Day 13 & 14 – And relax…

We pack up the campsite and amble the few hours back to Ait Youl where we have lunch in the house where we set off what seems like a fairly long time ago. Dog is shut in when we leave – one of the muleteers is going to give it a home – and we walk over the hill to the road. We get there just as the local mosque is kicking out after afternoon prayers. The two groups of people stand there blinking at each other as we wait for our minibus to come and take us to Ouarzazate.

Ouarzazate has a restaurant called Restaurant Obelix, a place full of props from the film studios apparently which the guidebooks smear with the word ‘kitsch’. I vote for eating there in the evening, no one else bites, so we eat in the hotel instead in a room which has been decorated to try and recreate the atmosphere of a large Berber tent in the mountains…

A 3.45 start to get an early flight from Ouarzazate airport, but no-one minds too much as the five hours or so in a bed beforehand have been complete and utter bliss. A surface that doesn’t send your hips numb – fantastic! We have five hours to kill in Casablanca airport, which we do by playing cards, drinking coffee and simply enjoying sitting in chairs. Chairs! Fantastic! And the toilets…by all that’s holy, they flush! Fantastic!

Feelings of calm and serenity picked up from nigh on two weeks in the wilderness last all the way to Heathrow where they are derailed by a) the coach back to Reading, as they'd changed the whole system around and it was only a kindly coach driver letting me travel for free that prevented me from freezing my knackers off for an extra half an hour. Then b) I saw a piece in the Daily Mail which was basically themed Women, Stay At Home And Have Babies And Leave The Hard Stuff To Us Men which made me a tad angsty. Frankly, I wouldn’t wipe my arse on that paper in case I caught something toxic. Oh, and then c) England lost the rugby to Scotland. However, this was offset slightly by d) Bath beating Gloucester, e) being welcomed home by friends who plied me with drink and good cheer and f) the knowledge that I could get up tomorrow and didn’t have to walk anywhere unless I really really wanted to.

I then rearranged all the furniture in the living room and now have a perfect space which would ideally suit a nice Moroccan rug. Guess I'll have to go back at some point, though next time I think I'll save my feet and take the train via Fes...

Day 12 – I Ain’t Going To Camp No More No More

With over 2cm of ice in the washing bucket overnight, Mohamed and Abdou estimate that it probably got down to –5 last night. Christ on a bike, it was cold.

Another day when you’re just covering the ground rather than walking for the sake of it. We’re heading back to civilisation now. We come across our first sign of a road/track for about five days, and later on we climb a hill and look out over Ait Youl. With its two hundred houses or so it looks like a metropolis. I get bright lights/big city fever and dream of French burgundies and Tournedos Rossini.

One more night in a tent and that’s it. Tomorrow, I give my sleeping roll to the muleteers and swear off canvas for good.

Dog looking almost perky.

Day 11 – Life in the Freezer

The wind got up during the night and, coming down from the High Atlas as it was, it all got a bit parky to say the least. We hit our highest point of the trip, crossing a rocky saddle at 2180m in the snow (in the snow! – most days have been a combination of 25 degrees and factor 50).

We’re on the home leg of our loop back to Ait Youl now, and the walking has got a bit less interesting. After six hours or thereabouts, we all end up lying round the mess tent in our sleeping bags. Even four season ones fail to keep out the chill, and at night you find yourself turning over as first one side of you then the other goes numb as the ground leaches away your body heat.

Dog makes it through the day, humans look on slightly shakier ground.

Day 10 – Music Over My Head

So, having moaned about camping, now we get to one of the reasons why it’s worth putting up with on an occasional basis: Irhissi.

Irhissi is an old, ruined kasbah at the intersection of three valleys that was built a shade over two hundred years ago. All that’s left now are the four walls, which are gracefully crumbling back into the rock from whence they came, and a few nomads scattered about the valley.

It took about six hours to get there, including a long drag up a fairly steep pass, so we were all fairly tuckered out when we got there. The evening more than made up for it. A scavenge round the local area picked us up enough firewood to get a good blaze going in the centre of the kasbah, and then the muleteers picked up all the plastic buckets they could get their hands on and started singing and drumming. It was a fantastic performance: Berber songs in a call and response pattern with a bit of dancing thrown in by the firelight. I wandered out beyond the walls and sat on a rock looking at the stars coming out (the skies out there were stunning) and apart from the odd satellite whizzing overhead it was almost as if the past two hundred years had never happened.



Until, that is, Mohamed Ali decides to lead everyone in a chorus of ‘That’s The Way I Like It’.

Woke to find the dog curled up in the ashes of last night’s fire. We discuss names. Dog features strongly, as does Yallah (to go, literally ‘to go with Allah’). My suggestion of Mange is largely ignored.

Day 9 – The Hounds of Love

Another long day, though one with some spectacular scenery. We really are in the middle of bugger all anywhere today, so the little boy with the dingly dangly stall is a bit of a surprise. As is the dog that decides to start following us a few minutes later. To be honest it looks close to death, with its ribs sticking through its fur and its tail as far between its legs as it can get. This has not been a happy animal. We tell it to scram a couple of times but it takes no notice and no one wants to start throwing stones to start driving off such a wretched looking beast, so we let it tag along.

Crest a ridge and find my mobile phone has turned itself on in my bag and received a text message from a friend, Spencer, asking if the Bath Rugby Club defence are on holiday with me as they’re certainly not playing at the Rec. He then thoughtfully doesn’t tell me what the final score is, leaving me to wonder for the rest of the trip if we managed a heroic fightback or not. I turn the phone off sharpish.

Day 8 – Opting Out

Today’s eight hour walk is an optional one with a six am start. I decline and decide to spend the day chilling, doing some washing in a stream (clothes and body – luxury!), drinking mint tea and reading.

It’s not the walking that knackers you on these trips, it’s the camping. By now, if you ask me, mankind’s three greatest inventions in order of importance are the spring mattress, the flush toilet and the chair. Writing, space travel, the internet? Bugger all that, I’d gladly swap it all for a sofa.

I knew there was a reason why I’d never camped before (festivals, due to recreational pharmaceuticals and general imbibing, don’t really count). The ground’s hard and uncomfortable and, to be frank, crapping behind rocks doesn’t have a lot to recommend it. It’s very hard to concentrate on what you’re doing when you’re being looked at quizzically by a goat.

Day Seven – Berber Whiskey

The scenery is now typical for the area: mesas, buttes and broad scrub plains. Dotted throughout it are the odd irrigated oasis wherever there’s water, with fig trees prominent amongst the foliage. They’re strikingly white against the dusty orange of the area, looking like the White Tree of Gondor to the Tolkeinites amongst us.

Today is the first of three eight hour walking days, which means vast amounts of mint tea at lunch. Mint tea fuels the Berbers in the same way that normal tea powers the British. Mint leaves are mixed with Chinese Green Tea and unfeasibly large amounts of sugar are added and the whole syrupy result drunk with relish. It’s great stuff and rejoices in the nickname of Berber Whiskey, though you can feel your teeth dissolve rather than your liver as you drink it. Big Chris meanwhile has a bottle of the real stuff bought from a supermarket in Ouarzazete, and the odd nip helps the evenings pass pleasantly. In fact, several people bought bottles of wine at the same time, so we’ve had a small glass with a few meals, though not nearly enough to maintain health and fitness as far as I’m concerned.



The cairns are interesting. Some of the pagan Berber beliefs have survived alongside Islam, and here passing men are supposed to build a cairn to increase their fertility and women build one to find a man. Mohamed says it worked for him two years ago (he now has a young daughter) and he might build one next year. I idly wonder if I need to kick one over to lower the sperm count.

And while we’re on the subject of fertility, apparently the best Berber match you can make is with your cousin, as this represents the best balance between keeping the land within the family and casting the genetic net wide. I asked about inbreeding, Mohamed said it wasn’t an issue. Hmmmm. Either the Berbers have a very different genetic stock to the rest of us, or the women have their own way of sorting things out on the quiet if you ask me.