One adventure week in an Adventure Year

We started our trip in Casablanca by accident after our bus to Essaouira was three hours late and we missed our connection. This the giant, modern mosque that is built in the sea jutting out from the city and so the whole area was filled with people enjoying their Sunday with their families, fisherman, and little boys jumping off the walls of the mosque into the sea about 10 feet below.

Essouira is beach town with a medina that is a UNESCO heritage site. It was all very pretty, very touristy, but largely uneventful except for drinking beer for the first time in 2 months (a bit anti-climatic unfortunately).

Next we took an 8 hour bus trip to the eastern part of Morocco over the Atlas Mountains (snow!) to a valley of gorges. Oh Jen threw up on the bus trip, a very exciting few seconds as Brandon scrambled for a plastic bag.

When we exited the bus at Boumalne du Dades, a guy named Ali started talking to us asking if we had a place to stay (we didn’t and we barely knew how to go see the gorges since we don’t have guidebook, just the map Jen drew in her planner). After a bit a discussion we agreed on a price for a hotel, which included dinner and breakfast. The next day we went on a solo hike along gorges against the advice of Ali who wanted us to hire him for the day as a guide.

In the summer you can usually walk through the huge gorges but there was so much rain that the chocolate milk river forced us to scramble hundreds of feet up the mountains around the gorges. We tried a few times to descend into the gorge with no luck. Though we may have missed a few "key" sights as we went without a guide, we definitely would go guideless again just to get the adrenaline of nearly dying a few times.

This is an old Kasbah that was slowly being washed away by the rain (it was also filled with used baby diapers).

So much water in this oasis, Brandon chose to go barefoot after Jennifer slipped in up to her knees.

The next day Ali also put us in touch with Yusuf, a man who does camel tours in the Sahara and so we set off to that…after we gave him a deposit of 200MAD as were hopping on the bus out of town. We weren’t sure if we were being conned into giving this guy our money but we decided to trust him. 

Yusef met us at the bus and took us on a rollicking 4X4 drive over a river, up some dunes and through a black pebble desert until we reached the amazing, red, golden Erg Chebbi, the largest dunes in Morocco! They rise out of nothing, just this giant pile of the sand in the middle of the desert.  The camel ride to our camp was funny, a bit hokey, definitely very touristy but a worthwhile experience. 

Brandon's beard got so huge and all of the Moroccans were calling him Ali Baba everywhere we went. Because of his beard or because we are tourists, we never could get a straight answer.

What made the experience really great was that we were the only ones on the trek out. We met some desert cats that survive off tourists and nomads. The cats were mangy beasts that Brandon happily petted and Jen ignored. Also in accordance with our characters Jen woke up before dawn to watch the sunrise over the dunes and Brandon stayed asleep in our Berber tent.

And when we got home Brandon finally shaved off his giant beard, now no one calls him Ali Baba anymore.