Vacation

The final long long drive was around 10 hours including stops and due to the choice of Ait Sedrate Jbel El Oulia as the hotel, preceded by almost an hour of horribly narrow winding roads! Our final hotel was buried within the medina of Marrakesh, where coaches can’t go, so we had to transfer to a smaller vehicle, then walk the last ten minutes (but at least porters took our luggage!) … once again here’s a collection of views from the long drive (including spotting the world’s largest solar power plant!)

To give the group a rest between two very long driving days, we spent two nights and all of today in this hardly-a-town of Ait Sedrate Jbel El Oulia; a walk through the town was offered, but it wasn’t made clear that this walk would be two long hours of climbing and balancing on narrow and rocky paths, turn-arounds due to unsafe river crossings, and not much of the rest we were supposed to be doing!

There were some interesting views, and a nice lunch in someone’s own home; happily the tour organizers noted the tiredness of some and arranged transport back to the hotel after lunch …

Because the Erg Chebbi dunes are so far from Marrakesh (our final destination), the drive got split into two halves with a two night stay in a poor choice hotel (in Ait Sedrate Jbel El Oulia and the short Wikipedia page tells you a lot about the poor choice!) that added nearly an hour each way of twisty travel to already long days! This I think was the one poorly designed part of the Photofly Morocco package.

We drove some five hours today with a few stops for scenery, etc … here are photos: