For the last 3 days of this adventure I headed out to the Sahara desert with Nicole. She had organized for a private guide to pick us up in Imlil and drive us south across the High & Low Atlas Mountain regions, through some unique villages, and eventually into M'Hamid. This is a desert town where we would leave civilization as we know it and head by 4x4 into the Sahara desert. Once in the desert we would rest at an oasis during the hottest part of the day and then head to a Berber camp to take camels out to the Erg Chegaga sand dunes. On the third day we would make the voyage back to Marrakech and then on to Casablanca where I would catch a flight to Boston via Madrid. I enjoyed a quick breakfast in Imlil before heading down to the taxi rank where we met the chauffeur, Muhammed. To our surprise we also met Sylvia and Georgia, two Italian women that our guide company had added to our trip. Now Nicole had negotiated a price based on a two people, so I got on the phone with the company and negotiated a 15% price reduction before we would pay. Once resolved, we headed out for an awesome time. Day 22 was a long day of driving but we enjoyed majestic views in the mountains and unique villages in the desert. We drove into the High Atlas Mountains in a Toyota 4-Runner on a two lane road that wound it's way on cliff edges and through switchbacks for 2 hours. The ride was intense, with Muhammed passing other cars while heading into blind turns and with limited guardrails and easily a 1,000 ft drop. We stopped for the Italians to get breakfast at a place Muhammed knew that had a terrace overlooking a huge mountain valley from over 2,000 meters high. So the 4 of us enjoyed coffee and fresh orange juice in this restaurant in the mountains of Morocco. The first of many great stops. So a quick word about the new fellowship. Sylvia is a woman probably in her early 30s who grew up just north of Cinque Terra, Italy. She is an interior designer who after finishing her education moved to Casablanca because of a booming real estate market. She's been in Casa for 10 years and speaks Italian, English, French, & Spanish. She's very engaging and has no problem with me peppering her with questions about French pronunciation and grammar. Georgia and Sylvia are childhood friends and she is a lawyer in Italy. She's a bit less outgoing, but clearly well educated. Though she doesn't speak as confidently as Sylvia, I find her grasp of French to be more strong than Sylvia's, who learned informally over time in Morocco. The two of them are very friendly, and encouraged Nicole and I to negotiate a lower rate for the tour; and they are very flexible as we now discuss combined plans over the next 3 days. In fact, I say that add to the enjoyment of the trip. while we sacrifice absolute authority over the agenda, we saved money, picked up a fluent French speaker, and made some new friends. Muhammed is quite a character. He's exactly how I picture a Berber to be. He's Moroccan born from a Berber mother and an Arab father and is a practicing Muslim. I can't tell if he's been formally educated or is just street savvy, but he's like an encyclopedia when it comes to questions about the history, politics, and social issues of the regions we visited. Muhammed speaks Arabic, French, English, Spanish, and the High Atlas Berber dialect (a mixture of French and Arabic). He lives in Marrakech with his wife and 3 pre-teenage kids. An incredibly friendly guy and I came to enjoy his company as we manned the front of our rig. Muhammed taught me many things, but the most pertinent is the difference between Bedouins and Nomads. To my ignorant eye they are the same. They dress in the long flowing fabrics covering most of their body and heads, they keep camels and donkeys, and they live off of and in the desert in huts, caves, and tents. The difference is origin. The Bedouin are of Arabic decent while the Nomads are of Berber, which implies they are from the Atlas Mountain region. There are not many Berber in Arabia, but there are plenty of Bedouin in Morocco. We would see both over the next few days. After breakfast we continued out of the High Atlas until we arrived at a trail intersecting the paved road. Muhammed missed it, pulled off the road and reversed back to the trail. He switched it to 4-wheel drive and into the desert we went. After 20 minutes of bouncing around the rig we emerged on to a different paved road with a small village in the horizon. This was AĂŻt Benhaddou, a film location for Hollywood blockbusters such as Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Lawrence of Arabia, Jewel of the Nile, and Indiana Jones. To tie the blog back to the Camino, the main character in Gladiator, Maximus, was from Galicia which is the last junta through which I walked. Now months later I'm standing where the Arabian scenes were filmed. For those familiar with the movie, this city is shown as Proximo's house and the site for the first gladiator battle. In Indiana Jones I THINK it's the city where Indiana shoots the swordsman in the marketplace in the first installment, but that needs to be fact checked. After this we drove to a small pottery village but before arriving Sylvia asked Muhammed to pull over so we could visit a village not overrun with tourists. This was my first exposure to a kasbah, which is a building created from a dried mixture of mud and grass and connected to others of the same material to create one huge structure. The building materials are essentially free since they are ubiquitous to the region, but require a high degree of maintenance. The people here had built a structure at least 150 meters long and wide, creating a labyrinth of near pitch black alleys throughout. We definitely got ourselves lost a couple times as we walked around fumbling in the dark and hoping not to stumble into a private residence. One little girl took a liking to our group and asked me for one of my bracelets. I have her one and helped her put it on, and though shy, was very pleased with herself. She and her friends shadowed us the rest of our visit, though offered no direction when we took a wrong turn. After this we drove to the pottery village where we witnessed the all encompassing commotion of a Berber wedding. I forgot to write down the name, but it translates into "Last Village Before the Desert." As we drove up we saw hundreds of people crammed into a main thoroughfare and heading away from us. Muhammed confirmed with his friend that it was a wedding and we later learned more about it. A Berber wedding ceremony is a massive celebration lasting 3-5 days and for up to 6 couples. Every family in the village chips in to help with the cost. As we moved further south we noticed an increase in the demographics as it moved to mostly black people. Muhammed explained that this was because over time people from central Africa had migrated north. This particular village had previously been slaves of the neighboring city Zagora. It was interesting to see the shift in physical appearance, and even customs, as we moved further south. This would become more apparent later, but it was noticeable even now. While here we visited a pottery making operation. That's not to say a factory, but rather a primitive manual operation that still produced high quality products. Villagers dig up the clay nearby, being it here to make the moulding mixture, and then shape it using a pedal powered wheel located in a hole in the ground. The operator literally climbs into the hole to waist depth and works at this level. After shaped it is cured, and then put into a simple kiln made from a pile of rubble. In their shop we saw our first reference to Timbuktu as the popular sign showing the number of days walk across the frontier to get there. The beauty of this area, and the sublime clash of Arabic, African, and desert combine to such a unique culture. I'm struggling to find the right words to describe it, so hopefully the pictures will help. We left the last village after sunset and drove on a crumbling asphalt road as a nearly full moon peeked over the mountains in the distance. Another eerie experience as we sped past motorbikes and pedestrians walking in the dark and the nearest village at least 10 km away in any direction. Suddenly we came across a police checkpoint literally in the middle of the desert. Muhammed provided his credentials and the vehicle registration and were allowed to pass. This dumbfounded me. These people don't have sanitary drinking water, but they prioritize a police checkpoint in the dark somewhere in the desert. We overnighted in a hotel that was straight out of the Star Wars planet Tatooine. The facilities were modern but built out of the same mid mixture seen throughout the region. The difference here being that everything was square and clean, whereas the other kasbah's were not. But when I say modern I mean that they had modern water pipes. I didn't say they had running water to fill those pipes. In fact, the pressure was so low that water wouldn't even trickle out at times. I think they were using a solar powered water heater and either it was empty or they had shut off the valve to conserve or to divert to something like the kitchen. So a nice group dinner where we decided that we would spend the next day in the desert, despite Muhammed's insistence that it was too hot. I think we were jaded from our experience with Moroccans using the bait and switch tactic and so we pushed back and firmly stated our desire to stick to the schedule. In hindsight, I'm not sure that was the best decision, but that's for another time.
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