All posts tagged: Morocco

10 Things to be Aware of When Visiting Morocco

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#1 The roads The roads, other than the big toll motorways, are pretty bad. Admittedly probably not so bad if you’re in a car rather than a 22ft motorhome, but even then they’re a long way off what I’m used to. One of my main gripes was width, with even major roads only just wide enough for two cars to pass each other and certainly not a whole lot of breathing space. Potholes, of which there are many, are another major nuisance with some roads seeming to consist mostly of pothole and not much else. The edges of many of the roads are strangely broken away so that if you did want to give that enormous coach hurtling towards you at 100 mph a little more room, you’d fall off the mini-cliff at the edge of the road and crash anyway. It all makes for some pretty hairy driving at times but as I say a car would not be quite as problematic as a motorhome. #2 Coaches If I went to Morocco again I …

10 Reasons to love Morocco

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Righto then, as I’m a travel blogger of sorts (in that I travel and I blog), I thought it was about time I did one of those listy blog posts that travel bloggers like to do. And as I’m now at the end of the Moroccan episode of the adventure, it seems fitting that I should wrap it up with a couple of vaguely advisory posts about the whole affair. So, without further ado, these are ten of the reasons why you should visit Morocco: #1 Every Journey is Epic I think I’ve probably said this many times to quite a lot of people, it’s become my Morocco related catchphrase, but it’s absolutely true. If you drive anywhere apart from the major motorways along the coast, you will be blown away by the scale and variety of landscapes. What’s more, lots of it feels familiar in a ‘seen it in the movies’ kind of way and because of all those romantic movie associations, every journey is moving. As I’ve said (a million times!) the mountain …

Photoblog – Azrou, Volubilis & Chefchaouen

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Given that the blog is now approximately eight weeks behind our actual lives, I’m attempting to cover some ground with this photoblog. The chronology is a little out but apart from Fez these three places were our last stops in Morocco and we drove like people possessed to get round them before we had to zoom off to Spain to see waiting grandparents. I’m going to wrap up the Morocco adventures with the next two posts and then it’ll be all about Espana! But for now enjoy these last few piccies (and Rob’s little debut) – especially the ones of Chefchaouen, which was a total treat for a lass that likes to take photographs. Azrou Volubilis – Rob I used to be an archaeologist, and while I got tired of scraping around in the earth looking for tiny fragments of pottery, I retain a high level of geekery about ancient sites. I was very excited about visiting Morocco; the place is littered with remarkable remnants of the Roman Empire which I had been taught about …

Fez

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Fez was to be our last big stop before we left Morocco to meet my parents in Southern Spain and we drove almost the entire length of the country to get there. Leaving the baking desert at Merzouga, we stopped only briefly at Azrou for a spot of monkey-bothering and once for an overnight rest at the Ziz Gorge, passed by the still snowy Atlas mountains and arrived in Fez only three days later. We were determined that our Fez experience wouldn’t be a repeat of our Marrakech misery and, to that end, we booked into a guesthouse within the medina itself, hoping to be able to give ourselves up to the sensory onslaught of the souks, then slip back into the calm of the dar (like a riad)* and recover. Our customary frugality was also abandoned for the weekend as we knew it would all be much more enjoyable if we could enter into some friendly haggling. To help us start our aquaintance with Fez without getting immediately lost, the guesthouse owner Brian met …

sahara desert

Into the Desert

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 …