Finally got a decent sleep last night – only took an entire bottle of red on top of the usual drug cocktail. :/ Wooo… Happy New Year.
Ait Ben Haddou is as gorgeous in the sunrise as it was in the sunset.
We started out day off this morning with a spot of rug shopping at a local women’s weaving cooperative. The Berber style of rugs prevalent throughout Morocco is quite distinctive. They’re very busy and have a lot of motifs (many of which are for good luck or fertility) that repeat through the patterns. They’re also really asymmetrical compared to other hand made rugs that you usually see coming out of Eurasia and the Middle East. 
The boys looked very exciting for their second foray into Berber home furnishings.
Our hosts laid out about 100 rugs for our viewing pleasure… some of them gorgeous, some of them downright hard on the eyes. We seemed to have an extraordinary shopping experience this morning. These rugs actually had prices on them, which is unusual in places where you expect to barter (ie: where they really truly want to fleece the tourists good and proper), and the marked prices were quite reasonable compared to what we had seen in other rug shops in the various medinas.
Like many other cultures I have visited, the traders here believe if they offer a good bargain for the first customer of the day, then they will have good sales all day. So you can sometimes get a nice bargain if you happen to be the first in the door on any given day… but today we were the first customers of the day, on the first day of the new year, which happened to be the first day of trading of the new decade. Our salesman told us ‘This morning is special day, so this morning for all of you, I make special prices’. And far-out was he true to his word! The prices tumbled from the marked prices without any haggling or difficulty whatsoever. One couple was looking at a rug marked 6000DH and they picked it up for 3200DH. Another guy was looking at once for 4000DH and he scored it for 2300DH. I think our salesman was either particularly superstitious or at the very least a strong adherent to tradition. Allah bless his cotton socks.
Mr K getting worried for his wallet…
In the end, our small group of sixteen purchased seven rugs – and for a fraction of what they would have cost in Fez or Marrakech, and with no bullshit bartering at all. There were smiles all round.
Then we were off in our little bus, with Mohammed at the wheel, into the desert heading towards Zagora. On the way out of town, we got to see some of the large movie studios that have grown up around Ait Ben Haddou – I guess when you have the whole production crew in place, and are using the location, there’s no point moving everyone to another studio area when you can just build a studio in Morocco.
Very quickly though we were into the mountains again and into the pass. Unlike the terrain around Aroumd which was formed by glaciers, this entire area was formed by volcanic actions however many millions of years ago. You can see the swirling layers of rock that form the desert. It’s so dry here and barely a tree in sight.
It beggars belief as to why you would bulid here, but there are the Berber people who live in these walled towns, and Bedouin and nomadic people who used to raid them all fighting for resources in the region. Each little town has a kasbah or fortress which can be retreated to when the nomads or Bedouins come invading…?
The scenery was really impessive, enormous rocky canyons, and steep cliffs as we approced the mountain pass which was 1800m above sea level (much lower than Aroumd at 2640m).
The rock formations were enormous and amazing… and unbelievably, on occasion, we could see handfuls of little black dots on these extremely arid areas. Little black dots that would turn out to be goats and a shepherd. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to grab a photo of one of these herds of goats (herd? flocks? pack? *shrug* (Fuck who what the collective noun for a group of goats is?).
Once we had passed the pass, we found ourselves in the ‘oasis’. Now this confused me somewhat – I always though an oasis was a spring of some sort in the middle of the desert. A kinda Disneyeque situation where there’s nothing but sand in every direction and suddenly a small pool of fresh water with four or five palm trees… but not so! This oasis spans 200kms down the valley and supports an enormous amount of people, commerce and agriculture. 
The mountain is Mt Kissane, and the oasis here supports and enormous date palm industry which spans the entire 200km length. It was along this oasis that we stopped for a picnic lunch at a ‘truck stop’ (which looked more like a fancy hotel). At lunchtime, I asked Samirr if he could enquire about the young woman from Aroumd who had tried to jump from the mountain… being stuck on the bus for hours, my mind kept wandering back to how the lack of education and bullshit religious superstitions may have driven this poor woman to desperation – he made a phone call and found out that she suffered only a broken leg and a broken jaw, and was due to have a surgery on both today. I’d like to think she will get the medical attention she needs for her epilepsy, and her subsequent mental health issues… but I somehow strongly doubt it.
Anyway. Another day another earworm. Every time Samirr mentioned the oasis, I could hear ‘Midnight at the oasis, send your camel to bed…’ going through my head. We followed the palms and the mountains for a few hours.
With beautiful, typically Moroccan vistas in every direction – this is more like what I expected Morocco to look like, not the lush green rolling hills of the north. This was the only that I actually saw the water source that was sustaining all this growth: the Draa River which feeds the entire valley. 
We did one stop and it was date palms as far as the eye could see.
Eventually, our drive came to an end and we arrived at Zagora. Zagora is the major town in the Draa River valley. So anyone in the entire Drâa-Tafilalet region in this part of the country comes here for major supplies. The town is flanked by the mountain Zagora from which it derives its name.
Our hotel, Le Tinsouline is our jumping-off point to the Sahara camps, as is tradition for most tourists it seems, because there is scant little to do in th is town, yet it’s full of hotels and tourists.
Pretty swish for being in the middle of nowhere.
After we got settled, we went for a ‘gently walk for an hour and a half through the date palm trees of the oasis’, which turned out to be nearly a 6km walk, an easy third of which was over fucking sand dunes. Nice one! I wasn’t wearing my boots, just sneakers, and was exhausted from five hours being jostled around in the bus for most of the day, and here were expecting a nice easy walk in the cool of the palm trees, and instead, we were slogging over two kms of fucking sand dunes to see… well, I still don’t really know what?!
Le sigh. The walk started out okay. We walked through the oasis and the date palms. The locals only keep the fruit-producing palm trees, if they don’t produce, they get cut down for building materials. Each tree is capable of yielding 60-120kgs of dates per year, which are harvested by hand. Inside the oasis in the middle of the palm trees are homes belonging to the land owners many of whom own about 50 or so palm trees, as well as small Riad guesthouses where people like to stay in the summer as it is so much cooler in the oasis than out in the town. 
Following the paths through the palm trees in the oasis was a bit like winding through a medina – lots of nooks and crannies, cool door ways and arches.
Many impressive building facades and doorways, that you would never know was in here among the palms.
At the base of the palms, there are small spaces of other produce being grown – turnips, henna, lucerne, alfalfa and the like.
Samirr demonstrating how the locals climb the palm trees to trim the fronds off the trees. The trees themselves can live and keep bearing fruit for a century, but the fronds get cut off every five years or so. These fronds are used as a building material – primarily in the building of fences.
Here is where we saw the fronds coming into use as fencing – the oasis is a naturally occurring space thanks to the river that runs through the valley, but the Sahara is an ever-changing landscape that encroaches and retreats where it pleases. Here, in the oasis, the people have learned how to try and keep the Sahara at bay, by making fences to stop the sand dunes from overrunning their water sources and changing the geography. They weave the fronds into fences which are then laid out in a grid or checked type arrangement, so when the sand storms come, they hold back the sands.
Fresh fencing.
It was roughly at this point that I got sick of the walk in the sand dunes and lost the energy to look around me properly and keep taking photos – I was in a lot of pain, was trying not to throw up, and working hard on reminding myself to keep breathing. But it’s one of those shitty things – I was kinda committed, and it’s hard to know whether to pull the pin or not, because at this point it could be further to try and walk back the way we came than to keep going to fuck knows where? Additionally, I don’t want to impact the entire group’s walk just because I’m falling apart – some of them might have actually been enjoying this?! Samirr had told us we were going for a ‘gentle walk through the palms’ but here we were up and down small sand dunes and my hips and back were like ‘wtf this doesn’t resemble the brochure’ – I had zero energy for it but had to keep plodding on. Eventually, our walk went ended back at a Riad I recognised called La Soleil du Monde, where I could have waited for the mad bastards that actually wanted to walk 2kms in the sand to see very little more of I know not what? :/
I can walk, especially on flat ground and will quite happily walk until my feet are ready to fall off when there’s actually something interesting to see – but trudging along not knowing how much further we had to go or if there was anything worth seeing at the end of it is really stressful for a chronic pain sufferer. The whole time Samirr was so far in front of me that I had no way of asking him any questions either. By the time we were finished, I was gritting my teeth, feeling hot and bothered from failing to breathe properly and my pain was through the roof.
Thankfully, we were heading straight back to the hotel and had time for a shower and a heatpack before dinner. While I had tried to explain to Samirr that I had limited capacity for some things at the beginning of the trip, he obviously didn’t really understand. I had to take Samirr aside and let him know how difficult this walk turned out to be (especially after five hours of being jolted around on the bus), how his description of the outing was misleading and that I simply can’t make good decisions based if he is going to be so vague. I can’t tell you how much I HATE having to admit defeat in a situation like this. It’s almost as much as I HATE having to share half my life story and medical history with a relative stranger just so they can understand what I’m talking about. Honestly, I’m not sure why he thought I have been always asking for so many details about each walk we were doing: ‘how far is it’, and ‘how high do we go’, and ‘how many steps are there’… maybe he just thought I was fucking lazy and didn’t want to go to some places? This is where having an invisible illness really works against you.
Anyway, I was sufficiently recovered from a shower and an hour on a heat pack that I managed to hobble over to the restaurant for dinner. It was kinda touch and go, Mr K was getting so worried, he was talking about us ditching the remainder of the tour entirely and heading back to Marrakech – something I would never want to do! I haven’t come all this way to miss out on the Sahara.
Dinner was in a really pretty restaurant and I had the veal and prune tagine which was really tasty, and then back to the room and onto the heat pack again and well, bed soon. I have a feeling tomorrow is going to be another big day…
We passed quite a few mules on our way down the road – none of them was Frank.
After we returned to Imlil, we collected our larger items of luggage and jumped into the minibus. We had a six hour drive ahead of us and I was not looking forward to it. The landscape was very changeable as we wound along the roads through the High Atlas Mountains.
Around 1300, we stopped for a barbeque lunch… there was meat hanging on the street and smoke everywhere with about half a dozen BBQ restaurants all in a row largely catering to truck drivers and tourists.
Out the back of the row of restaurants was a small bridge leading to a patio dining area.
After a meat-heavy meal we hit the road again – the landscape was much more like I expected from Morocco, unlike the north of the country that was so green and lush.
Another stop to have a look at a fossil and gemstone store. With no fancy cut stones, or any jewellery to hunt through, the women were largely back on the bus in no time – the men, however, fossicked through the fossils and geodes for quite a while. Several of our party bought a few pieces to take back home.
A roadside puppy was perched high on a rock overlooking the construction site – a large part of this road was being rebuilt into a proper dual carriageway. Samirr said the contractors in the north were doing a great job, but the contractors in the south were lazy and working with old equipment – we can vouch for that! The ones that were working south of the pass were on machines belching out massive clouds of black smoke. Gross!
The landscapes were really quite pretty and we had several opportunities for photo stops, and to stretch the legs a bit.
These guys had their trinkets set up beside the snow markets… the yellow and red poles are to tell drivers how deep the snow is and to show the edge of the road. By mid-January, these guys won’t be able to hang out here.e
After what seemed an interminably long time to be stuck in the bus, we made it to Ait Benhaddou. We walked through the modern side of the town to get to the picturesque ‘movie set’ side of the town.
Aït Benhaddou is a great example of Moroccan earthen clay architecture, it was built in the 17thC and sufferred only a little under French occupation in the early 20thC, so it is incredibly well preserved It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 and has been a popular place for tourist to visit due to its unique beauty and connection to Hollywood films.
Below is the space used as a slave market and later a fighting arena for the movie, Gladiator.
It’s a particularly pretty and very well kept city.
Wandering the streets was interesting – cute little alleyways, and fun little shops. I stupidly made the mistake of pottering around by myself, and had several men trying to lead me into their dark little shops! 
The views from the top of the kasbah:
After this, we made our way down to our hotel, where we managed to get ourselves half sorted. We also got to enjoy a cous cous cooking demonstration.
After this we found ourselves settled into the upstairs terrace to see in the New Year, ther was beer (oh so much beer – thanks to a language communication error with the driver Mohammed who collected supplies for us while we were up at the Berber guest house!) and wine and late night pizza snacks. Everyone had a wonderful night and I slept like a baby for the first night since we arrived in Morocco. Yay for the muscle relaxant effects of alcohol!
Happy New Year from Morocco!
And a small tagine shopping village – whereever there are tourists there are shopping opportunities.
Local mosque:
Some high-speed landscape photography on the way there…
We arrived at the main village of Imlil, where we stored our main luggage and took an o’night pack to walk into the village of Aroumd. It is a one hour trek up a bloody steep and rocky mule track to get to the village and if you’re like me and you have a fucked back or mobility issues, you can ride a mule up instead. I made a particularly sane choice and decided to ride the mule up…not that riding the mule is an easier option, you’re hanging on for dear life on steeper sections and actual stairways, but I think this hike would have taken me about three times longer than anyone else, and I’m not sure my hips would have thanked me for it for days. I was given a mule and asked Samirr to ask the handler what his name was (my guide only spoke Berber, no English or French), and it turned out my sturdy friend had no name, so I promptly dubbed him ‘Frank’ for the duration.
Anyway, Frank and I plodded up the mountain while most of the rest of our group walked up in front of us. He was certainly sure-footed, though not quite as sure-footed as the mules I remember in 
At the top, the views were magnificent. Back down the valley, the village of Imlil seemed very happily situated.
Wandering around the town, there wasn’t a lot to see – there was a four hour hike down into another valley and to see a shrine (a painted white rock) where people pilgrim to be cured of epilepsy (the Berber people believe that epilepsy is a condition where the human is possessed by evil spirits and can be ‘fixed’ by miracles which occur when coming here and saying lots of Koranic verses over the afflicted). It might have been interesting to go see it – but I kinda googled some images and decided the walk down and back simply wasn’t worth it. So instead we went for a wander around the town to see how the Berber mountain people lived.
Life seems very simple here – the farming of apples, walnuts and other frost hardy fruits, some goat herding and well, fleecing tourists seems to be the primary industries. We were staying in a traditional ‘gite’ or Berber guesthouse which was very colourfully decorated:
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The purple and orange was a particular treat.
We discovered all the power points were at waist heigh above the ground and none of the furniture was – so necessity being the mother of invention. 😛
After everyone was done with their exploring (only the five new arrivals to our group went for the walk to the shrine) we came back together for a traditional Berber meal consisting of lamb tagine and vegetables, and fruit. 
Cones of ‘spices’ for display… this is literally a timber or cardboard cone with spice coloured cement over it to lure tourists into the shop to look for things – this is not the bright coloured piles of spice you are looking for!
Shopping, shopping, shopping. So many lovely things; so much of it so hard to bring home.
At least this stall had piles of spices that were actually made of spice.
I’m in love with this silk rug – it’s probably made in Turkey though, based on the design and the knot count. We managed to find the store again, so now I have a week or so to think about whether I really want it when we get back to Marrakech.
More knitted beanies in every size and colour…
Rug stores. Everywhere.
Cane and wicker baskets and handbags.
More leather goods – some of it fantastic, some of it tacky as all shit. The poofes aren’t as nice as the ones we saw in Fez, which is a shame.
Carved timber – all I can see is having to get in the ‘something to declare’, line when coming back into Australia. :/ 
After nearly three hours and four kilometres of wandering around the medina, we found ourselves back out in the Square where we needed to meet our cooking class guide/teacher. This is a very popular spot for tourists to sit and watch the world go by.
Zita and I met up with Hannan, our mentor for the afternoon, and she set us off at a brisk pace through the medina to buy ingredients for our meals. Turns out that it was just the two of us, so we had a private little group which was lovely. We marched past about a kilometre of touristy handicraft shops before popping out in a slightly slower-paced area of food shops more populated by locals.
The poor thing was quickly weighed, and before Zita could say, ‘Are we going to have to pluck it?’, it was swiftly slaughtered and skinned. Yep, that’s right, skinned. I saw, just after the poor chicken lost its head and feet, the butcher de-feather and deskin the bird in a very swift very smooth and obviously practised motion – much like how one skins a rabbit. I was actually quite surprised, I didn’t know you could clean a chicken that quickly – the whole transaction barely took two minutes. Buying live chickens is no doubt the result of there being very poor (if any) refrigeration in the medina.
Next stop was to buy some fresh produce, some of which bounced off the ground a few times and yet still ended up in the basket to come back to the Riad.
We bought tomatoes, onions, garlic, capsicum, sweet potato, beans and other various items that I probably would walk right past at home.
After this, we stopped to buy some preserved lemons and some olives at a different little store… preserving lemons is not difficult, but takes months, so the locals tend to buy them already preserved.
The final stop was to buy some spices – you’ll note that this deep in the medina, there are no fancy cones of pretty spices to attract the tourists, just dump bins of spices for the locals to buy.
Here, we bought some ground ginger, cumin, ground coriander, mixed spice and sweet paprika.. not all of which ended up in our dishes?
Another 600m or so of winding streets and we found ourselves at the Riad where we would be doing our cooking. It was amazing how it was so chaotic out in the alleyways (full of women marching with purpose, motorbikes zooming around the alleys, bicycles pinging their bells, touts yelling for your attention, and under-employed men seemingly just loitering about everywhere), yet as soon as you stepped into the Riad, it was quiet and peaceful. You couldn’t hear a single two-stroke motorcycle going past and the sounds of the touts and tourists seemed miles away.
Hannan laid out all the ingredients we were going to need for our dish, while we made mint tea.
Making the mint tea is quite a process, and now I understand why it seems to take so long to prepare when you order it at a cafe.
Then it was onto the cooking! We had our fresh chicken, produce and spices, and Hannan led us, step by step, through making a chicken tagine with preserved lemons and olives. It was a lot of fun and we learned a lot about Moroccan everyday life as well.
Zita wrangling the garlic press into submission.
Eventually, all the onions had been sliced, the garlic all pressed, the chili finely chopped, fresh coriander and parsley minced, and spices added. Then the mixing. By hand…which I was somewhat reluctant to jump into…
… And which, naturally resulted in this: ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, I have lotion to get it off later.’ Hmmm… sure.
Our tagine went onto the gas while we prepared a Moroccan salad comprising of peeled and seeded tomatoes, red onion, and grilled green bell pepper, plus lemon, herbs, spices, and a tiny bit of olive oil.
After the salad was set aside to soak in its own juices, we set to making the third course, a fruit dish of sliced orange, prunes, sultanas, honey, cinnamon and orange blossom water.
Which was perfectly timed to then check on the tagine and add some olives and the preserved lemon peel.
While the tagine was finishing cooking, we were encouraged to have a look around the Riad and found ourselves up on the roof. Most Moroccan homes have a rooftop space to recreate on hot summer evenings. A lot of people will sleep on the roof if the nights are really hot. 
This Riad has created some particularly lovely spaces for their guests to relax and enjoy in a really nice rooftop patio. You could hear the noises of the medina up here, but it still felt distant being four floors down.
I was keen to see across the rooftops to see how crammed it all looked. All the buildings are definitely packed in tight. Medieval town design, clashing with modern living.
Unfortunately, when I looked down over the side of the patio, I saw this… on two sides of the Riad, were two enormous holes in the ground that are basically being used as rubbish dumps. No one lives in these spaces, and no one is looking after these spaces. It seems mad that there could be hundreds of these dilapidated spaces that were once buildings sprinkled throughout the medina when space is at such a premium. I honestly can’t understand it. Who owns the space? Why did they fall into disrepair?. 
In stark contrast, by the time we came back downstairs, the table had been set with the good flatware, and our bread warmed under the fancy bread warmer, and the dinner we had prepared was served to us.
The Moroccan salad was really quite tasty, and I am not normally a fan of bell peppers at all. Skinning and seeding the tomatoes made them extraordinarily sweet compared to how we usually serve tomatoes in salads at home. 
A little spice pot shaped like tiny joined tagines was on the table with salt, pepper and cumin to add to our dish if we so desired. I have seen these little pots everywhere in the medina for sale and had no desire or plan to bring one home, but now it seems almost essential. 
And, finally, ‘la piece de resistance’, our chicken tagine with preserved lemons and olives – and OMG was it delicious. It was literally the best chicken tagine I’ve tried since we arrived in Morocco – and we’ve shared about five at various restaurants so far. Just a really fabulous combination of fresh ingredients and a nice balance of spices resulted in spectacular flavours.
Admittedly, Zita and I couldn’t come anywhere near finishing the chicken dish, so I hope the family’s children enjoyed their dinner (no doubt they are sick to death of this dish!), but we had to leave some space to try the honied orange slices we had prepared. This was a truly simple and refreshing finish to a lovely meal.
After that, we stumbled fortuitously onto a bottle shop (as you might expect they are few and far between in Morocco), and then back to the hotel for a cheap and cheerful lunch and a shower and a nap. Cold shower, unfortunately – the hotel seems to turn the hot water off during the middle of the day very likely to save money as no one is really in their rooms, but there’s me washing my hair in a cold shower and it’s barely 18C out. *rolls eyes*
We wandered around the medina for a while, having a look at the shops, ceramics, brass, rugs, pashmina, lanterns, leather, produce, spices, and all the good things. Fell in love with a gorgeous silk-on-cotton rug – which of course was not at all Moroccan! No matter how hard the shop seller tried to tell me it was made in Casablanca, you could easily tell by the design and the knotwork that it was far more likely to have been made in Turkey or Iran (which Samirr confirmed later at dinner – Morocco only makes Berber style rugs, not the typical Eurasian / Persian rugs at all. Seems to be my MO though – go to Turkey, buy a rug from Balochistan, go to Balochistan, buy a rug from Esfahan, so maybe going to Morocco and buying a rug from Turkey makes sense somehow?!
The square only got busier as the evening wore on… probably twice as many people as there was earlier in the afternoon. 
… and then the shit fight for a taxi back to the hotel ensued. The first cabbie wanted to charge us 100DH for what should be a 20-30DH trip. We tried a couple more and ended up caving at a 50DH ride because ‘is very busy tonight, very busy’, and also because it was getting a bit late and one of our small group needed to hurry back before the laundry closed to get their things.