The road to Marrakesh

Somewhere in the middle of Morocco, Tuesday 13 October

The drive over the Middle Atlas mountains from Fez to Marrakesh (said here as ma-rack-esh) is 500 km, windy for the first three hours and reasonably similar: arid, litter strewn and a long time between communities. Every now and again the landscape quietly changes…the soil at the beginning is a beigy dust colour there is little to cover it so it is very noticeable but this is first and foremost a just get me to the next stop travel day.

Our first stop in the small and very out of place town called Ifrane. It could be a little town in France, it is clean, European in layout and look, the houses are chalet style because it snows here in winter. I am told there is a ski field here but I just can’t see how that would work, I don’t see any hills! I had to see the snow on a postcard to believe it and I am still not sure that I do. However it actually looks like a nice place to stay. We just get a coffee stop today there is too much road to get through.

We see three accidents on the way to our lunch stop, one an over turned bus in the middle of nowhere, completely surrounded by hundreds of villagers and kids running towards the chaos from all directions. The roads are two laned and actually not that busy, those that are on it are probably not travelling great distances because they are moving huge stacks of hay or farm product or dozens of people! Otherwise we see only Mercedes or very small beaten up cars like Honda City’s. Petrol here is around E2 (NZ$4) a litre. While there are some shiny modern petrol operated cars in the cities, most of the cars on the roads including Taxi’s are old Mercedes, the reason for this is because they run on diesel and diesel is cheap in comparison to petrol. We see Mercedes next to donkey’s and carts all the time, this is the face of Morocco.

By late afternoon the soil has changed from beige to pink to red and as I notice this and the greenery that suddenly surrounds us, the palm trees against the bright blue sky, and the roses dotted everywhere we begin to drive into the former hippy paradise Marrakesh.