A Visit to Azilal

I visited my friend Dan over the weekend! He lives a couple hours Southeast of Azilal in the High Atlas Mountains. His village is absolutely beautiful and more what I pictured my PC experience to be like than my village. I met Kaylyn, Audrey and Brian in Azilal (they all live within an hour of Azilal) and we took a taxi through the mountains on a stunning drive. Dan's village is a small farming community nestled into a valley, which also draws a fairly consistent stream of tourists. Many families have a “gite” attached to their homes; these could be compared to a bed and breakfast in the States – a couple sleeping rooms with communal eating. The gites house the tourists in a relatively discreet way – several of the guides we met told us there were a lot of French tourists in town, but we saw only a handful when we were walking from the taxi stand to Dan's house.

Dan's sitemates are Zarnaz and Doug, who were waiting for us at Dan's house. Dan's friend Tova was also visiting. She just finished studying abroad for a year in Israel and is traveling for the summer before heading home. Doug received a care package of dried fruit from Trader Joes and was making scones with crystallized ginger – yum! Dan's host family lives next door and they invited us all over for tea. They have a gite on top of their house and Dan was telling us that their actual house pales in comparison to the gite. In fact, he lived in a room the size of a closet during his home stay! The gite was beautiful and apparently they pull out all the stops for visitors. We had tea and coffee and wonderful bread with honey from the area!

Afterwards, we settled into Dan's house for the evening – made dinner, hung out on his roof and stargazed, had a “trash fire” and caught up with each other. A trash fire is kind of like a campfire except you add your trash. Dan's village is relatively remote, so absent packing it out when he goes to Azilal once or twice a month, Dan opts to burn his trash. We did not roast marshmallows over the fire! It was a beautiful evening and we caught a few falling stars. Dan's village doesn't have any streetlights, so we could see the Milky Way and more stars than I can remember seeing in a long time. I tried to sleep on the roof, but ended up inside on the floor because it was too cold! Can you believe it? In my site, I sometimes sleep on the floor because its too hot, but in Dan's mountains it was too cold to sleep outside!

Doug, our chef for the weekend, made pancakes with dried blueberries from his care package! After eating bread and oil for breakfast for the past 5 months, it was a wonderful treat. We headed out for a day hike to a gorge Dan had visited with the previous volunteer in his site. It was unbelievable – we hiked for about 3.5 hours through tiny Berber villages that still seem incredibly isolated. In several, they were separating the wheat grain from the stalk the old fashioned way. This involves tying a handful of donkeys, mules or horses together (shoulder to shoulder) with one attached to a pole in the center of a field. The grains are on the field and the horses walk or trot in a circle, while men mix the grains with pitchforks. Tova just finished a year studying abroad in Israel and she explained that there is evidence there of people using this technique hundreds of years ago.

This got me to thinking that in some ways, life in Morocco hasn't changed much over the past several centuries. Women still make bread the way they have for probably thousands of years. This grain technique dates back a while and although tea is a relatively new addition, arriving with the British in the late 1600's, it doesn't seem to have changed much in the past 400 years! Then we passed a man selling sodas and scarves outside his house – obviously, some things change! I just wonder who his market is – we didn't see anyone other than locals during our entire hike and he was a couple hours into the hike.

We had lunch at the mouth of the gorge where this is a beautiful waterfall formed by a natural spring. We drank right from the falls – cold, clear water! It was so refreshing. We had forgot to pack lunch before we left Dan's village, so we bought some bread and cheese from a small hanut in the first village we passed at the beginning of our hike. The bread had whole wheat flour and was among the best bread I've had in Morocco! We napped and relaxed by the falls for a while before heading back.

By the time we got back to Dan's village it was starting to get dark and we were all exhausted from our hike. Dan and Doug introduced us to their “Berber McMuffins” - basically a scrambled egg sandwich with laughing cow cheese and some sort of salami. You can get this just about anywhere I've been in Morocco, but they swore by the sandwiches at their favorite cafe, so we all had a sandwich before heading back to Dan's house.

Dan had asked everyone to bring food to share, so I bought a watermelon in Azilal on the way down. I didn't realize that Dan's house was an hour walk from where the taxi dropped us off. By the time we got to his house yesterday, I couldn't raise my arms because I'd just carried a good-sized watermelon for an hour! Today, it was totally worth it – after our egg sandwiches, we gorged ourselves on watermelon.

After a short night of sleep, we all headed home. I had a long, hot trip back to my village, but I stopped in Khenifra for a shower. There's a place where you can pay 8Dh ($1) for as long and as hot a shower as you'd like. I opted for cold, but not ice cold and spent a while cleaning up; it'd been a while since my last real shower and I missed out on my family's hamam last week, plus our hike was pretty dusty.

Before I left I was feeling a little disheartened after my host uncle's advances and some other personal things going on. The weekend was just the escape I needed to get back to my site feeling energized and ready to face the world again. Dan's language is pretty good, which was encouraging, since he was communicating pretty well with people in his site and I understood the majority of his conversations. This gave me hope for my language skills because I still feel like I miss 70% of what is said.

View Pictures of my trip to Azilal here.