Back from the Sahara: What we learned

A nomad camel guide makes his away across the Sahara dunes © Joe Newman / X-Peditions

Our scouting trip to Morocco was everything I hoped it would be.

Tom Petzwinkler, our May workshop instructor, and I stood in awe at the base of Erg Chebbi's massive dunes. On the road, we had to fight the urge to pull over every 15 minutes for another sweeping vista or another kasbah rising out of the dusty terrain. Essaouira turned out to be even better in person than we'd imagined. At Aït Benhaddou, we let ourselves imagine what it was like looking out across the terrain in the 11th Century when the fort there was a critical trading post.

We crossed the High Atlas Mountains to and from the desert © Tom Petzwinkler / X-Peditions

After months of emails and Zoom calls, we also spent six days on the road with Mustapha, our in-country producer. He's the real deal. The years he's spent running custom tours through his company, Roaming Camels, showed at every stop.

None of that surprised me. I went in confident about Mustapha, and the photography was the one thing I was sure of. I got my first taste of Morocco in April, when I spent a week in Marrakech and the Ourika Valley with my family, and I came home knowing the pictures would never run out.

This month’s trip had a different purpose. It traced the exact route of our X-Pedition Morocco travel photography workshop in May. We were there to find the pitfalls and hurdles our group might run into, so we can spend the next several months planning around them.

We found them.

The fog was thick and meant there would be no spectacular sunrise in Essaouira © Tom Petzwinkler / X-Peditions

Take the ramparts in Essaouira. We'd planned a sunrise shoot from the walls but the gates stay locked until 7 a.m. Then a heavy morning fog rolled in and changed the whole shoot. Lesson learned: our best chance at the ramparts is the golden hour before sunset.

Essaouira on the Atlantic Ocean was everything we had hoped it would be © Joe Newman / X-Peditions

Then there was the sky. We built the workshop schedule around the new moon to get the kind of darkness you rarely see near a city. What we found was more complicated. The tourist camps around the dunes throw off more light than you'd expect, and on our night out, dust in the air cut visibility so much that the Milky Way looked washed out. Desert skies can be spectacular but they aren't guaranteed, and a good workshop plans for both kinds of night.

Our best image of the Milky Way was actually shot from our lodgings in Ait Benhaddou, which is technically not in the desert © Tom Petzwinkler / X-Peditions

The smaller lessons matter just as much. We now know what each lunch stop is like: what the food will be and how long a group of twelve will spend there. We also found the sunrise vantage points that make the fortifications at Aït Benhaddou look their best, along with a few that sound good in theory but don't work as well in person.

That's the whole point of scouting. We hit the locked gate, the fog and the dusty sky in September so our group won't be suprised by them in May. Each surprise is now part of the plan instead of a problem on the ground. With seven months to go and Mustapha running things on the ground, we're ready.

Registration for X-Pedition Morocco is open. Come see it for yourself.