot for camels. A camel lot, if you will. I was greeted by my guide, who put me in a long blue shirt and wrapped a turban on my head. All part of the authentic experience, I guess. We walked over to one of the camels who, with some coaxing, eventually knelt and laid on the ground so I could easily mount the saddle. She lumbered back to her feet, the guide taking the reigns, and we set off at a slow walk. And I mean a slow walk for the guide, the camel was just ambling along. The guide walked us to a nearby lot that was little more than packed brown dirt and scattered bushes and trees. We walked a path around the lot, with the guide occasionally yelling a greeting to other guides with their camels and guests or talking in Arabic to the camel herself. The camel, for the most part, went with the flow, only occasionally stopping to try to get something to eat or, more often, just stopping for the sake of stopping. Of course, if I had over 200 lbs of American on my back, I’d probably stop walking, too.
After about 20 minutes, the guide gave me the reigns and let me guide the camel. The camel knew where to go, so my work wasn’t tough, except when the camel saw a tasty bush or wandered off the beaten path, in which case I’d try to urge her back in the right direction. Sometimes she’d oblige, sometimes she’d ignore me, which actually made me happy, since it meant that the reigns weren’t causing her any pain to get her to comply. The guide would then step in and get her going in the right direction. After another 20 minutes of riding, we returned to the camel lot (now that I think about it, it’s probably more aptly called a paddock, but I’m digging the camel lot thing, so I’m sticking with that), and I dismounted. I thanked the guide and tipped him well, in total $50 spent.
| Yours truly astride a mighty beast of the desert. |  |
Riding a camel isn’t exciting, nor is it fast. It’s exotic only in the sense that it’s not something most people would have the opportunity to do, but there’s very little challenge to it. I don’t know if the guide was deliberately walking the camel slowly or if that’s their regular pace, but if it’s the latter, I don’t know how caravans would ever have survived crossing the desert. Our 40 minute tour may have covered a mile and a half, and that’s being very generous. But the ride was certainly entertaining, and the guide took plenty of photos, and it’s one more thing off the bucket list. Well, I added it to the list just so I could cross it off, but it still counts.
