Two for the Road

This weekend, we drove nearly 1000 kilometers in a zippy little Hyundai over the High Atlas Mountains to Ouarzazate, the Dades Canyon and then on to the Todra Gorge in southeastern Morocco. The route was a bit harrowing. About 50 kilometers out of Marrakech, the road starts to twist and turn into the mountains, stomach-turning switchbacks that continue long after the adrenaline rush subsides. “Make it stop, make it stop,” we chanted. We were divided on what was scarier: the guardrail-less hairpins with vertigo-inspiring vertical drops, or the yahoo cab and bus drivers that take the turns at seemingly impossible speeds. Why is it impossible to capture that sense of vertigo in a photo?



At one point, feeling confident, we careened around a curve with the wheels screeching, only to find ourselves being passed simultaneously by both a car and a small pickup truck filled with men blithely holding onto the cage. Speed: 80 kilometers/hour. Distance between hairpins: 50 meters. Why torture ourselves in this way? The extreme beauty of the route is the only answer. In a matter of hours, we passed through canyons and toppled over mountains that reminded us of the Rockies, Lake Tahoe, the red rock of Moab and the unrelenting vastness of Utah. Morocco is grand. Morocco is gorgeous.