Collapsing Kasbah ruins

Trip Start Oct 30, 2007
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Trip End Dec 11, 2007


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Flag of Morocco  ,
Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Yesterday we drove back through the Todra Gorge and towards Ouarzazate. We had planned to stay the night here, but we didn't see anything of interest, so just looked around the market and then continued onto Ait Benhaddou. As we drove along we passed women carrying bails of straw on their backs and crumbling Kasbahs blending into the stony desert landscape.

The old Kasbah in Ait Benhaddou is well maintained for Moroccan standards. It is a large walled house made from mud and straw, which is now collapsing. You are allowed to walk in and around the buildings. We went upstairs in a few of them and dared to walk across the mud floors held up by a few branches. Every step we took the building vibrated and I thought it was going to crumble on top of us. I almost fell into a room below through a hole in the floor that had been covered with polyethylene, Dad warned me about it, but I hadn't listened to him and almost stepped on it.

We are getting closer to Marrakech now and are beginning to notice an increase in the number of tourists. So far on our trip, the only other tourists we have been aware of, are a few other campervans that we seem to keep bumping into along the way. But now we are hitting tour bus area, so we watched a fair few loud, fat American tourists getting ripped off in the souvenir shops; they hadn't quite mastered the art of haggling.
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