We woke early at our hotel nestled in the folds of the beautiful Dades Gorge and, after breakfast of bread and fig jam, pancakes and mint tea, we jumped back in the van. We stopped briefly to view what Ibrâhîm called the Monkey Fingers – strange rock formations that rippled over the red surface, jutting up to the deep blue of the sky above the lush green foliage that grew around the river bed in the cavice of the gorge. Personally I couldn’t see monkey fingers or any other type of fingers – the rock looked more like sunburnt hardened earth which had cracked and opened in the hot sun.
We drove on through the looping roads and after an hour or so we reached Todra Gorge, a gigantic fault line that divides the Atlas Mountains in a narrow 300m valley peppered with Berber villages. Muḥammad dropped us off and sped away, leaving us to walk between the huge swatches of red rock that towered high above us into the sky. The small dry riverbed with just a trickle of water ran along at our side and we followed this the length of the main section of the gorge. It felt like we were walking in the centre of a huge earthquake which had opened up just wide enough for a couple of vehicles to pass through. The path was lined with stallholders selling the obligatory Moroccan carpets and pashminas – “of best quality” of course.
We scrambled up a gravelly rock path and got a stunning view into the depths of the gorge, before retrieving our ride and heading on – to the desert!
Life Well Travelled 