We jump in a Toyota Land Cruiser at 9:15 with the same driver that drove us from Fes to Marrakech. Today, the destination is Skoura, via Demnate and over the High Atlas Mountains. The drive starts out through the same pancake flat valley we drove the other day.
Murray has been mentioning the fences in the fields in his posts. Today the rock fences are replaced by spaced out single rocks in a row with the occasional small cairn, to delineate fields.
A right hand turn takes us towards the mountains. Soon we are climbing. The road grades are much steeper here than in the Rockies and we ascend quickly.
Our first stop is at a natural bridge at Iminifri. The bridge is a travertine rock arch that has created a huge cave below, some 70 m tall. A stream runs through it and we see people climbing on the rocks in the cave. I like watching the birds catching the thermals and flying like they have no cares but to swoop and glide.
As we climb steadily up, the road changes and becomes rougher and rougher and the speed gets slower and slower. There are many spots where rocks have slid down the cuts and are piled along the shoulder. Soon, we are driving through a construction zone that is kilometers and kilometers long as they try to improve the road and the shoulders. They are also working on bank stabilization and it will be a decades long project, I think.
The landscape is stunning! It is a cross between the Alberta Badlands, the Grand Canyon, Namibia, Mars and the moon. The soil and the rock turn from brown to red to tan to grey and back again. The mountainsides are barren, rocky, have scrub brush in areas and pine trees in other areas. There are Berber villages here and there in the valleys and the villagers have cultivated every bit of horizontal land that they can access, with terraces cut into the slopes to grow crops.
We stop at one point to take photos and a fellow comes out of his house to see who stopped. Before we know it we are having tea and home made lemon cake with the fellow on, basically, his roof top. Our driver buys two lunch bag sized bags of freshly picked walnuts from him. He grows them in the valley below where we are sitting. I eat a few and they are delicious! Fresh walnuts! We chat, using our driver as a translator, and find out that he is married and has three sons. He seems so excited to have visitors and we enjoy the chat. Our guide explains that in Morocco, this kind of hospitality is normal.
Our driver tells us that the owner of the tour company wanted him to drive the Mercedes for our three day trip, but our driver said, No! I need the 4 x 4! Luckily we have the Land Cruiser as by the time we get to Skoura, we drive through 4 streams of water running across the road. The Mercedes would not have been happy.
We finally get to our riad in Skoura after a seven hour drive, a little longer than we were anticipating. The drive was worth every hour.
