Whenever we say that we’re going to northern Africa and visiting the Sahara Desert we frequently get asked the question “Will you ride a camel?”. Actually, we’re not sure if we’ll do the almost obligatory camel ride in the Sahara. Having ridden camels in three other deserts around the world, we know how uncomfortable they really are for anything much more than 10 minutes or so. Or maybe that’s only when using the traditional wooden saddles? On the other hand, our camel rides in the Gobi, Uzbekistan, and Jordan were not in the largest sand desert of them all, so maybe we will break down and saddle up once more!
We did visit Arabia in 2023 and skipped the camel ride at our desert camp. But it was on that trip that we first saw camel racing. And did you know that in camel racing nobody rides the camels? Read the post for details.
We have visited several other countries with a large camel population without ever getting aboard one of the ornery creatures; Morocco (on our first trip), Egypt, Somalia (with the second most camels in the world according to the World Population Review that apparently tracks non-human populations too!), and even Australia (with twice as many camels as Egypt).
One mode of transportation that we would prefer to try for the first time is hot air ballooning. Stay tuned for a future post about that!