This is shoulder season in Morocco (high season is the spring and low season the summer), so at several points I’ve been the only tourist staying in my accommodations, eating at a restaurant, or visiting a store. This was starkest during my overnight stay on the edge of the Saharan dunes. My camel ride across the sand was in a caravan of one, even if there were other groups around headed for some of the other tent camps. I chose when to eat my dinner and sat in the large tent alone next to the space heater. Then I retreated to my tent.

As the moon was nearly full, I was denied a mind-bending view of the stars sans light pollution. It made for a slightly eerie glow instead; there was enough light to be able to see all around but not to see fine details. I’ve watched a few nature documentaries shot with low light cameras in recent years that have had a similar visual effect, but city lights drown it out most places. And the wind whipped through the night. In a different time it might have been a djinn of the desert, but such stories aren’t told as much anymore. The moonset in the west more or less coincided with the sunrise over a raised plateau in the east that forms the Algerian border and I was up early to take them both in a short distance from my tent camp and towards the giant dunes. Then it was off to breakfast and then onto the next destination.

There have been a lot of windshield miles on this trip. As it’s just me with my guide/driver, we sometimes go long stretches without speaking, though our conversations have grown deeper as the days have passed. Morocco is not a country filled with wildlife either. The only animals are birds, herd animals, dogs, and an obnoxious number of cats in the cities and villages. It is a country with varied topography, though. I’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean, four different mountain ranges, beautiful high-walled gorges, rolling hills of wheat and olive fields, valley oases, a lake at the base of a desert sand dune, and miles and miles of high shrubland plains. It provides time for thinking, and me not accessing the internet for the last few days has given me some mental space for that thinking time to be more than just focused on the next work tasks I’ll tackle when I return next week. It has been refreshing and something I’ll try to replicate at intervals through the year even without traveling across an ocean to do so. Even as I type this out, I’m sitting alone on a patio, sun back over my right shoulder and me facing the Anti-Atlas Mountains to the south. It’s a nice view, especially since I have some dates and cookies in front of me which my host so generously provided.