Taliouine to Tafraoute
It’s been rather cold recently, so we are keen to go further South. There’s a minor road on our map that leads to Tafraoute from Taliouine, right across the Anti-Atlas and we feel ready for more adventures off the beaten track. For two days, we enter another stretch of breathtaking, jaw-dropping landscape, as Emma slowly winds herself up into the mountains.
We stay overnight on a disused bridge (one part of it having been washed away and the road having been re-routed), in a very silent valley.
Next morning, I go for a strenuous scramble up the mountainside to be rewarded with a 360-degree view for many miles, the snow-covered peaks of the High Atlas mountains visible in the north and a dusting of snow on the Anti-atlas too.
In Igherm, we catch sight of some freshly-baked Brioches in a café window. While enjoying them, we chat to the waiter, who lives here but has his sights trained on Europe. (As with all the young men we meet, we try to dissuade him and tell him that right now, Europe will not give him the welcome he expects). He comes to look at our van, and once inside and sure that the door is closed, for the first time in Morocco, we hear a voice critical of the King, whose decisions, he says, are sometimes driven by personal or financial interests and not for the benefit of his people.
After Igherm, the land seems to become more arable, with many little villages and intensively maintained terraces high into the mountains. It looks like I imagine a Chinese landscape to look like, with very steep mountain peaks towering over layers and layers of green terraces.
We see people dressed in very colourful clothing, often on an underlay of black. There are embroidered shawls and wraps with bright tassels and extraordinary headgear. We stop at a souq somewhere high up in the mountains and go out in our jellabahs, much to the delight of the local population. They lean over backwards, laughing at us. I wish we could take more photos to show you how they look like though, but here as everywhere, there is a strong reticence to be photographed, so we refrain. You’d never get an English person laughing at someone in this way, yet, it is such an innocent laughter that I would trade it any day for the thoughts that a northern European person might hold in private.
At the top of the mountains, we enter another plateau. Fields of Almond trees at I don’t know what height, maybe 2000m, before the view opens to the next mountainous valley and our road zigzags down amidst the most spectacular rock-faces. We have arrived in Tafraoute.
**********************
There are many more amazing photos of this chapter here
Posted in Uncategorizedwith comments disabled.