The long and winding road

Ted. When last we met, we were about to drive back to Marrakech from our desert camp outside of Mhamid.

The morning started off with a chuckle. We had agreed to leave camp around 8:30am and had requested breakfast for 8:00. When we sat down in the dining tent, I noticed that my iPhone now said 7:00. It turned out that daylight savings had ended that morning and nobody in the desert had noticed.  So, we were able to leave an hour early at the new time of 7:30. We found out later that the day before the time change, the Moroccan parliament voted to keep permanent daylight savings time.  Unfortunately, that led to a great deal of confusion throughout the country for the next two days.

The ever faithful Abdoul had driven his car out to our camp so we didn’t need to ride camels back to town. The drive through the dunes made me think of the Brits chasing Rommel across North Africa. Here’s a little video (remember that you will need to visit the blog site, losingsightshore@blogspot.com to see it since our videos don’t go out in the emails).

Ultimately we made it to a paved road and I was reminded again why I was glad not to be driving a rental car. The road to Marrakech was much as we had seen before with lots of scenery and old villages. 

Berber pickup

We did stop in Ouarzazate to pick up a souvenir djellaba for number one grandson. As we entered the shop, Abdoul approached the owner and explained in Arabic that we were friends of his and the owner should show us how a good Muslim man does business and not treat us shoddily like tourists. He only showed us his best clothing, offered his best price first and there was no haggling.

We enjoyed the views of fresh snow capping the Atlas Mountains as we made our way up to Tizi N’Tichka, the 7,400 ft high pass we needed to cross.

High Atlas Mountains

At about 2:30 pm, we reached Ighrem N’Ougdal, 8 miles short of the pass and 2-½ hours from Marrakech, when all traffic stopped. Abdould walked up to the police barricade to find out what had happened. He returned, reporting that “The mountain has brokit the road.”  He explained that repairs could take two hours or two days. We debated our options. We could sit and wait or return to Ouarzazate and spend the night. Ultimately, we chose a third option and drove back to Marrakech via Agadir, adding 7 hours to our trip (we later found out that the pass was closed for 3 days).

Mhamid to Marrakech, the long version

Towards midnight, we staggered into our riad to find Youness waiting for us with hot tea. We hugged faithful Abdoul to bid farewell. After nearly 16 hours of driving, he had gotten us safely home. We may never see Abdoul again, but we will never forget his service. To use a Southernism, “In Morocco they treated us like we was their Mama ‘n’ Daddy!”

Judy, Abdoul and Linda