BootsnAll Travel Network



Morocco Day 2: ‘On the Road, Again’ Begins

Overall I would sum up my tour of Morocco as a too many toos:

Too crowded
Too rushed
Too much time on the road

Don’t get me wrong, I greatly enjoyed the trip. I loved Marrakesh and Fes, and met some great people in the group (including some other active Boots-N-All folk). I also really liked the people who ran the company and even though there were some problems, they did just about everything within their power to fix them, much at their own expense. I have no doubt they lost money on the trip with having to foot the bill for fixing some housing and people issues, and I would highly recommend the company —Journey Beyond Travel (JBT) — in part because of how well they tried to respond to issues in the interest of making their customers happy. I just can’t recommend the intinerary we did or traveling with this large a group.

Sixteen people was WAY too big for this trip (this was bigger than JBT wanted but it’s what Bootsnall gave them), and the people who were on it had diverse interests. Some were into cities and shopping, some were into outdoorsy stuff, and the trip tried to pack that all in, but it’s just too much for a 10 day tour (well, “12 days” but that includes arrival and departure day). We ended up seeing each place for too little time as to make the traveling to get there worthwhile, and I felt like we spent half the trip in the crowded van. Plus with a group that size every bathroom break or lunch break takes that much longer to complete. Sickness spread like wildfire. Of the 19 people (clients and tour folk together) only three people did not get sick the entire time. I think four people ended up going on cipro. Fortunately, I was one of the three not to get sick! Two of us who didn’t get sick had been traveling in the 3rd world for some time so clearly our immune systems were a bit stronger. I was still taking doxycycline for malaria and as this is an antibiotic and I have to assume was the reason why I never once got stomach ills in all my travels, as I have no other rational explanation given that I have a sensitive stomach. But I digress…

So, day two began with what would be one of our many days spent largely in the van. To begin, we had breakfast at Dar Cordoba and it was one of the best breakfasts we had on the entire trip. In many places breakfast was tea/coffee, orange juice, and bread with jam, butter or cheese. Here it also included funky pancakes, fruit, and maybe eggs (I don’t quite recall). Then, we piled into the van.

We drove to Ifran, a university town, where we stopped so people could buy snacks and make a bathroom break. Then, outside of Ifran in Tarmilat we stopped at what at first appeared to be a garbage dump. We got out and for the life of me I could not fathom why we were there. There were impoverished stone huts built on and around a massive dung heap, with goats and dogs hanging around. As we walked up the dung heap on the other side there were more huts and I realized I had been told earlier where we were going, but it hadn’t sunk in.

We had stopped at a women’s rug-making cooperative. It’s a bit like a microfinance operation where these women, whose husbands are shepherds so spend almost no time at home, bought a loom and make carpets and purses and sell them. For each one sold, some money goes to the weaver, but some goes back into the coop where they use it to build more looms or train more women to weave. Each item has a card attached that tells a bit of the weaver’s life story. This is NOT a tourist stop because the tourist industry is run entirely by men and they would never bring people to a women-run coop. JBT is one of the only groups (the only?) that stops there. In addition to JBT clients they also sell things at events at the local universities.

The rugs and purses are definitely not the ‘classic’ berber rugs you pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for in the cities, but almost everyone on the tour bought one to support the operation. I bought one purse as a gift and one rug. Most of the rugs are regular woven wool rugs, but the one I got actually has the thick sheeps-wool still in fat clumps on it. It is really soft, though really fat and heavy to carry. It also smells a bit of sheep and as such my parent’s cat seems quite intrigued by it! Though at first I bought it more as charity, I have grown quite fond of it and am eager to get it home and use it, though I may have it cleaned first.

After the women’s coop, we stopped at a farmer’s market and a bunch of people bought fresh food. The market was cool, it was huge and the colors of the all the fruits and vegetables and nuts and everything was just great. You could see them weighing watermelons with an old-fashioned scale and other neat stuff like that. Unfortunately, these vegetables were the beginning of the sick-fest that was to plague the rest of the trip.

At lunch we stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall and one group just washed and ate the vegetables from the market and another group ate lunch at the dive. I ate the dive-meat and was afraid of getting sick, but apparently the meat was the better of the two options. Most of the people who ate the veggies ended up getting tummy troubles later that day. One person became so sick that she was sidelined for a couple of days, barely able to travel, and started on cipro in another day or so to get better. The dive was also where we stopped one of the tour twins — Thomas — from being responsible for divvying up the bills and in the future gave that job to fellow Bootsnall-er Llalewyn, who is an accountant and did a much better job. He ended up being assigned this task for the entire trip…

After lunch we drove on to Errachidia and stayed at the Auberge Tinit for one night. It was quite nice and had a good pool that most people swam in before dinner. As for the rooms, the a/c didn’t work very well and I had my first exposure to what I now consider the traditional “moroccan guest mattress” which is basically a slab of concrete with a sheet over it (at least, that’s what it feels like to me) but overall the place was pretty nice.

That night we had a local band play for us which was a lot of fun. I went to bed and passed out around 10, but the band played on for a few more hours.



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