borogove

sabrina here again. so to continue from my last post, we've been meeting quite a few people in the last week. on our bus trip from gabes to douz, serge became friendly with a man named ahmed, who had taken his mother to see a medical specialist of some sort in gabes and was on his way back to his home in douz. ahmed invited us to have a drink with him sometime, and we're hoping to do that when we head back to douz on thursday. the main reason we'll be going back to douz, though, is that we've been adopted by the family of one abdel majid de la russie ibrahim, on whose horse-cart we hitched a ride during our first afternoon walking around the douz oasis. so far, he's taught us to ride bareback on his horse, whom serge was given the honor of naming (he chose man o' war), taught serge how to climb a palm tree, and brought us home to meet 5 of his 8 siblings. they're bedouins, although only their parents still live out in the village with all the goats and sheep (sheep!!), and we're all going to go out and visit them on saturday.

but the main reason we'd come to douz at all was to see the sahara, and that we did, during a 2-night camel trek that was very exciting. luckily, camels walk very slowly, so we didn't actually need to ride them the entire time, though we put in a good few hours on them. serge's camel, barshik, tried to throw him twice during our first hour, so we avoided him for the rest of the trip. we decided that barshik was a bit depressed and wished to be free. the alpha male in the pair, labsha, apparently competes in the camel-fighting portion of the annual festival du sahara in douz and appeared pretty content with his lot.

our guide, a 21-year-old former cook named kamal, was a pretty good kid, although he made cucumber salad for us for lunch, which serge very bravely choked down. he also made bread from scratch for us, sometimes more than once a day, burying the dough in a mound of embers and then beating the resulting loaf to clear away the ashes.

stay tuned for details of sleeping under the shade of bushes, playing with desert beetles, and a windstorm that kept us up all night: