A Few Snags

We headed to the Erg Lihoudi Desert the next day, piled into our little bus. Suddenly, we get off the road. We get out, wondering what has happened when we see one of the back tires, it has totally blown out. We happen to be beside a hill, so we decide to start climbing it while the tire is being changed. A bunch of us make it up to the top. But then the feat was coming back down... it was sand and small rocks that slipped, so you had to get down very slowly. The tire got changed and then the jeeps that were supposed to take us into the desert met us to pick us up earlier. So we pile into the jeeps and speed off. Suddenly we turn around and go exactly the same way we came from. I'm wondering what's going on when we come upon one of the other jeeps. It has broken down. We try to figure out how to fit about 20 people into two jeeps when finally we get the third jeep working. By then we're running supper late, so although we had planned to see a pottery village and a kasbah (fortified town) we go straight to the Nomad's house for dinner. We listened to him speak, and it was interesting that they were still able to keep their way of life while mixing it with the demands of modern life. For example, the sons would go off to school and live in a settled village while the older boys still herded camels. The fact that these nomads still herded camels is surprising because the art is dying out, since not many people want camels anymore. It was interesting, one of the nephews of the head nomad began to speak with one of the boys in my group in Dareja, and my friend was having trouble understanding, so I helped translate, yet even though I was speaking better, the guy spoke to my friend more--I feel it was because I was a girl and the divide between men and women is even stronger in that society. We did not see one woman at the nomad's house.