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snow on the Atlas ridge

almond blossom and snow

Igherm, southbound

Zagora oasis

terraces near Marrakesh

Aguelmane Azigza

My first voyage outside Europe was to Morocco in 1974.

My friend and I had been to London to buy a second hand Land Rover with a long wheel base. Jan had it equipped with an overdrive, so in each gear we had an extra option. It made changing gears a bit difficult: put into second, clutch in the overdrive, pull out the overdrive before switching to third... but it provided the right gear for all possible circumstances, as we learned on Morocco's inner roads. The jeep only had three gears and its maximum speed was 90-100 km/h. It took ages to get to Gibraltar, but it was a lot of fun to drive it all through Morocco.

From Sebta/Ceuta (the Spanish enclave) we went to Chefchaouen. There our friends took a bus to the warm south (it was January). I got me a tailor-made djellabah (none of the ready-mades was my length) to survive in the cold north, next to the Rif mountains. We two switched driving the jeep, and the one co-piloting always was a bit scared by the driving style we shared... Some roads through the mountains, particularly at the Todra, were covered in snow and ice, and at night we once decided to empty the radiator for fear the water inside would freeze. We crossed the mountains of the Middle Atlas, the Atlas, and the Anti-Atlas.

Most of the time, we were in Berber country. We listened to the local radio stations and the uptime music of the mountain people, quite different from the slow monotonous lowland tunes... The people were friendly and we didn't worry about thieves and felt quite at ease. Nevertheless we got lost several times because road indications were very scarce. We ate bread and stark butter with a couple that only spoke some Berber dialect (we understood none of that), but just gave simple hospitality for travellers.

The people are very friendly, and don't want to disappoint. We tried to avoid drinking Nescafé, because there is such good real coffee. When we asked whether they had real coffee, the answer was always yes, even if it turned out they only had Nescafé. So we rather asked: "Do you have Nescafé?", and when the answer was an enthusiastic "Yes", we disappointedly asked for a Coke or Fanta... But when they said they only had bean coffee, we praised the qualities of 'the real stuff'. We didn't like it too much when we ordered couscous with beef, and they served us couscous, patatoes, onion and something hard to chew. "No vegetables?" "Potato is a vegetable!" "Not in our country, it isn't!". In the middle of nowhere, we had trouble with the steering of the jeep and learned some more about ball joints and other mechanics.

We traveled through the inside of Morocco. Todra, Igherm, Ouarzazate,... We wanted to go further south but the Gendarmerie told us the roads were too bad. In fact, they had problems with the sahraouis^✶ that didn't accept the annexation of the Western Sahara by Morocco. We had already seen -and our friends that traveled by bus confirmed this- that the 'darker' looking southerners were often singled out by the police and the military at road blocks and checkpoints. So, our most southern point was Zagora, where we stayed some days in an oasis, with some dark brown bedouin tents nearby our Alpina tent. On the way back, after a turn to the coast at Tiznit, we made a brief visit to Marrakesh and its Jemaa el Fna^✶ market. Other stops were at the Oum Er-Rbia source and the Aguelmane Azigza lake (both near Khenifra)...

[The colours of the pictures are a bit unnatural because they have been lying around for many years, then souped up by the scanner program.]

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