Meknes is a beautiful town with some great architecture on offer, but unfortunately we catch it at a bad time. Most people are still exhausted from Friday prayers, so all the stalls in the famous covered market are closed, with one single exception. Once we arrive at Bab el Mansour, the most impressive of all city gates that this town has to offer, it appears to have been covered in scaffoldings for quite some time. And to underscore the whole situation, the weather is drizzly, grey and quite cold.
We take a walk and eventually find a fresh market that is open, where there is more than enough to experience to still get a taste of the city. We find donkeys, motorbikes, anything you might want to buy and some nice old city walls. Then we pull the motorbikes out of the porch and set course for Midelt.
To be honest the roads leading up to Col du Zad aren’t exactly spectacular, and they have many roundabouts on offer. (Click here if you want to skip straight to the beautiful part after Col du Zad). We come across two snow barriers that are still open, but somehow we didn’t come to the conclusion that it’s also quite cold at the end of October in places that are closed off by snowfall in the winter. So we trot on, we don’t put on our rain suits, a thick fog gathers, we ignore it, the wind cuts right through our suits and the mercury drops to 8 degrees.
Saved by Aziz
After an hour we can’t go any further. Already well on the way to freezing, we stop at a parking lot that is supposed to have a museum, in the hopes of finding some sort of café there. There isn’t any, but we find three men warming themselves in front of a small wood stove in a shop that we would probably call a garage in the Netherlands and before the engines have even shut down we are called inside.
We are put on stools in front of the fire and slowly start feeling our hands again. The owner of the fire is Aziz, a quiet man with a friendly face and four children. The oldest is 24, the youngest 3. The tea is prepared with care and we are given cookies. This will give us energy again.
Aziz himself speaks Berber/Amazigh of course, but we can communicate reasonably well because he also speaks Spanish, French and (Moroccan) Arabic quite well, like almost everyone we have met so far. He also speaks a little English and German, because many tourists stop here. They mainly come for the monkeys, we already saw fat gray macaque-like monkeys sitting next to the road. He sells handmade souvenirs in his shop.
When we are patched up and have color on our cheeks again, we’re allowed to go. We try to leave him something for the warmth and the tea, but he doesn’t want anything in return. He says he wants us to know that Berbers are hospitable people. And although it is still misty and freezing cold, our day changes after this.
Descending to the plains
Not much later we have crossed the Col du Zad and are driving down. When we drop under the cloud cover, a beautiful landscape stretches out before us. So many colours and so much space. A red plain below us with the mountains behind it, seemingly purple in the distance. Although there are plenty of vehicles on the road, you can see so far with hardly any buildings that it feels very remote. Along the road we see many herds of donkeys, large flocks of sheep with black heads, accompanied by shepherds and dogs.
This road leads to Erg Chebbi, a piece of desert with red sand dunes that is not officially in the Sahara but is nevertheless impressive. Most tourists who pass by here are on their way there. When you hear about people camping in a nomad camp in the Sahara with camels and such, it is usually in Erg Chebbi (although there are some other places).
Midelt, a friendly mountain town
We drive on to Midelt, a quiet town where we immediately feel at home. It’s a nice town with a mountain vibe, there’s not much more going on than daily life and some trade between mountain inhabitants. It has just enough tourist traffic to find a hotel with a garage and place to eat with an english menu. We talk to someone who lives in Imilchil in the summer and here in the winter, when it is too cold up there. He speaks Berber, but he can’t read it, even though you see it on road signs and such here (alongside French or Arabic).
Next up: Cirque de Jafar
We’re here for the single other reason tourists visit Midelt (I think?) and that is the Cirque de Jafar (also written as Circo de Jaafar). It’s a natural amphitheater and the roads leading up to it would be our first stretch of easy piste before heading on to the riverbed to cross the gorge and continue on to Imilchil – at least that is the plan. We don’t have any real offroad experience and it’s quite hard to find any route information – including how hard it’s going to be. We’ll find out tomorrow.
