About 30 mins into our journey we stopped at the town of Tinerhir to visit the souq, which is held every Monday. A souq is a large market where sellers will rent a space to sell their products.
The Tinerhir souq is huge and on offer today was a wide range of goods including vegetables, spices, clothing, sofas, bicycles, electrical goods and more. The vegetables are huge, noticeably bigger than what we buy back home and the colours are so vibrant. The spices look and smell incredible. We met a very friendly spice seller who was showing us the difference between spices such as Moroccan and Indian cumin - the smell was so good!!
The only thing missing from the market was meat products. There is a separate souq held every Saturday morning when they sell livestock as well as butchered meats.
About an hour later, after driving mainly across very arid plains, we pass through a pretty town known as the rose town. The town is the main producer of roses in Morocco. Whilst it's not rose season, the plants can be seen growing in amongst the vegetable paddocks. In and around the city, the land is very green and lush and perfect for growing and produces over 700kgs of rose petals each season which is used to make rose oil.
As we leave the town, the land turns back to brown and arid and the plain stretches for miles. About 10 minutes out of town, there is a large Berber farming area. This is an initiative launched by the government about 10 years ago for the local Berber people.
The land can be leased for a nominal price for a period of 90 years and must stay in the same family. Once the lease has been granted, the farmer is responsible for digging a well to create his own water supply. As water is such a precious resource, they are employing the drip-watering technique and long lines of hose can easily be seen. It looks great, with very healthy olive trees growing and is now providing an income for the farmer.
Another hour up the road and we stopped to visit Kasbah Amridil. This Kasbah was built in the 17th century and is Moroccos most coveted Kasbah, so much so that its image appears on Moroccos 50 dirham note alongside the king.
The Kasbah is now a living museum and gives great insights how they used to live. It's such a clever design with wide walls to heat and cool in winter and summer, multiple kitchens which were also used for heating the Kasbah. The number five pops up all the time in its design - five towers, rooms with five windows, five layers of bamboo flooring and more. This is by design, with the number five representing the five pillars of Islam.
The guide for our tour of the Kasbah was hilarious. When he was explaining how things worked in the Kasbah, he would pretend he was back in time and having conversations with other family members - maybe calling them to eat the freshly cooked food - or pretending the Kasbah was being invaded and how he would protect himself. A bit hard to explain, but very good fun.
By now it was 2:45pm and everyone's a bit hungry, so we headed to our lunch stop, in the town of Ouarzazate (pronounced Wa-Za-Zat), about 45 mins up the road. Knicknamed Ouallywood, Ouarzazate is the film capital of Morocco and has been used for movies such as Lawrence of Arabia, the Sheltering Sky and Black Hawk Down. We pass by the main studio and out the back (which is all desert) they have created a massive fortress that was used in the creation in Alexander the Great. It looks so real, yet it's just a facade and there's nothing behind the massive walls.
From lunch it was back in the van and on to our next stop, Ait Benhaddou. It's a small town, which relies heavily on the movie industry and tourism. There are around 3-4 major movies shot in the region every year which brings a good injection of money for the community as well as opportunity for the locals to earn a bit of cash as extras. The town is below middle class, so every bit counts.
One of the features of the town is a fortified village which sits at the bottom of a pyramid shaped hill. The village was built there when there was conflict between the Berbers and the Nomads. Since that was resolved, the hundreds of people who lived there, moved to the other side of the river, which was a far more practical location to live. Sadly, the village was simply vacated and left to ruin and quickly started to crumble and collapse.
In the late 90's, the village was recognised by Unesco as a world heritage site, so a bit of money was injected to repair the village. As part of the condition of support, five families have also moved back to live in the village. It's helped that a number of movies have used the village for filming various scenes which has helped in the repair.
It's really disappointing to see the amount of rubbish that lies around. It's not just here, it's all over the place. It seems like such an easy thing to fix, but when it's just part of your culture to discard rubbish they way they do, it takes an awful lot to change!!!
Dinner was salad and cous cous on the terrace of our hotel over looking the river toward the old fortified village. The only thing missing was a nice cold beer and some wine. Ait Benhaddou is a dry town - bugger!
No comments:
Post a Comment