The true African experience happens out on the Moroccan Sahara red dunes of Merzouga. Our super-friendly guide “Ton-Ton” doesn’t explain a thing - what to bring, itinerary, food restrictions - just loads us into the jeep and takes us to his cousin’s shop to buy traditional headscarves for the wind/sand. We scream through the desert, up and down dunes until we arrive at the camel camp. Oh, but our camel tour does not actually include camels - those only live in Egypt. Our camel tour is actually on their one-humped cousins, “dromedaries.” (Alice the camel has ONE hump, cause Alice is a dromedary.)

Turns out our beloved Ton-Ton isn’t coming out with us - he’s tired after doing the tour last night - so we’re with “this guy” - a lovely man of indeterminate age in full traditional desert/Muslim gowns and headwrap who doesn’t speak a lick of English or French. OK, two words (plus "Algeria", which he emphatically points to when we crest a hill and can see the next country's mountains surprisingly close on the horizon):

1. RELAX - After we mount the crouched-down “camels”, they stand up really quickly and really high. I’m squeezing my legs for all they’re worth till “that guy” hits my thigh and says “Relax.” For the next painful 90 minutes of sauntering through the endlessly undulating dunes I try vainly to follow his advice.

2. GO - Arriving at our oasis (trees in a sheltered valley) tent camp, we painfully dismount, then our guy points up a steep sandy ridge and says “Go!” while he takes the camels to their resting nook for the night. Following instructions like good Canadians, the boys and I start trudging up the steep incline, feet sinking deep with each step, until one by one we’re exhausted enough to declare that the view is good enough from here and summits are highly over-rated (proud to say this 57-year-old Camino hiker made it the furthest). After all, his “Go” didn’t specify how far.

Sarah didn’t join us because (a) she’s smarter than us, and (b) getting off a 6-feet-high dromedary is every bit as difficult as you might think. Our guide gets them all to crouch down, and I get off first (they put Big Daddy on the lead camel, of course). It takes me 3 tries to get my sore cramped inner thigh to agree to lift up and over the saddle. Then Sarah’s having the same trouble when the camels decide they want to get up again. My beautiful, graceful wife is now half-off, dangling upside down on the side of a camel as the guide and I try to gently catch her (him also being reluctant to touch a woman) into the soft sand below. I can’t believe I actually chose to help instead of filming this hilarious Blazing Saddles scene, but apparently it was the right choice, because she’s badly pulled some muscles, and limps into camp while we do our dune scramble.

Our guide has exhausted his two-word vocabulary so has no words for "Sorry," nor how to help Sarah or explain what’s happening in camp. She’s lying on a wooden bench in pain while a group of very-high-testosterone Spanish men are singing their exploits on their quad tour - we have no idea if they’ll be disturbing our desert peace all night. Nor can he understand and respond to the fact that Sarah will not be able to mount a camel to return tomorrow.  But just like the Camino, Africa provides, and later on another French-speaking guide magically appears and calls Ton-Ton, and also explains that we should return to our dune to catch the sunset, then have dinner in the hut, then sit around the fire before another dune walk under the stars - all of which we dutifully devour with desert delight.

At our 7am departure time the next morning, our guide is nowhere to be found, and the camels are still sleeping in a row in the little valley up the dunes. Our guide eventually emerges from somewhere and surprises us with a third English word - COME! We three boys follow and boost our blistered backsides back on the not-camels, leaving Sarah all alone in camp with the Arabic-only chef/helper and no cellphone service, hoping she'll somehow stay safe and make it back to town. Ton-Ton never actually agreed to send a vehicle (suggesting we should pay for it, then saying vaguely that probably some Spanish-speaking tour groups might come by and offer a lift). 

After a full hour (and one verbal mirage of someone calling from the dunes “Sarah, come!”), a new person does arrive and says, (you guessed it), “COME!” With no option but Trust, she does follow, and over the dune there awaits her desert chariot - an ATV quad. She swings that sore leg up over the seat, and holds onto the back rail for dear life (squeezing herself up against the unknown guide not being an advisable option) for the same energetic dune ride that had the Spaniards so riled up and we three boys so envious.