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Published: September 27th 2012
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Well last night the worst thing happened, it rained! In a country that's mostly dessert you hope to evade such weather, though it was only for an hour in the night, then it was gone. In the morning we packed up and headed for the cedar forest south of Ifrane. The route down was quite easy, so we stopped at a nice, clean town called Imozzér-el-Kandar for supplies. So while Dave watched the trucks the rest of us took a wonder over to a kiosk to get some water. This kiosk was also a photocopy shop, and the guy in front of me had decided he needed to copy the entire edition of The Divinci code, or something of similiar size. But I did the british thing, I stood patiently for my turn in the queue, only for some local to jump in front, but because I didn't want the copier I got served first. Ha. We then headed down the street to find some bread for dinner, where we picked up a couple of soda flat breads and french sticks, both of which were very nice, especially filled with bacon and eggs... Hmmm...
The next place we found was
Ifrane, home of the Royal palace, which has a guard outposted every 30 meters or so just to be safe. On the way out we took a wrong turn and ended up heading to Midelt. But before turning around, we carried on to the top of the hill, which paid off as the view was amazing. Back into Ifrane we then headed to Azrou as there were suppposed to be a couple of casmpsites in the cedar forest. As usual they were no where to be found so Dave had spotted that there was a ruin nearby so we headed for that. The road to this ruin was very similiar to the "bad road" but slightly milder, though once we reached the destinaion point, the ruin was nowhere to be seen. Thanks Tomtom, again. So we carried on down this road, heading for a fort this time, only for the road to come to an end at a farm yard with a large ditch running across it. So we turned around and headed for a tarmac alternative. Though half way back down this road we decided to stop and have a cuppa, at which point a local noticed us and
wondered over to have a chat, the only problem with this was he didn't understand us, and we definately didn't understand him, so before his neighbour could make it across his field to join in, we headed off.
This time the fort did exist! But it was part of the Royal Palace making it a fully functioning military compund rather than a tourist attraction! By now we had passed the guards a number of times, so I'm suprised we weren't stopped. So we pulled over and looked for something else, at which point Mark suggested an ancient cedar tree which was home to some barbery apes. This was pretty cool to see, as the monkeys were very used to people so you could get close to them even though the tree itself was long dead and had unfortunately been graffitied over. With this we decided to go to the campsite as the next port of call would have made a 202 miles round trip, making it very late for us to reach the next campsite, as we want to visit a Berber village north of Khénifra.
Couple of unneccesary pieces of info for you, berber as in the
berber mountain people, is roman for barbarian, a slur from back in the time of the great roman empire. Also the campsite we are staying at is called Campsite Amazigh, which means "free People", the real shame is that the place isn't that amazing.
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