22.06.18
Early start today as we headed out of Marrakech and into another section of the Atlas Mountains to see the Ouzoud falls. They are supposedly the highest falls in Africa (2m higher than Victoria) and are also were the monkeys live here in Morocco!
Today’s trip was in a group so we had to go to the meeting point to get picked up by the bus, all good for us and the group picked up after us but then we drove around for what felt like nearly an hour “looking” or waiting (we couldn’t work out which) for the other group who were coming with us. Not super happy about that! As it turned out it kind of made sense why we were waiting around as we ended up meeting up with three other bus loads later in the day for our walk down and back up the falls..
So bus trip itself was pretty boring and quite long. We headed slightly north east from Marrakech, passing through miles and miles of flat countryside. Today, and probably the next few weeks, it must be harvest day because everywhere we looked we could see big harvesters and people with donkeys picking up the hay + bags of barley. Also, plenty of above ground aqueducts (made from concrete) keeping the fields well irrigated.
The bus made a stop mid morning to enable us to all go to the bathroom + grab a bite to eat before we continued along the same fairly boring route to Ouzoud. I fell asleep for the last 30mins or so because when we arrived in Ouzoud I was a bit surprised to see us surrounded by mountains (not super steep ones like yesterday but still pretty hilly). This part of the Atlas isn’t quite as verdant as near Imlil, much more rocky and lots of little bushes but still pretty nice. When we arrived we were gathered up by our tour guide who joined us in with three other busloads of people all in the same group for the hike down and back up the waterfall- all in all about 25-30 people in the group. Our guide spoke excellent English (had a bit of a cockney accent so I’m guessing he has spent plenty of time in London)
The hike down was pretty steep to the bottom of the falls, passing through plenty of olive + almond groves before we arrived at part of the falls where we could go for a swim. The guide was pretty smart as he brought us a bit further down the waterfall so that we could swim without offending anyone wearing our bikinis etc. Water was pretty chilly so I didn’t hop in for very long but S did a few good jumps from off the rocks and into the churning water below. After taking the obligatory selfies and drying off somewhat we headed back up the river to see the actual waterfalls and take the “boat” across the river to our lunch stop.
The falls are pretty impressive when we got up close. The “boats” are barges that have to flotation barrels on either side and a flat walk way above. On top of the walkway are perched plastic chairs that are rigged up to look a bit special with fake flowers + faux velvet cushion covers… CLASSY!
It was classy enough that we both invested our $2 to get on board and sit down on the royale chairs! The barge (sorry the boat!) took us as close as we could go to the waterfall without getting drenched and enabled some pretty good up close photos of the falls. Our barge rower also let some of us take turns at “rowing” the barge. These “turns” ended up getting us stuck on some rocks so we all had to get to the back of the barge and try and use inertia to get the barge off the rocks! Pretty funny all round.
After crossing the river and mucking around on the barge we headed up the hill to see the monkeys. The monkeys are native to the area and are wild.. well, sort of.. They are wild in that they don’t have human owners but are pretty tame in that they know that there will be people coming who will feed them! Apparently today the monkeys were enjoying wafer biscuits!! I had some wafers thrust in my hand by a seller and promptly had a monkey sitting on my head eating his wafers from my hand. As soon as he had consumed all the wafer he hopped straight off and waited for S to have some wafers for him to eat.. They know the drill better than the humans! Of course we had to pay the wafer dude but I was happy to invest a couple of bucks to actually see the monkeys up close. Apparently they are the same monkeys that are on Gibralta—the monkeys were actually taken from the Ouzoud valley and transported to Gibralta over a hundred years ago… now they are “native” to Gibralta! Last stop was for some lunch, tajine for S and chicken skewers for me before we boarded the bus for the long boring trip back to Marrakech. Another good day out, but not quite on the same scale as the day previous.