Morocco - A Trek Into the Atlas Mountains
Amanda Jones
You've got to wonder if it's a setup when you're in a Muslim country and someone asks, point blank, "Are you lot drinkers?" Despite the hooded djellabah he was wearing, John Horne, who was doing the asking, looked like he'd guzzled a few in his time, so I took a calculated risk and confirmed that yes, we lot were drinkers.
John was a Brit. A bespectacled, erudite, eccentric and highly amusing Yorkshireman who'd spent the past 40 years circumnavigating the globe. He was currently living in Marrakech working for a tour company and he was about to join my two friends and me on a six-day hike in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains.
"Right then," Horne said, visibly relieved. "When you've walked all day, by God, you really need a pop at night. Got to bring your own though. No pubs up there." Horne impressed us as a man who knew a lot about North Africa, so naturally we felt obliged to take his advice. We turned the car around and beat a hasty retreat to purchase rum and wine. Moroccan wine, in fact.
That we could buy locally produced wine with great ease in Marrakech but not in remote mountain villages was an example of Morocco's current dichotomy. Cities like Marrakech, with a population over one million, are startlingly modern-and the ban on the sale of alcohol to Muslims is not enforced. In rural areas, however, people live as they have for centuries: the beverage of choice being nothing stronger than mint tea.
My friends, artist Susan Burks and photographer Kodiak Greenwood, and I were in the country not only to exert ourselves in the Atlas Mountains, but also to be among traditional Berber people. Apparently they were tolerant of the nasty drinking habits of nasrani (non Muslims), quite used to them rocking up to their villages with their own mule-born bar.
Unlike the Himalayas, the Atlas Mountains aren't very impressive from space. In fact, they look like a poorly healed scar. But what they don't achieve in height they make up in breadth, stretching 1,500 miles though Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. In Morocco, they're divided into three parts-the Middle Atlas in the north, the High Atlas in the central-south, and the Anti-Atlas as they taper into the Sahara Desert. Jbel Toubkal, in the High Atlas, is North Africa's loftiest peak at 13,671 feet. We would hike toward Toubkal and drop below, but not summit. Some would say this was disgraceful indolence. Toubkal is popular with peak baggers as a challenging overnight climb.
After six days hiking the still-plenty-precipitous parts of the High Atlas we'd end up at a luxury Kasbah hotel as a reward to ourselves. When planning, I'd searched for a tour company that knew the area from an off-the-beaten-path perspective, finding New York-based Heritage Tours. They'd hiked the routes themselves and offered unvarnished opinions.
I'd pushed hard to sleep in Berber tents while in the mountains, fancying it would be more authentic, but Heritage had swiftly disabused me. "Your friends will want to kill you when you're 10,000 feet up, it's blizzarding and you're hunkered inside a tent." Snow in the High Atlas can arrive in October apparently, right when we were to be there. I conceded to small trekking lodges instead.
Three hours drive from Marrakech, we reached our trailhead at Oukaimeden, a popular ski resort in winter but a place with the look of an abandoned Soviet mental institute in the fall. There's nothing much to say other than it's a good spot to begin walking and that Chez Juju, although having Spartan accommodations, serves unexpectedly excellent lasagna.
Over dinner, we were joined by our mountain guide, Mohammed "Calal" Bouchahoud. A stately prince of a man, Calal had the dark skin and tall stature of the Sahara dwellers and a charisma that buzzed around him like a force field. Calal was Berber. Berbers were the original, pre-Arab inhabitants of Morocco and are typically short, mocha-skinned, often with green eyes. Calal had none of these, but he spoke French, English, Arabic and Tashelhit, knew every inch of the Atlas and had ascended Mt Toubkal over 100 times. He was also a Hajj, meaning he had taken the pilgrimage to Mecca, the holiest city in Islam. In a country where the average annual income is $4,000, any Berber who can afford Mecca is a man oozing social standing. Wherever we went, from the tiniest village to a sizeable town, everyone stopped to hail Calal. It was like taking a five-day hike with a spiritually inclined Fonzie.
The plan was to walk 6-9 hours a day, our luggage and booze accompanying us on three stalwart mules driven by local muleteers. Without consulting Susan and Kodiak, Calal and I had conspired to take the more precipitous route up Jbel Oukaimeden, going from 8,600 feet to 10,800 in a matter of hours. The trail, or rather a ribbon of goat tracks, was straight up, switchbacks be damned. Susan later dubbed it "Jbel I-hate-Amanda," after her mantra with each furious, short-of-breath step. Kodiak, in his twenties, bounded ahead, camera in hand, pausing only to salute us from great heights. Calal floated upward as if every step took him closer to Allah, and John, in his infinite wisdom, had mumbled something about "ensuring the mules didn't roll the rum," and taken the flatter valley route with the muleteers.
Finally cresting the peak, I stopped to take in the view. The sky was brilliant, the air chilled and sparkling. Spread before me were the Atlas, one of the world's great mountain ranges, layers of rock slanted sideways, stacked to the horizon in one direction and thinning into the smudge of the mighty Sahara in the other. It was a chest-swelling scene for sure. Even Susan eventually admitted so.
Tachedirt, the highest and possibly darkest village in Morocco, was our first night's destination. The educated and progressive king of Morocco, Mohammed VI, promised electricity to all when he took power in 1999. He's been true to his word, Tachedirt has lines strung and waiting. The problem is nobody has figured out divvying up payment for the power, so the hamlet remains off the grid, lit by candle and oil lamp. Berber women still cook over fire, grind flour on a stone wheel powered by donkey, use machetes in the fields, do laundry in the river, hand-sew their clothes, and use mules for transport. Electricity is not likely to change any of that overnight.
We lit candles, dressed warmly, and retired to our rooms to drink surprisingly decent Moroccan red and listen to John tell tales of his days with the British Ministry of Defense. Calling himself "The Uncivil Servant," he had us chortling with stories of shooting his way out of Yemen, being threatened with beheading in Algeria-somehow he managed to make these incidents amusing- and then chucking it all to become a long-haul tour guide, driving hippies across the Sahara in the 1970s. Now in his sixties, he spoke Arabic and French with a glint in his eye. When we walked through villages, children followed him like a Pied Piper while he teased them in Arabic. "You Arab?" they'd ask, confused. "Nope," he'd reply, "I'm David Beckham."
With each day the scenery became more striking and untouched. Our mules snaked up barren rock faces and along narrow mountain ledges, clinking shamelessly. After the severe rock of the peaks, the landscape dropped down and turned suddenly verdant, the path an arbor through fruit and nut trees. Flanks of valleys were terraced with stacked rock walls, some to keep goats in and others to keep them off the neon green barley. Even the air took on a sylvan light. It was all so bucolic it had a tranquilizing effect, and I was grateful the only thought process required of me was putting one foot in front of the other. At lunchtime we'd round a corner and find the muleteers had arranged a picnic beside the glinting waters of a mountain stream. There we would lounge, eat tuna salad, dates and khobz bread, drink mint tea, take a siesta and hit the trail again. It felt like a scene out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald book.
Occasionally, a Berber farmer would encounter us near a village and enthusiastically shepherd us into his home. This meant the wife had to drop her duties and scramble to make mint tea, remaining in the shadows of the low-ceiling house while the husband entertained us on rugs woven of old pieces of cloth. A large-eyed child would carry in the tea and the patriarch would make a ceremony of adding overpowering amounts of sugar (an expensive commodity) and expertly aiming the amber liquid into tiny tea glasses. He'd then walk us to the edge of town and wave us on our way. The Berbers are famous for their hospitality.
Over the course of five days we hiked southwest from Oukaimeden to Tachedirt, Tachedirt to Imlil, Imlil to the Azzedine Valley, and finally to Ouirgane, driving back to Imlil. Our nights were spent lying about sipping illicit alcohol (that word, ironically, comes to us from the Arabic al-kohl, meaning the spirit or essence), listening to John's James Bondian tales of global derring-do, and feasting on couscous and tagine meals. Some of the guesthouses were fancier than others, most had between three and eight rooms, and all were comfortable and attractive with excellent food.
Imlil, a buzzing metropolis with several hundred locals, is the launching spot for those not too lazy to ascend Jbel Toubkal. Reminiscent of a miniature Kathmandu, the dirt streets were populated with emaciated travelers sporting dreadlocks, ethnic tattoos and hand-loomed harem pants. It is also the home to the famed Kasbah du Toubkal, an old fort turned Berber hotel that sits above the town and draws a more upmarket crowd from around the world. We stayed in Dar Imlil, a beautiful, Berber-owned and operated hotel on the outskirts of town. With great food, chic decor and the best view in the valley, we were quite content to sit and watch the first snows fall on the mountains surrounding us.
To recover from our grueling Toubkal non-ascent, we said goodbye to Calal and John and headed for Branson's Kasbah Tamadot in the Asni Valley, 20 miles from Imlil. Imagine a scene in which the parched and weary traveler arrives at a Sultan's court, a walled Shangri-La with fountains, rose gardens, petal-strewn reflection pools, carved doors, silver chairs, silk divans, stuffed dates on golden platters, and, blessed day, not one, but three bars and a spa.
Once the home of famous Italian designer Luciano Tempo, Sir Richard Branson found Tamadot when attempting to fly around the world in a hot-air balloon. Factually, Branson's 80-year-old mother discovered it while he was cogitating the vagaries of navigating an inflatable from Morocco to Hawaii and she explored the Atlas, so we have her to thank for what is now one of the most sumptuous Virgin hotels.
With 18 palace-like rooms and six Berber tented suites, I finally got my tent experience-only it was heated and had a sitting room, shower, claw-foot bathtub, dressing room, plunge pool and a vast deck from where I could gaze up at Jbel Toubkal and pity the die-hards who were huddled in their tents while a blizzard raged outside.
While submitting to a massage in the marble-arched Tamadot spa, I thought about the fact that less than 50 miles away there were still villages without electricity and residents who had never seen a city. I marveled at this for a moment, feeling fortunate to have seen such places, and then turned over for my head massage.