In Morocco, One Man's Oasis Is Another's Watering Hole - New York Times
The Sahara, the world's second largest desert (after Antarctica), covers 3.5 million square miles, nearly the size of the United States. Only one quarter of it is sand; the rest is rocky plains, steppes and volcanic mountains. I wanted to experience not just the desert's moonlike isolation - Saharan dunes can rise to a thousand feet and stretch hundreds of miles - but also its lush aberrations: oases.
A Times reporter takes a trip to a desert oasis but returns disillusioned by the local tourism business.