5. Morocco 1 - South and Sahara

Day 16, April 29th. Tangier – Chefchaouen

The days don’t start early in Tangier, despite the muezzin’s best efforts, with his sprightly 5am call to prayer. 

At 9am after Ralph’s finished his school Zoom check-in, we head out in search of breakfast.  A thorough search of the still sleepy Kasbah and gently stirring medina reveals nothing until, increasingly hungry and in need of sustenance, we ask a series of medina-dwellers for directions.  The 3rd attempt leads to a gloriously welcome sight – an open café, on a pleasant little square.  It appears that every other Westerner currently in Tangier has found the same place.  But it’s good; we relax into omelettes, coffee and hot chocolates in the gentle morning sunshine.

Later we meet Anas, a friend of our apartment host, for a quick tour of the city.  Anas is round-faced, bespectacled and charming.  We meet on ‘Place 9 Avril’ – a busy pedestrian and traffic junction, named after the date in 1947 when the then Moroccan king declared independence on this spot.  Anas briefly describes how Tangier was ruled by a joint administration of nine countries (including the UK) from 1928 until independence was finally granted in 1956, which explains it’s international feel and architecture, and its liberal approach to religion (it’s the only city in Morocco which tolerates any churches or synagogues, apparently).

He leads us on a tour through the bustling food markets, past huge whole tuna, sharks and giant squid, rows of whole and dismembered lambs (heads and entrails sold separately, in carefully stacked piles), and huge vats of spices, arranged in colourful, deliciously scented rows.  On through the medina, past the municipal bread oven, hammam and fountain (all still in use), and then up to the Kasbah (ancient walled city) perched on a hill overlooking the port, which is now rather busier than when we walked through it earlier. 

Two hours with Anas gives us more of an insight into Tangier’s past and present than we thought possible - and sets us up with a very rudimentary understanding of the country. 

We sort car insurance with Rachid – our block housekeeper-cum-general fixer, and then head out of the city in the early afternoon, hoping to get to Chefchaouen in good time. 

The Tangier traffic is dreadful.  An hour and a half later, queueing and pushing like everyone else through surprisedly good-natured traffic jams, we’re finally on our way, heading south for a quick stop at Tetouan.

We don’t get Tetouan right.  Nina’s driving as we enter, and I’m navigating – and we’re reminded why we tended to do things the other way round on our last trip.  Nothing to do with Nina’s driving – but she’s a far better navigator than me (I get carsick looking at maps).

We park in the wrong place, miss the key sights, get overcharged for parking by one of Morocco’s ubiquitous and incessant (illegal) street parking valets, buy a coffee we don’t really want (to break up a 200 dirham note to pay said valet) and leave a little disappointed. 

On to Chefchaouen and we get it right this time – Nina is navigating.  We’re staying in a little homestay in the old city (foot access only) and leave our car five minutes’ away with (relatively) honest-looking parking valets at the Hotel Parador – 30 dirhams (about £2.20) for overnight parking.

We walk into Chefchaouen’s impossibly photogenic little alleyways – all beautifully painted in multiple different shades of cornflower, sky and Mediterranean blue – and find our homestay.

Very basic – four single beds in one large room accessed through the back of a trinket shop, with a single electric bulb and a shared bathroom (no loo-roll, the back-packers keep stealing it apparently), but it’ll do us well for a couple of nights.

Day 17, April 29th.  Chefchaouen – Akchour – Chefchaouen.  13 – 17C, sunny, cloudy, cold wind

Our sleep is book-ended by calls to prayer.  Particularly vociferous at 4.45 this morning; many muezzin nearby looking to out-gun one another, but a clear winner emerges seemingly right outside our solitary window.

After a rather basic local ‘Moroccan’ breakfast of greasy fried eggs, spam, Dairylea slices and delicious labneh-esque yoghurt, we find the car (intact) and head for a day trip into the Rif Mountains, in search of the ‘Grand Cascade’ – waterfalls near Akchour.  After an hour and a half’s marching (or running, in Laurie’s case) up the rocky paths in the Akchour Gorge, we decide to skip the remaining two hours of this hike (we’d mistakenly thought it was only 45 minutes) and bin the possibly dry waterfall in favour of an excellent tagine from one of the many path-side hawkers.

We return to Chefchaouen via the back roads over the top of the Rif Mountains, through a series of remote, mud-brick villages, past locals eeking out a tough existence from their fields on the barren plateau above the altogether more gentle and fertile valley beneath us.

Back in Chefchaouen, a mix-up by our hosts means we must change rooms, as ours is already reserved for this evening.  No great drama; we end up in a ‘traditional’ Chefchaouen house on the other side of the street.  It’s very cosy and definitely traditional, adorned with painted stone walls, leaky and fragile plumbing and more bare light bulbs.  How can a country which makes so many beautiful lampshades not manage to use them in its own houses? 

We settle in, noting (via several sore heads) that you need to be 4’2” to use the shower, but 6’5” to see yourself in the mirror.

Day 18, April 30th.  Chefchaouen – Azrou.  13 – 19C, drizzle, then sunny, cloudy, cold wind

We wake up to rain this morning.  Rain!  Not exciting tropical storm stuff, but good old, UK-style drizzle.  How much further south do we have to go?! The locals say it's climate change and should be warmer.

We spend a final morning wandering Chefchaouen’s streets, every single alleyway an Instagrammer’s paradise.   The Europeans haven’t really found it yet, but the Moroccan equivalents certainly have.  You can ‘hire’ particularly beguiling azure alleyways off enterprising locals, dress up in local garb (complete with pointy straw hat adorned with colourful pompoms) and take pictures to your heart’s content, for five dirhams a pop.

After a hearty breakfast of Berber eggs and pancakes to stave off the cold, we head south, aiming to stop at Fez for lunch. 

All is good whilst we make good progress southwards along one of Morocco’s excellent national roads – the infrastructure in this country is astonishingly good – until we fall foul of our first speed trap.  Moroccan police checkpoints are regular on all major roads, and speed limits are low and strictly enforced.  It only takes us till day three to be zapped doing 102kph in a (not particularly well signposted, in my defence) 60kph zone.  The speed limit on national roads is 100kph – but that drops to 60kph at every junction.  Any many junctions have a checkpoint.

On this occasion, a kindly, slightly portly police officer takes our papers (passport, driving licence, V5 etc) and, after a 15-minute wait whilst he argues with a local he’s also stopped, he – bewilderingly – lets me off with a warning.  This is most novel.  I pretty much had the 400 dirhams in my hand ready to pay him.  I smile, thank him profusely, ask no further questions, and return to the car tout suite.

We take the back road to Fez shortly after and approach the city via rolling hills of golden wheat, ripening in the spring sunshine, which has now made a welcome appearance.  We’re already noticing the diversity of this country’s landscapes.

Fez is apparently the cultural epicentre of Morocco.  But for us, today, it’s a place to grab some medina street food for lunch and then buy groceries for the next few nights’ camping.  It might be sacrilegious to some, but it already feels that perhaps one medina looks largely like the next. 

We stock up on fresh fruit and vegetables, local sausages, bread and eggs. The egg-man takes a break from slaughtering his chickens (kept in cages at the back of his stall) to serve us, wiping his bloody hands on the front of his shirt.  We make a mental note to give the eggs a little clean when we get to our destination.

Then on towards Azrou, in the Middle Atlas, where we plan to camp.  The Middle Atlas have an Alpine feel as we ascend; Moroccan pines and cedars interspersed with lush grasslands.  Then we reach its high plateau (about 1,700m) and the landscape opens up: more pasture, shepherds grazing their sheep and goats, and mile upon mile of beautifully tended and netted trees: apple, pear, cherry, olive, walnuts, pecans, almonds.  We had literally no idea Morocco grew so much food.

We’re warmly greeted at our campsite – nestled in a grassy cherry orchard – by its jovial owner.  He explains its 10 dirhams for the night and urges us to shower promptly at 7pm, when he lights the wood-fired boiler and before the French steal all the hot water.  We park under the shade of one of the cherries, set up camp, and at 7pm Nina duly complies with the shower orders.

We spend the evening discussing routes with a convoy of friendly French overlanders who arrive shortly after us, who are just returning from the Sahara.  We’re relieved when they roll in, since the place was feeling a little ‘motor-homey’ until they turned up. 

We’re in bed by 9.30, still wrapped up warm against the chill evening air in the mountains.  But it’s not to be a vintage night’s sleep.  A cacophony of angry donkeys, barking dogs, the ubiquitous enthusiastic muezzin(we’re didn’t see a minaret anywhere on our way in) and some determined cockerels mean that, for virtually every minute of the night, some loud, tuneless being is doing its damnedest to ruin our sleep.  Collectively, they succeed.

Day 19, April 30th.  Azrou – Zizi Gorge.  13 – 24C, sunny

Eight boiled eggs (undercooked, then overcooked – it’s very difficult to boil eggs at altitude) plus bread, honey, tea and coffee and we’re all human again.  

We pack up swiftly and continue through the Middle Atlas, initially through cedar forests teeming with large Moroccan monkeys (delighted not to make their acquaintance in the campsite last night) and hawkers selling pony rides to Moroccan tourists.

Onwards, we drive through an hour’s worth of high plateau, past semi-nomadic villages and herders with their flocks, interspersed with cedar and Moroccan pine copses.  It’s getting hotter, and drier now. 

Then we begin our descent.  Suddenly, as we round a corner, the High Atlas sweep into view, a vast ridge of rocky, snow-capped peaks, rising majestically out of a vast, dusty orange plain that’s beginning to emerge ahead of us.  The contrast between what we can see ahead – and the soft, verdant, wooded land that we’re still in – is stark.  Laurie squeaks with excitement at our first glimpse of ‘the Sahara’.

Many bends later and we emerge onto the plain.  It’s technically still sub-Saharan, but the earth is now very orange and dusty, with only desert scrub bushes breaking it up. The sun is scorching, despite our car thermometer only reading 24C.  We drive for 50-odd kilometres on a virtually straight road, to the surprisingly large town of Midalt, where we lunch. 

We’re now four days into Morocco and we’ve finished the last of our Spanish beer.  We’ve yet to be able to buy alcohol in any bar or restaurant we’ve visited.  So much for the much-vaunted Casablanca!  At lunch (our best kofte tagine yet) a local befriends us, and I ask him if there’s a booze shop in town.  There usually is, they’re just very hard to find.  There is, and he agrees to take me – it’s about a 5-minute walk through the middle of town, to a nondescript, metal-doored shop on a side street.  We enter; behind the counter it’s crammed floor to ceiling with Moroccan wine, imported whiskey and vodka and crates and crates of beer.  They’re doing good trade – and this absolutely isn’t aimed at tourists. 

After a superb lunch we head into the High Atlas.  At this, their eastern end, the mountains are arranged in vast rocky ridges, interspersed with great, empty plains of dust.  The mountains come in wave after austere wave; our road snakes through narrow passes in each successive wave, then crosses each dividing plain in an almost perfectly straight line.

The occasional oasis crops up on the horizon, usually sheltered at the foot of the north side of a ridge, and in the passes.  They are crammed with palm trees, high grasses and lush, irrigated fields.  We always thought those paintings of oases done by Victorian travellers were exaggerated – but they’re really not.  Despite our significantly swifter and more comfortable transport than our ancestors would have endured, we can’t help feeling a little sigh of relief as we enter each oasis, and a pang of anxiety as we leave.  Water equals life here.

We camp for the night in the bottom of the Zizi Gorge, a deep, wide canyon that meanders its way south out of the High Atlas, into the Sahara proper.  It’s the last time we’ll be able to call upon the benefits of shade and altitude (1,350m) for a while.  We find a little campsite, are greeted by another cheery middle-aged Moroccan, and set up camp – this time amongst the shade of a well-irrigated olive grove, interspersed with almond trees, pomegranate, and the occasional quince. 

The boys spend a happy hour skimming stones in the remnants of the river that’s idly running through the gorge; the vast, sheer walls of the canyon rising above us all around.  In a few weeks, it’ll be dry.  No dogs or donkeys to keep us awake tonight, and we go to sleep, lulled by the chirping of crickets and the croaking of frogs.

Day 20, May 1st.  Zizi Gorge - Merzouga.  16 – 34C, sunny

Big day today.  Our first planned attempt at taking on some of the Sahara’s (smaller) off-road routes. 

We start in a relaxed manner, enjoying a lazy breakfast, then an hour’s home schooling, then more stone skimming for Laurie, whilst Ralph gets out his paints to capture the canyon. 

We stop at Errachidia, a large military town a little further south, to stock up on supplies for the next few nights – plus nearly three days’ worth (25 litres) of water as contingency for today’s adventures.  No risks here – you don’t mess with the Sahara.

We leave Errachidia on a main road heading west, then turn off south, on to what we believe should be a track.  We’re start using a GPS-based navigation app for this part of the journey, following what we hope will be the best track south. 

The track starts as a road.  Some chunters of disappointment from the back seats. After a mile or two, we enter a dilapidated village, where the truck is immediately surrounded by children, climbing on the footplates, reaching in through the windows, demanding sweets and money.  Some of the adult villagers looking on guide us to a sharp right hand turn out of the village, not particularly concerned about their children.  Sure enough, most of them jump off when we reach the edge of the village.  Overlanders are obviously a pretty common sight through here – we’re fair game.

The road ends abruptly and now we’re on a track.  Hard and rocky, it’s a nice way to ease ourselves into the desert proper.   For the next five kilometres, we pass the occasional patch of fragile cultivation around a dry river bed, plus a few isolated houses, and exchange waves with locals working at their crops in bone-dry fields.  People cling to the very margins of existence here, life is brutal.  Looking at these people working in the absolute searing heat (and guiltily waving at their children who always coming running out of nowhere, looking for food, sweets, water, money), we have literally no idea what they live on, or how they survive.  And this is just the very edge of the Sahara.

Within half an hour, there is nothing.  Just the yellow-orange, stony plain, almost as far as we can see, with rocky ridges and outcrops punctuating the hazy horizon.  We stop the car and get out – it’s complete silence.  Or it would be, if the boys weren’t so excited about the fact we’re now actually in the Sahara.

We drive on for several hours, averaging about 25kph over the rocky terrain.  Our navigation app seems to be working well – and as in most deserts, it’s easy enough to follow the tracks.  And out here – you definitely don’t want to be leaving the beaten track, especially if you’re driving solo.

We pass a few huge palm tree nurseries – beautifully irrigated and fenced in.  We have to wonder at the determination of the farmers who’ve put them here.  There’s a grand house, too, at the entrance to one – but no sign of anyone. 

Onwards and through the midday heat (34C but feels much hotter), we’re now heading towards the ‘City of Orion’ – one of three huge sculptures built out of mud and straw bricks by Hannsjörg Voth, a German artist, between 1998 and 2003.  The artwork’s seven sheer towers appear on the horizon, initially hard to make out, but more imposing as we get closer. 

But then, when we’re about 200 metres away and seemingly on a nice route to take us there, our firm, rocky track degrades into soft sand.  Immediately the car starts to sway left and right, slowing rapidly under the braking effect of the deep sand.  It’s not a small patch – it looks like it carries on for another 100 metres or so. You can’t stop in this stuff.  Keeping the throttle on full, I pull the car round in a wide, drifting U-turn, the tyres fighting with the sand, saying “I’m not liking this, we’re turning back”.  Everyone’s in agreement.

It’s only ten seconds or so before we’re back on firmer, rockier ground again, but it’s a very stark reminder of how quickly things can go wrong – when you’re driving solo in the Sahara.  Had we been in convoy, we’d have happily backed our truck’s ability to get through the sand – but alone – it’s simply not worth the risk.

So we take a wider, firmer route around the City of Orion, and admire it from a distance.  We pass Voth’s second installation, the ‘Golden Spiral’, which would look more impressive from the air, and head on without stopping to ‘L’Escalier Celeste’ – his oldest and most famous installation, a 19m high, mud-brick staircase that narrows towards the top, pointing to the stars.   It’s sleek, triangular shape greets us as we approach.  We know it’s only another 4km on from here to a tarmac road. 

Rocks have been placed in a 200m circle around ‘L’Escalier’, so we park up and walk closer to get a better look.  Extraordinarily, a man appears quite literally out of nowhere, with an official-looking ID card, and a tariff sheet that says we need to pay 150 dirhams per adult to go any closer.  Flabbergasted, we say we’ll pay when we return to the car.  There’s another single Frenchman here, taking photos – he says he paid too.  So we cough up, despite it feeling like a scam – it’s not like we’ll be back here any time soon.

The final stretch is the toughest.  It always is, for some reason.  Approaching a (most welcome looking) oasis through which the tarmac road passes, we have to cross the Oued Rheris – a very sandy, dried-up river bed.  We try two different routes; both lead to sand that immediately becomes too deep to safely cross.  On our third route, we’re making good progress when we’re suddenly intercepted by a man on a small motorbike, who again has materialised out of nowhere.

“You can’t go that way, it’s sand.  Follow me and I’ll show you the way out”. He looks at us, urgently.  We look at him.  His English is quite good, he’s got a wild sort of look about him, old jeans, a long striped shirt and a raggedy light blue turban, covering most of his face. 

Our route – to the extent we can see it – looks rocky, and well used.  His route, to the left, looks like deep, virgin sand.  I get out, we talk a little more.  I’ve suggested we’ll just go and have a look at our route, he implores us to believe him.  Nina and I consider our options.  What to do?  We actually just saw another vehicle, in the distance, being towed out of this river bed somewhere.   Is he trying to get us stuck, to then extract huge amounts of money to rescue us? 

In the end, we agree to follow him.  He promtply abandons his motorbike and hops on our footplate, urgently shouting “Left! Right! Fast!  Steer like this!” instructions at me, through the driver’s window.  

The sand looks deep, and untouched by other tyre tracks.  With full throttle and drifting all over the place, we make it through a slalom of rocks, deep pockets of sand, and spiky bushes.  We eventually end up – unsurprisingly, perhaps – outside his restaurant. 

He’s actually charming and can’t offer us much food – it’s too late in the day.  Instead, we accept a brief tour of the nearby khettaras – ancient, hand-dug underground water channels, built by Berbers nearly 1,000 years ago, which gently guided water downhill from the High Atlas, 65 miles away, and stored it, far into the desert.  The channels kept working until 65 years ago when the Moroccan authorities built a dam at Errichidia.  

After, we drink tea with him, share some of his bread and sardines, chat, decline his offers to help us with luxury accommodation in Merzouga, and bid him farewell, with 200 dirhams for the tea, the tour and the ‘rescue’.  

Would our ‘own’ route out of the river worked just fine?  We’ll never know.

We head on towards the Erg Chebbi dunes, and the town of Merzouga.  We stay on road for now, enough adventures for one day.  As the heat of the day is subsiding, the beautiful, wind-sculpted orange dunes hove into view.  We set up camp in the palm-shaded rear gardens of the Sahara Garden Hotel, which – mercifully – still accepts overlanders.  We’ve time for a supremely grateful dip in their (freezing!) pool, and a quick saunter up the dunes, to see the sunset. 

The boys, despite having the world’s largest sandpit to play in, still insist on digging holes and making sand angels literally on top of each other.  Despite the day’s adventures, they’re still blissfully happy ragging around and playing with sand.  They’re coping with everything that we throw at them incredibly well.

Day 21, May 2nd.  Merzouga.  24 – 37C, sunny

We almost immediately decide to spend two nights here.  The allure of not driving anywhere for a day, plus a pool, plus a relaxed morning and evening messing around on the dunes, is just too much to resist, despite the intense heat.

We’re awake at 6.30am – I actually go for a run in the dunes, something I never thought I’d do again since finishing the Marathon des Sables last year.  Far more civilised when it’s only a few kilometres and there’s a pool at the end of it!

We all enjoy a pre-breakfast walk into the dunes.  They are endlessly photogenic, deceptively large, and great fun to run down.  We’re back at the car by 8.30am, in time to enjoy our breakfast in the heavenly, gentle early morning warmth.  After 9am, it gets very, very hot – and doesn’t really cool down till 6pm. 

Our day is spent lounging in the shade by the pool – home schooling, ordering tea and coffee, playing games, and enjoying doing very little.  I pre-order supper from the hotel restaurant at lunchtime – since we fancy a night off cooking.

All four of us have been learning Arabic since before we arrived in Morocco, through audiobooks in the car. We’ve been making good progress and can now politely order things like ‘tea’ and ‘coffee’ and ‘falafels’ and ‘hummus’ and ‘burgers’, as well as taxis, and asking for the doctor or where the market is.  So - in theory we won’t starve, and with any luck we’ll never need a taxi or a doctor.

But when I use my finest Arabic to order our supper, I receive a completely blank look back, from the hotel waiter.  Surely my accent’s not that bad?  I try again.  Nothing.  He’s Berber.  Speaks no Arabic.  I ask again in French – that’s a bit shaky too.  But it seems he speaks some Italian?  In the end I have to use no fewer than five different languages, all appallingly, to pre-order our supper.  Another linguistic car-crash.  Many language teachers must be turning in their graves right now.

We complete our rest-day with a camel-ride into the dunes, almost a pre-requisite, and something Laurie was bravely insistent on.  Whilst waiting for the sun to set, Ralph and Laurie start to make friends with a little girl who’s keen to join in their games.  Ralph tries to speak to her in English, then in his best French… The vast majority of tourists in Morocco are French. 

He tells us, frustratedly: “I tried literally everything I knew but she just wouldn’t reply.”  It’s only when her parents come to take her away that we learn she’s Spanish.