Author: Selina Gough

sahara desert

Into the Desert

Published by

Going into the desert. It’s a concept loaded with meaning and not just for those of us who’ve broken our hearts watching Deborah Winger in The Sheltering Sky. From Laurence of Arabia to Jesus’ forty days and forty nights, it’s impossible to escape associations with solitude, vast unrepentent wilderness and the deep domed sky. I went to the desert expecting to feel small, to look out at miles and miles of undulating sand and contemplate my own insignificance amidst the hugeness of it all. Trekking on camels to a Berber camp? A night under the desert sky? This would surely be the ultimate traveller moment, wouldn’t it? Our desert ‘experience’ started with meeting our strangely lovable tour organiser and being taken to meet our camels and guides. The guides were dressed for tourists in the blue Berber robes we’d come to recognise at all the Moroccan visitor hotspots, but my first thought as we wobbled off on our camels was that if the guides were on foot surely that made our camel transport surplus to …

Ait Ben Haddou

Photo blog – Taliouine to Todra

Published by

In between what you see in these pictures, imagine us undertaking more crazy six hour drives up barely surfaced mountain roads in second gear. Imagine children running alongside our van sometimes waving, sometimes throwing stones and sometimes making *ahem* lewd gestures. Imagine us waiting for herds of goats just lying in the road. Imagine us taking detours more suited to a tank than a classic Hymer, where flooded rivers have blown the roads out. Imagine us stopping for lunch and shopping at a market where there are sheep’s heads piled on the floor outside the butcher’s stall. Imagine us wandering a town that’s featured in movies, where only a few people live but there’s a rug salesman around every corner. Imagine an American film crew running up and down steps in the heat of the afternoon, their sound guy looking as if he could do with some medical help. Imagine us walking through lush palmeries, heavy with the scent of almond blossom, where quietly intent people toil at their perfect little patches of fertile earth. …

Dust to Dust

Published by

The Rough Guide that we used for Morocco is over ten years old and whilst at times this has rendered it a somewhat unreliable source of information, it nevertheless provided us with an interesting perspective on some of the ways Morcocco has changed since the book was written. The roads, although not always great, are much improved and the increase in tourism are two obvious ways in which the Morocco of today differs from that of over a decade ago. Reading about the villages of the Anelm valley, close enough to Tafraoute for a day visit, we were told that the buildings of one were ‘bizarre constructions’ built almost on top of one another, but when we visited Oumesnat ourselves we found that there was little evidence of the original village as experienced by the author.* Once upon a time, Morocco’s buildings were formed from the earth itself. The ksars and ksours rose up from the ground in the same shades as the land that surrounded them. The people of those settlements had their own …

Painted Rocks and Punctures

Published by

As it turned out, we entirely missed the almond blossom festival; not from arriving too late, as we’d feared, but in fact because we were two weeks early. We enjoyed Tafraoute so much, however, that it didn’t seem to matter that we were going to be leaving before the festvities began. Staying for nearly a week meant that we could adventure out beyond our immediate surroundings, and make a couple of guide-book suggested visits. Getting out to the painted rocks on our bikes was an opportunity for us to get out properly into the landscape. Having only biked between the van and the town, I think we were all eager to go on an expedition into the curious lumpy outcrops that characterise Tafroute’s surroundings. Rob and I canvassed opinion from fellow motorhomers and consulted various websites and guides on the exact distance to the rocks and the time it would take. As all parents know, cycling or walking with children is all fabulous fun until everyone gets tired and whiny and then something enjoyable becomes …

Tafraoute – Finding my Travelling Feet

Published by

After Essaouira we headed off down the coast with vague ideas of spending some time near the sea before heading to Tafraoute in the south of Morocco. Tafraoute had long been an eagerly anticipated destination for us. It was always to be the most southerly place on our itinerary, the town where we would finally adopt a slower pace of travel. Whilst Morocco dreaming and Google-searching from my kitchen table in Hebden Bridge I’d stumbled across heart-stirring pictures of blossoming almond trees set against arid red landscapes and discovered that every year the town of Tafraoute held a festival to celebrate this transient spectacle. The dates of the festival were hard to determine so we pledged to try and get there for early February in order not to miss it and it was this aim that had kept us moving so quickly. Through the empty, icy nights of central France, the grim downpours of Northern Spain and and the various trials of our first weeks in Morocco, Tafraoute pulled us on. I think it’s fair …

Fertile Roots – dust, wind and permaculture

Published by

On reaching Essaouira and finding the calming campsite mentioned in this post, we finally took some time to unwind. Up until that point we’d barely stayed more than two nights at any one place and dearly needed to stop for a while. Our time at Esprit Nature restored some of our equilibrium and we hoped that moving on afterwards to a permaculture project down the road would continue the settling down process. Fertile Roots, as the foundation is known, is homed on a little piece of land close to the sea some 10km up the coast from Essaouira. Although the hills behind are thick with argan and thuya trees, this little strip of earth is wind-stripped and arid. Its owner, Mark Anstice, bought the land without ever clapping eyes on it and although it could be tempting to call the move foolish, having more sympathy for blind leaps of faith these days, I call it bold. I’d been planning to visit Mark since we first conceived of travelling to Morocco but the track to take …

Pockets full of Rubbish (or How to Entertain Children Whilst Travelling!)

Published by

Despite some of my fears about how the boys would cope with Morocco and travelling in general, on the whole I’d say they’ve managed well. The first week or two were definitely challenging for all of us and particularly our littlest drifter, but since then I’ve been impressed with how the boys have adapted to a life on the move. In some ways, the circumstances of their previous lives have helped with their transition to a transitory way of being; neither of them were in school or kindergarten and, although our days at home were unstructured, we’ve never watched much TV or spent a huge amount of time in front of a screen, so they were both well primed for chunks of boredom. It’s also a huge help that Eli loves to read and will spend entire days immersed in a book, giving only the occasional grunt to signal that he knows we are there at all. Monty has found it harder to occupy himself, especially on some of our longer drives but mostly between …

Marrakech, expressed

Published by

Morocco has defied our expectations at every turn, but not necessarily in ways that we have expected. We turn up at campsites that bear no resemblance to their descriptions and the ever changing landscape continues to surprise and confuse us; but nowhere has confounded us more than Marrakech. As our campsite is a good few kilometres out of town, we initially take a taxi to the Jardin Majorelle, the artist’s garden famously patronised by Yves Saint Laurent. I’m hoping that entering the city this way, surrounded by the calm coolness of the carefully tended gardens, will enable us to acclimatise slowly, to dip a timid toe into the life of this most overwhelming of cities. It’s a gentle and stress-free environment, protected from the heat and chaos outside the gates; the blue pools and perfectly swept paths soothe us all and afterwards we walk with confidence towards the medina, with its souks and famous Jemaa el-Fnaa square.We think we are ready. Ready for all that our imaginations had promised; a sensory overload, a cacophany of hagglers, hustlers …

Rabat – The Good, the Bad and the…funny

Published by

The Good Although we hadn’t expected to stop at Rabat, thinking that it was largely a modern city with little to offer the tourist or traveller, we were pleasantly surprised by the charm of the old medina. It was Sunday, and it felt like a holiday! Crowds of people wandered the gardens and the old town, eating toffee apples and candy floss and taking lots of selfies! We saw a collection of people around a food stall where several men seemed to all be involved in the process of making a complicated snack of many ingredients; fried sardines, little spicy dumplings, eggs, herbs, harissa and more besides, all squashed into the cavity of a round bread. We ordered one, we should have ordered more, then stood and waited with everyone else. Whilst we hovered eagerly we asked one of the men nearby what this exotic delicacy was called. ‘Sandwich’ he replied, ‘mixed’. It remains one of the best things we’ve eaten during our entire stay in Morocco. The Bad Not really bad at all and …