After nearly 50 years of visiting Morocco I now have four favourite places I like to stay, each of them quite different, each suitable for a variety of moods. I'm not a great city lover, I much prefer smaller towns and the outstanding beauty of the Moroccan countryside, mountains and desert.

TAFRAOUTE: In no particular order, the first of these spots is Tafraoute in the Anti Atlas mountains. The town is renowned for its babouche (slippers) manufacture and it's a hub for almond, argan oil and amlou (almond and argan mix) production. The local speciality is beef tagine with prunes and almonds.



The town is surrounded by pink quartzite peaks, with marvellous walks, scrambles and gorges. Coupled with more than 80 fascinating medieval granaries to explore, perched in the most inaccessible spots.


The stone steps to reach the upper levels of this granary reminded me of the Lake District

SIDI IFNI: At about the same lattitude is my second spot, Sidi Ifni, a Spanish art deco-styled town on the Atlantic coast. I once planned to stop two nights here and ended up staying eleven which says something for the chilled atmosphere. Many happy memories of nursing a Flag Special lager at the beach bar watching the sun sink into the ocean, whilst snacking on my 1 dh bag of popcorn. One outstanding meal there started with sea urchin soup.


The view south from Sidi Ifni's Bellvue Hotel

ESSAOUIRA: Further north, my third favourite is Essaouira , again on the Atlantic coast. A definite bohemian feel to the place with lots to see and explore both in the medina and new town. Fish, fish and more fish means the town is filled with happy contented cats, and fish is on the menus of the many restaurants with great fish or sea food soup.


Fishing boats in Essaouira harbour

AZROU: But the one I fell in love with first is Azrou. On motorbike trips a couple of decades back I found I was going through Azrou twice on each trip as it's set at a crossroads. One road (N13) leads from Meknes via Azrou to the desert around Merzouga, the other road (N8) leads from Fez via Azrou to Marrakech.


Azrou photographed through the seasons

Azrou is a one day ride from the ports of Tanger and Ceuta and many years ago I seriously considered buying the land in the photos above and building a motorbiking base there. I spent six weeks investigating and negotiating before deciding I didn't want to be in charge of a building project, so ended up buying a cave in Spain instead.


After snow and minus 10ºC temperatures the roads were ploughed and gritted, so now riding one-handed taking photos!

What is it about Azrou that makes it one of my top four? It’s a friendly vibrant market town (Tuesday market) surrounded by beautiful mountains with cedar and holm oak forests, wild flowers, stream and lakes, wild monkeys and fascinating geology.



__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

Thx Tim, very interesting information.

Now, which is the easier entry point - Tanger Med or Ceuta gate? A couple of years after the HU mini meet in Andalucia, I think it was 2007 and you had just returned from Morocco, my friend and I visited the country. Jeez, the entry was a pita. We were more or less in the middle of the queue from the ferry but were the last to leave customs at Tanger Med. Probably because we decided against paying bakshish

Anyway, I'm waiting for you to continue .....

Hans

EDIT: Hi Hans, I still have the maps and information about South Africa and Namibia that you kindly gave me. Tanger Med is easiest but unfortunately the ferries aren't running to Morocco and the border from Ceuta is closed. Maybe some time soon....

Tim

__________________
Only when we pause to wonder
do we go beyond the limits of our little lives.
(Rod McKuen)

GEOLOGY

Azrou means ‘rock’ in Tamazight and the town is named after the gigantic rock outcrop in the middle of the old town. Azrou sits at 1300m above sea level in a wide bowl, surrounded on the north, east and south by the higher reliefs of the Middle Atlas which reach up to 1800m. To the west is the low level N8 main road to Marrakech that runs in the lee of the mountains. 



The surrounding area is a massive volcanic field measuring over 1,200 sq km, with clusters of cinder cones, calderas, volcanic vents, basaltic flows, and maars (shallow crater lakes). 

 Some of the last volcanic eruptions are only a few thousand years ago and there’s even a cinder cone on the edge of Azrou, see satellite view



The photo above is of the volcanic field north of Azrou from Passage d’Ito which is on the west side of the road from Azrou to El Hajeb. But most of the interesting features are on the Azrou to Timahdite plateau to the south east of Azrou, see map here

On this map you can see a black-and-white dotted track leading SW from the main road. The cinder cone marked Ha is Jebel Hebri, used in the winter as a ski descent as you can see in the photo below.



To the left of the black-and-white dotted track you can see a triangle denoting volcanic vents, you can get an idea of scale by comparing my motorbike on the second photo below.





Also of interest in the area is the ski resort of Michleifen, set in the caldera of an extinct volcano



On the edge of another nearby caldera with gas-bubbled ejecta in the foreground and a volcanic cone in the background.



The area is a wonderland for amateur geologists and I sense there's an untapped market for exploratory tours that could be developed.

TO BE CONTINUED...

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

I've stayed in Azrou a few times over the years and the area certainly sticks in my mind. Quite why I was never certain but maybe I was subconsciously taking in all the characteristics you listed. I hadn't realised it was quite so high up. Great pictures

I often stay in Cedres Hotel on the left of the photo. Hotel Panorama is less basic than Cedres but not so convenient for walking around town.

From my notes of an earlier trip, "Going back to Azrou is like putting on an old pair of slippers—before I'd been in the town an hour I'd been greeted by half a dozen locals, including one bristly cheek to cheek air kiss. And then an English voice asked, "Are you Tim?". It was someone I'd sent some trekking maps to on Lonely Planet forum. As is often the case I spent a couple of hours relaxing in the sun in a pavement cafe, nursing a nus nus and watching the world go by."

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

Thanks, Tim! Interesting, informative, and even thought-provoking.

Stop torturing us

MIDDLE ATLAS TREKS AND TRACKS

Much of the Middle Atlas region south of Azrou is a high altitude plateau without the deep valleys seen in other mountain regions. This is similar to the Altiplano de Granada (high plains of Granada) where I live in Spain. The advantage of high plateau is that trekking can be fairly gentle, enabling participants to concentrate on enjoying the natural beauty rather than puffing and panting up steep slopes.



Locals collecting drinking water from fresh water springs between Azrou and Ifrane.




This beautiful scene with cedar trees is further along the piste denoted by the black-and-white dotted line on the map in post 3.




In the spring time Morocco is so green, it’s hard to imagine you are in Africa (though note the distant volcanic cinder cones). The Middle Atlas ties with the Anti Atlas for my favourite area of Morocco.



Lovely smooth beaten earth surface (when dry), travelling through an area of evergreen Holm Oak trees.

GPS navigation in Morocco is much easier nowadays with the detailed tracks shown on Openstreetmaps, but ten years ago when I was exploring it was much harder—some notes from the time...

"I found that the zaouia near Ifrane was marked there as Zaouia d'Ifrane hence my confusion, when in reality it should have been marked Zaouia Sidi Adbsellam. I decided to visit the other zaouia which was south of Ain Leuh. No roads were shown in the area on either the Olaf or Garmin GPS maps, but the paper ones showed an approach from the west which wasn't much use as I was to the north east! I decided to look for a road or piste from the Ain Leuh direction and set off accordingly. I worked out roughly where Zaouia Oued Ifrane should be by triangulation using paper maps and the tourist info as a guide and set a waypoint to point me in roughly the right direction. Coming out of Ain Leuh I found an easy piste heading in the right direction and whenever I came to a junction of pistes made a guess as to which to follow."



And lo and behold, I found it. The area between Ain Leuh (literally ‘spring of wood’ due to the cedar forest) and Zaouia Ifrane (literally ‘religious school near caves’) has a high incidence of limestone with waterfalls dropping from a plateau above.



You can see the cornices formed by the calcium traces in the streams. This is prime trekking country with several gites d’etape where you get dinner, bed and breakfast for between 150 and 220 dh/night.





Some more examples of limestone in the 'valley of the rocks' near Ifrane. I named these outcrops ’topographical oceans’ after one of the album covers of Yes prog rock group.




In limestone areas the water tends to travel underground and the scenery of the region is described as ‘karst’ with features such as poljes (depressions), sinkholes and caves. This is near Taza in the north east section of the Middle Atlas.



Goufre Friouato near Taza is a 270m-deep sinkhole.

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

CEDAR FOREST AND MONKEYS




The two are inseparable as the cedar trees are the habitat of the monkeys. Cedar trees grow at altitudes between 1600 and 3000m. When you drive south from Azrou, the road climbs from 1300m to 1800m and as it does, the evergreen holm oak trees are replaced by cedars. Many of the cedar trees are magnificent specimens, growing to over 30m, and the forests cover over 120,000 hectares in Morocco, mainly in the Middle Atlas but also in the Rif and High Atlas mountains.





The macaque silvanus (Barbary Ape, though it’s a monkey, not an ape) is found only in the Atlas mountains of Morocco and Algeria, together with a small population in Gibraltar. When studying in Fez I would often ride my motorbike to the Azrou region, settle down under a tree and study my books, waiting for a troop of monkeys to pass by.



Melon is a nice treat for the monkeys as it has lots of water content. I shot this video in June when the baby monkeys were still small and starting to explore. Azrou is a good place to view the macaques, with three spots that are normally more or less guaranteed to provide a sighting, per the placements on the map below. Orange and yellow routes are asphalt, pistes are white.



Spots 1 and 2: from Azrou head south on the N13 to Midelt. As you leave town you pass an Afriquia fuel station on your right and the road starts climbing. 6-7km after the Afriquia you start to see the first of the cedars. Spot 1 is the crossroads with rock and fossil sellers on the left. 

If there's none here, or if you are coming from the south, the second spot is right at the southern edge of the cedar forest before open countryside.


Spot 3: head east out of Azrou on the N8 towards Ifrane. After 3-4km you'll pass a remarkably ornate set of buildings on the right. 900m further on take a road to the right which is probably signposted Cedar Gourand. Carry on for 4km, the last couple of hundred metres are gravel and park up by the big dead cedar tree pictured below.



The map above also includes a waypoint for Mischlifen shown on a previous post in this thread.



White Cattle Egrets (Bubulcus ibis) are small heron that feed on insects disturbed by large mammals

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

Chris Stewart was at Charterhouse Public School with Peter Gabriel, Mike Rutherford, and Tony Banks and was briefly the drummer for what became the prog rock band Genesis.

Somewhat a free spirit, Stewart then joined a circus, learnt how to shear sheep, crewed a yacht in Greece, went to China for the Rough Guides, gained a pilot's license in Los Angeles, completed a course in French cooking and then travelled through Europe before settling in Órgiva in the Alpujarras region of Spanish Andalucía to became a farmer.

Stewart has written several books and is best known for 'Driving over Lemons' in which he writes how each year he would visit the forests around Azrou to collect plant seeds which he sold to a friend in London.

In this article, Stewart relates, "I wrote of the time when Moroccans were very kind to me, when I had little money and sought to make a living seed-collecting in the Middle Atlas. It was a hand-to-mouth but privileged time, spending days in a cedar forest with a Moroccan Graham Greene enthusiast and his unemployed friends, and whiling away evenings in the cafés, watching the good people of Azrou on parade."

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

IFRANE

Although Azrou with its major Tuesday weekly market has historically been the largest town in the area, the provincial capital is the smaller town of Ifrane. I will come back to modern Ifrane in a minute, first of all some words about earlier history.



The name of the town is pronounced ‘ee-fran’ (not if’rain) and in the Tamazight language this means caves. There’s a lot of limestone in the area so there are many natural caves, and the first settlement in this area 500 years ago was in the Tizguit valley a few km to the north west of modern Ifrane where cave dwellings were hollowed out of the soft limestone. This troglodyte village is mistakenly named on Google Maps as Zaouiat d’ Ifrane, but its actual name is Zaouiat Sidi Abdeslam (the proper Zaouiat Ifrane is 80km to the south west and has been mentioned in earlier posts on this thread).





I live part of the year in an old cave house in southern Spain and it was interesting to note the common factors such as the mangers (animal feed troughs) carved out of the cave walls. The caves in the Ifrane area are still in use for storerooms and animal shelters and nowadays the locals have built houses on the front in an ‘out build’ so it’s not at all obvious that there are caves behind or below.

Dr Eric Ross from Al Akhawayn University showed me around the village and caves and has written about them here.

Ifrane was constructed in the 1920s during the French Protectorate as a ‘hill station’ to escape the summer heat of Fez. Modelled on similar stations such as ‘Snooty’ Ooty in British India, it was planned as a garden city. I can truly say it is a town unlike any other in Morocco, with wide boulevards, lots of greenery, water gardens and a top golf course. Golf in Africa might raise eyebrows, but the Middle Atlas isn’t short of water, it’s known as ‘The Tower of Water’ as all of Morocco’s major rivers rise in these mountains. 





In the summer months many families take 'piques-niques' to the water meadows of the Oued Tizguit with burbling streams and the Chutes de la Vierge waterfall set amongst the trees.



At about 1700m, Ifrane (as well as Azrou) gets a regular dusting of snow in Feb/March and to make the summer retreat as much like France as possible, the houses were built in the style of the French Vosges Alps, with very steeply sloping roofs which easily shed snow.

A royal palace was built for the King, together with an airport which is used almost 100% for royal and government flights. A massive carving of a lion on the main street attracts many photos as it is said to have been carved by an Italian prisoner-of-war during WWII, but in reality it dates from the early 1930s.

In 1989 there was a massive spill from an Iranian oil tanker that threatened fishing and tourism and the Saudi King Fahd created a generous endowment of $50 million to clean it up. And then nature intervened and the slicks were blown out to sea. King Fahd told the Moroccan King Hassan II to keep the money and it was decided to build a university set in the mountains which would be called Al Akhawayn, or 'The Brothers' after the two Kings. The faculty is modelled on American universities, with a wide curriculum and all classes taught in English.

Prince Charles is an avid student of Islam and regards his role as a future King as 'defender of faiths' (plural) rather than just the 'Defender of Faith' (Church of England). He was a visitor to the University in 1996 shortly after it was inaugurated, and again in 2011.



A very short video clip from my visit in 2018 with the British Moroccan Society, showing the beautiful buildings.

Dr Eric Ross is Professor of Geography at Al Akhawayn University and his blog on Ifrane has a lot of detailed information including not surprisingly, more detail on geology.

Ifrane is very clean and modern and probably a fun place to attend university, but for me personally there is not so much interest in the town as in Azrou, so whilst I've visited many times I've not stayed overnight.

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

MORE INFORMATION ON TREKKING

Whilst my legs won't carry me the distances of my youth I am still very keen to get off the motorbike and explore on foot and my Forma Adventure Low boots that are ideal for this. And although I love biking for the freedom it gives especially in places like Morocco, more than half my pleasure is using the motorbike to reach interesting and often remote places.

Dr Eric Ross (mentioned in the post above) has created a treasure chest of information on the Middle Atlas. I met Eric and his colleague Dr John Shoup, Professor of Anthropology, when I visited the University in 2018 with the British Moroccan Society, and we discussed some of their wide-ranging field trips in Morocco, particularly to the pre-Saharan steppes around Merzouga.

Dr Michael Peyron is a visiting Professor at the University and a specialist in Amazigh (Berber) language and culture. His 'Hiking and Walking Guide to Ifrane and the Middle Atlas' published many years ago has been updated and edited by Eric Ross. I was given a copy of the book, which is now also available at Amazon

Eric has blogged a fairly large extract of the book material, together with lots of maps.

One of the places I wrote about earlier was Zaouiat Ifrane which is 60km SW from Azrou. I hadn't realised this was also a favourite of Eric's and he writes about it (with much better photos than mine).

Eric's final words on the village will inspire me to stay for at least one night on my next trip, "In Zawiyat Ifrane the local population benefits directly from tourists’ visits, as opposed to cash flowing into the pockets of tour operators, outside guides and hotels owned by out-of-towners... This gem in the Middle Atlas is on the Ministry of Culture’s list of heritage sites. Crucially, both the charming architecture of village and the spectacular geomorphology which rises behind it are cherished by the villagers too, so Zawiyat Ifrane has excellent potential to channel tourism revenue into sustaining the heritage site. Certain tourist activities, like rock climbing, would be destructive while others, like solidarity tourism, could sustain the livelihoods of the people of Zawiyat Ifrane while help them maintain the unique beauty of the site for future generations."

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

Great for the wait ...

Thanks for this Tim - very helpful.

Ed

__________________
Where Next Barney? Buenos Aires to Lima 2015 | London to Sydney 2015/6 | Armenia, Georgia & the FYR 2022 | Algerian Sahara 2023.

@Tim, your insert

EDIT: Hi Hans, I still have the maps and information about South Africa and Namibia that you kindly gave me. Tanger Med is easiest but unfortunately the ferries aren't running to Morocco and the border from Ceuta is closed. Maybe some time soon....

Tim



Right. And I still have your Morocco map. Came useful when we visited MOR.


Re South Africa - I have just plotted an nice route for a friend who wants to visit SA for three weeks. Mostly off the beaten track, with lots of landscape and some spectacular mountain passes plus a detour through Lesotho.

Attached Thumbnails

 

__________________
Only when we pause to wonder
do we go beyond the limits of our little lives.
(Rod McKuen)