Cascades and Mountains

Making argon oil

Cascades
From the beach we traveled inlaid through Morocco to see the Cascades d’Ouzoud waterfalls. This is a very small village that we stayed in a riad, which is a hotel with a courtyard. We had a tour guide take us down through the town and to the waterfalls. It was a long walk with Brent’s back, foot and it was 100 degrees out it wasn’t such a good idea to take this 2-3 hour trek but we all survived. The tour took us through a 100 year old olive tree grove, we saw artichokes growing wild, cacao trees, wild asparagus, saw a village that the ladies showed us how they make argon oil. The waterfall was really pretty we walked back up the other side about 1000 steps (!) in the heat of the day and all felt really tried after that. Nobody felt like eating dinner so we had ice cream for dinner and the kids thought that was the best thing ever as they’ve never had ice cream for dinner before.

Mountains
next we traveled through the High Atlas mountains. This was a really long day almost 9 hours in the car and the scariest mountain roads I’ve traveled on in my life. Lots of zigzag switchbacks and sheer cliffs. Then  we arrived at our kasbah which is a Moroccan castle. This kasbah was probably the worst place to stay but it was the only one I could find in the region. ( Could this be where the bed mites traveled home with us?) Although we had a horrible nights sleep it was one of the best tagine dinners we had our whole trip. Was that worth a good night sleep? Depends on who you ask!

One of my favorite towns of the day was Ourzazate. It had pink beautiful buildings throughout and was very clean. We traveled through the valley of the roses to get to our hotel in El Kelaa M’ Gouna. However it wasn’t the right season so we didn’t even see any rose bushes. They produce rose oil, rose water and other rose products from this area.