Sand, Storks, and the Road to Fes
We woke up in the Sahara, drove out through an oasis choked with plastic, got shaken down by a gendarme with a fake speed camera, and ended the day in Fes, wondering why we had planned to stay two nights. It was that kind of day: beautiful in parts, exhausting in others, and honest throughout.
The desert at night is the quietest place I have ever slept. No traffic, no voices, no ambient hum of anything. Just canvas walls and cold air and the particular silence of a landscape that has nothing to prove. We slept deeply and woke up slowly, which is the only appropriate response.
Sand, by Herman van Veen
I put on ‘Zand, zand,zand‘ by Herman van Veen as a wake-up song. It is a Dutch classic about exactly what was outside the tent. I have heard it many times, in many places. It has never sounded like that before. Some songs are waiting for the right geography, and that one had apparently been waiting for the Sahara.
By the time we made it to breakfast, the American birders who had shared the camp were already gone, packed up and out by eight with the quiet efficiency of people who have somewhere specific to be before the light changes. We had the camp to ourselves.
The breakfast was cold. For a place that had gotten almost everything else right, a small camp with no other guests and plenty of notice, it was a disappointment that was hard to explain away. We ate, appreciated the surroundings for what they were, and let it go. The camp itself had been genuinely special: small, quiet, unhurried, the kind of place that does not try to impress you and impresses you anyway.
Out of the Desert
We drove off around ten, destination Fes. The landscape on the way out of the desert is not dramatic in the way you expect. It simply changes register gradually, the dunes giving way to stone, the stone to scrub, the road straightening out as the altitude drops.
At one point, a prison appeared at the roadside. High walls, watchtowers, razor wire, the full vocabulary of incarceration, sitting in the middle of an empty desert horizon with no town in sight. There is something particularly unsettling about a jail in a landscape with no other landmarks. We drove past without stopping.
In Merzouga itself, we passed a hotel under construction that appears to be channeling Gaudí: curved walls, organic shapes, mosaic surfaces, the whole ambition. A sign indicated construction began in 2020 and completion is planned for 2030, in time for the World Cup. Given the pace of visible progress, the timeline felt optimistic. Even the building speed is Gaudí.
The Gendarmerie Stop on our way to Fes
A few kilometers further, we were flagged down. The officer showed me an image on his phone of a speed camera reading, the kind of reading that appears on a phone screen rather than an official document, and explained that the fine would be 100 MAD, payable now, to avoid the paperwork. I paid it. I should not have. I know I should not have. But I was in a country I did not know, on a road I could not afford complications on, and the math of the moment pointed in one direction.
It frustrated me then, and it frustrates me now. Corruption at that level is petty and grinding, and it poisons the interaction between a country and the people visiting it. It is not a local quirk or a cultural difference. It is just someone with a small amount of power using it badly. I drove on, irritated, and kept it to myself for about ten minutes before saying exactly this out loud to Peggy.
The Storks and the Oasis
The white storks appeared beside a lake somewhere along the route, dozens of them, standing in the shallows with the calm authority of birds that know they are worth stopping for. We pulled over and took pictures. It was a genuinely good ten minutes, the kind of unplanned stop that ends up in the memory longer than the planned ones.
The Ziz Oasis came shortly after. From the road, it looks exactly as an oasis should: date palms dense along the valley, the river catching the light below, the green of it startling against the surrounding stone and dust. We stopped to look properly.
Then we looked at the riverbank.
Plastic. Everywhere. Bags, bottles, and packaging accumulated in the kind of quantity that only happens when it has been arriving for years and no one has been taking it away. It is the same story we saw at Ourika, and probably the same story along most of the accessible waterways in Morocco. The oasis is genuinely beautiful. The shoreline is genuinely not. Both things are true, and neither cancels out the other, but it is hard to look at one without thinking about the other.
Fes
We arrived in Fes in the afternoon. The parking attendant reached the car before I had finished turning off the engine. A man offering guide services appeared before we had our bags out. Two children materialized with paper towels for sale, the kind of sale that is less a transaction than an opening position in a negotiation you did not agree to enter.
I coach startup founders on hustle. I understand the value of persistence, of not waiting for permission, of creating your own opportunities. Fes operates on a version of this logic that has been turned up past the point where it stops working. It is not friendly persistence. It is pressure, dressed as service, applied without pause.
The evening was worse. After dark, the medina fills with a specific type of operator whose business model is misdirection: your riad is this way, follow me, actually it is through here, past my sister’s restaurant, near my uncle’s carpet shop. We declined, repeatedly, with decreasing politeness, and found our own way.
We had planned to stay two nights. Somewhere between the third unsolicited redirect and the fourth person who appeared from a doorway with a very good price on something we had not asked about, we made the decision: one night. Tomorrow we move on.
Some cities want you to stay. Fes wants something else entirely, and by the time we went to bed, we had stopped trying to figure out what.
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