7 hrs, 6.6 kms,

               Day Totals: 16 hrs, 18 .6 kms

 

Don't the road is one more village before reaching Tafroute Proper. I don’t bother finding out its name, assuming it will be on Google maps… but it’s not. In the end I decide I’ll just consider it part of Tafraoute. I guess would be nice to have some more photos and memories associated with Tafraoute itself.

As I stop in shop to grab some snacks to hold me over until Tafraoute, a couple of children run in. One of them, maybe 5 years old, looks too blond to be a local. He keeps staring at me "Spreiken Deuich?" he asks. No, don’t speak German I tell him. A bystander explains, the boy is the son of a Moroccan father and German mother that live here in this village…

Here in this town is another of the classic postcards associated with Tafraoute: a redish brown mosque and some houses dwarfed by some gigantic boulders right behind it—making them almost look like toy houses . Fortunately I can find a boulder to climb up on to get a good photo and video clip of it.


A nice classy finish to my Superhike/3 day trip. Every bend is some cool new discovery… a boulder right in the middle of the village with a stone wall at the top… no visible way to get up there… a path to another part of the village, where you have to squeeze under two boulders to get there… And finally, the climax. A gigantic sort of lion’s head gazing straight ahead, as if guarding Tafraoute proper which is in the background. There’s a tourist standing next to it when I take my videoclip, which I don’t mind—he helps give perspective to how enormous the rock is.

The fellow, an older German guy seems quite eager to chat. He’s been coming to Morocco since the 80s, spending long periods here and has plenty to say about the region and the country.

He talks about how people were much more open back then . Back then it was easy to talk to women and they didn’t dress so conservatively as they do now—which I find surprising to hear. He talks about how Morocco has become much more dangerous than before… how towns like Tafraoute, which was once just an isolated village, is getting overbuilt.

But his biggest complaint is about the tourists—particularly the camper car tourists that come to Morocco in droves these days. “It was better back in the hippy days” he says. “back then it was simple folks in simple clothes coming to connect with the local people. Now it’s just rich people in expensive campers, driving around with no interest or respect for the local customs. Giving nothing back—people don’t like them here”.

We chat a bit more, until I realize I’d better hurry or I’ll miss my bus. I sprint on into town, grab a quick bowl of beans, hop on my bus… and bid this region farewell.

Someday I’ll come back and hike some more of these mountains . But for now, I am finished with this amazing corner of the world

Postnote.

 

A few days later, I get to talking with some Tafraoute native who live in Casablanca and they give me some more interesting nuggets of information. For one thing, I’m told, some of these people are actually not Berbers in origin. Some of them were Arabs who came from Rissani area some 500 years ago—but melted in with the population and are now considered Berbers.

Also, just in the last 10 years, the strong attitude against marrying folks from outside the region has changed. Now it’s common for them to marry outsiders. In fact, it’s even become common for folks from Fes (who are also quite ethnocentric) to marry with Tafraoute folks. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that both cultures are business people…

I’m eager to learn more about this intriguing culture which seems so connected with the past—and yet is changing so rapidly.