Today we travelled to the mountain village of Aroumd (pronounced Are-emd). To get there we drove over the 2,260m Tizi n'Tichka Pass in the High Atlas mountain range and through the Toubkal National Park.
As we journeyed further west, the landscape began to change. There's still quite a lot of brown, arid land, but more and more green started to appear. The trees are taller and denser.
A couple of hours into our drive and we crossed the Tizi n'Tichka Pass. The drive up was great, with fantastic views looking back down the valley. Once on the other side, the views became even more spectacular. The road twists back and forth, with some insanely tight corners. The views from the top are amazing, both of the stunning surrounding scenery and also of the road as it snakes down the valley.
They're right in the middle of a road widening project which is crazy. They're widening the whole road at the same time, which means we slow to a crawl in several places. Huge diggers are attacking the cliff face, right alongside the passing traffic. We passed within a couple of metres of falling rocks on several occasions. No stop/go guys to make sure the traffic flows safely. That's left to each driver to assess and manage. Occupational, safety and health doesn't seem to exist here!
The road has steep cliffs on one side, with vertical or near vertical drops of several hundred metres down to the valley below. It's obvious by the damage in some places along the road that some vehicles have gone over the side.
Moroccans love their football and football fields pop up everywhere. As we wind down the road, there's the odd house along the way and on one flattish piece of dirt, the locals have cleared it and made themselves a football field on the stoney surface - ouch! It looks so out of place, as there's virtually no homes nearby.
Through the Atlas Mountains and the landscape continues to change as we hit the Haouz plains. The plains are huge and stretch out towards the west coast. Whilst still pretty dry, there is clearly more water around here as it's noticeably greener. Our journey followed at the foot of the High Atlas mountain range, which stretches over 700kms from Midelt, where we were only five days ago, right out to the coast in southern Morocco.
Lunch today was excellent. We stopped at a large truck-stop style place, which had the widest variety of food we've come across so far. Sandwiches (mini baguettes with fries) were the order of the day, cheese and tomato for Cindy and chicken for me - delicious!!!
Next stop was the very alpine-looking village of Imlil. On the road to Imlil, we passed a massive mansion, built in traditional Moroccan Kasbah style. Apparently it was a bit run down until Richard Branson bought it a few years ago and has completely transformed it. We're told that it's quite common to see helicopters coming in and out fairly regularly.
Imlil is set in amongst the high Atlas Mountains and is close to North Africa's highest mountain, the 4167m Jebel Toubkal. Imlil is around 1800m above sea level and is the place where many tour groups head off to walk to the summit, so it's very busy with loads of trekkers and shops selling trekking and climbing gear and of course all the normal touristy stuff that you would expect.
Our digs for the night is in a wonderful little guest house called Gite Dar Armed, located in the small village of Aroumd, which is about a 45 minute walk up the valley from Imlil. Just like when we went to the Sahara, we only needed to take the bare essentials, so we dumped our packs in Imlil and headed up the valley. The walk was made very easy by having our day packs driven up to the guest house.
The setting is simply stunning. We're staying on the banks of the river Ait Mizan, that stems from the mountains and we look up a valley to the mountain range. The only sound we hear is the running water and children playing. Absolute bliss.
The guest house is owned and run by Hussain and his wife, Marrika. He's a great guy with wicked sense of humour and excellent English. Marrika doesn't speak much English and is very quiet - she keeps busy in the kitchen getting dinner ready for us. They have three daughters, from 1-7, who keep running in and out giggling at us. Wonderful family.
Outside it's lovely watching the locals gathering, having dinner or playing by the river. Up river it's very narrow, but as it gets closer to Aroumd it widens to well over 100m in places and then narrows again to just a few meters once past the village. As the river widens it separates into smaller streams which makes it easy to walk across.
Dinner was Harira soup and goat Tajine. I reckon both are the best we have had while we've been here. It's the second time we've eaten goat this trip and both times it's been really tasty. Could definitely develop a taste for it!
During dinner it started to rain and we were treated to a spectacular lightening and thunder display which lasted for a couple of hours. The lightening was so bright, it would light up the entire valley and the thunder so loud sometimes, you would swear it was right above your head.
There's no wifi where we stayed, so it was great just to relax and chill without having online distractions.
I'm looking forward to tomorrow as we're going on a 3-3.5 hour trek up the valley to around 2500m to visit a shrine before heading back down to Imlil to continue our journey.
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