Rocks, the kasbah

We were up bright and breezy this morning to prepare for a long days travelling. Indeed getting up at 6:30am felt more like a work day than something you would choose to do as an adventurous day out in Morocco.

We breakfasted at 7:00am and were on the road by 7:30am. Aziz kindly informed us of the plan as the journey began. First off we would go to Ouarzazate (pronounced Wah-tsar-sat) via the highest mountain pass in all of Africa, the Tizi N'Tichka pass which everyone in Morocco seems to be proud of, judging by the fact that people can reel off the detail of the pass being 2260 metres above sea level.

The pass is in the high Atlas Mountains, and I don't think I appreciated how windy and windy it was going to be. It took an eternity to get through the mountains and even though our destination was only 200km away, we didn't get there until 11:30am.

Stunning views along the mountain route, managed to get a nice ass shot here too

That said, for once in my life, i found the journey through the Atlas Mountains to be rather spectacular, and well worth it. I am usually more interested in man-made wonders than appreciating the natural environment around me. But here, every single turn in the road brought us another vista which we could snap. I was in danger of delaying our day by making Aziz stop all the time so I could get some good pictures, but he was very accommodating and slowed down when he thought I wanted a picture so I could take it from the car. 

Berber villages on the mountainside

The winding ascent to Tizi N'Tichka, only about halfway up at this point.

We got to a pass called Tizi N'Tichka (pronounced Tij-in titch-car), which as i mentioned above is the highest pass in all of Africa, at 2260 metres. We were going to get out and have a picture taken next to the sign but it was so wet and windy that we left it after two failed attempts to have a photo of us in the car while Aziz took a picture of us under the sign.

After our ride through the mountains our first stop was to the Atlas movie studios, which has sets from lots of famous films. Aziz referred to it as the second Hollywood, and i wondered if this was an idle boast, or if any other countries could make that claim. Well I say famous films, but on closer investigation, they are usually remakes of famous films - I pride myself on knowing a few things about cinema, but I never knew Timothy Dalton appeared in a remake of Cleopatra!! Other less famous titles include Ben Hur (remake in the 90s), Moses (French film) and Wes Craven's 'The Hills have eyes 2' making me wonder why would they shoot that all the way out here?

Car from The Living Daylights

Plane from Jewel in the Nile

Ok, i am being a little bit disingenuous here, as this is also the place they shot scenes from Gladiator, The Passion of the Christ, Kingdom of Heaven, The Living Daylights, The Jewel in the Nile and according to the guide they have just finished filming bits from season three of Game of Thrones there too (reminding me that i need to watch the first two seasons), so there is some genuinely famous stuff here too.

Behind the set of The Passion of the Christ

Egyptian temple set which was used in Series 3 of Game of Thrones(?)

Overall, The sets were very good fun, and something different to see on your average day out in the Moroccan countryside. I was amazed at how wonderfully realistic it all looked until you tapped it with your finger to find it was plastic or fibreglass, and I love looking behind the scenes and seeing all the scaffolding etc.

Ridley Scott's Jerusalem from "Kingdom of Heaven"

We moved on to our first kasbah, in Ouarzazate. A kasbah is the Berber name for a palace and the one we went to managed to tick all the boxes of being a palace but actually left me feeling a little bit underwhelmed. It was a series of empty nondescript rooms, with only occasional decoration. My initial impression of it was that the outside of these kasbahs are much more interesting than the inside. I didn't. Spend too long in here, and was really relieved I didn't pay for a tour guide who would have cost £10 (which was twice as much as the ticket) and shed very little light on the place in my opinion (i.e. Tour Guide: and if you look to your left, here is another empty room without any decoration in it).

View from the inside of Ouarzazate kasbah looking out

Non-descript room number 113, and if you look to your left....

From there we moved on to the reason for the day trip out, the visit to Aït BenHaddou. This is a ksar (a fortified town) and is a UNESCO world heritage site (another one ticked off!) and is considered a classic example of Berber civilisation. The word aït is actually Berber for family, and Ben means son, so the literal meaning of the place is Family of the son of Haddou. It was built as a stopping point on the Saharan trade routes before the caravans moved on to Marrakech but surprisingly is not as old as you would think (about 400 years old). It has since been abandoned by the Berbers apart from a few families who stay there still because they have nowhere else to go.

Ait BenHaddou looks promising.....

So I was looking forward to walking around abandoned streets, taking photos of all the narrow passageways. The approach towards it was lovely, it looks very impressive perched on the side of a mountain ( I am struggling to call it a mountain after going through the Atlas Mountains which makes the Lake District look like a couple of speed bumps), but once again getting inside the ksar was a little bit underwhelming.

People might not live there anymore, but almost every street is full of people with shops trying to sell you an authentic piece of Moroccan tat, which you got the feeling was actually not hand made by the owners but bought in en masse from the Souks in Marrakech. There was one exception to this, and it was a man who was making pictures by burning the canvas using the sun's rays through a magnifying glass, which was interesting enough, but other than that I passed by most storekeepers without so much as a second glance.

The deserted streets of Ait BenHaddou. Erm......

It was also a little bit disappointing that we couldn't actually go inside any of the houses there and investigate what it was like to live in the ksar, they were all closed off and bolted. On the plus side though I made my way to the top where the storage tower for the ksar was and from there I managed to get some lovely pictures looking down over the whole town wiith the backdrop of the mountains in the distance.

Ait Benhaddou from the top looking down.

On top of Ait BenHaddou with the Atlas mountains in the background

We left here and made a slow trek back to the Tizi N'Tichka pass via a back route. On the way we passed many other kasbahs, which reinforced my feeling that these things are not as special and unusual as I first thought. Pretty much every town has a kasbah, in various states of disrepair, and all the village does is abandon that when it. Becomes unusable and builds something newer right next to it.

Town in the valley, these people must be fit to get up and down there every day!! 

Again, the journey back was long, windy and bumpy (we were off road for a large part), but the scenery was absolutely wonderful with villages on mountainsides or down the bottom of deep valleys or just admiring the mountain range as it went past. There were a couple of funny sights along the way, like the cows sitting on top of a bus or an amusing sign for a restaurant called 'Le Coq Hardi' which brought out my inner child and made me giggle somewhat....

'Le Coq Hardi' was next left.....i think i will give that a miss....

I was starting to flag by this point as it had been a long day, full of travelling around, and no respite, so I was thankful when we got home and showered and could relax for the evening with another lovely tagine in the hotel. The food in this hotel is amazing, and no other restaurant I have been to here comes anywhere close.

A sign of things to come....

One thing that is worth mentioning about Malta is their signs are wonderfully malapropriate. I puzzled at the bus time table which had bus times from fri-sat and then the Sunday times. Either they meant mon-sat or bus drivers have the cushiest job on the island!

That pales into insignificance when you visit one car mechanic though and his sign reassuringly offers you "free punctures" with every set of tyres bought. That is a business model which you have to applaud really. I wonder if the customers buy the second set of tyres off of him.....

When you add that to the church which seems to branched out and now offers manicures and pedicures - nuns like nice nails too i am guessing or, slightly more worrying, maybe the monks do! Anyway, there is a wonderful array of signs to enjoy here and any that I see and get a chance to snap will be posted up here.

By the lack of action thus far into the blog post you might have guessed that today has been a rather sedate day really, and you would be right. All we have done is a bit of sitting by the pool and drinking cocktails. Engrossed in a book, I forgot about the suns evil rays, and now have lobster legs. This wouldn't be so bad apart from the fact that I must have sat on the lounger in a rather silly way, as only half my leg got exposed, so I have one side, from thigh to ankle, lobster red, and the other side paler that a goth girl's complexion ......

Also, it seemed a rather good idea to look at the temple on our doorstep in order to whet our appetites for the temples to come. Our hotel was actually built around a small megalithic temple, and it seems rather a shame to admit it, but in fact this is the quietest and least visited part of the hotel. If you go to the sun loungers you find them filled with Germans and east European tourists cooking themselves slowly by the pool, but the only person other than us who drank from the cultural cup was a small child (nationality: unknown) who I think was actually lost and was looking for a way back to the pool.

The temple ruins are small, but rather lovely in their own right. The cynic in me suspected that they might actually be a modern reconstruct by the hoteliers in order to get some extra business, but they are in fact pukka 5000 year old stones. Anyway, here are some snaps of Bugibba Temple.

 

 

 

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A Va-lletta from Malta

There has been a slight change to the itinerary that I listed out the other day. Instead of today being a day at rest, the need, to get reliable internet access meant that we ventured into Valletta, the capital of Malta.

One of the things Malta is known for is it's wonderful bus service and buses, and indeed the Maltese seemed proud of this heritage too as all the souvenir stands seem to have yellow bus fridge magnets aplenty. It is somewhat sad to see that, as far as I can tell, these quaint things have been replaced by soulless Arriva buses.

That said, I could not deny they were nicely air-conditioned and were very frequent and cheap (you can travel the island on the bus all day for less that three Euros). I love travelling by public transport wherever I can as it invariably takes you to places you would never naturally go to, so the journey to Valletta was great fun, allowing us to enjoy the Maltese countryside.

A special mention has to go out to the driving over here, it is very random, especially at roundabouts. Britain was the country which invented and standardised the rules of etiquette when using roundabouts and it appears that to cock-a-snook at their former colonial overlords the Maltesers have dispensed with these rules. When a car is on the roundabout it is usual in the UK for cars looking to join to wait until they have passed before embarking on their manoeuvre; in Malta a car on the roundabout is a signal for flooring it and forcing the other cars to stop on the roundabout to avoid hitting you.........

Anyway, back to Valletta (my tangential witterings would put Ronnie Corbett to shame!). The bus ride was very nice giving us a long tour of some of the towns on the north of the island. There is a lot of rubble and derelict buildings and I wondered if they were a residual hangover from the second world war or not.

We arrived in Valletta and headed down towards the harbour so I could get the obligatory Valletta "money shot" of the forts across the harbour. This was a very impressive view to be fair, but I was slightly disappointed that the access to the fort was restricted so I could only get a few token snaps of the outside. Part of me felt like sneaking in anyway, but my curiosity was soon assuaged by the sound of repeat gun fire coming from the fort. Either they took the act of trespass very seriously here or, more plausibly judging by the sign I found a bit further down the road, the fort was used as a Police academy (only slightly more amusing than the film franchise I would imagine....)

This is Fort Ricasoli as seen from Fort Elmo

In case you are not aware, Malta was one of the most bombed places in the whole war, and its residents proved to be so resolute, that at the end of the war, George VI awarded the whole island the George Cross, the highest accolade that can be awarded to civilians.

This is a plaque on the parliament building quoting verbatim the letter from the king.

Personally, I preferred the language on the American plaque next door, apart from the fact they spell centre incorrectly!

The American plaque......

Another thing that Malta is famous for is for its churches. Being a catholic country, you can't go more than 100 yards without finding one. I like churches (coming from an Irish heritage it would be a sin not to) but I have to admit my real reason for coming here was the megalithic temples. However, here are a couple of church shots with which to feast your eyes.

This is St John's cathedral in the centre of Valletta......

......And this is a church on Merchant's street

Today has been a day at rest, and tomorrow we venture out to Gozo for our first day of templing. I need to dust my fedora down and get my bullwhip out of retirement.....Indiana Beamish returns......

The Plan

This tour is only a ten day excursion, and so to be completely efficient in seeing everything I want to, I need to sketch out a loose plan of things to do. Brace yourself Sarah - this is where you realise what you have let yourself in for....

For those who don't know, Malta might be a small island in the Mediterranean, but it is packed with a rich history. One of the key reasons I wanted to go there is that it has some wonderful megalithic temples which date from around the time of our own Stonehenge. I love my temples, so it will be nice to tick these off in my EyeSpy book of UNESCO World Heritage sites.

So this is a rough itinerary:

Day 1 - Arrive at hotel, and visit Dolmen temple (this is actually a bit of a cheat really, as the temple is in the hotel grounds).

Day 2 - Acquaint ourselves with the Maltesers, and the local area (i.e. find out where the nearest MacDonalds is etc.) and just relax a bit.

Day 3 - Visit the Tarxien temple complex and also see the Hypogeum (they are near each other)

Day 4 - Visit Hagar Qim and Mnajdra temples

Day 5 - Visit Ggantija temple and explore Gozo island

Day 6 - Day spent enjoying Valletta (I think it is probably sensible to take a break from temples to prevent fatigue!)

Day 7 - Visit Skorba temples and go to M'dina

Days 8-10 - Relax and recharge those batteries (and update blog!)

This is of course a very loose plan and is subject to alterations as we work our way through things - I don't want to be beholden to time, like I was in my whirlwind tour of the wonderful Karnak temple, but similarly, I wouldn't want to allot a whole day to something that amounts to two rocks set parallel to each other, which some Oxbridge scholar has proclaimed to be a temple.

There are other things to see too, and fortunately, the Maltese bus system (I am assured) is a fantastic way of travelling around the island, so it is fairly certain we will end up in some interesting places without intentionally listing them down. I have to admit that I am getting quite excited now that the holiday is within touching distance, and will hopefully get some nice pictures to share with you all, instead of these dry, pictureless posts!!!

Well, that is all for now folks, the next time I post I will be in the Med, with my string shirt and Union Jack shorts on.......