heres flick in front of the amazing middle atlas.
winnebago warriors have invaded morocco, they are everywhere!!!! unfortunately theyre not keen on picking up hitchhikers.
chefchaouen, check the blueness
and some birds flying over the town square.
chefchaouen
chaouen, as the locals call it, is a lovely little town in the rif mountains. its medina is a crazy warren of house and alleys painted in a veryu calming shade of sky blue. apparently the colour repels the flies! apart from being blue chaouen is famous for one thing; hash. the rif is possibly the biggest ganja growing region in the world producing most of the hash for europe. not surprisingly for such a region every second person doubles as a dealer, but more surprisingly none of them managed to sell us any drugs.
the first day we arrived the inevitable tout who directed us to our hotel kept asking us if we wanted any, or maybe to see the hash factory. now i must admit that sounded interesting but we'd just spent 25 odd hours travelling and dealing with tetouan taxi drivers so we werent real keen on commiting to anything. so i said maybe we'd think about it later but now we just needed to sleep. the next day we saw him again and he had hash for us, we said we didnt want it and he flipped and started claiming he'd waited three hours for us yesterday to stop sleeping and how we were disrespecting his culture and time etc. anyone he followed us for about half an hour swearing and threatening and generally being a pain in the arse. so after that we were kinda put off the whole chilling out smoking idea. anyway having every second person you see try to befriend you in order to sell you hash or carpets doenst really sound like the kinda of environment i'd like to be stoned in.
so that was chaouen it wasnt so bad really, very pretty n all, but very touristy, i think we stayed three nights then moved on.
azrou
we caught a bus outta chaouen heading for the city of meknes. only problem was when we arrived there shortly before nightfall we changed our mind and decided we didnt want to stay in a city and so jumped on another bus to the small town of azrou. azrou means 'the rock' and is named thus cause of a huge big chunk of rock sitting right in the middle of town, otherwise its nice but a bit unremarkable though so we flitted off the next morning.
timnay
next we moved on further south, our bus climbed up into the mountains (past a few barbay apes) onto a huge rocky, barren plateau. after about an hour of driving along this plateau we reached the complexe de tourisique de timnay. this was a strange hotel/campground in the middle of the plateau which amazingly had the only soft shady bit of ground for miles, so we took advantage of this and setup our new tent. then we had a wander round the area the landscape was fantastic, at the edge of the plateau the huge snowcapped mountains of the middle atlas rose out of nowhere. the owners of timnay were cool, and taught us a few words of berber. the berbers make up about half the population of morocco but the cities are made up mainly of arabic moroccans which means that most of the small towns are predominantly berber.
the next days we waited by the side of the road till finally a bus arrived and we continued our journey south over the middle atlas towards the sahara.
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