Since my rental car was not going to allow me to visit the desert as I wanted to, I had arranged with the camp to hire a driver and 4x4. I had originally been quoted €150 for the day, but that was lowered to €140 when I demurred. Then, the woman at the camp found a couple of French girls who wanted to visit a specific site, and they were willing to pay €25 each to go there, so I was down to €90. It is still a lot of money, but it was an easy decision for me.
The driver--named Wally (or at least that's how I would spell it)--came around 10:00 and we headed out, eastward first, and then south, towards the Mauritanian border.
Wally lives in Dakhla with his family, but he is ethnically Sahrawi, and as soon as we left the peninsula he put on a head covering. I was shy about asking to photograph him, so I did it surreptitiously.
He speaks French well, a little English, apparently Spanish (Western Sahara was once a Spanish colony), and presumably Arabic and at least one Berber dialect. He also feels resentful to Moroccans, or at least Moroccan military/law enforcement, but this only came out in snatches, and he was quite friendly and deferential to the Moroccan soldiers we encountered (the Moroccan military presence in Western Sahara is such that I believe Moroccan soldiers outnumber the civilian population).
Our first stop was impromptu--at a well to visit a camel herder and his herds on their way to water.
Then, our first scheduled destination. To get here, we left the main highway about fifty or sixty kilometres south of where we had joined it, and drove on a narrow paved road for several kilometres, before leaving it to follow a piste many more kilometres east. In one place the driver pointed out to me that the piste split into six different directions, and in other spots it was not even obvious to me that we were following a piste at all. For most of this time there were literally no signs of humanity around us except for 4x4 tracks. I took a video to try to get a sense of this desolation.
Our destination was an ancient lake. There is almost no water left now, but quite a bit of vegetation, and our guide said a "million years" ago there was five centimetres of water.
This is obviously an incredible place to find in the Sahara!
There were about five or six small pools, most filled with fish. Moreover, these fish apparently love dead human feet skin.
It was one of the more other-worldly places I have ever been.
I was fascinated by all the salt on the ground (huge crystals in some places) . . .
. . . as well as by how clear the water in the pools was.
From here we went back west, following a different piste, and once again ran into a herd of camels.
Our driver was able to make some sort of call that attracted this large male right up to the car window.
We continued west, right to the Atlantic ocean, to a beach called Puerto Rico.
The beach had two signs of civilization--ruins of an old Spanish lighthouse, and a tiny Moroccan military outpost (maybe big enough for two or three soldiers). One of the French girls was innocently taking pictures of the beach when Wally freaked out and told her to stop because of the military post. He had warned us previously to not photograph military personnel and installations, but I was surprised how stressed he got about her inadvertently catching the post in her pictures.
Once we were clear on the "no photos of the military," we were able to enjoy the beach and ocean.
We were only here about fifteen minutes, but I changed into swimming trunks inside the ruined lighthouse and jumped into the ocean for a little swim.
From Puerto Rico Beach we started back north towards Dakhla along the highway, turning off on the west side of the lagoon (more or less directly across from Dakhla Spirit Camp). We covered some pretty fascinating terrain here, and stopped a couple of times, including to watch a pat of flamingos from so far away I could not get a picture.
Eventually we got to a spot known as the White Dune.
Why there is a massive dune of white sand here I have no idea. It is the only dune within many kilometres, and by far the largest dune we saw all day.
I ran to the top of the dune and I was totally out of breath once I reached the top because moving up through the sand was similar to running through deep snow.
You can see in the picture below the difference in colour between the White Dune's sand and the rest of the sand in the desert.
Another aspect that made the White Dune interesting is that it is not in the middle of the desert, but rather on the edge of the lagoon. In fact, at high tide, I think the lagoon might actually be right at the base of the south edge of the dune.
Tide was clearly going out while we were there, but may have been at close to its lowest. I enjoyed walked barefoot on the damp sand, wading through occasional tide pools and so on.
We also could see crabs moving along in bunches, and they would quickly find holes in the sand to hide in when we got close. I actually never got a good look at the crabs, because they were so quick to find a hiding spot.
Daklha Spirit Camp (where accommodations include all meals) had arranged a picnic lunch to be packed for us, so we ate that at the White Dune. Then, after lunch, we went to our final spot, a place called (at least on Google) "Thermal Source of Asnaa." There is an underground sulphur spring here (apparently 750 metres underground), and for a few dirham you can lay/stand on a mat and have this guy blast you with the sulphur water. The water comes out with the force of a fire hydrant, and it is in fact a remarkably wonderful experience. I felt very clean and relaxed afterwards, and our guide told us that the locals come here all the time after hard days of work.
After this it was now almost 16:00, and we were only about ten minutes down the highway from Dakhla Spirit.
At Dakhla Spirit I picked up my rental car and drove myself into Dakhla, where I am going to spend my last night at Dar Rio Oro. This time I have a different room, but one just as large and stylish as the one I was in two days ago.
This is my view from the back window:
I ended my night in Dakhla with a walk and dinner along the lagoon.
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