M’hamid is a little town of about 4,000 people located in the mid-eastren part of morocco, along the Algerian border. So the first day we flew into Marrakesh, a pretty big city in central Morocco, piddled around for a day (SO SO cool, will explain later), met up with the rest of the group and took a seven-hour bus ride through the night over the Atlas Mountains and into the Sahara to M’hamid.
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| Marrakesh is in the center-left, then move your eyes southwest across the Atlas Mts to find M'hamid along the Algerian boarder. |
Interestingly enough, we could see the Algerian boarder from one of our campsites. Our guides said they used to trek a major trade route from M’hamid to Timbuktu on camelback all the time, but now, the borders are closed. At one point we were able to see military personnel in the distance. It seems like it would be really hard/kinda pointless to patrol a border in the open dessert!
Anyways, the first day we flew into Marrakesh! Mollie and I came a day earlier than the rest of the group so we’d have time to explore the city before heading into the desert. I was so excited when we crossed over the ocean on the plane…I took a picture of leaving the European continent, and then one when we crossed over onto Africa, woot whoot for continent #3!
After recent events in Tunisia and Egypt, and much talk of a domino effect across northern Africa, we had almost canceled the entire trip twice. Soo we were still a bit nervous about the whole thing...that is until we got on the plane and noticed that over 40% of the passengers were families with young children. Hahaa, there were SO many kids – laughing, crying, running down the plane isles without pants—craziness! Why are all these college kids so worried about going to Morocco when all the French people are perfectly fine with taking their small children?! Haha, silly Americans… J
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| Looking out over a Marrakesh garden built in memory of Yves Saint Laurent (apparently famous...i dont know him but maybe you do) |
So, back to Marrakesh. Major tourist attractions: the beautiful gardens (both public and private/built in memory of famous rich people), the mosques (Morocco is predominately Muslim), and the souks – huge markets of spices, leather goods, fruit, pottery, jewelry packed into these little streets/corridors that are like a maze and so easy to get lost in, where you have to haggle with vendors to get the price ya want. Though its kinda stressful, I thought haggling with the vendors was ridiculously fun. They would start out at like 400 durams for a nice leather bag, and then you slowly work your way down, pretending like your friend bought the same one for 70…and then buy it for 110. Conversion rate: 10 durams = about 1 USD. Yeah, so things are pretty cheap. A large glass of fresh squeezed orange juice? 4 durams (40 cents!), a huge plate of chicken tajine (a typical Moroccan dish with couscous, veggies, and meat) with bread and olives? 30 durams (3 dollars).
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| lovin' the colors! |
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| the souks |
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| moroccan goods (pic credit to Elliot) |
The only bad thing about Marrakesh was the attitude towards women…Mollie and I were so annoyed…lots of cat calls, and guys that are like “hello my girl, were you looking for me?” and try to stop you, or pretend they want to practice their French with you…it was really weird, but then the next day when we were walking around with Elliot and Farlen (two guys on the trip) it was much much better.
So to explore the city, Mollie and I just decided to start walkin around and see where we ended up! We found some cool gardens
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| Mosque in the background, little tourist horse & buggy in front! |
And saw this random, huge stone wall in the distance so decided to go check it out..still don’t know what it was.
So on Monday evening, we meet up with the rest of the group at the airport and took a seven hour bus ride in a 15 passenger van across the Atlas Mountains. It was ABSURD. Haaaha the road was so curvy, like almost Valley Crucis curvy—except there weren’t any guardrails, just these little short crumbling rock walls, and it was night time, so you couldn’t really see a lot, but you could just barley make out the contours of the mountains, and could only tell how high up we were/how low the valley was by how deep the darkness seemed or if there was a house with a light on down below. And although I think technically the roads were two-laned…they were pretty narrow, and probably wouldn’t have counted as two-laned in the states! The driver would lay on the horn when we went around sharp curves to warn other cars. And of course he was going really fast. Tom Graham, you would have loved driving like this guy.
As I’m sure you can imagine, it was pretty hard/basically impossible to sleep. Then the driver turned on some really great/funky drum + instrumental Arabic music, and Elizabeth told him it was ok if he wanted to turn it up, so he turned it up a lot, hahaaaa it was great. We couldn't stop laughing. The Party Bus.
Then around 2am, we drove through a little town with no streetlights which was M’hamid, and then kept driving a little ways, now only desert on either side of the road, and then pulled off the road, drove in the sand for a couple minutes, and then got out of the car, and walked over a sand dune to see our camp, a little cluster of white tents lit by candle light. It was really cool. And the stars…oh the stars…I don’t know if I’ve ever seen them so clear!
Since we arrived in utter darkness, it was pretty stunning to get up, open the door of the tent, and see mounds of sand going for miles and miles and all directions, until meeting the cloudless blue Moroccan sky. It was astonishingly beautiful.
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| the bivouac a.k.a. fancy tents |
After breakfast, we packed up the camels with our food, blankets, and backpacks, and left the bivouac for the open desert.
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| howdy camel! |
We were hiking at a pretty relaxed pace, haha definitely not booking it – on Morocco time. We passed through several old deserted communities where many years ago people had tried to set up tourist establishments...and failed. So there were some cool-lookin’ reddish-brown, stucco buildings . I think they were composed mostly of dirt and straw type stuff held together by who knows what. Reminded me of the little model pueblos we had to make it 5th grade. In the sand near these settlements there were lots of cool broken pottery pieces (not sharp, rounded by years of weathering by the sand) which being a little crafty dork, i just had to collect in hopes of making something out of them when i get home!
Apparently there is a town about 100 miles south of M'hamid that makes this unique green glazed pottery with some minerals that are found in the area. Basically all the dishes we ate on were this same beautiful dark green glaze. Even when we were invited to eat with Professor Boughrab's family (pretty big deal to be invited to dine with a moroccan family) all the dishes were this same color. A lot of the pottery shards i found were also this same green, so what every glaze it is, they must have been making it for quite a while!
On our second day of trekking, we hiked through an oasis. It was really cool walking up to it b/c you just see sand on all sides...and then this little green island in the distance. There were actually several houses, and a school built around the oasis, and lots of little patches of farmland (most just growing a type of hay/grass to feed to the donkeys and goats).
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| me chillin in the oasis |
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| donkey muchin on some green grass in the oasis |
For a good portion of the trek we were actually walking through a dried-up riverbed. This river (forget the name...) ran through the Moroccan desert until 1990 when it was dammed up to create a lake to facilitate irrigation and provide hydroelectric power for communities upstream. As an environmental science major, this is exactly what i study and read about in textbooks...the effect of humans and urbanization on mother earth. I talked with Baoroc a bit about what he thought about hte lake...whether it was a good for the community or not...this is where our language barriers kinda came into play (both speaking french as second language, my first being english, his being Arabic) but he talked a lot about how there used to be lots of birds and wildlife and now there aren't. L Also, I'm not exactly sure whether or not this was like a continually flowing river, since it doesn’t typically rain in the desert, it was probably just certain times during the year corresponding with snowfall/melting in the Atlas Mountains.
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| crackily mud |
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| trail marker in one section of the riverbed. and yes, i added a rock on top |
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| shell found in the old riverbed |
So about rain in the desert – on our last night in M'hamid it RAINED! And not just a sprinkle, quite a bit! Sooo thats when we found out my tent had several holes in it. Hahaa...typical.
Rain in the desert is obviously pretty rare...the last time they had even a drop was over 3 months ago, so normally they don’t really worry about holey tents. So Mollie and I just took all our wet stuff and slept in the dining tent.
All this precipitation coming down as rain in M'hamid was coming down as snow in the higher elevations of the Atlas Mountains. Since there was a bit of black ice on those curvy, guardrail-less mountain roads, so they closed the roads and we had to change our plans for getting back to Marrakesh.
So instead of our private 15 passenger party bus, we got to experience Moroccan public transportation! We got up at six am and took a 10-hour charter bus ride through the Moroccan countryside. It was really long, but the scenery was gorgeous.
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| looking down on a village from the mountain roads |
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| driving over the Atlas mountians |
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| snow! |
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| Lush, eastren side of the Atlas |
And then about an hour into the ride, the kid in front of me threw up. And then the girl beside Mollie threw up. And then the two girls across the aisle from me threw up. And then i moved to a different part of the bus.
Hahaa...ohhh what a ride. J
Check back in a day or two, there's much more to come!
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