Tazzarine

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Moving on from the camp site Hotel Kasbah Meteorites, our first priority is to find someone who can help us repair the window mechanism in the driver’s door.

We drive on to Tazzarine, another funky town. We find a garage straight away where a young guy tries his luck for about half an hour before taking us 100 m further down the road to a bodyworks place. The ‘chef’ is not there, so we wait a bit until he returns from the souq on his little moped. He takes one look and knows exactly what to do. It involves dismantling the mechanism even further than we already have done, in fact removing it from the door entirely and replacing the bolt that must have come loose on all these bumpy Moroccan roads. Putting it back together again, he replaces a whole lot of worn plastic parts, tut-tutting at previous attempts to make do with lesser solutions. A real perfectionist – Emma is in the hands of a good craftsman here. After an hour or so of giving Emma TLC, he asks for 200dirham, which we gladly pay and we’re off on our next adventure.

We seem to be in luck with passing towns exactly on the day of their weekly souq. Tazzarine is heaving with people. Even though we still have food left over, we can’t resist stopping for a stroll through town, and who do we bump into but our mechanic. It seems as if, on Wednesday, everyone stops their work to meet in the souq, and he must have just interrupted his visit to the souq to return to the garage and help us with the window problem.

We find a type of citrus fruit that is neither an orange nor a lemon, so we buy some of them, even though the locals say they aren’t for eating but to use on your skin and hair. That sounds like it could be a kind of Bergamot, so we take a load of them to add to the next marmalade-making session. We meet Youssef, a smiling, well-spoken man who invites us back to his family home some 20km South of Tazzarine. He has some more shopping to do, and he instructs us to wait for him by the riverside and where he’ll join us shortly after sunset.

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for some photos of the beautiful landscape we drove through in those days, click here


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