Berber Villages of the High Atlas Mountains Part 3- Conclusion

Still Day 3- So basically I suck at soccer. I’ll be the first to admit it. So I stuck myself as the goalie since I felt more confident there than anywhere else. I made a few big stops here, let in the odd goal or two there; I played average. The villagers had awesome teamwork and would always manage to rush the goal somehow and have 3 guys standing right in front of me. I guess it’s pretty much the only thing they have to do for fun besides watching satellite TV.
        About midway through the game, someone lifted the ball a little too high and in just the wrong direction and sent it sailing off a cliff. I mean about a 2,000 foot cliff here. Not a sheer cliff, but a very steep downhill to a river valley very far below the town, which was built along the road as it passed by their terraced farmland. Unphased, however, a boy from the village bounded down the hill after the ball. From my vantage point it looked as if he had just dropped off the face of the Earth. About 10 minutes later, to applause from all, he brought the ball back up. Play was resumed but the Moroccans were awarded possession for all that work to get it back. I subbed out a little later since I was getting a lot of dust in my eyes and was thirsty.
        Anyway, after a game of Mafia with the SaS’ers and a fairly average dinner (chicken, salad, bread, tea, and melon again), and a spirited discussion with both Muhammads and Hassan about Berber family planning practices, it was off to bed. I went back to my gite and remembered that I still had all 3 of those pins I had brought with the US and Moroccan flags on them. I found the old man who owned the gite and who knew absolutely no English and clumsily asked him in French if I could give gifts to his grandchildren. He smiled and nodded, went into a back room, and brought out 3 toddlers: a girl and 2 boys. I pinned a pin onto each of their collars and they were absolutely stunned by them. Their grandfather told them to thank me and they did so in that way that little kids do when they have to be reminded. The grandfather was very grateful for the gift and I could see that it had made the kids’ days. They were showing the pins off to each other and their older siblings for the rest of the night. Up on the roof, I looked down into the courtyard and the two boys were wrestling each other. Their mother yelled at them to stop, but instead I took two flashlights and started twirling them around rave-style. The boys were fascinated and immediately stopped fighting to watch. Their mother laughed and thanked me for calming them down and took them to bed.
        After that I took myself to bed, but as I was about to go to sleep I heard music. I went back down the street to the first gite where a few men from the village were playing a Berber version of a banjo and singing some folk songs. I recorded a video which is pretty much pitch-blackness (there were no streetlights) but the sound came out great. I hope I can post it sometime before the end of the trip. I returned to the roof of my gite and fell asleep to the sound of restless donkeys tied up nearby and the music down the street.

Day 4
        We were up early and it was only a short hike back to the buses on a paved road on the other side of the river valley. The bus ride along this one-lane road with no guardrail might’ve been a bit nerve-wracking if I hadn’t’ve just spent two days on all kinds of narrow ledges and paths so it wasn’t too bad. The buses took us back to Marrakech by way of that same town we stopped in on the way over, and we caught a nice first-class, on-time train back to Casablanca. It felt great to take a real shower and eat some protein for a change, but I definitely consider this trip to have been one of the most eye-opening experiences I’ve ever had.
Souvenirs: Marrakech t-shirt, small brass ward against the evil eye, cedarwood box, lots of dust in my lungs and on my clothes, and a small rock I picked up on which Muhammad wrote in Arabic “Morocco rocks”