A LETTER FROM THE MOUNTAINS
A scramble up the Ourika Valley in what was once the land of the Almoravids
This morning on the outskirts of Marrakech it was grey and drizzly - the kind of day that felt more like we were in lowland Scotland than northwest Africa. So we decided to take a drive into the mountains, following the Ourika Valley from its dazzling green floodplain to the falls in the High Atlas where the river begins.
We wanted to see the world from up high, near the clouds. To find the place where the water dances bright and clear among the rocks; before it picks up the prehistoric orange-brown hue of almost everything else that rises out of the ground here, from the tagines to the mosques.
After driving for an hour up the easy bends of the mountain road we stopped and ate lunch in one of the dozens of little tourist restaurants that line the road-front in a village called Setti Fadma. Then we gave a guide called Kamil €20 to show us the path to the head of the river.
It was more of a scramble than a walk - a proper hike, as opposed to the American word for a stroll - over a mixture of rough concrete steps, precarious wooden bridges and boulders made slippery by the drizzle. The girls went in front with Kamil. I plodded behind, a child slung on my hip like a babushka, huffing and puffing as the air thinned.
We got most of the way up before the girls gassed out and my nerve failed - a tumble down a mountainside being one thing; a tumble while tied to another person quite another. But we got high enough to see some waterfalls at work, and for me to spot something that sparked a historical memory.
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