Lonely Planet Morocco
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The Marrakesh Express
The coast to the mountains
East of the Atlas
Quest for the Sahara
Todra gorge & Marrakesh
Meknes & the north
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Travel notes from Western Sahara
Hi Everyone
This journey across the Sahara Desert began in the commercial, port city of Casablanca as my flight from London landed in the early hours of Saturday morning. I didn't plan to stay in Casablanca long and wanted to be on the first train to Marrakech in the morning. My early start to Marrakech turned into a late start and it wasn't until 10:30 that I took a taxi across the city from the Rialto Hotel to the Casa Voyages railway station, where I caught the 11:16 Marrakech express. On board I met an American, Kourt, who had just arrived in
the country and was paying a morale boosting visit to his friend, who was working in the Peace Corp in a small village no-one had ever heard of, in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. It was raining when we arrived in Marrakech, so we took a taxi to a cheap hotel just off the main square, Place Djemaa el-Fna.
I last visited this vibrant city on my trip five years ago, when I passed through many times as I toured the country. It was great to be back, to wander around the labyrinth of alleyways around the souq and to enjoy the entertainment in the Place Djemaa el-Fna. The snake charmers were still charming their cobras, the musicians still making their music as the storytellers told their stories to crowds of enthralled people. Each evening the food stalls would set up and the smell of cooking food drifted amongst the crowds in the square.
There is no other city anywhere in the Arab world that can match Marrakech for the shear spectacle of noise, colour and smell; Marrakech is a unique city. I spent three nights here enjoying the fruits of civilisation before beginning my journey south into the desert.
I left the city on the 09:30 bus to Tiznit, about 90km south of Agadir, just inland from the coast. The journey took most of the day travelling along valleys through the foothills of the Anti Atlas Mountains, which stretch out down towards the coast at Agadir. I had heard rumours that a plague of locusts where moving north along the coast from Mauritania; as we came through a valley
I saw two swarms moving steadily north into the mountains. These swarms were nothing compared to what I would see along the coast the next day. It was late afternoon when I checked into a hotel in the small souq, just east of the main square in Tiznit.
I didn't travel far the following day, just two hours in a grand taxi to the coast and the sleepy little town of Sidi Ifni. The drive along the coast was beautiful, winding through rocky hills and past small villages. It was on the coast that we literally hit the plague of locusts. I have never seen anything like it before, the sky was thick with these bright red, cumbersome flying insects. We drove for 40km through nothing except locusts, millions upon millions of them, munching through anything green. Desperate farmers fruitlessly walked up and down their small fields beside the wadis waving flags trying to keep the locusts off their crops; it was a hopeless task. The road turned red as the locusts carpeted everything, a million silver wings glinting in the sun. By the time we reached Sidi Ifni, just a few stray locusts remained, they had thankfully passed the town.
This town used to be a Spanish enclave obtained by treaty in 1859, but not fully developed until 1934. The enclave was eventually given back to Morocco in 1969, but the Spanish left their mark on this small town of 15,000. Today there is a slightly quirky feel to the place, an air of faded grandeur almost as though it is turning into a ghost town. In the old part of town, on cliffs overlooking the sea, there is hardly any traffic, people wander down the middle of the
streets. There is an eclectic mix of architecture from Spanish art deco to traditional Moroccan. On the main square the crumbling Spanish Consulate lies abandoned, while other art deco buildings have been preserved. My favourite building was next to the Hotel Suerte Loca, where I stayed, a house shaped as a ship looking out to sea.
From Sidi Ifni my road trip south across the Western Sahara began in earnest. It was Thursday and I took a grand taxi about 70km south to Goulimime. From here it was about 1,300km to the border of Mauritania and would take me the next three days to reach. I took another grand taxi from Goulimime to Laayoune. Soon after leaving Goulimime the semi-arid landscape I had become used to turned into desert. There is really nothing for hundreds of kilometres, just an
inhospitable rocky plain dropping away to cliffs to the Atlantic Ocean. Every now and then the coastline would be punctuated by a rusting shipwreck, I counted eight in total on the journey south. Even in the middle of nowhere fishermen lived in shacks on top of the cliffs; it looked like a desperate life surrounded by the ocean on one side and the desert on the other.
Laayoune is the main city in the disputed territory of Western Sahara, with a population of 120,000. This territory used to be Spanish Sahara, until the Spaniards pulled out in 1975 and the Moroccans and Mauritanians moved in, the Moroccans finally gaining control of the whole territory. They then spent almost two decades fighting the Saharan independence movement, Polisario. Since 1996 a UN sponsored ceasefire has held and life is fairly normal once again in Western Sahara, although the UN promised referendum on final status has never materialised.
I stopped for a night in this shiny, new city in the desert before taking a 08:00 bus to Dakhla on Friday. Again the road stretched across endlessly featureless rocky desert plateau, running mostly along the coast. The occasional herd of camels straying close to the road were the only sign of life out here. Dakhla is where the public transport ends, 360km north of the border with Mauritania. I looked around the market area that night for a lift south. At my hotel I met a couple of Mauritanian traders who offered me a ride across the border. We left at 08:00 on Saturday, together with another traveller from Japan, who had spent the past two days in Dakhla looking for a ride. There is a tarred road now all the way to the border, so the journey was easier than I expected, although not the most comfortable, cooped up in the back of a van with a dozen other passengers and no windows; an oven on wheels would be a good
description of the journey, at least it was the middle of winter. By late afternoon on Saturday we reached the Moroccan frontier. The tarred road abruptly ended at the border fence and ahead of us a dusty track snaked through the rocks into no-mans land and towards the Mauritanian frontier.
Regards
Geoff.
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