Day 6 Fes – mountains
I’ve also been remiss in fully conveying the experience of driving through Morocco, especially the mountain country. There are several kinds of road signs giving advice on the road ahead. Some are a weird house type arrow with a perpendicular crossbar, and I have no idea what that means. Some are an s turned sideways, and I think this means some windy bends are coming. There are signs in arabic and french, and say something about hazardous roads ahead. There’s a sign with two cars, the car on the left is black, the car on the right is red. To me, the logical meaning of this is no overtaking, but I’m not so sure as this doesn’t seem the case in practice. It might mean that it is permissable only for red cars to overtake black cars, but if that’s the case I need testing for colour-blindness. So I’m really not sure. My favourite sign has to be the red borderedd triangle, inside of which is nothing other than an exclamation mark. This gets used when the road ahead is simply !, so hang on and prey. One thing they don’t have are passing places/overtaking lanes. These would be a good thing.
Not all the roads are likke that, there are some straight passages that don’t have blind corners and slow trucks, and these passages allow the passenger to reflect on the beautiful countryside and to relax. As I type, were travelling through an area that seems to have an honour system for buying honey: containers of all description sit on ad hoc stone columns, occasionally with someone sitting nearby, but often unattended.
There are also regular gendarmerie check points, though I’m not sure what they’re checking for as we always get waved through. They seem to be randomly stopping folks, doing license or identification checks or something.
I’m still trying to figure out Abdul’s Celine Dion attachment. I’m not sure if he plays it all the time because he likes it, or he thinks we like it, or somewhere in between. In the meantime our ears die a little from politeness. I might keep an eye out for another CD, any other, but am thinking that something by Tina Arena would be a good compromise. To be fair, some of the Celine Dion is growing on me, a couple of songs, mostly because they sound like other singers. Maybe I’m coming down with some sort of travel insanity, or Stockholm Syndrome.
The morning’s drive took us into the middle Atlas mountains, where we drove through forest, stopping to take pictures of babboon-like monkeys. And then we saw snow. Not white capped mountain kind of snow, but real patches of frozen water alongside the road. If I was being cynical, I’d say it looked like a bunch of people had defrosted their freezers by the roadside. But we stopped near a patch and got out of the car and touched it and stepped on it and I made a snowball and sure it’s like the stuff you find in old, non frost free freezers but the shit I touched wasn’t made by no fuccking kelvinator. For the first time in my life I saw and touched real, natural, organic snow. That’s pretty fucking amazing. (Sure I know I could take a trip to the Snowy Mountains at the right time of year, but this was white stuff by the side of the road that I dodn’t have to jostle past yuppies and other rich sporty types. It was just snow, you know.)
Yeah, i know I might have got a little excited over my first encounter with the white stuff (god forbid I ever see the stuff fall from the sky, insha’alla) but hey I think it’s awesome. To be driving through hills with big patches of actual snow was way cool, literally and figuratively. Okay, I get it, enough with the snow, did I mention we saw monkeys?
The middle Atlas mountains descend into a huge, amazing valley, with the high Atlas in all their snow capped (yup, that word again, snow snow snow snow snow snowsnowsnowsnow!) majesty straight ahead. Dotted throughout the valley are weird, knobbly rock formaations that seem to indicate to me that this used to be under water (that and Abdul telling us this, and the various stores and stalls along the road selling fossils — just wait till I get started on them!).
(pause for new road sign — watch out for falling rocks — as we wind through some of the most amazing mountain roads I;’ve ever seen. Wow.)
The valey is awesome, it really feels like we’re somewhere different. The dirt, shrubs, rock formations all seem completely unfamilliar.
Lunch was at another tourist trap, this one a bit less trappy so it only cost 250 dirham. Had a Bereber couscous, which was lots of vegetables in various states of warmth on top of a maryland of mystery bird (if it was a chicken it was really small) with lots of couscous, not as good as Kamal’s mum’s. Dessert was a quite yummy apple tart (the town, M…, is famous for it’s apples, it even has a big apple fountain) with apple, some sort of curd cheese, and good pastry. Good and sweet. I needed this to take away the taste of the tea, which had brewed so long all the mint and sugar in the world was not going to save it. Mmmm, tannn-nnn-nnnin.
After lunch we head up into the high Atlas mountains, but unfortunately not the snowy big. Beautiful scenery, huge gorges, massive walls of rock. Amazing rock formations. And I’m also very chuffed to be travelling through fossil country. A trilobyte in the hand is the same as a tyrannosaurus rex in the mind,
Driving throught the middle high Atlas mountains, wow. just wow.
Speaking of driving, city driving in Morocco is … interesting. Cars, bikes, powered bikes and scooters seem to come from every direction. road lanes are more of a suggestion, and although everyone beeps their horns, no one takes any notice of them. A beep may get a cyclist to move slightly out of the way, but that’s about it. There are traffic lights in places, but I’m glad I’m not driving because I never know where to look to spot them. Most of the time they seem to be wedged into light poles or on the diagonally oposite side of the road.
To pay the Moroccans their due, we’ve only seen one accident, and that was a minor fender bender. for all the weaving bikes and pedestrians, traffic tends to flow pretty well most of the time.