Heading South, i.e. driving into the heat

Trip Start Jun 13, 2008

Trip End Aug 20, 2008

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Flag of Morocco Zagora, Morocco
Tuesday, June 17, 2008

We left the friendly thieves of Marrakech to head south towards the hotter, desert areas, including the Sahara. We will be traveling around various villages and smaller cities in Southern Morocco and closer to the Algerian border for the next 5 days. For this part of our trip we have a driver, a guide, and were joined by two Belgian sisters, who speak good English (as well as French, Dutch, some Arabic because their family is from northern Morocco... many more languages than we speak). Today we drove about 400 km in our trusty Toyota Land Cruiser, through the mountains via the narrow Tiz-n-Tichka pass, through the town of Ouarzazate and stopped in Zagora. The roads through the High Atlas mountains were steep and windy, enough to make anyone carsick, but the views were incredible. Along the way, we saw a lot of camels, some nomad tents, and a bunch of small villages that kept the Flintstones theme song running through our heads. For the most part, the road is a solid highway, although some parts are dirt roads through villages. Most villages have electricity, although you would never be able to tell (and surprisingly, many have satellite dishes... go figure). Street markets and donkeys are the norm. We even see a small boy no older than 10 chasing after his runaway donkey down the street. As we got further south and east, the landscape really turned arid with very little vegetation.

Each day, during our travels, we stop for lunch, and are usually served typical Moroccan: mixed salad, bread, tagine chicken or beef, couscous and then melons for dessert. Overall, we think it's healthy...we hope. On Monday, there was a pool at the restaurant, and given that it was 42 degree Celsius [>100 degree F], I pretended that my boxer briefs was a European bathing suit and decided to head in....very refreshing for me, maybe not so much for the other guests.

Other things we have seen, visited or done over the last three days include: visiting a small pottery making village and seeing the operation soup to nuts, stopping in a small Arabic town and going to the weekly market (pictures were not allowed at all, so I only took a few stealth ones), but the women were all dressed in full black wardrobes and Lauren and the Belgian girls garnered a lot of stares. We passed on tasting some camel milk, primarily because it had been milked about 30 seconds earlier (our guide and driver drank a lot of it). Also, after passing village after village of arid, desert conditions, we were mystified by the towns in the Draa Valley, where palm trees grow everywhere and they have water year round from a river.

Finally, on Wed night, we had a very nice candlelight dinner after the power in our hotel went out...remember that this is the desert and A/C is crucial. We improvised some torches with candles and a sprite bottle, and I was very lucky to have the crank powered flashlight that my Dad gave me for Christmas 2 years ago. Thanks Dad! The hotel was pitch black and the night was sweaty, but nothing too bad in the end..