Back to "Civilization" - Tinerhir (10.5.07)

Video of Camp Staff at Second Camp Saying Goodbye in the Morning:

We started the morning at about 9:00 with a walk across the desert for about 45 minutes and then we were picked up by the Toyota's. I slept like a log with the exception of a sore throat and stopped up sinuses. Mom had already dragged her bedding out to the center of the campsite sometime during the night so that she could better appreciate the stars, and had probably been sniffed over by the fox that left tracks around the food tent and the dunes. A 15 minute ride in the rovers brought us to some seeming deserted rock and adobe structures out in the middle of the moonscape. They were the winter residences of the semi-nomadic Berbers, we were told, who summer up on the slopes of the Atlas Mt. and then bring their camels and goats to this valley for milder winters.

Apparently Morocco has a problem with a lot of poor, uneducated people moving from the countryside to the city in search of a better life. All too often they end up underpaid and living in city slums. To help quell this, the government has been working to bring electricity and running water to many of these communities, but I am tellling you, we drove through/stopped in at least 5 towns of varying sizes and it is a hard-scrabble, almost medieval existance. I can completely appreciate why someone would leave it behind for a chance of a better life.

We drove another 30 minutes and then gathered around the edge of a country cemetery in which the graves were marked with nothing more than a mound of sand, rocks, and 2 slabs of stones demarcating the gender of the deceased. Muslims are not cremated, but are instead buried as soon after death as possible and are put into the ground on the right side with the face pointed to Mecca. In yet another example of Muslim gender discrimination (to my foreign eyes) women are not allowed to attend the funeral or to visit the grave site until 3 days following burial.

Our next stop was a small family's working farm. The mostly silent man who took us around was apparently the son of the previous farmer. Since his father passed away from a heart attack, he had the responsibility of tending the cattle, goats, date palms, pomegranate and fig trees and fields of corn, wheat, alfalfa, and henna. The irrigation system that carries the water around is nothing more than a gasoline powered pump at the well and a series of adobe and dirt channels crisscrossing the farm. As if the man doesn't have enough to do already with the farm, his wife, their two kids and one on the way, he also has to take care of his father's 3 wives who we saw sitting in the dirt next to the house.

As we bumped down the dirt roads for the next hour, waving at children who appeared out of nowhere to wave and give us the thumbs-up sign, I felt myself fading fast. I spent lunch in Alnif asleep on the cushioned bench of the dining room while the rest of the gang chowed down on goat. The rest of the afternoon was spent winding through dusty roads to cross the J'bell Sahro Range. In the background we could see snowcapped peaks of the High Atlas Mountains, and every direction you look you could see the mountainous evidence of some past siesmic shift since huge mesas and mountains have been pushed up out of the ground and display thousands of years of geologic history in their jagged but matching layers and stiations.

We had only 30 minutes to get settled into our hotel in Tinnehir before collecting our bathstuff and heading to the local hammam, or public bathhouse. Several women in the group elected not to go, and of the ones who did, several had reservations about getting naked among others in the group and were a bit apprehensive about the total experience. In some ways the whole experience was surreal, because 10 minutes after meeting us and Aziz in their black jelabas and conservative head scarves, the attendants when inside stripped down to the waist to their knee-length granny panties and were soaping and scrubbing 7 of us American women (who were wearing only panties) while singing heartily and doing raunchy dance moves to our clapping. The gist of hammam is that it is a local public bathhouse that both proscribes to purification rituals of Islam as well as providing a place to bathe in areas and times when water was scarce. And it provides a social area for women to sit and talk. With the exception of 3 desperate flights from the washroom to the Turkish toilet to deal with Morocco's version of Montezuma's revenge (prompting one of the attendants to think I was pregnant!), it was a very interesting experience. While getting soaped up we all tried to sing "Row, Row Your Boat" in a round. I did my best imitation of a sea lion when our attendant flipped me over to loofah my back.

I skipped dinner in favor of staying within 10 paces of a toilet, but got to talk to a few people from home, including my neighbors, the Kimels, so I don't think I missed much. I have to decide whether to stay in or go for tomorrow's activities, and I am inclined to stay. I need time off from this vacation business!