A long arduous hike up a gorgeous rock mountain

We left the desert and headed west towards the eastern edge of the base of the High Atlas Mountains and Todra Gorge. Todra (also spelled Todgha) Gorge are a series of limestone river canyons with steep cliffs walls. These canyons were carved by millennium of water flowing through river beds and seasonal flooding. The spectacular canyon walls can reach heights of up to 400m and are a siren call for avid rock climbers (they travel from around the world to scale these walls).

Before arriving in town though, we transversed more of the plains and stopped at a few interesting sites along the route. The first of these sites was one of the old Khettara of the Tafilalt Oasis. The Khettara were underground aquifers that supplied water across the large, flat basin to many of the smaller cities and towns in the area, as well as the nomads that make the basin their home. Each aquifer was painstakingly dug by the male residents of all the towns and villages that would benefit from the system. They used a wooden pulley system with camel power to pull up the tons of dirt required to make the wells and the main underground tunnels. The dirt was dumped on the sides of each well and wells were made every 50meters or so. This gives the land an alien like quality with its rows of “pockmarks.” 

Having so many wells so close to each other served as both a place to gather water and as an easier way to fix the system if any one section of the aquifer’s clay walls caved in. Up until a decade ago, water could still be found running through the miles of these systems, but now they run dry as water is no longer only 7 or 8 meters below the surface, but 70 meters or more. The signs of Global warming are very visible here.

We left the arid oasis and drove to Tinejdad to see the Ksar El Khorbat Oujdid and visit the Musee Lalla Mimouna (Oasis Museum). A Ksar means many different things depending on where in the world you are, but here, in the South of Morocco, a Ksar is a village surrounded by walls, made of soil, with one or more monumental entrances and at least the following communitarian infrastructure: the mosque, the baths, a Koran school, a public place and sometimes an inn. In the pre-Saharan valley in the 1920s there were over 1000 of these fortress cities, but today more than half of those are now ruins. Each Ksar was designed to be a city unto itself where the outside walls were high and impenetrable and there was no need for the residents to venture outside. 

The cities were meant to seal themselves off to protect the residents if there were any sorts of conflict outside its walls. Now in days, those Ksar that still exist have added additional entryways and windows into the walls as the need to be autonomous cities has passed and the inhabitants have integrated with their surrounding communities. The Ksar El Khorbat Oujdid is attempting to share the rich history of Ksars and the Berber people via ecotourism and the Oasis Museum. 

The Oasis Museum was the brain child of Zaid Abbou, who invested his own time, energy, and funds to collect many relics and historical pieces of Berber culture. The museum is housed inside three restored houses inside the Ksar and is distributed across three different levels. Therefore as you follow the unidirectional layout through the various well designed local exhibits with explanations in six different languages, you also get to learn about how the traditional house in the Ksar were designed. The museum gives you a really good sense of the Berber culture and the Ksar was really interesting to see. 

After a tasty lunch, we continued up the windy mountains roads to Todra Gorge, our home for the next two nights. 

We’re staying in a nice hotel just across the small river that flows at the base of the Todra Gorge. We had to walk across a bridge and ascend a bunch of steps, but it was worth it. The hotel is situated directly next to the ruins of an old mini village (it may have just been a few houses). This whole area is scattered with abandoned and semi-abandoned adobe and mud brick homes and villages sitting side by side with more modern constructions. It gives a slightly surreal feel to everything to see the old and the new so intertwined.

Our one free day in the area was spent, first with a lot of exertion, followed by an afternoon of relaxation. To best appreciate the beauty of these rocky cliffs, Em and I (and Nathan and Brian), did what we always do in foreign countries; hike a mountain with zero preparation. Although, for once, I think I was a little more in shape than I’d originally thought, for the two hour climb that wound up the rocky outcrops didn’t seem as arduous to me as past hikes have. Em though, cursed me for “forcing” her to come along and decided she might need to start working on her cardio a bit when she gets home.

We were told that we could hire a local guide to take us up the trail and back down, but declined with the thought that a trail (even if it’s really a goat and donkey path), coupled with accounts from previous hikers’ online directions should be more than enough to get us up and down. And we were right, baring a few mishaps. We lost the trail about ten minutes into the hike and I lead everyone up the dry river bed until Em spotted our goat track about 100 feet above us. So a little rock scrambling and bouldering later and we were back on track. After about two hours of consistent uphill, we crested the peak (regardless of Khalid telling us we didn’t need to hike to the top to get down the other side, we needed to hike to the peak to get down the other side).

At the top (of the area we climbed) is a very small nomad settlement (maybe five homes). These families live here because it is the only place they can legally graze their goats. Lower down in town, the people have their own animals or are frowning palm trees and don’t want the goats to graze there. Sometimes the nomads will invite travelers to join them in their home for some wild thyme tea gathered from the nooks and crannies of the rocks we’d just finished climbing. We didn’t get an invitation, but the young children did chases us asking for money.

The back side of the trail starts with a long downhill across rocks and it became a game of spot the next cairn to make sure we were on the right path. This area is definitely one where a guide probably could have been useful, but we managed well enough on our own. 

Our prize at the end of the 4 and a half hour hike (we walked an extra mile because we wanted to see a very picturesque portion of the gorge where the river still flows with water and the cliffs tower on either side….so we were dropped off further from the hike’s starting point so that we could walk through the canyon first since we wouldn’t have been able to see it any other time) was that the trail drops you into the ruins of one of the old mud-brick villages. 

While most everything was eerily silent and empty, there was an open shop with a nice older man that helped make sure we didn’t wander down the wrong path and were able to correctly to exit into the palmeraie (lush green areas where they grow palm date trees). In the case our Todra Gorge, the palmeraie is in the riverbed between the two sides of town (the rocks cliffs we just climbed and mostly remnants of ruins on the one side, and most of the modern town on the other. The river bed is also home to small agricultural beds, and the water source for the nomadic people that live in the area.

Another bonus to the end of the hike was we meet up with Mary (who had abstained from the long hike and opted instead for a nice leisurely walk through the shady palmeraie) and Khalid at a riad in town for a local speciality; Madfouna, aka Berber pizza. 

Madfouna is stuffed flatbread prepared using a handful of staple ingredients (meat, eggs, nuts, onions and garlic, and herbs and spices such as cumin, paprika, turmeric, ginger and parsley)– is traditionally baked in a fire pit in the sand or a mud oven, and has long served as a wholesome meal for many families who live on the fringes of the Erg Chebbi dunes near the Algerian border. So even though we’d left the desert, we were still able to try this treat. While we were thinking calzone when original told about it, it’s more like a very flat frittata was stuffed into the middle of thick bread.

Tried from our hike and full from Berber pizza we spent the rest of the day lounging at the hotel.