On one bright and shining morning I woke up as usual to get ready for my assignments related to tourists guiding but on that day onwards and for three consecutive days, I had to entertain the largest number of guests I had ever dealt with at once during my position as a Tour Guide. It was soothing news when I heard that a colleague of mine Francis was designated to help me out in caring for those guests for the entire excursion. In fact, my dear colleague and I had to organize the number of the guests into two groups with Francis leading the first group and me guiding the second one. The day looked great as guests enjoyed the landmarks they visited during their half day tour. Then in the evening as dinner was booked, both guides and guests had to meet at the pointed location to have sumptuous meals and drinks as well. Until then everything went normal and each one of us had a rendezvous for the second day of our trip but this time to the dunes, in the sand desert where a night was booked for everyone within the mass.
In the morning of the following day and in the process of making the procession easier and for practicality of a trip on the dunes, Francis and I grouped the eighty-seven guests into twenty-one four-wheel drives with one driving behind the procession as the backing-up car. Of the twenty-one cars, I led the route with eleven and the rest of the fleet was led by Francis keeping a reasonable distance of five hundred meters between each group. Strangely on the way a few tourists from Francis’ group voiced their need to stop for a soft drink whereas none among my people expressed such a need. A lack of communication would result into me being one and half kilometres from what I would call the queue of the procession. Then we stopped the motion of our group when we realized it.In the meantime, time was ticking against us because on the itinerary of that day, lunch was to be taken on the exact due time and furthermore the taking of snapshots of the sunset was a prerequisite for an accomplished tour.
We drove on to reach the main spots scheduled to be visited and we also had lunch though not on the scheduled timing; we were 30 minutes late. Now as we ended up the series of spots to be visited we headed to the tourist camp where everybody had to relax in handmade tents under the glazing stars but before we did that it was necessary to make sure we were on time for the prerequisite which was ‘the sunset snapshots’. In fact we were short of 45 minutes overall. As all the cars pulled into the dunes where the camp was located, we saw a croissant-shape sunset which none of us dared to stare at without taking glimpses of the golden color sunset tanned by its own rays. And forming a queue of eighty-nine people looking it up as a sign of salute, we contemplated that celestial body disappearing solemnly.
Z L Florent
