We wake up in Skoura, a tiny town just east of the more famous Ourzazate -- so famous that I'm sure you've never heard of it. We are still in the desert, but staying in this tiny town because of its huge date-palm oasis. For our morning activity, we wander through the oasis, with me singing "Midnight at the Oasis" over and over to everybody's annoyance. Probably because the only lines I can remember are "Midnight at the oasis. Put your camel to bed."
It's beautiful, and relatively lush after days in the desert. There are ancient kasbahs dotted throughout the oasis and initially, looking from above, they are so easy to spot, we assume they will be easy to find. But once we're in the midst of the oasis, it's so overgrown, we can no longer see the kasbahs. Eventually we find our way to one, and ultimately we find our way back out, but not before get lost numerous times and discover a date tree. It's the end of the season, so what we actually find are fallen dates, in among the lower branches of the tree. Date palms look gentle, but turn out to be incredibly spiky and cactus-like. Anthony finds that out the hard way. We discover that we can use dried spikes fallen from the tree itself to spear the dates without too much injury. At great peril and pain, we spear about a dozen of these semi-sun-dried dates then sit down to have a picnic snack, only to discover that they are starchy, bland, and disgusting. Lesson learned: Next time, just buy the dates.
Next and last stop on our itinerary before heading out of the desert for good: Aït Ben Haddou, another place you've never heard of. But you've seen it, if you've ever watched one of the following movies, for which it was used as a location.
It's beautiful, and relatively lush after days in the desert. There are ancient kasbahs dotted throughout the oasis and initially, looking from above, they are so easy to spot, we assume they will be easy to find. But once we're in the midst of the oasis, it's so overgrown, we can no longer see the kasbahs. Eventually we find our way to one, and ultimately we find our way back out, but not before get lost numerous times and discover a date tree. It's the end of the season, so what we actually find are fallen dates, in among the lower branches of the tree. Date palms look gentle, but turn out to be incredibly spiky and cactus-like. Anthony finds that out the hard way. We discover that we can use dried spikes fallen from the tree itself to spear the dates without too much injury. At great peril and pain, we spear about a dozen of these semi-sun-dried dates then sit down to have a picnic snack, only to discover that they are starchy, bland, and disgusting. Lesson learned: Next time, just buy the dates.
Aït Ben Haddou is classified by UNESCO as one of the world's cultural treasures, and it's easy to see why. The first construction of the ksar -- a fortified collective village of pre-Saharan earthen buildings -- is said to date from around the 11th century. Clearly there must have been a lot of construction and reconstruction since then, seeing as how easily mud structures erode, even in an almost rain-less place.
Here are views from afar, from inside looking up, from the top looking down, and no matter how you look at it, it's really something special. Even on a hot day. We're thanking our lucky stars that it's 80 and not 110, but we're a bunch of soft San Franciscans coming from gray, cool Paris, and this is about the temperature when we start to melt.
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