ⵜⵉⴼⴰⵡⵉⵏ Morocco!
ⵜⵉⴼⴰⵡⵉⵏ (Tifawin) means "good morning" in Berber language. They have their own alphabet, as you can see, and they are the native people of Northern Africa. Our Berber tour guide also gave me an Arabian name, Aicha. This means "long life" and I kind of like it.
One week ago, I came back from an absolutely wonderful week in Morocco that not only met my expectations but exceeded them by far. I had been on my second G-Adventures trip which took me from Casablanca to Fés, over the Atlas mountains into the Sahara region, to Todra Gorge, Ait Ben Haddou, and back over the Atlas mountains to Marrakech. Along the way we visited Roman ruins, ate countless Tajine and Couscous dishes with over-sugared green mint teas and enjoyed the February warmth of Morocco.
Video Info: Now that I have a working phone, I can take longer video sequences, so the video of Morocco turned out longer than the other ones. I decided against cutting them too much so you can get more of an idea of the journey. If 12 minutes viewing time is too much for you you can also just keep on reading and look at the pictures of course ;)
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| 1350 km in 5 days |
Our group was also very relaxed, very friendly, and very positive. I came alone since Jan wasn´t interested in both desert and group travel and I was immediately welcomed as part of the group, as was everybody else. We were a "classic" tour and the ages were mixed ranging from around 30 to around 60 I´d say, coming mostly from the US and Canada with two coming also Switzerland and Finland. Our CEO, or tour leader, was Hamid - also a very happy, friendly, and open person who we liked listening to and who always spread an athmosphere of fun around him. All these people made the trip the positive experience that it was!
On Saturday, I arrived late night in Casablanca, waking up my roommate-to-be who didn´t even know I was coming. I was very sorry but it wasn´t my fault after all that the hotel hadn´t told her, or the CEO. She slept quite quickly again, I was too excited to go to sleep and was half-asleep for a long time.
The next morning, we had breakfast at 6:30 and left the hotel at 7:30. We had a few early mornings but being out before the sun rises means you get to snooze some more on the bus whilst enjoying the sunrise outside the van, plus the coffee stop after around two hours when everybody starts truly waking up.
We drove through green valleys on the way to Fés with a stop in Volubilis, very well-kept Roman ruins. It´s nice that you can just walk through them and climb over them with few exceptions such as the floor mosaics.
We then spent two nights in Fés: the first evening just walking around in small groups, sitting in the "park" (a stripe of green with pavements between two roads) along with lots of other families and small children and eating dinner in a small restaurant down the road with the rest of the group. I had vegetable couscous, mint tea, and I also tried some "Pastilla" which can be AWESOME and I can still taste it on my tongue just thinking about it. It´s a chicken/almond pie with powder sugar and cinnamon on top and it tastes a lot better than it sounds. It reminded me a little of the Pastel de Belém in Lisbon, if you ever had one of those.
The next day, we were shown a pottery and mosaic factory (so much handwork!) and taken along a walk through the Medina, the walled old part of the city with tiny alleyways and lots of shops inside.
There were lots of dusty street cats lounging around and I wanted to feed, pet and wash all of them.
Rounding yet another corner, we got to the world-famous UNESCO-heritage site of the leather tannery in the middle of the old city. You can see the little pools in which the leather is softened from balconies from above, and it´s a very interesting sight even though it smells like a pig barn because they use pidgeon excrements and such to treat the leather.
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| University of Karueein, the oldest educational institution that still exists. In Europe, the first university was founded in Bologna 200 years later! |
The afternoon we spent in a Hammam getting exfoliated and washed, followed by a light dinner outside with avocado-nut-raisin sundaes.
The next day was my favorite day of the trip. We got up early again and drove for most of the day, only interrupted by short Nous-Nous breaks (the Moroccan version of Latte Macchiato). The scenery changed from green into stone, we passed the "Moroccan Switzerland" high up in the mountains with hoarfrost on the ground where the rich can study or ski and where the houses don´t have flat roofs like in the rest of the country but steep roofs like in Europe. We saw the Atlas mountains approaching in the distance and passed them, after which the scenery was very different altogether.
On the way, we also stopped to visit a nomad family that lives in a tent made from sticks, carpets, and plastic sheets. We had tea with the lady and were able to ask her some questions about her life.
Morocco as a whole is like going back 100 years in time. This is what the CEO said, and this is also what I felt. People ride on donkeys, do the field-work with animal-pulled ploughs and walk a lot because they can´t afford a car. In the countryside at least it feels like a world that I thought didn´t exist anymore.
In the afternoon we reached our goal at the borders of the Sahara and went for a dip in the pool after being heated up from the sun. Temperatures reached around 27°C in the afternoons, after all! The weather in general was very lovely and I enjoyed it very much.
An hour before sunset we met again, got our turbans ready and mounted the dromedars to ride into the Sahara. When the low sun made all the sand look red, we sat on a high dune and enjoyed the view.
In the evening, we listened to some drums and danced around the fire. I liked it, but was more fascinated by the myriad of stars above us. I had never seen more stars in the sky than in this night, not even in Okavango Delta. They seemed so bright, and there were just so many of them.
The next day, we drove to Todra Gorge and spent the night in a hotel nearby. To be honest, the gorge walk itself wasn´t as nice as I had pictured in my head as it was more a paved road inside the gorge with souvenir sellers and beggars and lots of other tourists. The general scenery before was already nice, too, though, and I liked the afternoon walk we made through the palm-lined fields watered by a clever water-channel system branched off the small river in between the rock walls.
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| ok this is with a filter but it´s still a nice picture huh |
In the evening, I participated in a Tajine cooking class, which was nice, and we spent the evening on the roof terrace eating our dinner with a glass of wine and making jokes.
On our last day together, we drove back over the High Atlas mountains along winding roads towards Marrakech, the last stop on our itinerary. We had some lunch and went on a guided tour to see tombs of one of the royal families that lived around 1500, plus the Bahia palace, a historic palace of the vizier of the king with his four wives (you´re allowed four so that´s the maximum) plus an armada of about 400 concubines but I suppose they didn´t all live there. I had seen both sights before but I still enjoyed the warm air filled with the scent of orange trees blossoming.
Later, we went for a wander, I bought some spices (the "spice mixture of 53 spices" is mostly turmeric I believe but ok) and had a last dinner as a group.
Aaand we´re already at the end! It felt like more than a week. On Monday I already felt like I had spent more than just one and a half days in Morocco because we had seen so much, learned so much, and tasted so much.
I love the strong mint tea, the different culture, the smells, and generally just everything about my trip! I´m so grateful I have the chance to both afford it and actually do it, because right now, this is exactly "my kind of travelling". I enjoy the group travel immensely because you see and do things that you otherwise wouldn´t see or do, or only if you spent a lot of time researching, which I don´t want to.
It´s just fun, and I can sit back and enjoy. Perfect!
All the best and see you!
Aicha
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| and Hamsty |
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