Ouarzazate

In the midst of all the house shenanigans, I take an impromtu trip down to Ouarzazate, and leave Caitlin to fend for herself in Marrakech. Ouarzazate is an old French garrison town, the gateway to the Moroccan desert, and the film center of Morocco. My trip was too brief to see much beyond the string of high-end hotels and the studios, but we’ll be back to explore when the summer heat wanes.

From Marrakech, Ouarzazate is a 4-5 hour bus drive over the Atlas Mountains. There’s no air conditioning on the bus, and the locals and tourists packing it raise the temperature significantly above the 105-degree swelter outside. The trip is a terrifying rollercoaster ride up and down a narrow switchback road with stops every hour or so for the driver to get out and smoke a cigarette.

The town boasts two film studios, which have hosted countless American productions from Lawrence of Arabia through Kingdom of Heaven. I’d been introduced to a few film crew people and one of them invited me down.

Omar works as a transportation captain and location manager, and as he explains the lay of the land to me at a local café, a friend of his bounds up, grinning. The lanky man with the long brown hair of a hippy tells Omar that as he was buying eggs a director came up to him and hired him to be the double for Jesus in an movie that’s about to start shooting. The local Berber population, generally much more clean-shaven than their Arab neighbors to the north, has taken to growing out their beards to get work as extras in the films here where the local terrain (and population) often doubles for Iraq or Afghanistan.