mirleft, tafraoute and moroccan food

so we arrived in the little seaside village of mirleft planning to stay in some or other hotel recommended by the LP. when we rocked up however this dude wandered up and told us he had apartments to rent so we went and checked out a couple and decided they were too expensive before finding one that was just $15 aussie a night and so we took it. it was so nice to have our own place with a lounge room and most importantly a kitchen, i got really excited and headed off to the market to buy vegies, spices, pasta and rice. it was such a great break from tajine, tajine, tajine. dont get me wrong moroccan food is good (well pretty good i actually think its rep migth be a little overrated) but i guess being from australia im used to a bit of diversity in my diet. in morocco we had two choices vegie tajine or vegie cous cous. for breakfast we, effectively had one choice, omolette (from poor badly treated chooks no doubt, naughty me). i dont think being a meat eater would have helped that much either then the choice would have been lamb tajine or chicken tajine. actually the tajines were genrally pretty nice but in the end they are just spiced steamed vegies so they can seem a little bland.

oh there were two other foods actually, moroccan salad; tomatoes and cucumber diced with pepper and orange juice pretty nice actually, and harira a beany soup which was really good but you could never really tell if it was vego. the markets do have a lot of good stuff, nuts and dried fruits as well as fruit n veg.

so anyway we pigged out on our own food creations for a few days and hung out in the very chilled out mirleft. its a very small town where the beach has seemed to creep into the town and all the streets are sandy and dusty and everything moves at a very slow pace. we didnt do much at all except made one trip to legizira about 20kms away which is a beach with some nice archway rock formations. the beach was pretty good except for the fact that like everywhere else in morocco it was covered in trash.

after mirleft we headed into the hills to another tiny village named tafraoute. its in a valley surrounded by rocky, boulder covered hills, very hot and kinda like you'd imagine morocco (at least in the good senses). we ended up staying a week in tafaroute as it was really nice and really cheap. we hired mountain bikes for a couple of days and went riding through the surrounding areas. on the first day we went to the ameln valley. this is a prime region for growing almond and the argan nut a locally delicacy which is turned into a yummy roasted oil, amongst other things. apparently its harvesting involves goats climbing the argan trees (we saw this a few times it looks wierd a wiry spiny tree with as many as six or seven climbing around the upper branches) and then apparently picking the digested nut from the goat dungs. anyway we rode to the ameln, a rocky desert valley overlooked by decent sized mountains. the ride was hot work but good fun and we rode through a couple of picturesque villages and lovely palmeraries where we could hide away from the sun for a little bit. we visited a traditional berber house that had been turned into a very interesting museum, the whole house was made of mud and thus very cool, the kitchen was in the centre adn in winter the family slept in the hallways surrounding the kitchen, in winter they slept on the roof. in the corner of the kitchen was a little hole where vegie scraps were thrown and these were eating by the animals that lived in the cellar below.

the second day we rode past a strange rock formation known as napoleans hat and onwards to an artpiece known as the painted rocks. these are huge rocks that a belgian artist painted blue in the 80s. after a long ride we arrived and theyre they were a bunch of big blue rocks. flick managed to fix her kite and got in flying away very successfully. after our energetic couple of days we settled down to our more normal routine of being lazy bastards. me and flick both bought some cool slippers and i picked up heaps of wicked moroccan music really cheaply. otherwise we just lazed about, oh yeah we also found a cool paste made of argan oil, almond and honey yum yum. after our fun time in tafraoute we caught a bus through some insanely thick fog through windy mountain passes and off to marrakesh.