When in the Desert...

By J.T.

The desert felt like home. Not just because of our time in the desert last summer, but because of all of our travels in the Middle East and Morocco. The arid weather, the bright sun, the dust, the barren landscape and weird rock formations made our hearts happy (until we got to the Mojave later...man is that an ugly desert).

And so, we did what felt, to us, totally normal. We sat down and had tea.

There's nothing like tea in the desert.

We were in Monument Valley, on the Navajo reservation, which is the sort of place one drives through rather than hikes. So, since we had all of our supplies in tow, we got out or Jetboil, water, sugar, and Lipton's black tea.

Arabs drink their tea super strong and super sweet. In all of our time there I haven't seen anything but Lipton's black tea, except for Morocco where they drink an admittedly far superior blend of fresh mint and gunpowder green tea. Then they "sugar the shit out of it" as we've taken to saying. We actually can't drink it as sweet as they prefer, for reasons of both health and taste. Sometimes it's more like hot sugar water and less like a nice cuppa. Once I asked someone, I think in Egypt, if there was a high rate of Diabetes in the country and he thought about it and said that yes, come to think of it there was.

We really hoped that we would see some Arab tourists who we could offer some tea to, as they would have surely done for us, but we didn't, so we had the whole pot to ourselves.

The scene wouldn't be complete without the obligatory "Serious-but-sexy-Arab-Facebook-Photo" shot.