Marrakech to Dades -- Into the Wild

Note:  We’ve been in involuntary “cyber silence” for three nights, so we’ll try to get our backlog of posts online tonight.  Here’s the first. Forgive the poor formatting, it is a software problem

Monday, April 20, 2109

This morning, we were picked up by an escort who loaded one of our suitcases onto the back of his bicycle and walked us to the square to meet our guide and car for our four-day desert excursion.  Leaving the riad at 8:00, we were amazed to find the souks and the square quiet; with shops closed and the crowds gone, it was a totally  different scene from those we’ve experienced there before.

We were soon on our way with Idir at the wheel and Mohamed seemingly along for the ride.  As soon as we left Marrakech, we were surrounded by groves of olive, orange and apricot trees.  We rode deeper into green agricultural valleys which seemed a world away from the city we’d just left.  Every hour or so, we found ourselves in a different terrain and color scheme.  We stopped to see Berber villages terraced down hillsides toward the river that supports green life amid increasingly dry surroundings.  We drew closer to the Atlas Mountains and their snowy peaks, though when we did cross them on the Tichka Pass, they were just masses of dark gray rock; the distant views were the better ones.

Along the way, we stopped for photos and to give the locals the opportunity to interest us in fossils, jewelry and geodes.  We also visited a cooperative to see young Berber women cracking, roasting, and grinding Argan nuts to produce the oil that is used cosmetic, medical, and culinary purposes.  Now if I can just remember not to grate the soap into a salad when we return home!

We enjoyed lunch on a rooftop terrace in Ait Benhaddou, with a view overlooking the 11^th-century kasbah (fortified town), which has been prettied-up by filmmakers to provide settings for many films,  including Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator, and Game of Thrones.  The buildings of the kasbah are constructed of adobe, with both the mud and straw components very visible.  After lunch, we climbed through the kasbah, which is now home to just a few families and lots of vendors, up to the hilltop agadir (a fortification with 360-degree views of the countryside, kasbah, and “modern” town below).

Then, it was on to Ouarzazate, a modern city of 80,000 built around the movie studios established there.  Its wide streets, new buildings, and ongoing construction activity were unlike any we’ve seen thus far in Morocco.

Skoura was a marked contrast to the dry and rocky desert that surrounds it.  It is a true oasis, green with alfalfa plots growing beneath olive trees and the date palms for which it is known.  Like the kasbah at Ait Benhaddou, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

Though the Valley of the Roses was just showing its first few blooms, we climbed a small hill for a great view of its deep green fields that were in sharp contrast to the mud villages and hills that surround them.  Ireland would be proud to claim the emerald greens we saw there!

Our hotel tonight is in the Dades Gorges, with terraces high above a waterfall and valley below.  Poor to non-existent Internet access here means a delay in posting today’s blog entry.  Tomorrow night, we’ll be in a desert tent camp, most likely very sore from our camel ride to get there, and very definitely without Internet access. We’ll catch up when circumstances allow.