Morocco: days five and six
Be sure to click words that aren’t in black to see more photos!
Those who slept outside said they slept well.
Throughout the past few days, we kept asking Abdou if we would ever reach a part of the desert where there was only sand and no greenery. He said we would. This was the day. The past two days had been in a valley, but now we entered a more open area, where the wind was stronger. My hat kept blowing off (luckily I had a neck string!), so I switched to using a towel to cover my head.
We stopped for snacks on top of dune, where you could see desert in most directions:
Naturally, the cameleers and camels weren’t so impressed with the vistas.
We pressed on (7.85 MB video available!), eventually reaching Ouled Driss, where there was a campsite for us to spend New Year’s Eve. More importantly, it had toilets, showers, and cabins. The cabins were actually empty rooms where you could put your sleeping bags on the ground.
(Me at the campsite.)
We had lunch in the campsite pavilion, which had lots of French tourists in it already. There was a poster on the wall funded by the EU and the Government of Poland reminding us to conserve water. It told us, for example, that one shower uses as much water as a Berber family uses in a week! It suggested waiting till we got to Ouarzazate to shower. Most of us let hygiene override altruism, so we showered there.
We then got to see the town, which was remarkably well-preserved. Homes are separated by roofed passageways, ensuring that they stay cool during the summer (when it gets up to 122° Fahrenheit). We then visited a museum of Saharan culture, run by an incredibly elegan, non-chalant Berber man. (We decided he should be in GQ.)
We had dinner back at the pavilion after having carefully staking out our table so the French wouldn’t get it from us. The elegant Berber guy showed up and played drums with some others that evening. As far as we could tell, he ran the campsite too. Basically, it seemed that Ouled Driss was a one-man city.
Some of us played Bullshit (the card game, which the British call “Cheat”), and then we held a midnight countdown using the clock on Marc’s iPhone. “Happy New Years” and hugs ensued. Everyone was in bed by 1 a.m.
Peter had gone to bed early but was afraid to sleep outside in case there were New Year’s revelers, so he set up his sleeping bag in the cabin I was in. His snoring was quite loud but unfortunately irregular, meaning there was no hope of me falling asleep. I relocated outside the cabin at 2:45 a.m. (the revelers had long ago gone to bed) and finished out the night there. Turned out to be a lot warmer in the campgrounds than out in the dessert.
We were told to get up for breakfast at 6 a.m. and a 6:30 a.m. departure since we had an eight-hour drive to Marrakech. Unfortunately, our drivers ran late, so we all stood around for a while at dawn while they loaded up our bags and the camping equipment.
The ride was indeed quite long, with lot of twists and turns as we crossed the Anti-Atlas and Atlas Mountains. We stopped at Aït Benhaddou, a UNESCO world heritage site that has lots of well-preserved architecture that has been used for filming parts of Gladiator and other movies were filmed.
We had tea and ate our picnic lunches at the house of a local. Unfortunately we didn’t really get to see much of the house, but it had a little open-air room for the goats and the toilet. We sat in a cozy room on an uppper level, with cushions for sitting on and a framed poster of Russell Crowe on the wall to admire.
We climbed to the top, from which there was a nice view:
We stopped for a look from the high point while crossing the Atlas Mountains. (We tried to take photos of the valley, but they don’t do justice to reality.)
We arrived in Marrakech after dark. Lots of honking by our driver to get cars to move out of the way so he could drop us off at the door. We had a half hour to get settled into our rooms before meeting in the lobby to go to our dinner reservation. Ridiculously large portions, but quite good. I can’t remember if we were this tired before eating or after eating.
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.