Day 8 and 9 of my trip, day 4 and 5 of the Tour, October 23 and 24, 2017 We left Fez in the morning after our usual breakfast and were on the road to Merzouga, going through valleys, and off to our camel ride!!
We crossed a 6042 foot high mountain range.A town snuggled up to the mountain, date palms in the valley.Back on the roadA traffic circle in apple country! Midelt, Morocco.Apple trees.Ait KharrouInteresting rock patternsTiny town of Tassalaht, but they have their mosque.Stop outside Er-Rich, Morocco for a picnic, there were benches and a spring!A very narrow tunnel!Palm branches set out in an attempt to hold back the desert sands.A dammed up river outside of Errachidia, MoroccoA new waterline being run along almost every road we traveled!The sale of fossils was everywhere!! Camels! Not the ones we rode however.One of the structures on the north edge of a dune area.A caravan??The entrance to our hotel in Las Yasmina.Our dromedaries!!Tents adjacent to the hotel Amazir.Part of the hotel.The camel I rode on!Some kids like to ski the dunes!Path down to the tents at the hotel.Abdellah showing us how to stay on the camel!I am ready!A lot of help getting on!Map of our 2 mile camel ride out into the desert.And we are off!Our shadows this evening!A palm tree about to be swallowed up by the moving dune.Arriving at the tent area.We reached the encampment Auberge Yasmina.Huge dune behind the tents!!The kids tried to climb the 600 foot high dunes, but they did not make the top.Dinner outside.Music and dancing after dinner.Inside the tents, the multiple blankets at the bottom of the beds were needed!!Early start to see the dawn over the dunes.Up before dawn.Mount up.A solar panel provides electricity.Dawn!Breakfast at the hotel.Leaving the desert behind, after breakfast we were gone!A tractor!A lady at the service station cooking using 15 tajines!!A stop for lunch.Another stop, for selfies by the warning sign for camels ahead!We stopped for a walk down along the farmland adjacent to the river.Down some stairs.Plants down in the river overflow area.Bridge over the river!Abandoned housing.Abdellah telling a story as to which family owned which treeWalking between the family plots.A man coming down to tend his plot.Vegetable patch.Corn almost ready to pick.Water from the river conveyed to each plot.Egrets.Oranges!The community well.A tree being eaten from the inside had to have fire to produce enough smoke to kill the pest or they would lose the tree.On the way up, back out to the bus!Back to the bus.Todra Gorge.The hotel was closed by the authorities because of the danger of falling rocks.
Then on to the hotel Amazur for the night. Return to blog
