A Row of Sunloungers in Switzerland

High Atlas Mountains

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I rode my camel! I think he had a wonky hump though because I kept slipping off to the right (it didn’t help that the camel behind was taking a more-than-healthy interest in my left buttock).

We had stopped on the way to the camels for a cup of mint tea with a Berber family who were friends of the minibus driver. The Berbers are the indigenous people of North Africa, and they are obsessed with offering you mint tea. I drank three cups. This was not a wise move as, coupled with all the jiggling about on the camel, I really needed the toilet. Luckily we stopped again further up the road, to look at a shop selling tagines and to take photos of the Atlas mountains in the distance. I announced to the shopkeeper in my proudest, most rusty schoolgirl French: “Ou es le toilette, sil vous plait?” and he waved me to an outbuilding behind the shop. I pushed open the wooden door of the first cubicle, observed the plastic tray on the floor with the drain in the middle and thought: “Oh, this is a shower.” I tried the next door, which was also a shower. And the next, which also turned out to be a shower. Then I noted the lack of a shower head, soap dish or towel rail. Then I realised: they are not showers. They are the toilets. Oh God. The plastic tray is where you are supposed to rest your feet as you squat. There was no toilet paper, just a small bucket of stagnant water to rinse your hands. To top it all off there was no electricity in the building, so the entire procedure had to be executed in pitch darkness.

I’ll spare you the graphic details of how I straddled the drain, trying to avoid the dubious water on the floor; of how I attempted to wipe myself with the hem of my t-shirt then rinse it with a bottle of mineral water, or the unpleasant sensation of liquid drying on my ankles as I climbed back into the minibus. I will go behind a bush next time.

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Our ultimate destination, the Ourika Valley, is a stunningly beautiful spot deep in the High Atlas mountains, with a waterfall at the top and restaurants with sofas and canopies lining the banks of the river below. Some of the restaurants have placed their tables and chairs in the river itself, so you can eat with your feet dangling in the water and watch the local women doing their laundry on the rocks.

Matt, Michael, Carlos and I got separated almost immediately; Matt and Carlos rushed off to climb the waterfall and Michael and I got talking to a young gay couple from our minibus. Turns out they are cabin crew who met and fell in love on a Virgin jet at 37,000 feet.

By this point we were starting to feel hungry, nobody had eaten since breakfast, so we turned our attention to the restaurants in the river. We got offered a brilliant deal by one waiter: 25 dirhams each for a tagine, with free mint tea thrown in! The tagine, as it turned out, wasn’t great and contained splinters of bone and we had to put up with being serenaded by an old man with bobbles on his hat and a tamborine, but for less than a fiver each we weren’t complaining. We complained like hell, however, after the meal when the same waiter tried to charge us 60 dirhams each for our meal. He pretended he had never said anything different. Well, we refused to pay, an argument ensued, the waiter told us to “fuck off”, we fucked off, and the waiter chased us down the mountain and kept intercepting us and asking for money. The whole thing ended with a showdown on an outcrop of rocks overlooking the valley, with the gay air stewards silhouetted nervously against the afternoon sun, the waiter gesticulating angrily with a teapot and Michael a mere few inches from the edge of the cliff, trying to reason with the guy. Realising that a medical student and two members of Virgin’s cabin crew were not exactly going to protect me against this mad Moroccan, it was I who eventually stepped in, slapped 100 dirhams into his hand and informed him, in my best no-nonsense teacher’s voice, that that was all he was getting, then marched off down the mountain without looking back.

We witnessed an accident on the drive back to Marrakech; a man was lying in the road with his moped next to him and a crowd of locals gathered around saying “Oh dear, very bad.” I’m surprised we haven’t seen more accidents. Moroccans, when they get behind the wheel, seem to be gripped with an insane desire to break the speed limit together with bouts of particularly aggressive road rage, and one wonders how they would cope with driving through central London’s congestion charging zone.

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