One Night in the Sahara Changed My Relationship With Silence

I am not normally a silence person. I sleep with a fan on, I put podcasts on when I’m cooking, I find quiet vaguely uncomfortable. One night in the Sahara reset all of that.

Getting there

We left Marrakech at 7am in a shared minibus and arrived at Merzouga around 4pm, crossing the Atlas Mountains and watching the landscape go from green to orange to deep red as the altitude dropped. The dunes at Erg Chebbi appear suddenly at the edge of a small town and they are genuinely enormous. Photos don’t do scale.

The camel ride

Uncomfortable. Completely worth it. You lurch and sway for about an hour while the sun drops and the dunes change colour every ten minutes — gold to copper to a kind of bruised purple. By the time we reached camp I’d forgotten entirely about the saddle sores.

3am in the desert

I woke up because the tent was warm and went outside. The Milky Way wasn’t a faint smear at the edge of things — it was a thick bright band that took up a third of the sky. I lay on my back in the sand and didn’t move for about an hour. Nothing else moved either. No wind, no sounds. I could hear my own heartbeat. I’m not a spiritual person. But I understood, right then, why humans have always gone into the desert when they need to think.