Berber Villages of the High Atlas Mountains Part 2- The Actual Mountains

Day 2
        Breakfast at the hotel. Moroccan breakfasts are all carbs. There are 3 different types of bread and spreads of either jam or butter. To drink there’s orange juice, coffee, or tea. Anyway, I ate all of this and we got on our minibuses to head out to the mountains. As we left Marrakech on the Muhammad VI expressway (there’s that name again!) we slowly made our way out to the desert. The outskirts of Marrakech are a bizarre mixture of huge open spaces, extremely well-maintained highway medians with gardens and pavilions, country houses for the poor, suburban compounds for the wealthy, and half-finished construction projects miles away from the highway. It seemed like back before the global economy went to shit, they were expecting Marrakech to be growing very fast. But anyway, as we drove, the mountains slowly came into view, and the ground got sandier and rockier. Up until this point, the Moroccan countryside had looked a lot like Andalucia: dry but still farms and vegetation. Out here though, there were lots of rocks and not much of anything else. We stopped briefly at a very lucky town where 60 people all patronized the roadside general stores for bottled water for the hike later in the day. We drove and drove onto increasingly narrower roads until we met up with some porters and their donkeys. They would be carrying our stuff. Or other people’s anyway. Mine wasn’t too heavy so I just wore my backpack the whole way. You couldn’t get to your bag once it was on the donkeys unless we had stopped for lunch. Anyway we were off after about 15 minutes of prep. The beginning of the hike was along a dry riverbed that gradually went uphill into some shallow rolling hills. There were small houses and farms around, and the occasional shepherd. These people were not Arabs, but were Berbers like our guides. They’re the aboriginal inhabitants of North Africa who are Muslim like the Arabs but have their own language and are a separate ethnic group.
        Berbers, as we’d find out, are an extremely hospitable people. They are also friendly to strangers. Children would run excitedly across their fields when they saw the hiking group and wave to us as we walked by. They didn’t have what I’ve come to call the “income gap stare” that poor people in the cities of Morocco (and probably every country we’ll visit) look at you with. If you’ve ever travelled to places with REALLY poor people, you know what I mean. It’s very awkward, judgmental eye contact. It says “you shouldn’t be here.” But the Berbers meet your gaze with nothing but excitement to see strangers and a very genuine friendliness.
        And this friendliness, as I’ve said, comes with a very high degree of hospitality. Our lunch was provided to us partially by food carried by the porters from Marrakech, and partially from food from the farm houses near where we stopped to eat. It was a salad of olives, corn, tomatoes, peppers, and probably some other stuff. There was also some canned spiced tuna, rice and chutney, and lots of tea. Berbers love their tea. At every meal there is plenty of tea to drink. Some of it is minty, some of it isn’t.
        Anyway after lunch we continued on to our first village homestay. This was at a gite, or basically a Berber bed and breakfast. Everyone unpacked their mattress pads off the donkeys and set them up on the roof where we’d sleep. I passed the time chatting with other tripgoers. The boys from the village came running to see us very excitedly and we were exchanging gifts with them. I taught some of them all of the Muay Thai that I know in about 15 minutes, and they had a lot of fun challenging me to boxing matches.
        Then I went back on the roof to put on more sunscreen, and I heard drumming. Down below me through the open-roofed courtyard I could see that our porters had spontaneously started drumming and singing some Berber folk music along with the villagers. The men of the village were playing some drums they had, and the porters were hammering on the empty water jugs for the donkeys with spoons. Many of the SaS tripgoers and villagers and children were dancing together. One of the village kids about 8 years old had a sort of Bon Jovi haircut going on and was an incredibly good dancer. We called him Justin Berber. Shaved Head Muhammad explained to me that Berber men meet their wives when multiple villages gather for dances like that.
        Dinner was more chicken of some variety or another. It was very tender but I couldn’t really recall what it was supposed to be cooked in. It was alright I guess. As with all meals there was also bread, tea, a salad of some variety, usually with olives or figs, and then melon for desert.
        After dinner I realized how bad I smelled, and remembered that it was now the men’s turn in the hammam. The hammam is an Arabic and Turkish bathhouse which is basically a sauna room that also has a cold water tap. The water was heated by a fire under the floor that the villagers kept stoked with bamboo and cardboard boxes. Anyway, it was incredibly relaxing and probably was a big factor in me not being too sore to walk the next day. Afterwards, even without soap, I felt as clean as if I had taken a shower. Good stuff. Speaking of plumbing, Moroccans are apparently opposed to operable toilets. They had a couple of the infamous squatty potties that are all the rage everywhere in the world except the US, and their sole western-style toilet had no button to flush it. They had a bucket of water that you filled from a tap in the wall that you were (I guess) supposed to pour on top of your filth and it sort of made it fall through the drain and not stink. Also, we couldn’t drink their tap water (or at least were advised not to by the doctor) so I had to brush my teeth with some of my precious bottled water. Fortunately the old man who ran the gite was selling additional 2 liter bottles of cold water for 10 dirhams each.
        As the sun set we played some cards and chatted with the guides a bit (on our way to discovering just how cool they were), and lay out to sleep on the roof. It was incredibly dark since we were essentially in THE middle of nowhere. It was only the second time I’d been under skies dark enough to see the Milky Way and so many stars. Since I didn’t do too much sleeping (it was cold and windy and the donkeys made so much noise!) I could sort of keep track of what time it was by where the star Vega was in the sky. It was almost fun to not get any sleep.
        Well the next morning after sleeping about 15 minutes I awoke to roosters, which I was fairly sure only happened in those animal sounds books you read when you were 4. We had another quick all-carbs breakfast and were on our way in 3 separate groups based on hiking speed. The next leg of the hike took us up 300m total higher in altitude over the course of 5 hours, from 900m at the first gite to 1200m at the second. That doesn’t sound too bad but we actually went up to about a mile altitude (1600m for those that never ran track) and down and up a few times. It was a pretty challenging hike and I’m fairly sure my mom would freak out if she saw the kinds of ledges we had to scramble along. The scenery more than made up for this though, and we would always encounter shepherds with their flocks or other Berber villagers riding donkeys up and down the roads. I kept having to remind myself that this wasn’t another mountain national park, but was actually a place where people lived. As we hiked, I had a nice long conversation with Shaved Head Muhummad, who told us all about the kinds of music and sports that are popular in Morocco (French rap, American pop, Moroccan bands), where he grew up and where he lives now (a rural valley about 200km south of where we were hiking, and Marrakech respectively), and a lot of other insights into Morocco. I asked him about the king, and he said he was a great guy who really cared about the poor and helped to bring electricity to places in the country like his family’s home- and our villages.
        The landscape was surprising. In the morning it was very foggy and humid as we ascended into the mountains by way of a dry river valley. It looked like it’d been dry forever but Muhammad said it’d actually been very stormy in the mountains just a few weeks ago. The valley itself was very green and leafy next to the riverbed, but about 50m above the river it got very dry and rocky. The soil was dark red and looked a lot like Mars. As we reached the summit of the first mountain (the highest one) we actually walked through a pine forest. Can’t say I was expecting that in Morocco. It could easily have been in the Appalachians except down below in the valley to the north and east, back toward Marrakech, there was desert and small towns with minarets.
        We had lunch in a pine forest too. On the way there, there was a small village where the path through it had to first cross a gate made entirely out of cacti. The Berbers use cacti as fences for their fields. Low maintenance, I guess. Anyway I avoided getting stabbed by any cactus needles but it slowed us down a little bit since the donkeys wouldn’t fit and their handlers had to find another way up. Lunch food was the same as the day before, except now there were canned anchovies as well.
        After another hour and a half or so we finally got to the second village and its two gites. I stayed in the smaller of the two and set up my mattress on the roof. Then I went down to join in a little game of Semester at Sea vs. Berbers soccer, which includes the most memorable reason for a delay of game ever. You can read all about it in the next part.