This morning, we woke up very, very early to meet our 3-day tour into the desert. We met eight other travelers and our driver at 7 am (after sleeping very little as our riad’s neighbors were up into the wee hours of the night talking loudly and revving the engines of their mopeds) and headed out in a mini-bus without any real explanation of our destinations or plan for the day. This turned out to be a trend that would continue, since our driver didn’t ever tell us where we were when we stopped, saying only “ok. Take picture. 15 minutes” in four languages.
Even without good explanations, it was still beautiful to see what I assume are some of the most famous sites in southern-central Morocco and the Atlas Mountains. We stopped at several Kasbahs along the way that were filled with overpriced tourist goods, but that gave a glimpse of how Moroccan life may be outside the tourist areas. At one of these stops, we successfully, although awkwardly, managed to bargain the price of a necklace down from 200 dirhams (about 20 euros) to 40-something (about 4 euros).
We stopped for lunch in a town that was filled with movie studios, nice hotels, and a cinema museum. We were told only that it was “for lunch and pictures of Kasbah. 1.5 hours,” but I am pretty sure that this is the Kasbah that we had heard about before – the site of filming for several Hollywood films set in Arabic countries. The lunch was quite expensive by Moroccon standards – about 5 euros per person for a small dish, compared to the two sandwiches, fries, and drink that we got for the same price in Marrakesh – and we were pretty sure that the driver got a hefty commission for bringing his tourists to this particular lunch spot, but so it goes. We sat with a Korean girl who had big plastic glasses that reminded me of elementary school and was traveling alone for her “20th anniversary,” which is apparently a Korean tradition to travel around age 19 or 20 before going to university. Her father demanded that she take a long trip and “learn the world,” even though she had planned to only travel to France for a few weeks. She proved to be the assertive person that we have needed throughout our trip, going to ask for the check, then bringing it to the counter to pay for it when we were unsure if we should wait for a host or not (she told us that “Koreans never wait. We have other things to do”).
Anyway, after the meal we had 20 minutes for wandering the area. I should mention, at this point, the weather throughout the day. In Marrakesh in the morning, it was warm and a bit cloudy, but not much different than it had been for the last two days. At each successive stop, though, it seemed to get cooler, windier, and darker, as we climbed into the mountains and apparently into a new weather pattern. So as we wandered after lunch, the clouds finally broke – with about 20 seconds of drizzle, then an out
and out downpour. We joined several other tourists under a thatched overhang (one saying over and over “ha, it never rains here. They say it never rains”) and were dripped on for several minutes through the uneven thatch roof. Then finally our driver returned and we ran in the downpour to our bus to continue on our journey. We drove out of the rain in a half hour, but then stopped again for “beer if you need it. Not at hotel. And pictures. 15 minutes.” The rain caught up with us, and the downpour began again. This pattern continued at ever stop for about 3 hours, before we finally got stuck in the rain for good. It rained and stormed for the rest of the drive, creating massive puddles in the winding mountain roads. We plowed through them much too quickly for my taste (Jeremy was asleep, so I guess he didn’t mind), coming way too close to a lot of steep drop-offs into the valleys below. Yet we somehow survived and made it to our hotel. The power was disconnected (presumably from the storms), so it was charmingly lit with candles throughout the hallways and one candle outside each room. And that is where we are now, waiting for dinnertime and relaxing to the sound of the rain pouring into the ravine outside our window and typing until the computer battery dies.
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