Gorge-ous

Three hundred miles of driving is enough to wear you out, but when you’re in Morocco, it’s also enough to see some gorgeous, varied countryside.

The Atlas Mountains are dry on their sunny south side, but on the cool north side, snow clings to the ground. We expected our entire drive to be like the beautiful bleak of the American West, and were surprised over and over as we drove through thick forests of fir. The roads were empty save one thing; every few miles we passed people selling gems from the local terrain. Sometimes an actual store had been erected, but more often it was a solitary roadside table piled high with gems and fossils or a young man frantically waving his lone geode in the sunlight, hoping to slow a passing tourist. Amethyst, quartz, indigo, peridot. It was remarkable to see such profusions of color coming from dusty brown hills.



We made our way across small streams where women squatted washing their clothes and drying them on the banks, and saw birch trees for the first time in Morocco. As we wove up into the Dades Gorge where wood smoke clung to the sides of the hills, we passed men plowing small fields with pairs of mules and plows that looked like something from Little House on the Prairie.

The Dades Gorge twisted back and forth taking us through narrow canyon walls of a deep brick red. Having seen the Ait Ben Haddou Kasbah in its glory, it was interesting to pass several smaller and more run-down kasbahs on the route. Because these dwellings are made of local earth, we passed by many without noticing them, camouflaged as they were.





As red as the drive up the Dades is, the drive up the Todra is green, perched in the treetops of a 35-kilometer ribbon of palmerie. At the end of the road in Todra (beyond which you can continue in a 4x4 but not in our miniature Hyundai) we stopped for lunch at Les Roches, a small hotel owned by a friend of a friend. It sits just above the riverbed, with 350-meter high rocks rising on each side. We comment on the beauty to the owner, and while he agrees, he explains how difficult life here is. When it rains, many surrounding mountains drain into the gorge, and the water lever can rise 10-15 feet in five hours. Though the government has installed culverts and solid concrete and rebar roads, the water proves too strong - again and again washing them away, and sometimes taking pieces of the hotel as well.

We’ve heard that this part of Morocco is predominantly Berber, and we see some Berber graffiti on the walls of the gorge as well as a road sign written in both Arabic and Berber.




We paused in Tineghir. where we toured through communal farming plots, past a derelict Kasbah, used mainly for its well, and stopped in the old Jewish cemetery. While Morocco was once home to a large and robust Jewish population, beginning in the late 1950s over 300,000 emigrated (mainly to Israel and Canada) and the sad, untended cemetery here is surrounded by encroaching industrial buildings. Because of a Moroccan law allowing people to build on top of cemeteries if there have been no interments in three generations, it seems that the fate of the small grave stones here and the remains they mark is sealed.