By ahblackwell
Over the course of the past few weeks, I have traveled across Morocco on several different excursions. Throughout my excursions, I learned that the country’s landscape is not only beautiful, it is incredibly diverse. My first big trip with my program was our southern excursion. We left the big-city coast of Rabat and headed southeast for Azrou, a small city that sits at the base of the Middle Atlas Mountains. The mountains are one of three main mountain ranges in Morocco, stretching throughout the middle and low-eastern portion of the country. After lunch in Azrou, a delicious and huge lunch (as usual) in a swanky restaurant surrounded by rolling green hills and fresh crisp air, we headed for Midelt, a very small town situated in a valley in the Middle Atlas. We reached Midelt around 5:00pm and used the rest of our available sunlight to explore the area surrounding our hotel, which consisted of a muddy plain that stretched flat and expansive until it jutted straight upward into a dark and snowcapped mountain. We walked out into the plain and watched the sun set standing next to a mud-and-grass farm with donkeys and a friendly puppy named “Rosa” as our companions.
The next day we moved beyond the Middle Atlas Mountains and switched transportation - from tour bus to Land Rover - and raced into the Saharan Desert via the region of Merzouga. We enjoyed a very bumpy (and very smelly) camel ride into the dunes of the desert and climbed one of the highest dunes to watch the sun set. Out of breath from the steep climb, I enjoyed sitting on the soft Saharan sand and watching the sky redden and turn to purple as my friends and our camels became silhouettes around me. The following morning I woke up at 6:00am and headed back out into the dunes by foot (missing my camel..), wrapped in layers against the frigid night air, to sit on another dune and watch the sky brighten and turn pink as the same sun came back to meet us.
We left the desert later that morning, and within hours we were in the plains and mountain-bound, once again. After a night in the city Ourzzazate, where we had dinner and spent the night in a girls’ dormitory, Association Tishka, we headed West. After a brief nap on the bus, I woke up to find my window thick with condensation from the cold air outside. Thick grey rock, slick with rain and frosted with snow, surrounded our bus. Only a few hours after leaving the flat plains near Ourzzazate, we were winding around a wet single-lane road up in the High Atlas Mountains, towering over the neon-green valleys miles below.
We spent the next several days in Marrakech, and large city whose sounds and smells and size are intimidating but captivating. My time in Marrakech was spent eating delicious food and exploring the huge souk, where I witnessed my friend Julia talk down the price of a beautiful woven Amazigh carpet with a very insistent carpet salesman entirely in Arabic, a task which took about a half an hour. It ended successfully, and we made our way out of the souk with Julia’s new carpet nestled safely under her arm. Upon leaving the city, we ate lunch in Tinghir, a gorge of sheer orange rock where Amazigh villagers sold scarves and jewelry along the bank between the road and the river that cuts through the gorge.
My southern excursion ended in Essaouira, a small beach down on the southern coast of Morocco. The old wooden blue fishing boats sitting in the harbor, salty wind whipping their flags, made me reminiscent of beach towns in New England. The old stone castle walls, remnants of an ancient Spanish fort, along with the brown walls of the town’s medina and the shouts in Darija Arabic from the fishermen in their boats were the only indicators of its Moroccan inhabitants. A beach town is a beach town, no matter where you are.
This past weekend we headed north for a short northern excursion (mostly with the intention of renewing our entrance visas in our passports). On Saturday, our first stop was in Ouezzane, a town in the Rif Mountains (the northern-most mountain range). We meandered our way through the old medina, most of which was uphill, to the house of our Academic Director, Abdelhay, and his wife, Farah. The backyard of their house opened to the incredible valleys and mountain ranges of the Rif Mountains, green with the leaves of olive trees. We ate a lunch of homemade olive oil and bread, fava bean soup, salads of eggplant, potatoes and beets, and chicken and olive tajine while listening to jazz music and feeling the cool mountain breeze. It was heaven. We left Ouezzane and traveled further north and out of the mountain range, stopping first in Chefchaouen. Chefchaouen is an incredible little mountain town that is most famous for its medina, whose walls and doors are all painted various shades of light blue. I spent the hour we had to explore climbing the steep incline of the medina streets, getting lost among the blue as I took pictures and said hello to the town’s cats. The medina’s colors stood out brilliantly against the brown stone mountains jutting upward on all sides.
We spent the night in Fnideq and woke early in the morning to cross over into Ceuta, or Septa, the Spanish province in northern Morocco. Rain pelted down on us the entire time we stood outside waiting to cross the border, leaving us soggy and cold on the other side. Our time in Ceuta was short and cloudy and we did not see much of the city. Before heading back to Rabat later that afternoon, however, we did run down to the beach along the Mediterranean coast, and a few of the guys took a quick and freezing dip into the sea’s waves in their boxers before getting back on the bus.
This upcoming week, I will be spending six days living with a family in a rural Amazigh village in the Middle Atlas Mountains with my program. I am looking forward to seeing and learning even more about Morocco’s gorgeous landscape and hidden treasures. And, as with every excursion, traveling through the Moroccan terrain will make me long for Rabat’s crowded but friendly medina where my host family is waiting on their couch to welcome me home for kaskroot (evening snack), watching TV together under layers of blankets.