I’ve determined that there are four ages of woman in Morocco, defined by their behaviours.

Young women will smile at you, but also avoid eye contact and look away. The smiles are often embarrassed that they did catch eye contact.
Middle aged women will make eye contact, hold it, but never smile. They glare at you.
Old women don’t avoid eye contact but don’t seek it out. They always smile.
The ones that amuse me the most are the small girls. They stare in fascination, and sometimes wave shyly. I wave back.

I passed an old lady yesterday in the medina. She smiled at me as she carried an unleavened loaf in the other direction. After finding a dead-end (this was frequent) I walked back and found the loaf on the floor outside a house, the door partly open. A few minutes and another dead-end later I was heading back towards the souks when I passed her once more. She had her loaf back and this time I got an even bigger smile. I think she was amused at me wandering around lost.

There are exceptions. I never see young women in rural areas, and some young women in towns (always the ones with their hair loose, which is quite unusual) adopt a western haughty, “Why are you looking at me” expression. I smile at them anyway, which always results in either a smile back or reversion to generic young Moroccan shyness.

The men are much more relaxed. Unless they’re trying to extract cash from you they’re happy to catch your eye, share a quick smile or nod, or exchange pleasantries. I’ve had to re-learn ‘Ca va bien’. The French is actually proving a massive issue for me, for three main reasons. One is that I’ve just forgotten everything (despite taking French at school I now speak better German), the second is that my deafness makes it hard to work out the words being said, and the other issue is that despite my ineptness with the language, I’m a fucking master of the accent. So I can bonjour and ca va like a native.. at which point they launch straight into full local lingo expecting me to keep up. No.

My half of a typical conversation goes like this: “Bonjour” “Ca va bien” “Parlez vous Anglais?” This may take several minutes. They’re quite loquacious.

The worse bit is that I just can’t cope with numbers. I can translate numbers, spell them properly, everything. I’m buggered if I can understand a price some Moroccan is telling me. It doesn’t help that I’m fairly sure they add 30% when translating it to English too. Maybe this isn’t my incompetence at all, and it’s just Moroccans that can’t speak French properly.

Wandering lost is a common theme for me in the medinas here. Some of the men get distraught that I’m walking away from the souks, or towards a dead-end, or just towards an area with no tourists. They warn me, tell me I’m going the wrong way, tell me I don’t want to go there, tell me it’s not for me. I ignore them.

Every dead-end I went down though had life in it. People walking to or from their homes, or children playing in the alleys. Once I’m amongst those homes the men just glare at me, the women don’t take notice and the children play if they’re older, or stare if they’re still toddlers. I’ve seen a lot of children below school age stood in the medina with no parents in sight, nobody worried or concerned about them, and clearly also no harm to them. Seems Moroccans treat their offspring the way they treat their cats.

But today was all about monkey hunting. So I went to the forest in which the monkeys allegedly live. What a waste of time. What I should have done instead is just drive towards my next hotel and stop by one of the numerous hawkers selling peanuts by the road, as the endangered Barbary Macaques sit next to them waiting to be fed the peanuts.

But no, I drove up a mountain and into the forest. Then the road ran out unexpectedly. I turned down the offer of a horse to continue and then did what any bloody idiot would do:
Wearing a short sleeved shirt and an open cardigan, carrying no map or compass, having never visited before and forgetting to even take some water, I struck out into the woods on foot, ignoring the tracks, crunching over the frozen ground. It might be sunny but we’re 2km up and it’s winter..

Naturally I eventually realised that I couldn’t see a track, or the road, or people, or the horse, or indeed anything but trees and the mountain they covered. So I turned right. This was highly logical and took advantage of the sun peeking through the trees.

A couple of hundred yards later I found three men, two in traditional Moroccan dress and one in an army beret but with jeans and a winter coat. They looked lost and bewildered to see me there, so I greeted them and strolled past.

Only 5 minutes after that I realised something was moving through the trees. It turned to look at me so I said hello. Turns out Macaques in Morocco don’t speak English, he ignored me and wandered off. Turns out he was on point; the rest of the trip were following and headed straight for me. So I walked with them for a while, as you do. They stopped to sunbath and groom each other, and the babies dropped from the back of their carriers and had a play.

I now have some photographs of wild monkeys. Forget the tourist roadside tackiness, just me, the woods, the mountain and the monkeys. Properly awesome.

I left them there, walked in what was hopefully the right direction and found my car over the next ridge. The monkeys had brought me back.

Driving through the mountains is nice. I like mountains but I love deserts and it turns out the plain between the two tall ridges I cross today is just one massive desert. It reminds me of the Mojave, lots of scrub and broken ground rather than sand. The people here feel wealthier, the shepherds have a flock of 80-100 sheep not the 20-30 elsewhere, everybody has at least one donkey and there isn’t the same level of roadside selling.

I’m still trying to work out if I’m seeing wild donkeys or just free range ones a mile from their owners. They still look depressed, even with food, no load on their back, no harness and a lovely warm sun.

It’s only warm in the sun though. There’s a brisk wind, a lot of frost until noon or so and I did reach the snowline in one pass. Clear blue skies though, so it’s going to be a bit brass monkeys tonight.

Better yet I’m staying in the tower of a Kasbah. I have mud walls, a flat roof above me, my own personal water heater and a radiator plugged into the only plug socket. So I need to choose between camera battery, tablet recharge, phone or warmth. So the camera is now already charged, the phone is on flight mode and and I have crossed fingers that the tablet battery will last until the room is warm. The phone can charge in the car tomorrow..

I’ve already paid hotels.com for my room. Worryingly the guy on reception didn’t think I existed and is expecting someone else that booked via expedia. I’ve emailed hotels.com to sanity check, or tomorrow morning could get awkward when I walk out without paying.

I randomly chose this one on the grounds it’s one of only four hotels within 40 miles in any direction. It’s quite nice and it’s inside the Ziz Gorge, which is apparently extremely pretty. I’m sure it is, I just can’t see much of it – too many mountains in the way. I did though take a photograph from the terrace by my room, and a second looking the other way, towards the centre of the hotel.


Yes, that fruit is growing inside the hotel courtyard in winter. You can also see the room in the opposite tower to mine. The greenery in the first photo is due to the river flowing past the hotel – hence the gorge. Looking forward to tomorrow’s drive down to the oasis it feeds, although wont be stopping there – I’ve added myself a 300km detour to properly see the Sahara.

Anyhow, only three hours sleep last night – combination of some noisy idiot in Fes that I could hear through a sixth floor window eight streets away – and excessive late caffeine. So time for a nap before dinner!

Today’s Drive:

Tonight’s Hotel (sorry, no hotel website).