Greetings from chilled out Meknes. We arrived here yesterday evening after an exhausting seven hour train ride from Marrakech. It was exhausting because the air conditioning was not working on the train so we literally baked in our own sweat for the entire journey. To make it worse the train was full most of the way, among our fellow passengers an annoying little kid who tried to see how many things he could try and break in the carriage and left to run wild by his mother who liked a member of Monty Python in drag. Anyway, it was good practice for India, or so I kept telling myself the entire duration of the journey.
I had wanted to upload some more pics from our amazing Sahara adventure, but the computer here kept on giving me some bizarre message in French so I only managed this one, taken in the Atlas mountains on our way to Ourzazate, Zagora and Merzouga, the towns we visited during our trip.
It was a brilliant road trip, made especially so by our great travelling companions. There were only seven of us - made up of the two I mentioned in my previous post, Loralin and Neil from Dublin, and an Italian couple, Veronica and Salvatore from Milan and Ibrahim a Moroccan from Rabat. It was great having Ibrahim along not just because he was super friendly but because he could answer lots of my questions about Moroccan customs and ways of life. Veronica happened to be a doctor of infectious medicine, so we were covered if we got sick.
The trip was four days and three nights. The first two nights we camped in the desert, travelling by camel to our tents. We ate communaly from tagines prepared by our guides, nomadic Berbers. At night they played traditional music among the sand dunes. Our second evening, we had to wait out a vicious sandstorm before taking camels through the enormous salmon pink sand dunes of Merzouga as the sun set. It is definitely one of the best things I have ever done. The dunes looked surreal and riding through them on our camels was worth the cost of the trip alone.
Besides the camels and dunes we also visited some ancient cities and kasbahs (two of which were used to film moves like Gladiator and Lawrence of Arabia, or so I was told), travelled through incredible gorges and valleys filled with palm trees with bunches of dates hanging from them and passed the Berbers red mudbrick houses literally rising out of the rock. I could go on, instead I will try and upload a whole bunch of photos the next time I am able.
As for Meknes it is a lot smaller and less frenetic than Marrakech and has a cool, European manner in the new city where we are staying. It was built by the French, so it figures. We played backgammon over fruit juice in the main square of the Medina today (the old part of the city) and took a wander through the souq. Our hotel is called the Majestic and is a period Art deco piece built in 1937, quite wonderful though more expensive than our unreliable Lonely Planet guide said. We will probably stay another night here and then head to Fez, which is only an hour from here.
No comments:
Post a Comment