25.06.18
As I mentioned yesterday our digs overnight were sub par. In fact, S commented on how even he is becoming a snob (clearly I’m rubbing off). My sleep in particular was pretty average.. I like a hard bed but even I don’t like a rock and I certainly like something to rest my head on, not the lump of concrete that was cleverly disguised as a pillow. So it was with quite a bit of thanks that the alarm went off and we got the heck out of town!
Today is the day that we actually arrive at the Sahara so we were both more than a little excited. Unlike the day previous we didn’t have to drive hours before we could stop and do some touristy things. In less than an hour we had driven from Dades Gorge to Todra Gorge for our tourist stop for the day. Our guide met us outside of the gorge and took us up the valley through his palmerie and Ksar to the gorge itself.
Really excellent walk! The palmerie was just beautiful. Plenty of running water throughout in carefully built irrigation channels to keep the fruit trees and veges growing. We finally found out what the green stuff is that we keep seeing ladies cutting down for fodder for the mules and horses and it is Alfalfa! I’ve been dying to know because the plant has these gorgeous purple flowers and it is really quite an attractive crop.
We also learnt some all important Berber words from our guide, Fouad, like; Ebohar (insect), Tellmerrrrit (thankyou) and Azoore (hello). Now I’d agree that remembering insect is not important but it is the only damn word I can automatically think of, every other word I have to stop and think for a few minutes to try and remember the word!
After walking through the fields and trees (fruit trees generally grow overhead and shade the irrigation channels and the crops are planted in between) we arrived at the Ksar of this town (can’t remember its name) and the ancestral home of Fouad. We kept joking with him that he needs to do up his Kasbah and turn it into a tourist stop for cold drinks (the Kasbah is on its way to ruin). He stopped us in another Kasbah to introduce us to some of the nomads who still frequent the town.
The nomads turned out to be wiley carpet merchants, who have learnt over the years to not push carpet sales onto western tourists! Our wiley nomad introduced us to the art of knot carpet weaving (which I’ve actually been interested in how they do, doesn’t look very difficult (think latch hook weaving) but must be time consuming) and shared tea with us. He then went on to show us many different types of carpets that are made by the Berber (with explanations for the designs) and in particular, made from different materials- sheeps wool, camel wool, agave silk (from the fibres of agave cactus) and baby’s camel wool. I was instantly a fan of the baby camel’s wool + also of the carpets that are embroided with agave silk. Therefore, you won’t be surprised to hear that I bargained for a carpet.. which turned out to be two before we struck the deal! Yep, I got fleeced! (boom, boom, ching!)
Our guide picked us up after my fleecing (to be honest I’m pretty happy with what I paid so I didn’t really get fleeced I just like using the term considering it is a carpet) and we continued our walk up to the top of the gorge. Todra Gorge is a renowned rock climbing place here in Morocco so you can imagine the sheer cliffs on either side of the narrow fast running river. We bathed our hands and faces in the “lucky” water (one of the springs is supposed to grant you good luck) and took some pickies before we hopped back in the bus to continue to our lunch stop further down the gorge.
Lunch over (Moroccan grilled chicken for me and a Tajine for S) and we jumped back in the bus for our final couple of hours to the Sahara.
I should probably detour a bit from the story to outline the landscape we’ve passed through today and yesterday.. Yesterday morning was the crossing of the Atlas- high craggy peaks, much of which is coloured rock so quite spectacular. Western side of the Atlas there are trees, shrubs, grasses regardless of whether you are near a water source. Eastern side of the Atlas is the arid side. Apart from oases and creek valleys (can’t really call them rivers except probably when the snow melts) there really is very limited vegetation, just small scrubby bushes. For much of today we have passed through land that really reminds me of Utah. Messes abound and plenty of coloured rock—very reminiscent. Then as we have neared the Sahara this afternoon the ground has gotten very rocky- small grey rocks on top of orange dust/ rocks.. exactly the same as I remember seeing in Namibia as we got closer to the sand dunes. And so speaking, in the distance, we could suddenly see these large orange mountains. And as we got closer it became more and more apparent that we had made it to the Saharan desert.
We stopped at a hotel at Mergouza to relax, drink the obligatory cup of tea and generally wait for the sun to go down a bit before we could head out into the dunes. It is still blistering hot here today (our driver told us that it was 47 outside today) so it was all we could do but to sit in the shade and drink water. The hotel had a pool and for some unknown reason the water is actually damn cold so we didn’t go for a swim, I did however, wet my scarf and wrap it around my neck to try and cool myself down a bit. We waited the hour or so by playing a few rounds of Euchre with both of us winning a round each.
Finally, the sun had set enough (it was about 7.30pm) that the Berber camel driver told us to “Yallah” and we got ourselves over to the camels and the dunes to begin our hour long trip on the ships of the desert. Before getting on board Mustafa and Donkey (we named our camels because the camel driver said they didn’t have names) we had our driver wrap our heads berber style with our scarfs (we purchased them the day previous in AB) and off we camelled!
Really spectacular riding through the dunes as the sun went down. These dunes aren’t as big as the ones in Namibia (and thank goodness they aren’t because riding down them would have made my sore arse even sorer) but still have the same spectacular hews of colour as the sun slants lower in the west. We watched the sun go down from the top of one of the dunes before we finally headed into our berber camp for the evening.
Luxury camp in the Sahara, we got! We turned up at this tent “village” to discover that there were only four of us staying the night in the whole camp! (There are ten tents so could sleep at least 20). In fact, there are more staff than there are tourists (6 staff for 4 tourists). Coming over the dunes we saw many little caravans so assumed we were all heading to the same destination, apparently not! Once we’d checked out our digs—nice comfy bed, shower and toilet and big tent for dinner/ brekky etc we headed up the sand hill behind our tent to check out the view. At the top we worked out where the rest of the caravans had headed to… there were at least five little villages that we could see stretched out over the dunes.. Probably two that are luxury and the rest standard.. I overheard some of the tourists at one of the rest stop say to another of their group that they were all sleeping in one big communal tent on the floor (berber style)—so glad that wasn’t us as we’d had a pretty big two days so a good nights sleep was what we both needed.
Dinner was served in the big tent and we were served enough food to feed an army! It was crazy! Soup, Main and Desert and I reckon what they brought out could have fed all four of us easily (if not more).. S and I only felt slightly guilty at sending most of the food back—it was a case of if we tried to eat it all we would have just thrown it back up so why bother!
Anyway, dinner over and we knew that the staff were going to sing Berber songs to us and light a fire for us so we couldn’t just head to bed (even though it was well after 10.30 when we finished eating) so we sat up and looked at the stars whilst we waited to hear them play.
It was pretty good to hear their music with a crackling fire (even though it’s still well over 30 degrees) and to clap along in time and fortunately they didn’t play for too long (maybe thirty mins). They finished by handing over the bongo drums to us and the other couple (from Hong Kong) and asked us to play a song from our local countries. S and I belted out Waltzing Matilda + the couple from HK played some song from their country.. a great way to end an awesome day in the middle of the Sahara desert (stars and moon above + music filling the air).