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Published: September 28th 2008
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Camels Ahead!
Yeah, and we were to ride them! Djemaa el Fna - the bustling market place in front of the alleys and souks of Marrakesh's medina quarter.
(Please note, the panorama of the Souk above is not our photo, but from Wikimedia. The rest are all ours though!) Morocco. Woo hoo! I think the most exotic place our travels (and Anth's work) have taken us so far. We arrived home from Egypt in March to an email saying Anth had to go to a conference in Marrakesh in a month. Ironic considering Steph had been the one desperately wanting to go to Morocco for ages. So she snuck along and spent the first few days of the conference living it up in the jumped up hotel room, and visiting the famous souk.
Marrakesh is everything the name conjures up: exotic and eclectic and with a souk full of spices and lanterns and sheep’s heads and oranges. And Marrakesh is unforgettable - even just with a small taste - but the real adventure was the safari over the Atlas Mountains and into the Sahara.
We had organised a tour guide and driver to accompany us and when we came out of the hotel to meet them
we should have guessed that the one rickety old 4WD between the brand new Landcruisers would be ours. Whilst bumpy, it did add some sort of authenticity to the journey. Our tour guide Mahmud was the nicest guy, which was such a relief. He had a degree in English Literature, but like so many Moroccan graduates could not find work. He was trying to build a career out of tourism - which is tough in Morocco since you need to pass exams to be a tour guide (which he had) but then had to pay the equivalent of 3 months salary for the certificate! Needless to say, this puts it out of reach for most people, and so Mahmud works with his fingers crossed. (Although at one point a policeman asked to see his papers and Mahmud had to take him for a little walk with his wallet in hand 😉.)
The Atlas Mountains kind of sneak up on you. The rise is not as dramatic as the Alps or the Rockies, and you think they're just a few rocky hills and towns that you're thankful sell Coke. Then whoa, all of a sudden you're on the dramatic Tizi'n'Tichka
Pass (cool name huh?) that winds around the cliffs with no guard rails and at such a height that you wonder if these are views you actually will die for! And when you see snow, in spring, in Africa, you know you must have gained some altitude. It seemed like every twist presented new scenery; Berber villages built into the cliffs and rocky red ravines and (surprisingly) lush green forest valleys.
Lunch, and dinner every day was included and turned out to be the traditional Moroccan dish tajine... every time. Tajine is like a stew of meat, potatoes and vegetables, slow cooked with Moroccan spices in a clay pot, and it is delicious, but even with a choice of chicken tajine or beef tajine, 6 meals in a row of it was enough 😊.
Over the other side of the dramatic Atlas' we visited a couple of kasbahs in the Valley of 1000 Kasbahs. A kasbah is an old Islamic fortified city, and this old camel route was filled with them. The best was the Ait Benhaddou, dramatically situated on a hill above the dried up Ouarzazate river. We were told this particular Kasbah had appeared in hundreds
of Hollywood movies. It looked kinda familiar, but I suspected it was only Paris Hilton famous - famous for being talked about for being allegedly famous!
From there we drove through Ouarzazate and the Valley of Roses to arrive in pitch black at our hotel. So we were shocked in the morning to look out the window and discover ourselves in the middle of the spectacular, earth-red Dades Gorge. It was the first of 2 gorges we saw on that day’s leg. The second was the Todra Gorge. Often it was only about 10m wide, but the gorge walls went straight up to a height of 160m. With glasses on I could just about make up little specks of climbers making their way up and down the walls. Eventually the rocky Sahara slowly turned into the sandy Sahara, and we had to exchange 4WD for 4 legged camels.
With our 'caravan' of 5 we headed over the sand dunes as the sun set to our camp in a Merzouga oasis. It was led by a friend of Mahmud's who has a geology degree, but like Mahmud there are no jobs for him, so he looks after tourist's camels.
He was such a cool guy though, and made our night a lot of fun - despite there being tajine again. We were awoken at 4am the next morning so we could climb the sand dune and watch the sun rise over the Sahara Desert. Any thoughts of how early it was soon passed as we saw the first specks of light over the Algerian border, without another person in sight.
Even Anth being thrown off a camel at the start of the trip home couldn't shake the good mood after such a start to the day. From there we met up with Mahmud and our old 4WD again to drive all day back through Ouarzazate, the Valley of 1000 Kasbahs and the Tizi'n'Tichka pass to Marrakesh. All up we covered 1181 bumpy kilometres in the 3 days - and every single bump was worth it to see what we saw.
Click on Page 2 for the second half of the photos!
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