People of Morocco

I have a few pictures of some of the people of Morocco that I took as we traveled. I wanted pictures of the women in their flowing garments. Their headscarves and the long robes they wore were sometimes very beautiful. Even those there were a  solid color, even sometimes all black, still gave them a sense of grace. Now, sometimes we saw quite elderly women walking alongside one of those crazy, curvy roads out in the rural areas in flowing garments, but they were carrying sacks of sticks/wood or rugs or some sort of fabric that simply bundled this wood together. It was pretty hard then to admire their garments when you saw these women (and might I say – Never a man) carrying these burdens. What we were told later is that because other forms of fuel for cooking/heating is expensive, carrying wood from somewhere else to home is still the norm and it is still the job of the woman.

So, hee are pictures of some folks I took as we drove. Some from out in the desert. Some from at the farming co-op and at the fossil musuem.

Vehicles I Have Met!

You know that TV show called "Most Dangerous Road" (or something like that) on Current TV? Well..... been there, done that. The Atlas mountain roads are curvy, full of switchbacks, and narrow roads with nothing to keep you from careening over the sides and into the valleys except your good sense and the good will of the oncoming traffic. Plus, in many places, the oncoming vehicles or even the vehicles you had to pass were not what we normally see in the good old US.

Not so unusual, but the tractors often were overloaded with people and had a variety of cloth covers for shade.

There were a million versions of this litle truck. Some had real roofs, some had shade like covers and some went topless like this one. They were driven in the city as well as most villages. Again - at times, several people could be riding on these.

These were only in the cities and functioned as sight seeing taxis I believe. All were elaborate in their decorations.

                      Yes, that is a truck in front of Michael LOADED with big bags stuffed with ??

                                                   Passing was pretty easy on this road.....

other times, a little hairy. And actually I couldn't take pictures of the really scary ones where someone had to backup for a little ways to a wider spot in the road or where one vehicle had to really, really hug the side of the mountain to allow room for the others. I couldn't take pictures because I was busy watching the edges of the car, moving the mirror in or just holding my breath.

And no report would be complete without mentioning the double decker transports that hauled cattle or sheep in these two story arrangements! I kid you not. Cows and sheep apparently willingly stand in the top level of these trucks and ride over narrow, winding, high mountain roads without a problem? Sometimes there were also people up in those top levels too. I could not tell if the animals were tied down somehow?? There were horse hauling trucks as well, but not on double decker trucks. Now that I think of it, I don't remember seeing goats in these kind of trucks. So... either goats and horses are too valuable to risk having them jump out or there are too difficult/smart to get up there. Who knows? Often both levels were indeed packed tightly with animals.

This is only a quick show of these trucks we saw. I might add though that most trucks sport very colorful paint jobs with lots of wooden designs attached and lots of flags, banners beads, etc hanging inside the cab as well.

Catching Up

OK, so here's the deal. My intention was to every night of this trip write snappy information for you and download great pictures. But, as I mentioned earlier, internet was not always accessible and often, if it was accessible, it was slow. So..... I got way behind (ugh) but now, I want to catch up. But instead of doing these next entries by dates of the rest of our trip, I am going to write and enter by topic. So my first topic will be Taxis. Yes, you read that correctly. I did a thorough study of the little taxi business of all of towns we drove through. All medium to large towns have different color Petite Taxis.

                                                                       Rabat's little blue taxi.

                                      Fes had little red cars (or for the native - le petitie rouge taxi).

                        This light green VW Rabbit was in one of the small towns we went through.

Petite beige in Marakesh.

Petite blanc on the way to Cassablanca.

And in Cassablanca itself - we were back to red!

Petite taxis could take only three people, sometimes four. Then there were large taxis that could take multiple fares which made things much cheaper for the passengers but then I guess you had to perhaps venture out of your way to get the other passengers to your destination.

When we rode in the blue taxis in Rabat, we had great drivers. One guy wanted to get us to enlist Michael's help to get him a VISA (our mistake for telling him where our son-in-law worked.) The second one who brought us home from one of our adventure days on our own wanted to teach us Arabic words for common things that we might need to know.

Journey into the Desert

I look back on this event - this adventure into the desert and still find it amazing that we did it. Riding a camel across dunes that have been the subject of many books, epic tales and movies (Lawerence of Arabia, Secrets of the Sahara, etc) was truly not ever on my life list of things to do. But, I am so glad that we had this opportunity.
These trips are set up to leave the starting point (several different desert hotels along the edge of the dunes) late in the afternoon. For us, the distance to our encampent for the night was about 90 minutes at a camel's pace. The winds had finally died down to be replaced by intermittent light rain. Our family and four visitors from Spain all left from Hotel Yasmina but in two groups. We gathered our few things to take with us - a change of clothes and our cameras and walked from the patio to the waiting camels.

Notice my head gear. Jenny and I decided if you are going to ride a camel, we must dress appropriately. There is an art to this head gear AND one must wrap according to need - if you need to cover your face, you wrap one way, if you don't, you wrap a different way.

Some of us rode double.

While others manned their camel all alone.

                                             Will chose to ride alone as did Pops.

And .... we were off. Our guide was Ahdid (that is probably not spelled correctly), and I apologize. He was wonderful. He spoke at least four languages, most of which he said he learned from the guests he took out into the desert. He was very attentive, helping us with everything:

1. Getting onto the camel (which you try to do like one would mount a horse. The camel is lying down and you try to throw you leg over and get on. However, the camel is still pretty tall, so you throw you leg over, lay forward on your stomach and then pull yourself up into a sitting position. Sorry, no pictures of this, thank goodness.)

2. Rescuing fallen objects that you lose as you bounce along - water bottles, pacifiers and shoes (Donovan and Pops).

3. Rescuing fallen people - ok, so Philip didn't fall off, but almost. As we climbed the first dune (and it was a small one), Philip began to slide backwards off of his camel's back. We were all laughing so hard, no one got a picture, but you can see that he rode far back on this poor camel, which contributed to this situation. Our guide ran back and offered Philip a push back up therefore preventing an actuall "fall from camel" event.

4. Photographer - he took many of our pictures for us.

5. Actual guide duties - giving us information and getting us to camp!

It rained on us on the way to camp and the sky was gray, but it was still great. We saw other caravans of desert visitors close by and off in the distance, but we were the best looking group!

About 90 minutes later, we crested a dune and saw our home for the night.

We had a dining tent, a cooking tent, our individual sleeping tents and a bathroom tent.

Layers and layers of rugs and blankets everywhere! We ate and slept very well. The food, tea and company were great.The night was very dark and very quiet. The weather cleared during the night and we were awakened early in the morning to go outside and watch the sun rise. 

Good morning from Hotel Yasmina

We awoke the next morning to the sound of the wind whistling loudly outside of our windows. The wind was ferocious and it was cold! This was not what we expected. We were even due to have rain! This was not what we expected. Yesterday had been sunny and hot. We were prepared to go to the desert on our might camel steeds and sweat!
However, the caravan doesn't depart each day until late in the afternoon, so we had time to kill and time for the weather to change.

So, after breakfast, but no swimming as the boys were hoping far like last night ... It was so cold, we were in layers of clothing.

Since we had time to kill during the day, we were able to hire a guide to take us by car down along the communites along the base of the dunes and let us visit some of the interesting parts of life. Our guide was Abraham. He was excellent. His English was very good and he had a wealth of information to share with us.

First, we visited a community farming area. Abraham was very thorough in showing us the well system:

the shared farming area:

the irrigations system:

While driving around, we passed an area that is the set for a new movie. Filming had just started the day before. The movie is called "The Physician" and will star Ben Kingsley. Sadly, we did not get to see him nor were we called upon to be extras in the movie!



Next, we sent to visit a small community that is the home to people whose familes originally came from Sudan. They are certainly Moroccan citizens, but have retained some of their Sudanese culture. Some of the men have a singing and dancing group. Apparently, they are quite famous and have performed at some official singing festivals. They performed for us. Jenny bought the CD and a set of their musical "castonets".

After this, we took off across the sand back toward the Hotel Yasmina to rest and get ready for our camel trek out to the desert!!

Second Day Out

On our second day out we made our way to the edge of the Sahara. This was a great deal of car time with young kids (but they were in the other car), so we can't really say we had it tough. Their parents on the other hand, had a lot of game playing, eating, singing, video watching, etc to do!

We drove until we came to a turn off that literally put us into pretty extreme off- road conditions. It was late in the afternoon and darkness was upon us. But our trusty navigators, armed with 3-G wireless, I-PADS, GPS and radios navigated their way to the Hotel Yasmina.

We were greeted by Yousef, the owner, given the traditional hot mint tea and fruit/pastries to eat on the back balcony, while we checked in.

The boys made a quick exit to The Dunes!

We had a nice dinner again prepared Moroccan style and retired for the night at the edge of the beautiful orange dunes of the Sahara.

The Fes Medina tannery

As I mentioned in the earlier post, we concluded our medina visit in Fes by visiting the tannery.

We had to walk outside of the narrow inner hallways of the medina.

We began to smell a fairly strong aroma. Then our guide stopped us temporarily, disappeared inside a building, then returned with several sprigs of mint for us to hold to our noses before entering the walls of the tannery. We climbed several flights of stairs before reaching an upper balcony where we overlooked the vats containing the dye.

We were told that the different colors of dye are created using natural products - herbs, flowers, etc. Every one of those vats is a different color.

The smell here was pretty awful! After this viewing we were taken through the shop below where clothing, purses, shoes and household decor products all made from leather was for sale.

This was the end of the tour. Then it took us another great while to find a taxi. But, we did. On the way back we crowded into two vehicles and made it back to our hotel!!

Back at our wonderful little hotel, Jenny and her gang were served a Moroccan dinner in their room while Philip and I ate in the dining room. The food was great, but we found ourselves eating at 11:00pm!!