Circling the Baobabs: Day 6: I saw the sunrise over the Sahara

After getting dropped off in the middle of the desert sometime in the early morning my contacts dried to my eyes from sleep and my head whirrling from the stillness, we piled into a small Toyota truck and took off slowly down a path through the open space. The other people in the truck were a Mauritanian businessman who spoke French, Arabic, and English and his manservant; two French tourists (a man and a woman); and in the bed of the truck seven or so Senegalese/Mauritanian men riding on top the luggage. I remember being squeezed into a back seat with three others and looking out the window to see only the hole of the headlights in front of us and thinking this is the craziest thing I've ever done I couldn't even have found myself on the map at that moment much less made my way to the next city on my own. And then I fell asleep my head bobbing from the jostle of the road. I dreamed about taking this trip with my brother, and I woke up to the now-familiar sound of flapping rubber. We stopped and a guy motioned for me to get out of the car -- I'd been so comfortable in my cacoon that I wasn't quite sure how to descend. In the time it took to change the tire, the sun slowly started to wake up, to se reveiller. The muslims took out their prayer mats and started praying towards that distant light and I slowly dropped to the ground. It's amazing how the two are so distinctly separate -- sky and land -- at this moment. I know surprise has been expressed about how this could happen every single day-- and we notice it not. It was a miracle to me to be at this place at this time watching the light and those men pray towards it. Again I would have become one of them, just to be sure of something, just to give myself to something, just to say thanks, just so I wouldn't have fight not knowing.

When were dropped in the city of Atar sometime around 8 in the morning. The taxi took as to a small auberge and we used their bathrooms to wash and then we sat down for breakfast with the French couple. They wanted to bargain for a taxi to take us around the various oasis in the area and wondered if we'd go along. The price seemed reasonable but it would have been two days non-stop travel, and we didn't want that, so we backed out and decided to take a taxi brousse to Chinguitti, the city about an hour north of Atar where we could really see desert and play in the sand.

At this point, the landscape though desert-ified wasn't the sand dunes we were craving to set our eyes upon. As soon as we left Atar, I was surprised by the rockyness of the landscape, the tall-tall almost mountains and the yellow flowered fields. It was soon that we crossed out of this and into the sand.