Let me start by saying that the Atlas Mountains are spectacular and I am so glad that I had the chance to tour them. You see such a variety of colour and landscape that you feel you're seeing Morocco, with some Swiss Alps, some French Pyrenees and a bit of Mars thrown in for free!
Visiting the small mountain villages, you get some idea of how basic and hard - but also how surrounded by beauty - life is up in the Atlas.
They seem to have a few fields of crops and a few sheep or goats to subsist on - if they can ever get to goats down from the trees!
In the mountains, you also see some very traditional Moroccan restaurants. I was taken with the tagines cooking outside on the street. They put a tomato or lemon on top to control the steam and add to the fragrance.
As far as the natural beauty thing goes, it may be that you can have too much of a good thing. When I took one local bus right up amongst some of the most breathtaking scenery, my fellow Moroccan passengers either fell asleep or pulled their headscarves over their faces, while I was oohing and aahing and snapping away. This may have been an effort on their part to counteract motion sickness, though, as the roads up in the mountains were really winding. One poor woman on a bus I took spent a good thirty minutes yawning up a rainbow. I was struggling at the time not to join her.
Usually, when I go away from the tourist trail and join the locals, I try to avoid the 'human zoo' thing and respect other people's privacy and not treat them as some sort of exhibit for me to enjoy. But sometimes I can't resist, and I had to catch this sneaky snap of the henna tattoos on the hands of an old woman beside me. You see a lot of this decoration every day over here. It's not just for special occasions.
I was supposed to be heading from the mountains into the desert for a trekking expedition. Unfortunately, I caught cold and had to cancel this plan. I knew from my time in other deserts that they are amazingly beautiful, but also that you boil during the day and freeze during the night, and I just wasn't physically up to that. Instead, I decided to spend a couple of days in Ouarzazate, the doorway to the desert. This was a mistake as Ouarzazate does not have much going on.
There is a pretty impressive kasbah, Kasbah de Taourirt.
To be honest, you see a lot of the same goods - scarves, pottery, wood carvings, etc. - so it was really the old buildings housing the goods in the kasbah that were of interest to me.
There is also a fun museum of cinema.
This is located across from the kasbah and has sets from films like Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator and Babel that were all shot in the area; but aside from that the town of Ouarzazate has a market, a lot of flies and a lot of beggars. I'm being pretty negative about the place, but I think after the splendor of the mountains and the disappointment of no desert trek, if felt like a letdown. I got feverish on my second day of sightseeing around town and spent the rest of my time there in bed. I was not sorry to say goodbye to the place and move on.
Visiting the small mountain villages, you get some idea of how basic and hard - but also how surrounded by beauty - life is up in the Atlas.
They seem to have a few fields of crops and a few sheep or goats to subsist on - if they can ever get to goats down from the trees!
In the mountains, you also see some very traditional Moroccan restaurants. I was taken with the tagines cooking outside on the street. They put a tomato or lemon on top to control the steam and add to the fragrance.
As far as the natural beauty thing goes, it may be that you can have too much of a good thing. When I took one local bus right up amongst some of the most breathtaking scenery, my fellow Moroccan passengers either fell asleep or pulled their headscarves over their faces, while I was oohing and aahing and snapping away. This may have been an effort on their part to counteract motion sickness, though, as the roads up in the mountains were really winding. One poor woman on a bus I took spent a good thirty minutes yawning up a rainbow. I was struggling at the time not to join her.
Usually, when I go away from the tourist trail and join the locals, I try to avoid the 'human zoo' thing and respect other people's privacy and not treat them as some sort of exhibit for me to enjoy. But sometimes I can't resist, and I had to catch this sneaky snap of the henna tattoos on the hands of an old woman beside me. You see a lot of this decoration every day over here. It's not just for special occasions.
I was supposed to be heading from the mountains into the desert for a trekking expedition. Unfortunately, I caught cold and had to cancel this plan. I knew from my time in other deserts that they are amazingly beautiful, but also that you boil during the day and freeze during the night, and I just wasn't physically up to that. Instead, I decided to spend a couple of days in Ouarzazate, the doorway to the desert. This was a mistake as Ouarzazate does not have much going on.
There is a pretty impressive kasbah, Kasbah de Taourirt.
To be honest, you see a lot of the same goods - scarves, pottery, wood carvings, etc. - so it was really the old buildings housing the goods in the kasbah that were of interest to me.
There is also a fun museum of cinema.
This is located across from the kasbah and has sets from films like Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator and Babel that were all shot in the area; but aside from that the town of Ouarzazate has a market, a lot of flies and a lot of beggars. I'm being pretty negative about the place, but I think after the splendor of the mountains and the disappointment of no desert trek, if felt like a letdown. I got feverish on my second day of sightseeing around town and spent the rest of my time there in bed. I was not sorry to say goodbye to the place and move on.
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