the wedding in the village did keep us awake for much of the night - plus worrying about our luggage really has affected us - it is true that we are healthy and in a wonderful place where people are so kindly taking care of us - but still, it is hard not to obsess about where our bags may be and when or if we are ever going to see them again! i stopped taking pictures a while ago because my camera battery charger is in my bag (so is my phone charger) and i fear that i will get to some amazing place and the camera will stop working (this did in fact happen at our fantastic desert camp)
we went over the wonderfully named Tizi n'Tichka pass over the High Atlas mountains - we didn't see snow close up, but amazingly they do have skiing in Morocco and we certainly saw lots of snow on the higher peaks - Lahsen offered us a Berber massage and knowing his weird sense of humor we were very hesitant to agree to anything, but finally figured what the heck? the 'Berber massage' turned out to be about 1/2 hour of riding over very bumpy rutted desert 'roads' without a seat belt so you get tossed back and forth - big fun! Lahsen is in general a fun guy and we've spent happy hours talking with him about his country (he considers himself a Berber way before being a Moroccan) and our country, and his family (2 kids, a girl 15 years old and a boy 12 years old) and his living situation (Marrakech most of the time, but still many visits to his family's village in the middle of nowhere - as it turned out, we wound up visiting his village and had a great time - more on that later)
after our massage we stopped for lunch in Aït Benhaddou, which is used as a setting for tons of movies - the arena from Gladiator is still there as well as some Egyptian statues used for Jewel of the Nile - while having lunch, Kelly and i saw people (crazy people) climbing to the top of a mesa in the boiling hot sun - to my horror, after lunch Lahsen proposed doing that climb! i was (smart and) adamant about not doing it, but he persuaded me to do half the climb so off we went - and somehow eventually i found myself at the top, hot and sweaty but loving the fantastic view of the movie sets and more impressively of the desert on 1 side and the kasbahs on the other - these (mud walled) kasbahs all suffer damage during the short rainy season and it must be very tempting to replace and repair with cement or other more durable materials, but it is a UNESCO World Heritage site and there is some monitoring to make sure it stays authentic - the village was also one of the many trading posts on the commercial route linking ancient Sudan to Marrakesh (i.e. for slave traders as well as traders in gold, silver and salt)
we stopped for the night in Ourzazate in a hotel that contained fantastic Berber art and handicrafts as well as another Mohamed who is the hardest working man in show biz - it seemed that he never left the place and was there to take care of everything, checking us in, serving us dinner, letting us back in, bringing out breakfast the next morning...this hotel was perhaps too authentic in that our room was quite small and very dark - this is probably a good way to keep the building cool but we did feel a bit like Batman might be living in a corner of the room
the hotel was in the middle of a village within the town and there was no way our vehicle could get us close - we were met by Mohamed (thanks to the magic of Lahsen's cell phone) to guide us through dark passageways and extremely narrow streets to get there - these streets were a bit reminiscent of India and Nepal in being very very dirty with unidentified liquid running through the middle - you did not want to get bare flesh anywhere near any of the substances lingering so aromatically in these alleys - and this is a big tourist town - so i imagine there are much down and dirtier areas of Morocco - it is definitely a poor country although the government (personified by the King, whose picture is everywhere and who seems to be well-liked) is trying to improve life with more irrigation schools etc.
the next morning we were to go farther on our way to a big adventure and i will wait for the next couple of entries to describe it!
