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Published: April 24th 2008
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Our Camp
Out on the barren plain As we've driven further south, our surroundings have turned from green, to orange and finally, in Tafraoute, we find ourselves in an earthy pink, lunar wonderland. Tafraoute is a French administrative town built in the 1950's on a barren patch of scrub. It is now the hub of the Ameln valley, although the majority of the people that work here live in the villages that cling to the steep mountain in the next valley along. There the water runs more freely, and the Berber tribes people have made their homes amongst the rocks and trees.
We've been here a good week camped out in the sandy scrub surrounded by the softly rounded, lumpy shapes of bizarre wind eroded boulders. The soil (if you can call it that) is made up of millions of bits of rose and white quartz crystal most of which have been worked into crumbs from the granite rock over thousands of years of wear and tear. Palms, argan and almond trees and the prickly pear cactus are the only plants tough enough to deal with year round aridity, 0% humidity being the norm, but as we are here in the Spring when a minutiae of rain
Wind Swept Boulders
Just a snapshot of the bizarre landscape. falls, there are a smattering of colourful flowers round and about. Everything dries out so fast. Carrots shrivel in a matter of hours and are kept fresh under damp blankets in the shops in Tafraoute. The van interior is shrinking and cracking all over the place and its almost impossible to play a reed instrument like the clarinet.
The journey here was fairly eventful as we unfortunately took the advice of our 10 year old Rough Guide which recommended the 'new road' to Tafraoute via Izerbi. This was completely the wrong thing to do as the first 30 km of the road was a real bone-shaker. It was impossible to drive above 20 miles an hour without colliding with some deep pothole. I later discovered that had I looked at the map properly we would have taken an alternative route. We did drive this on the way back via Had Tahala and although the surface was much smoother, the road twisted and wound its way erraticly through the valley. Several hairpin bends and a couple of suicidal truck drivers later we made it back onto the main drag to Tiznit.
Although hot most of the time, the weather
Tafraoute Town
Pink buildings; pink boulders is very changeable. There is a cooling breeze which occasionally roars into a powerful gust that rips through open windows, whipping anything loose into a whirl of activity before dropping dead as quickly as it began. The other morning I woke up early, popped some Buddy de Franco on the stereo and was rewarded with the sight of a rainbow arcing over the rocks next to our van. The sky was stormy looking but there were only a few random spots of rain that you could feel carried on the wind. The oddest thing about were we're camped is the lack of smell in the morning. Normally in a moister environment your nostrils are met with a fresh early morning aroma where the ozone meets the dew as it rises from the earth. Here, there's nothing, barely even any birds. It really makes me feel there is something missing.
In the next valley we found it again. Where the raw earth yawns upwards in a panorama of pink-purple contoured granite, the Berbers have built their homes. Casually approaching the village of Tamaloukt we suddenly discover ourselves surrounded by trees and pretty gardens. What a difference an abundance of water
makes! It immediately becomes clear how so many people can survive in such an otherwise barren environment. We wend our way through olive trees, stone walls, neatly kept gardens and the maze of acacias (watering channels) that run through the land. It's so comforting to hear the gentle sound of water as it flows over the ground. We even discover a large pool of water that is used for washing and swimming.
In the village itself, many of the old houses built in the traditional way from stone with soil pointing, burnt hard in the hot sun, have been replaced by brieze block constructions. Far from haphazardly being built like so many houses and hotels in Morocco, they are made to fit on the footprint of the older houses that once stood as space on the hillside is extremely limited. A curious feature of the old houses is how they are built on and around the rocks. They almost grow organically upwards from the land itself. Built out of materials native to the place, they are 'of the earth' and these older buildings and villages have a strong sense of place and identity. However, like so many places in
Just off to the shops!
Can I get you anything? the world, native building techniques and character are being lost to the identikit, shoddily built, dead geometry of the ubiquitous, brieze block.
Sitting at the top of the village the call to prayer sounds. Base notes reverberate and echo through the valley at the very moment that the sun comes out from behind the clouds. From my vantage point high up, it is easy to see the path the springs take down the mountain sides, spilling into the valley below, a velvet green carpet of life on the barren desert plain. As we drive out of the Ameln Valley we see the scars of another age etched into the rock. The silver slick marks of long dried up water falls leave their memories high up on the mountain sides, and deep carved river beds winding through the plain are echoes of a fertile past now long gone. This area would have been part of that abundant fertile crescent out of which our present agricultural civilisation has grown. Whilst northern Europe was still under ice, this stretch of land through to Egypt and Persia was home to rich verdant, fertile soil which our ancestors tilled and harvested. I can only
Tamaloukt
One of the original mud brick houses from the mountain village. imagine that the rapidly changing climate of the 21st century is going to change the way of life for the people who live in these precarious environments still further. I wonder how long it will be before the springs dry up and this pre-Saharan oasis merges with the desert proper, a little further to the south.
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