3 People, 1 Van & The Sahara Desert S04E07.

We've been living as mobile minimalists for many years now from Latin America to Arctic Alaska and now we're inviting you to join us here in Northern Africa as we continue our experiment with three people living in the tiniest of tiny homes and this time we're coming to you from the Sahara Desert. We are driving around the world, you guys are invited too so subscribe and buckle up. It's one heck of a ride. To drive from the coastal town of Tamrat to the edge of the Sahara Desert it's only about 670 kilometers or just over 400 miles but it's not your typical day trip. Now we're pushing on towards the Sahara Desert and we are already blown away by this journey. For the most part the whole of Morocco has excellent quality roads between the major towns even here covering immense distances through an extremely remote landscape the roads are awesome to drive especially when you're surrounded by the vastness of Moroccan wilderness. The journey took us up and over the anti-atlas mountain range descending down through valleys and micro oases shielded by gigantic fields of green palm trees which by the way are responsible for my second favorite Moroccan export. Dates, seriously it's worth coming to Morocco just for the dates they are absolutely amazing it smells like a doughnut factory and they're cheap oh they're so cheap These ones are really good here, try one of these. These ones are chewy. 50 kilometers west of the Algerian border we approached our destination of the town Mezouga on the edge of the great Sahara Desert and let me tell you the traffic was terrible we followed a black sand track past more camels looking for a safe place to park for the night it got a little bumpy and a little deep in sections so we let the tires down for a better ride our Kombi has been upgraded to be able to drive on loose terrain but driving on deep Saharan sand was never going to be possible still we're pretty stoked with having Saharan sand dunes as our garden for the day Jordan what do you think of Moroccan wine? It's nice. It's actually after three bottles it's so lovely where was the rosé from? Morocco. Really yeah that's nice it's nice these are the most flies that we've ever had in the Kombi it is one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve. I think there's a lot more than that. Look at them all get the tennis racket out of course one of the best things about being in the desert is the night time the temperature sure does drop quickly in these parts when the sky is clear but if it's dark enough the stars are incredible a few hours after sunset we noticed the stars disappearing and a bright light on the horizon then we realized that we were being treated to needless to say it was a pretty special night okay get out of my bed Ben and I had been embracing tiny space living for many years now so it's not new for us but this is new and a very different way to live for my sister it is not for everyone but I have to say she took it like a real chap do I turn this off? Do I start turning the lights off because he's taking his clothes off? Can't you take your undies off in front of my sister? Did you take your undies off? Ben! You never thought you'd be in this place if you're naked oh my god oh you're crazy Can I turn around and go to bed now? Yeah. Thank you. Goodnight. Goodnight Jordan A couple of years earlier in a very different desert on the other side of the world Leah and I had been living in a trailer park in Arizona. To get this project off the ground we worked tirelessly seven days a week for months getting our new home Boomerang ready for this adventure. During those days we often talked about the experiences that we were looking forward to as a way to keep motivated about the project when we were so far from realizing our dream and being here on the edge of the Sahara desert looking out over these dunes was high on the list and now we're here putting a tick on that bucket list. The best experiences in life are the ones we've earned. Those are the memories that are hard to forget. Just checking in from the Sahara desert sunrise pretty special moment icy cold desert so good to be here. Guys we just want to take a quick minute to say thanks to our sponsor and pay a few bills. This video is sponsored by Surfshark VPN we've spoken about them before because we use them all the time to secure our digital lives. We use our VPN when we are connecting to public wi-fi to basically protect our information so it's not visible to other people on the network and so that we can browse more securely and more privately but there are additional benefits as well. Yeah so my sister came to Morocco on a really really cheap flight because we used a VPN. It was saved her about $500 to book the ticket to get from Australia to Morocco and that was because we used a VPN to let us kind of hunt for like the cheapest country that had the cheapest price. Would you believe that the prices are different in different locations so actually using a VPN to jump to another country can give you access to an entirely different set of prices which is really really useful yeah when you're booking things like flights. Yeah when you can save $500 so that is a benefit of having a VPN. We saved a lot of money doing that. Yeah so if you guys haven't got a VPN and you want to get one this one's really good value very easy to use it works out around $1.99 a month that's about 83% off. We will leave a link in the description below and you can sign up for that and get a month free too. We said at night that the temperatures dropped quickly but not as quickly as Ben dropped his fashion sense in the morning. Bogan in the Sahara. Bogan, an uncouth or unsophisticated person regarded as being of low social status. This is what happens when you spend all your time with two Aussies, you end up looking like this. Don't ask me where he got that hat from, it definitely was not in the convey when we woke up. This is a well, there is water in the Sahara. How deep is it? It's not that deep, surprise me. Here come and have a look. I don't know about you guys but I was surprised to see a well in the natural underground body of water in all of Morocco. Water. Let's go find some shade next to the well. We borrowed this old broken snowboard from one of the desert camps in the dunes and headed off to give sandboarding a go. Yeah. Well the hard part is carrying it back up. Now it's time for the big one up there. Practice over. By this point it was still early morning and the desert was heating up real fast. Temperatures in summer can range between 30 and 50 degrees Celsius and apparently people come from all over the country to get buried in hot sand to treat a variety of ailments. Holy, holy. Jordan's dead. Oh shit, that was just a small one too. No straps. No straps. I guess we just hold on for dear life. Oh, what's that? Oh no. We noticed that life in the Mezouga desert was really quiet. We were expecting to see other tourists in this area and later found out from a local that tourism this year was in a decline. Little did we know at the time that this was the very start of a disaster for the tourism industry. Not only here but around the world. At the time Ben and I agreed that there was much more to see on this side of Morocco and we made a pact to come back and explore further in the future. Right now though my sister's time in Morocco is running out and we were a very long way from the airport. It's almost a 10-hour journey in a regular car across the high atlas mountains from the desert flats of Mezouga to the transport hub of Marrakesh but the drive is an adventure in itself. Dubbed one of the most difficult roads in Morocco this was not a time to get out and film as we jostled with overtaking vehicles through hundreds of switchbacks up the highest pass in Morocco at 2260 meters or about seven and a half thousand feet. We were just coming out the other side of the atlas mountains now in a much more tranquil setting but I'll tell you what it's a bit of a getting through there with all the trucks there's a lot of construction and a lot of vehicles just not going very at a very chilled pace it's kind of like white knuckle driving going through there a little bit sketchy in places but we survived boomerang survived boomerang was a champ pulling all the way through the mountains really strong I was actually a little surprised at how strong he is and so yeah we made it boomerang survived and so did we. If time had have allowed we would have spent more time up here siphoning up the clean air and high altitude life of the Berber villages but by 3am we had to be at the airport saying goodbye to loved ones is what I struggle with most about living on the road as full-time nomads it's incredibly rare for us to be able to spend time with our families and building these memories together is so precious to us at the time I remember wishing that Jordan could stay and I was even kind of wishing I could jump on the plane to Australia with her and pay a visit to my family and that would have been fine I mean Leah and I had agreed that we'd fly home whenever we needed to reconnect but little did we know that this freedom that we'd always taken for granted was about to be ripped away from us for the first time in our lifetimes borders would begin closing not just here but everywhere they've closed all of the transport links out of the north back to Europe so we can't get the combi out the whole world as we knew it was about to change foreigners around the globe would flee to their home countries but for us there would be no escaping and we were about to experience firsthand what happens when Morocco declares a state of emergency but that is a story for next time thanks for watching guys if you want to keep combi life rolling we could really use your support so please check out the join button below this video or visit our patreon page to keep this series happening thanks again for watching we really appreciate you