We got up at about 8:00 and I went down to the restaurant for the usual breakfast of toast, jam and coffee while Linda had a shower. We packed up our stuff and left it in the room and went downstairs to pay the bill. The luggage didn’t have to be out until 12:00.
Pete, Rob, Linda and I walked up the street to the place where where the line of horses and carriages stood and negotiated with a driver to hire his carriage for an hour at a cost of 40 dirhams.
The route took us through the old part of the city along narrow streets and lanes leading to the ruins of the Emir’s Palace. We paid 20 dirhams to go in an look around in what was really only a huge courtyard surrounded by high walls with an orange grove in two sunken gardens.
From the old palace, we went round to the Emir’s new palace – high stone walls again and a studded door set between two stone pillars – then through the botanic gardens (dry and dusty) before returning to the centre of town. We had a row with the drive over how long we had been away and ended up paying him 60 dirhams for the trip.
Linda and I had a quick lunch at a corner cafe then grabbed our luggage from the hotel and boarded the truck at about 12:30. All of the free-loaders [ie the members of the trip wh, dis-satisfied with the way the trip was being run had wandered off on their own and who now had a very holier-than-thou attitude] were back and there were a lot of snide comments being handed around, by Skip in particular, about how much of a drag it was to be “stuck back in the truck.” For our part, those of us who had stayed with the truck considered ourselves to have had a great time without the others and their constant complaining!
We drove out of Marrakech into the country, heading north and spent the afternoon driving through and ever-changing landscape: sometimes brown and barren, sometimes productive and fertile with complicated systems of raised concrete channels for carrying water for irrigation.
About 3:30, we stopped for a coffee at a roadside cafe then a bit later on, we turned off the main road and climbed a steep, winding road over a range of hills and down into a valley at the head of which was a campsite beside a set of waterfalls called The Cascades. Unfortunately, the road to the falls was washed out so we turned back and made camp on a hillside at dusk.
CurseOfTheTraveller 