The gorges of the higher Atlas and the experience of hitchhiking in Marokko.
After a good night of rest we woke up to a beautiful new day. After late breakfast we decided to continue our journey by hitchhiking through the marvellous landscape of the Marokkan countryside. The beauty at this time of the year are the contrast between blue skies, snowy mountains and desert like harsh landscapes. We always love to walk by the road to see the village life and local people.
First guy who stopped was a local teacher, very friendly and was already inviting us to stay with him. Due to lack of time, we needed to skip this opportunity and continued with two tourists from France. Next was a local firefighters working on electric plantation, who spoke only little bit of English, but nevertheless we had an excellent time. We even took a picture, which we need to send to him via email.
After two or three more stops we ended up with a young guy who had just started his career as a policeman.
Drive with him was very nice as he introduced us to a local music. The drive was long and in between we took a break to have a meal and a cup of coffee next to the viewpoints. Everywhere someone is wanting to sell you things like ancient jewelry.
After we reached his place in Tinghir, he was friendly enough to show us nice places nearby and suggested us to spend a day in the Todra Gorge.
There we stay at a friendly homestead and met a group of Spanish climbers. Gorge is very big and gives locals a source of fresh water. All the time cars came and filled the water from the spring into big canisters.
The Gorge itself is huge and red coloured which appears great on photos. We walked in the night and took some nice photographs of the sky, the stars were very bright as there is no lights from big cities.
In the morning we went for a sunrise and packed our things. We walked towards the big city and stopped for a coffee in a local bakery run by woman. This is a great initiative that we saw also in Asia. It's goal is to connect local women to do activities and earn money on the way. We must say that sweets and breakfast tasted delicious.
We stopped a shared taxi and reached big city where we boarded another shared taxi due to local bus being too full to even accept more people. We payed a ride to a lovely family, who didn't had enough money for the ride (lady had 5 children). Next ride was by a local guy with whom we got stopped by a police. Tamara got a ticket and needed to pay 30€ for not having a seat belt.
We found that quite interesting as locals don't wear them at all. Tourist are a nice opportunity for police to earn some money, as we saw they are stopping all the caravans and rental cars.
After a walk in the desert we got lucky and catch a big truck. He already took two local ladies, which we passed before. This was a very funny ride full of misunderstanding due to language barrier.
We are curious what do you think about hitchhiking and if you have any funny stories to share?
Thank you for reading.
Wish you all a nice day!
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