Home > Travel Writing > The Trail to the Last Oasis

“Don’t go to Figuig,” (I made a mental note of the pronunciation – F’geeg), “…Il ny a rien, en Figuig.” He screwed up his face in distaste and dismissed the Figwig of my dreams with a curt wave of his hand. But I didn’t like him, so I went anyway.

The next morning, just as the low hills were beginning to congeal out of the pink oil-wash of dawn, I inhaled my first taste of the Sahara from the vibrating air in the bus. I strained my eyes through the film of grit on the windows and struggled with the idea that, in theory, one could walk from here in a perfectly straight line all the way across North Africa without swerving around anything more substantial than a nomad’s tent or a few palm trees.

For thousands of Moroccan faithful, making their foot-sore way to Mecca, Figuig oasis was the last chance for a decent ‘swerve’ before their pilgrimage delivered them to their destinies in the open desert. Morocco is a country of such striking contrasts that, by the time they had travelled this far, most of those early wayfarers would have been as fascinated by the alien appearance of the land as I was.

The bare hills rippled into the distance, each blurring into its successor until finally the last rosy hump blended into the sky. The road quivered out ahead like an agitated rope until the sand-drifts along its flanks merged and it too vanished. The whole landscape seemed strangely transparent.

Only occasional clumps of palm trees, struggling to crane their shaggy heads out of shadowy gullies, appeared to have any depth of form. It was as if life itself lent them substance against the desiccated land. I remembered what the hotel manager had told me - “Don’t go to Figuig. The journey is sooo boring.” For him perhaps, after a life spent on the fringe of the Sahara, it would be. I glanced around at my fellow passengers. They too seemed utterly unimpressed. The pointed hoods of their djellabas bobbed in their shaken slumber.

Up ahead a patch of shadows started to condense in the dust and the town of Bouarfa began slowly to spread its skirts. It seemed to be a part of the wilderness itself, reflecting all at once the golds of the desert floor and the brick red of the slope at its back. Merely a ragged dune that had been blown under the shelter of the hills, I couldn’t shake-off the feeling that my perception of it was deepened only by the obstinate vitality beneath its shell.

On the edge of Bouarfa, a cluster of woollen tents had gathered on the banks of a wadi (dry riverbed) that had once been a powerful enough promise of sustenance to attract the town’s first settlers. The nomads of the desert can recognise an encampment of their own tribesmen from the design of their tents, and I could see that there were people from at least three different tribes here.

The road onward to Figuig followed the craggy hills for a short distance before we were again roaring across open desert. Three camels stopped their grazing and stared haughtily at this invasion. The sight gave me a thrill which seemed totally out of proportion when, minutes later, I had counted a herd of seventy-one animals. In this part of the Maghreb, the camel – as a statement of a man’s worth, though not as a mode of transport – is still giving the Mercedes a run for its money.

A young Moroccan, sitting behind me, introduced himself as Okach - we shook hands in the Moroccan manner, tapping our fingers smartly to our chests. In excellent English, Okach provided a commentary on the few landmarks we passed. There was a government administration centre, built on the remains of a French Foreign Legion post, and, 20 minutes later, a breezeblock hut that served as the local school.

“School for who?” I asked, staring out into a shimmering wasteland where the only signs of life were the stunted shrubs. “For the people who live here,” was the answer to what Okach obviously considered a ridiculous question. Right on cue a double handclap brought the bus to a shuddering halt and two women, wrapped from head to foot in white cloth, climbed down and shuffled away into the void. I could see nothing whatsoever to distinguish this spot from any other in the last 10 miles and I wondered how they even knew where to get off.

“They live with their families and goats over there.” Okach nodded towards a distant ridge where the light ochre of the land merged into the deep blue. The hills would provide some shelter from the fierce sandstorms that swept over this region throughout the long summer months.

Long before I could distinguish it for myself, Okach pointed out a faint line of greenery in the peachy glare of the sinking sun. I wondered how my own relief (after a twelve-hour bus journey) would have been multiplied in the breasts of the medieval Muslim pilgrims, when they saw the first of the 300,000 date palms that make up one of the biggest oases in Morocco. Here they would rest, socialise, restock their provisions and wait until there was a convoy large enough to risk a crossing of the dunes that were the domain of the terrible Berber bandits.

The bus squealed to a halt between two rows of boardwalked stores. This could have been the dusty streets of Dodge City if not for the hooded figures of a group of old men playing chequers…and a smartly uniformed policeman who was waiting to meet the bus.

Okach prudently deserted me and I waited whilst my fellow passengers hauled their livestock and baggage from the boot of the bus. My backpack was heavily dusted with the hoof-prints of six skinny goats that had been travelling in distinctly third-class style. The usual questions, parried with usual answers (“on holiday…student…no, I don’t smoke,”) saw me through the formalities of registration with a very courteous gendarme: “Bienvenue a Figuig, monsieur.”

Figuig is situated on a relatively sensitive site, which is effectively a Moroccan ‘promontory.’ A short walk in any direction other than the road that I had just come in on would take me straight into Algeria, where I might not receive such a polite welcome from the Algerian border guards.

Morocco keeps a garrison of 600 men permanently in Figuig but, although the town has changed hands several times over the centuries, there has been no fighting here since 1976. Being the only visitor, I had the pick of the rooms at the town’s only hotel, and sat down to a hearty plate of lamb tajine, a rich meal of meat and vegetables stewed slowly in a terracotta dish. The waiter prodded the television, and the frantic gyrations of the Spice Girls (piped to the desert courtesy of MTV) flickered into the dining room. The suggestive thrusting (normally a highlight of their performance) seemed embarrassingly raunchy and I wondered if perhaps I had been in Morocco for too long.

Okach was waiting, unannounced and unexpected, on the hotel verandah the next morning. With a typical Arab sense of hospitality he had decided that he would offer to show me around his hometown and began by pointing out the view that darkness had denied me the night before. We gazed across the largest plantation of date palms in this part of Morocco to the furthest minarets of the settlement. Nestling in the figuig (the local word for a pass) between two sun-baked mountains, the Algerian outpost of Beni Ounif stared belligerently back at us.

High mud walls were visible here and there through the palms and I pondered the historical significance of those miles of crumbling defences. In addition to an unsettled military history, this island of greenery has always had a very complicated and frequently violent social-life. Not least because it is in reality an archipelago of seven feudal villages or ksar, each with its own administration and often fanatical community pride. One of the pleasures of a stay in the oasis is exploring the startling differences between one ksar and its neighbours.

Lying on the furthest edge of the oasis, Ksar Zenaga occupies the last few acres of Moroccan soil and on the terrace cafés of the main plaza you are warned that you have reached the furthest possible point in Morocco. A walk of only a few metres would place you in ‘no man’s land’ and you wonder how the old pilgrims felt as they looked out from the shade of the date palms at the first of almost 2000 lizard-baking miles that – inshallah – would lead them to Mecca.

An emerald archipelago on the edge of a sea of sand, Figuig remains one of Morocco’s best kept secrets. I wondered if the hotel manager was in on it when he advised me: “Don’t go to Figuig. There’s nothing in Figuig.” For me, however, the journey had been far from boring and it didn’t take long to realise that a few peaceful days in the last Moroccan oasis is still reason enough for a good ‘swerve.’

Read more travel writing by Mark Eveleigh