Morocco: days one and two
Now let’s see, where did we leave off? Ah, yes, I arrived at Heathrow to fly to Morocco.
We were tall told to check in three hours early (just to be safe). I eyed the other people in line at Royal Air Maroc suspiciously, wondering who all was on my trip. I noticed there were not as many Moroccans as I expected. Mostly tourists. Hmm.
Check-in:
—Where are you going?
—Ouarzazate.
—Is that in Morocco?
—Yes.
—Oh, are you with the big group?
—Well, there’s a big group, but we don’t know who each other are.
At the gate I continued wondering who else was on my trip. Some people more chatty than me got to talking to each other, and I eavesdropped. Turned out there were two trips with the Adventure Company on the same flight.
On board the flight to Casablanca, the Moroccan cabin crew (more men than women, if I recall) and passengers all had high cheekbones—seems endemic to the population. I found the beef in the meal to be quite good, though later I heard complaints from others in my tour group that the chicken was the worst people had ever had. There were television monitors above the center aisle playing flight tracking info (in Arabic, French, and American English), occasionally interrupted by a 15-second sequence advertising the airline. Seems silly to show an ad to those who’ve already given you their business—especially because after watching it for the 50th time, it becomes quite annoying.
We arrived in Casablanca for our layover, where I met a few fellow travelers. Strangely, we did not have to go through passport control and customs in Casablanca but instead do so only at our final destination. (It seems that if you fly domestically, you show your stamp and then walk through without waiting in line.) Our connecting flight to Ouarzazate left from a gate near the announced one, and it seems that everyone in our group figured that out at some point. We arrived around midnight.
So after clearing passport control, gathering our bags, and going through customs, we met Abdou, our tourguide. (Most of us thought his name was “Abdul” until near the end of the trip, when we circulated a piece of paper to share email addresses on. Then he told us it’s actually Abdou-Rakhid, but “Abdou” “to make it easier for us”.) Really nice young guy with a good sense of humor that he clearly had picked up from past tour groups. Turns out he wasn’t the only person meeting passengers. There were a half a dozen other tourguides meeting groups of tourists from various European countries. My hope in blazing a new trail as a Westerner was further eroded.
There was a sort of Sprinter van and a Land Rover waiting for our party of sixteen. There was not much room for luggage, but both vehicles had heavy-duty metal luggage racks on top. So they tossed all our bags up there and covered them with a tarp for the ride to the hotel.
We arrived at Hotel Nadia. (I asked Adbou later what “Nadia” means. He said, “It’s just a name. Don’t you have it too?) Nice courtyard and architecture and feels comfortably lived-in. Abdou told us there would be a wake-up call at 7 a.m. for breakfast at 7:30 so we could leave at 8. Ugh.
We’re assigned roommates for the night, and I’m with Ben. We hit it off, sharing the same wacky sense of humor. I slept okay despite the barking dogs in the middle of the night. (It sounded like roving packs, but hard to know.) The wake-up call never came, but Ben was up early anyway since he couldn’t sleep, and I woke to loud knocking on a door somewhere. I guess that was the wake-up call.
After breakfast, we met in the lobby and received some instructions for the rest of the trip and met our cook, who traveled with us from Ouarzazate for some reason. As the cook went around the circle shaking hands, he alternated between “hello” in Berber and “hello” in French.
We loaded back up the vans headed into town to withdraw money from ATMs (or a bank, if you like) and to visit the supermarket (the only one, I believe) to buy:
- water for 24 hours
- any essentials we didn’t already have (like toilet paper)
- optionally, food for a picnic lunch (The alternative was to get “something like an omelet” at the cafe where we would stop later.)
“Supermarché Dimitri” was a cute little store filled with all sorts of things you can’t at normal stores (like 50 varieties of cookies from Europe), so the selection was a bit odd for lunch, especially when you don’t have utensils. Whole round loaves of bread (for tearing) and individually wrapped wedges of cheese were popular. Oh, it was also recommended that we get alcohol for New Year’s Even since it would be difficult to get elsewhere in the trip. I didn’t have room to carry much (considering I was carrying around London clothes in addition to Morocco clothes using my limited selection of travel bags that I brought with me from the US), and, you know, I could do without alcohol anyway. People picked up bottles and packs—or cases, if you were a couple and an old friend of hers—of various Moroccan beverages. The champagne was reportedly quite expensive.
We set off through the Anti-Atlas Mountains to Zagora, our stop for lunch. The road was long and winding but provided for a nice view at a highway rest stop:
Our next stop was a cafe with “good espresso and bathrooms”:
Morocco bridges European and Islamic cultures, including, for example, toilets. Most places present you a choice of thrones and squatters (so to speak).
We stopped at another highway rest stop:
And then in front of the house appeared a tractor, a person, and some goats.
Finally we arrived in Zagora. We stopped at a hotel with a large patio cafe in the rear, where we were free to eat the food we brought but encouraged to order a drink or something for being allowed to crash there. Some of the girls in our group even took advantage of the hotel’s pool.
Afterwards, we walked around the corner of the hotel for a view of the famous sign for Timbuktu (with accompanying explanation). Abdou said it was constructed for a movie, but it appeared to be constructed for tourists instead.
Some of the group bought scarves in case we encountered sandstorms in the desert.
We eventually reached our meeting point, where the cameleers were waiting for us for our first 40-minute ride to our first night’s campsite. We took the bags off the vans and put it onto a few camels carrying special large whicker baskets for “freight”. We all eyed the animals a bit hesitantly as they finished fitting them up with our riding equipment”
The cameleers were all Berbers—like Abdou but in more traditional dress. It seemed like everyone was named Mohammed or Akhmed. They all spoke Berber, some spoke French (more or less), and a few could even do a few words of English. The camels were generally tied in threes to walk in a line. I started out on a middle camel: behind Helen (I believe) and in front of Marc. (Peter decided to walk for this leg of the trip.) Turns out Helen was riding Bob Marley, I was riding Jimi (Hendrix), and Marc was on “Haidu” (sp?).
After a short ride, we arrived at camp, which the other Berbers had gone ahead to set up before us. Pretty nice arrangement, over all:
There was also a toilet tent, but unfortunately I can’t find any pictures of it.
Ben and I joked that we expected to spot Tusken Raiders, banthas, and Jawas. I’m sure that the noises camels make were used as sound effects for many different things in Star Wars, though I couldn’t place them all from memory.
We had Moroccan tea (mint, green tea, and lots of sugar) with cookies (the kind that are called biscuits—not actually exactly the same as an American cookie). The Brits said Moroccan tea was too sweet, but I told them that tea’s sweeter in the American South.
Some of the guys gathered firewood (well, mostly kindling from dessert plants) for a campfire.
Our cook did an amazing job with the food, especially considering he just had a portable gas stove. We had a soup that seemed to be all liquid broth yet was amazing. (It’s all in the spice!) Dinner was couscous with roasted vegetables and a bit of beef. Nothing was spicy, but it all tasted good.
After dusk, we hung around the fire for a while and were all disappointed that the nearly full moon and thin clouds kept us from seeing many stars. We all went to bed early to catch up on sleep. Everyone slept in the tent except Peter, who wanted to try sleeping outside. Since I knew it would be cold at night, I brought a “base camp” sleeping bag from Dublin, borrowed from a coworker, which was rated for below zero and still slept in my clothes. Thanks to all the layers, I was only slightly cold.
Note that for any of the pictures I embed from the Morocco trip, you can get a larger version here. Most of the links are to photos by Marc, which you can browse from here or from each photo.