DAY 227

Thursday 23 February 2012

Eleven hours of driving. That is what we did. On the downside, one can get a little claustrophobic with so much car travel. On the upside, one appreciates the smaller things seen on the drive, such as the town we passed through, Beni Mallal, which we likened to an old Vaudeville star (“Beni Mallal, ladies an’ gentlemen!”).

We saw lots of beautiful country, especially since we were taking the scenic route, and we even saw our first glimpse of snow on the Atlas mountains! We had since noticed a pattern in many of the small towns we passed: a nice (though often unpaved) main drag, with electronic stores, markets, etc., but just a block off the main street were dusty dirt roads, empty, overgrown lots, and sometimes just vast, untouched fields. It was like a western town movie set with facades of buildings but really nothing behind them. It was outside one of these small towns that we spotted our first REAL LIVE CAGANER (if you don’t know what a caganer is, please refer to DAY 152)!

We had hoped to find a campsite in Meknes, but after a couple tense hours of driving and finding only one camp (that was closed) we called it quits on Meknes and took the super highway to Fez, assuming we would stop for the night at an aire repose. This stretch of highway just happened to be the only one we had encountered so far that had zero rest stops, so we ended up driving all the way to Fez, then landing in a 24 hour gas station. We bought a bag of chips as a consolation prize for all the driving and searching we had done.

Charles called his old friend Roger Steffens, who told us he had actually lived in Marrakech for a year, and got “goose pimples” when Charles described to him our visit to Jajouka.