As promised in our previous post we now present: a camel ride in the desert,
. . . some walks in the Todra Gorge, a visit to a movie studio . . . plus a mountain shrine!
But first:
The Drive Continued
As we entered the Middle Atlas Mountains the scenery changed once again. The views were spectacular in a Utah / Arizona kind of way but . . .
. . . by the half-way point in the 500-mile long drive we were bum-sore and ready for more than a quick coffee/toilet stop. We stopped in:
Midelt
The tourist attractions in the agricultural town of Midelt are a couple of large, clean gasoline stations and some large, clean and kitschy road-side hotels.
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| Hotel Kasbah Asmaa |
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| Gas Station |
Happily the tour schedule included a leg stretching wander through the nearby Amazigh village of Berrem. Our visit was particularly special because we met a young Amazigh man who invited us into his family’s home for tea.
Amazigh hospitality is legendary, but we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that our host had been on the lookout for a tour wandering through the village that might accept his invitation to tea (we were on the “gringo trail” after all). He might have even hoped to find a tour leader willing to tip him for his hospitality to said tour group. It's called being an entrepreneur.
Our host’s ambitions notwithstanding, our encounter with him seemed genuinely unscripted. As we walked a path lined with both crumbling wattle and daub and more modern concrete block buildings, Bryce greeted a group of men apparently discussing a stack of concrete blocks. They responded politely and our future host introduced himself to our tour leader, Abdou, inviting our group to drink tea at his family home.
It was a wonderful visit (even for Bryce who only forces down mint tea in the interest of international relations). We particularly enjoyed the impromptu rhythm section our host and Abdou created using enamel-ware plates.
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| The Requisite Tea Service |
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| The Requisite Television Set |
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| Rhythm Makers |
Driving On
The following day we drove through more beautifully stark scenery, crossing a portion of the High Atlas Mountains and continuing to a frontier town on the Algerian border.
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| Pink And Blue School Buildings Stand Out In A Subtly Colored Landscape |
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| Morocco And Algeria Do Not Share A Peaceful Border |
We stopped to purchase stylin’ caravan rider sun protection. [Note: Abdou kept reminding us that we were riding dromedaries rather than camels, but in this blog we will use both terms because, well – that’s what we do.]
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| Most Of The Women Effected A "Laurence Of Arabia" Look |
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| Bryce . . . More Of A "Romancing-The-Stone" Look |
Desert Caravans!
And then we were there, our mounts waiting patiently.
Abdou and two camel wranglers hoisted us onto our respective rides and strapped our overnight packs to the saddles (our luggage stayed with the van). Our mounts were tied together to form two caravans. And off we swayed.
We had heard dromedaries are unpleasant beasts so we weren’t surprised (though still a little grossed out) when Bryce’s, tied in line behind Molly’s, slobbered on the left thigh of Molly’s last clean pair of jeans. Ugh. What we weren’t prepared for was the exhibition of aggressive behavior by Molly’s camel. He (she?) started chewing on the base of the tail of the dromedary tied in front of him (her?) and Molly started wondering what a full-fledged camel fight might entail. Fortunately the bite-ee stoically ignored the assault.
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| Molly's Misbehaving Dromedary |
Despite their crude behavior, dromedaries offer a fairly comfortable ride. We haven’t been on horseback recently but the swaying gate of our camels was more comfortable than we remember a horse ride to be. Bryce thought the motion might have had a positive effect on his van-ride-weary back!
Our accommodation was a camp of squat, dark woolen tents tended by three men who seemed to have successfully transitioned from nomads to tourist camp operators.
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| The Intrepid Intrepid Travel Travelers |
The evening entertainment included a climb (more of an undignified scramble) up a sand dune to view the sunset. Yep – just what we’d come for, the sun slipping behind a Sahara sand dune.
Dinner was simple and good in that everything-tastes-good-when-you're-camping kind of way. Later two musicians visited our campfire and serenaded us with traditional music. We passed around one of their drums and joined in. Amazigh music under desert stars. Check. Later we heard the musicians playing for one of the other camps in the distance.
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| The Desert Rhythm Section |
No, we were not alone in the desert silence. There were three or four camps in the area, each tastefully tucked behind a set of dunes. Sadly one was home to a group of quad riders. Sharing the desert with a caravan of combustion engine machines did detract from the romance of it all.
We can confirm the oft-repeated Desert Truth that “it gets cold in the desert at night”. The big heavy blankets the Amazigh use? Picturesque and wholly insufficient. [Travel Tip: We took fleece sleeping bag liners which helped a bit, but consider making room in your day pack for a full sleeping bag.]
The next morning we were once again helped onto our dromedaries by Abdou and the wranglers. There may be a dignified way of getting into a camel saddle but, if so, it takes more than two tries to perfect.
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| Wake Up, Everyone! |
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| Turn Left At The Third Dune . . . |
The two caravans swayed across the dunes. We held tightly to the metal saddle frames and tried to simultaneously take pictures. About half-way through our ride, Bryce looked up in time to watch our camera tumble from Molly’s saddle. The wrangler’s recovery effort was quick but the sand’s effect was quicker. The rest of our pictures of Morocco are courtesy of our cell phones. Sigh. [Travel Tip #1: When tying a camera onto a camel saddle – tie it well. Travel Tip #2: There are more expensive places to replace a camera than Panama City.] Remembering our last camera loss [going overboard during our inelegant towed-boat arrival to El Salvador back in 2014] we decided camera death-by-sand dune was less traumatic by far!
Desert Summary: Yes, it was a canned tourist experience. But for those of us unlikely to be camping in the Sahara any other way – it was wonderful.
Todra Gorge
The gorge, an impressive cleft in the Atlas Mountains, is at the end of a green and lush river valley. Our hotel – Kasbah Taborihte – was in a gorgeous location beside the river and was perfect because the hotel staff will carry one’s luggage from the road, across the swinging bridge and up the hill to the hotel, and even up (do you see the "up" theme here?) the several flights of stairs to the rooms. Those guys earn whatever tips they get.
[Travel Rant (ignore by skipping to next paragraph): We often hear travelers say that tipping too generously (or at all) “skews the economy for other travelers”. Interesting concern, that. Particularly when translated as: “Travelers (who are obviously wealthy enough to travel - even if on a budget) should be more concerned with People Like Themselves than with making the lives of the people in the service sector of the country they are visiting even the tiniest bit better." Hmmmm. A new spin on travel being for personal fulfillment. Okay, Travel Rant over.]
We took a morning and an afternoon wander near the hotel. The morning walk took us along the river, past small farming plots. Our guide, a charming young man named Mourad who had learned his very good English by watching American movies, explained the various crops, the community's method of assigning the small fields to arriving families and the clever, gravity-fed irrigation system.
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| Tiny Fields Fed By The River |
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| Molly - Looking Very Determined For Reasons We Can't Remember |
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| Farming Equipment |
We finished our walk at the gorge photo-op site, still pondering Mourad's information that the beautiful riverside hotels closest to the gorge had been closed because a house-sized rock had fallen and crushed a portion of one of them. No one was hurt but the local government seemed to think it was a good idea not to have too many tourists sleeping in the area. We decided to take comfort that our hotel was on the other side of the river and a couple kilometers from the gorge. Hmmmm.
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| Todra Gorge (Van Included For Scale Reference) |
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| The Smushed Hotel -- To The Right Bryce To The Left |
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| Don't Pass? Don't Park? Don't - Oh, Never Mind. |
We had been warned that the Amazigh consider it rude to have their pictures taken without permission (hardly surprising, that) so we didn’t take pictures of the most interesting part of our visit to the gorge: a group of Amazigh women and children filling water jugs from the river and strapping them onto mules. We were told these women and children and mules would trek the water back to their village in the hills. It made Abracadabra’s 100-gal water tank and tiny desalination system seem luxurious.
More Roadside Attractions
The next day we had another home visit. We stopped to visit Abdou’s family! His mother, sister and sister-in-law had prepared tea and couscous for us and gave us a tour of the family home – including an introduction to their goats.It was lovely to see how proud they were of Abdou even though as a single man, living in an apartment in Marrakesh, he must be the cultural outlier of the family.
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| Couscous and More |
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| The Family Goats |
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| Abdou, Relaxing At Mom's House |
Our next stop was at the Horizon Association for People With Disabilities, an organization sponsored by the Intrepid Foundation which provides rehabilitation services for people with physical disabilities. The man guiding our visit was better versed in NGO-speak (outcomes and measurables, etc.) than at storytelling, but we still got a sense of the organization’s work and were impressed by how much they could do with so little.
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| A Stark Reminder of The Mission |
Our next roadside attraction was a total hoot. We joined a tour (about $5) of the Atlas Studios movie lot. The Atlas Studios tour won’t put Universal Studios out of business, but it was fun.
The Atlas Studios lot has been used for many desert-location movies. Through the magic of cinema it has been ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, Tibet, war-torn Somalia, Mexico and various unspecified Arab-ish places. Some of the better known films shot there are The Sheltering Sky, Black Hawk Down, Kundun and Romancing the Stone.
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| Some Set Designer Had Fun With This, Doncha Think? |
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| One Season It Was Rome, Last Week, A Maya Market |
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| Big Crowd Sets |
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| Kundun |
Ait Benhaddou
Our final destination that day was the Ksar of Ait Ben Haddou.
This UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site was apparently largely rebuilt with movie money (see above). The result of this intervention is well worth a visit, though note that it requires crossing a river on some tricky stepping-stones.
Inside the ksar (ksar: a fortified village) are several kasbahs (kasbah: a merchant house), most empty or occupied by shops staffed by people who commute in from the modern village across the river. It is said that only four families still live within the ksar.
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| One Of The Four Families' Rooftop Terrace |
For us the ksar is the site of our biggest tourist purchase – two rugs. More for the storage locker!
Our night was spent at a very nice guesthouse in the village. The evening’s entertainment was a pre-dinner cooking demonstration by Hassan, the owner of the guesthouse who proudly introduces himself as “Action” (as in when a movie scene is about to commence shooting: “Action!”). Action reports that he has been an extra in over 50 movies. He is quite a character off screen, so we’re sure he would stand out on screen.
Into The High Atlas
The tour described our trip up to the mountain village of Aroumd as a walk, luggage consigned to pack mules. When we got to the departure point several of us (including the local mules, we suspect) were happy to see taxis to take the luggage and the lazy (Molly included) up into the village. Those opting to walk up were rewarded with . . . a long steep walk.
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| Here They Come |
When the lazy and the virtuous were reunited there was much discussion about which group had the more harrowing experience because the taxis were . . . sketchy.
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| Not Your 4-Wheel Drive . . . |
The next morning Molly, having skipped the exertion of the day before, joined the hike into the Toubkal National Park (named for the highest peak in Morocco – which we did not attempt, and is not a day trek!). Bryce decided to rest on his previous day's hiking laurels and stayed to enjoy the views from the guest house.
The scenery was lovely but the climb was tough.
About a third of the way toward the destination (a shrine outside the really tiny village of Sidi Chamarouch) Abdou recognized that at Molly’s pace he might have to find her lodging for the night somewhere along the trail. So he arranged for transportation. Her first mule ride.
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| Safer Than The Cab! |
[Travel Tip: Mules are trustworthy as mountain transportation, but in general camels are a more comfortable ride.]
The shrine perched on the side of the hill at the end of our hike was very interesting. The condensed version of the story of the shrine is that a holy man’s house got squished by a falling rock; the rock was painted white; a white building was erected next to it; a trip to the shrine is believed to cure the dreaded disease of infertility; and sometimes the holy man comes out at night and travels the countryside in the guise of an animal though, frankly, it was not made clear why he does this.
We were also told that the shrine is not recognized by local Imams and that they have declared visits to the shrine to be un-Muslim. Still locals come. Our group was passed by a woman riding a mule and holding a baby, apparently returning from giving thanks for her new child. Very biblical.
Molly's Side Note: The shrine was oddly touching given its unlikely story. It reminded me of mountain shrines I visited years ago in Nepal and has caused me to muse a lot about universal human needs and the intransigence of local myths and legends. Religions come and go and people still worship mountains and trees and spirits and ancestors. Even though visiting the shrine is prohibited by local Imams, the people still travel to ask the squished holy man for assistance in fulfilling their ancient obligation to procreate and continue their family's culture. Lately a vision of this shrine has come up for me during yoga. Not sure why - or that the Imams would approve of that either.
Okay, that's it for this post. And if you thought this was a loooong read, perhaps you'll have a better understanding of why we had a comparatively lazy stay in Marrakesh.
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