Dwti Draig

As ever I’ve left it ages before catching up with writing my blog, and now it all seems a bit overwhelming! I’m forcing myself to sit down and try and remember exactly what we’ve been up to recently, as it all seems a bit of a blur of sand dunes, mountains, date palms and blue skies!

I know I touched on it in the last blog, but I genuinely loved our desert stays. We ended up staying in 3 different areas which we have innovatively named as Desert 1, 2 and 3! Full of imagination! We stayed for 2 nights at Desert 1, in a campsite at the North end of the Erg Chebbi dunes. We came off road to get there, driving on the bumpy hamada, also known as washboard,  which is the rocky desert plain. Driving over it is like driving over corrugated sheets, which creates immense vibrations. There were plenty of tracks over it, and vehicles sped over it a lot faster than us, leaving large dust clouds behind them. The dunes arise from this hamada, and stretch as far as the eye can see. We checked into the camp site we had chosen, only to find 85 Monkey Bikes (little 50cc Chinese motorbikes) lined up outside. They had a travel organisation arriving that night before all the participants took off on the bikes around Morocco. This was not going to be a quiet campsite! We found our solitude in the dunes as the sun set, as long as we ignored the off road vehicles and camel trains that trrekked over on their sunset tours. We thoroughly enjoyed just watching the sun set over the dunes, and the amazing colour changes and shadows that emerged. We made it a point of principle to always be the last ones off the dunes, when it was dark. We would have our private desert experience dammit! All the tours vacate within 15 minutes of the sun setting!

We moved on further down the dunes to Desert 2, where we managed to find an amazing campsite right at the foot of the dunes. The view was just incredible, and although we did have tours and camels galore we still managed to keep our evening routine up to get our solitude, although as ever in Morocco it didn’t take long before someone came over the dunes in full arab regalia to try to sell us his fossils. We declined and watched him try with other people. We much preferred this campsite and even had a tagine meal there in the restaurant. We stayed here for 2 nights. 

Desert 3 was even more spectacular, as we followed the road to the end of the dunes and then beyond, bumping along offroad tracks until we chose a space to park up. Lyn is always worried about sinking in sand, so he always gets out to manually inspect it first. We saw the odd vehicle pass, but were mostly alone. We spent one sunset on our own totally private set of dunes; no camels, no quads, no bikes, no guides, no tours, just us and the setting ball of fire. It was bliss. This was followed by a sky we rarely get to see. The lack of light pollution meant the Milky Way stretched above us in a huge arc, and millions of stars twinkled. We slept with the sky hatch open, and I woke at 4.30am to see Orion watching down over me, until he slowly moved away. Incredible. 

We reluctantly left the desert, although we were hoping to escape the heat a little bit, as it is draining. We headed to a place Lyn was desperate to visit; the Portuguese prison/fort in Gara Medouar. Before we got there we spent an hour watching the Moroccan Rally 25 go through. Lyn was over the moon…me not so much!

We passed through the town of Rissani where we had spotted shops with headscarves hanging outside. We parked outside and were immediately besieged with a group of young girls begging us to buy them chocolate. They were very persistent, even poking us in the back for attention! We went into the shop and quickly bought  two of the cheapest ones so that we could try and avoid the flies in our faces. The owners tied one around me to show how the locals use them, but I wasn’t tempted!

As we waited for our change we went into the next shop, where we went into a back room where they were processing dates by hand and sorting them. Risaani is famous for its dates, and it is harvest time at the moment. They offered us some to try. I was expecting the hard sell, but that didn’t happen at all; they said it was just Moroccan hospitality. The dates were divine; unlike any we’dt ried before. They were absolutely massive, and so juicy. We didn’t buy any there and have regretted it ever since. 

We came off the main road to take the track to Gara Medour. It is a striking horseshoe shaped fortress like rock formation rising from the hamada. It’s vast circular walls and natural amphitheatre appearance have led to myths that it was a prison built by the Portuguese, although in reality it’s a natural geological formation later adapted for military and trading use. It is famous for being in films such as The Mummy and 007 Spectre, and more recently SAS Heroes. We drove inside and got to meet the infamous Ali; a local Berber guide. We decided to drive around the perimeter of the outside  to try and find some shade, but the sun was too high, so all the bumping was in vain, so we parked up and sat outside in the shade of the truck, but still sweltering. When it got a bit cooler we drove back to the entrance and parked outside for a quiet night. Lyn went in to explore the next morning. At 7.15am he hadn’t taken more than 20 paces before a had a lively Berber “hello” off Ali! Lyn climbed up and walked around the inner perimeter, climbing all over the shattered rocks. There were lots of old collapsed look out points. He eventually came to above the lorry and took some photos as another overlander drove past. 

We were supposed to be going from there to a secret overlander meet up somewhere in the desert, but by this point it was still a few days away and we were exhausted and sapped by the desert heat, so we decided to turn right instead of left and headed for the hills, where hopefully it would be cooler.

We headed towards the Dades Gorge, which was spectacular. We didn’t spend anywhere as near long enough there as we wanted, and it is somewhere we will definitely return on another trip when it is cooler. We entered via a chaotic town, and could see the gorge and the valley floor stretching out below us, like a ribbon of green snaking away into the distance. We drove up the gorge, through some hair pin bends and some crazy overtaking before we got to our park up in a hotel car park perched up high. The view from it was amazing in every direction, and  we could reach out of pur window and pick olives off a tree. We had breakfast in the hotel the next morning, and as we stopped to take in the view Lyn chatted to a man from the hotel. He explained that the crops we could see drying on the flat rooves of the houses was maize. He said that the families all live up in the hills, but each have a plot of land near the river bed, which they cultivate. Every year the river floods and everything is washed away, so they start again from scratch. Every year at least 2 or 3 locals from the valley die in the flooding. It was surreal looking down and seeing all the greenery and trying to imagine a very different scene when the river floods. 

We left Dades Gorge and drove onto Ouazarzate which seems to be a newish town with lots of construction and infrastructure. We were excited to visit a Carrefour there and stock up on fresh food. We took an unsexpectedly spectacular road from there over the mountains to Agdz. The road was fast, new, smooth and just my type of road. I could take in the view without being shaken and strirred. There were mountains in every direction you looked, stretching for miles, as the road cut through the rocks. This might just be my most favourite scenic drive ever! It remined us at times of Wales, and at other times of South West America. Stunning!

We stumbled across an idyllic little campsite in Agdz. It was just such a lovely chilled out place with views of mountains and palm trees that we stayed for 2 nights so Lyn could get his bike off. He went for a 4 hour bike ride, 130 miles high up into the mountains. He reached the top of one mountain pass at over 2300m/7000 feet. Typically he looks for the wildest twistiest roads where we can’t go in Dwti. It must have been good because he came back saying it would have been hard work in the truck. He did come back with a little suprprise; 2 boxes of dates from a roadside seller. He didn’t even have to get off the bike or take his helmet off. It was like a date drive through! The dates are, of course, amazing, and I keep having to tell him not to eat too many!

We reluctantly left the lovely Agdz campsite, with our daily delivery of free fresh bread, and headed towards Zagora, another “Gateway to the Desert” town. It has a famous sign saying “Tombouctou 52 jours’ marking its start of the camel caravan to Timbuktu, but we missed it! We had a stressful journey into Zagora when a car followed us for about 8 miles, driving really close behind us, and flashing us constantly. We guessed he was trying to sell us something so just kept going. Funnily enough he hung back as we went through police check points but then sped up again once through. It was stressful as he just wouldn’t pass us, making cars behind him pass us both. We drove into the centre of Zagora but then had to stop as the sat nav had taken us the wrong way to the camp site we had chosen. He pulled up alongside us and was shouting “camping?” at us. We just shouted “NO!” and pulled off, before another man came alongside us trying to get us to go to his camping place. I absolutely hate all this hassle! We got to our campsite, and had to drive through a very narrow entrance which was a bit fraught! The campsite is rather underwhelming, as is the part of the town that we have seen. We walked in  yesterday evening and had a drink and some desserts in a cafe watching daily life go by, (including 5 people on one motorbike!)