The week I fell in love with Morocco-Part 2 -High Atlas Mountains-Ourzazate-Tinrhir

On day 3, we set off on our road trip through Morocco- our journey started from Marrakech and headed towards Ourzazate. The route took us through the High Atlas Mountains. An hour into the drive, I started to feel dizzy and a bit sick...the morning's breakfast felt as if it would come out again.. it wasn't a nice feeling....

I really wanted to enjoy the scenery as we drove up into the mountains but the dizziness wasn't going away. It reminded me of the time when I was a young girl travelling with my family to balik kampung before highways existed and there were endless country roads which were continuously winding throughout the whole journey. I used to get carsick easily and had to take pills to make the journey more bearable. As I got older, I managed to control it by listening to music and sitting by the car window in order to distract me from feeling dizzy. The car-sick feeling came back to haunt me in the Morocco trip...but I tried to control it and having the fresh air as we drove up the mountains instead of the air cond unit helped me.

Morocco's roads leading up into the mountains were very well maintained...there weren't many potholes as one would see in places like Malaysia. This was because you don't get big trucks travelling frequently along these roads...Most of the mountain people (Berber) still used transportation such as donkeys and horses which meant roads were generally well maintained.

Once I overcame feeling car-sick, I was able to enjoy the views of the mountains of Morocco. I felt truly blessed to be able to witness God's creation of nature and beauty and felt humbled on how small and insignificant we are compared to the mountains that we saw in Morocco. Those of you who appreciate nature would hopefully be able to understand that feeling.We visited the Kasbah near Ait Benhaddou where films such as the Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator were filmed. The kasbah are villages in the mountains which often have a row of craft shops which are made by the Berber people. We visited the craft shops and I even managed to try out the desert style of wearing a scarf.

We continued driving towards Ourzazate and went for our first Hammam experience. I didn't know much about Hammam before this except that it was similar to a Turkish bath. The Hammam experience was more than that -we received a body scrub by the lady at the Hammam followed by a Moroccan style massage and oils. The body scrub and massage was a different style than what us Malaysians are used to so it was definitely an experience. Would I want to do it again? Probably not. I think I prefer the Malay way of spa treatments.

After hammam we felt tired and famished and stopped over for lunch before heading to Tinrhir. Before we reached our hotel , we passed by the Atlas Studios which is where movies like the Mummy was filmed. We didn't go inside the studio but from what we could see it looked as if it was a larger production house but not as big as Universal studios of course. I can understand why Morocco would be an ideal film location because the mountains and desert has so much to offer.

We reached our hotel in the evening called Kasbah Linmani -which had an entrance that looked very similar to a jail door so for the rest of the trip we referred to this place as the Jail. Inside , however, the place was nothing like a jail. Overlooking our rooms we could see the rocky desert- a taste of what we would experience as we drove towards the Saharan desert.The meal at the hotel was included but in terms of the food we had tasted elsewhere it was so-so...

The next day we headed further into mountains to discover the Todre Gorges which I will write about in part 3..