It is now 2 a.m. in a hotel called The Berber Palace in the town of Ouarzazate. I am finding it difficult to sleep. In just three days of our Moroccan adventure so much has happened and the future is still very uncertain. My deadline has been overshot and even though I am writing this at this unearthly hour I have no inking when the sporadic internet connection will allow me to send it through. As I write, one of our party is in a clinic recovering after being operated for acute appendicitis. So far, everyone has been magnificent and ever so helpful but this event naturally has thrown a rather large damper on our holiday and we have to wait and see how things develop.
I had this niggling doubt that I would be sending this article in late despite the assurances that all the places we would be visiting in Morocco had all the cyber mod-coms.
Therefore, I happily packed in my tiny Asus laptop and all the necessary wires and chargers to enable me to write this article at leisure and not let you down by skipping, for the first time in five years, my Tuesday appointment with you. One literally never knows what there is around the corner. Our Moroccan acquaintances say it is all "maktoub" but I sometimes wonder. They have come up trumps in all this. They have been extraordinarily kind, helpful and supportive; indeed a great comfort.
Only yesterday we were driven from Casablanca down to the awe-inspiring Atlas range through a spectacular mountain pass down to Ouarzazate, which has been the Moroccan Rinella film facilities for many decades. Our present hotel, which we are in by accident, is full of props from films that were shot here; Babel, Cleopatra and The Kingdom of Heaven spring to mind. The lobbies, corridors, bars and restaurants are packed solid with relics like Sumerian chariots, Roman eagles and Egyptian gods and goddesses, half human and half animal, while thrones and columns decorate the gardens, surprisingly lush in climate that is a semi-desert, that surrounds this surprisingly attractive hotel despite its cinematic flotsam and jetsam.
We should not have been here but in a place called Ouednoujoum, the valley of the stars, about 40 kilometres away; a place the like of which is going to be difficult to describe without you all thinking I am grossly exaggerating and which we left yesterday because we simply had to be near our friends in hospital when they needed us. There was no other way.
The eco-lodge in Ouednoujoum, a Berber-style desert camp, is run by Mohamed, a burly young man with a freckled face, light eyes and reddish hair, and lies at the end of a jagged gorge of red sandstone that has been sculpted into fantastic shapes by the sun, wind and rain. Mohamed is a Berber whose family has eked out a sparse living from this beautiful but most infecund land for many, many generations.
He does not own the desert camp but is its heart and soul. Like Figaro he is everywhere assisted at odd times by his younger brother and his father while his mother was always hidden in her tent at the end of the settlement, cooking tagines and couscous for us that appeared as if by magic.
We had arrived from Casablanca after a nine-hour journey and were taken into Ouednoujoum in the dark.
The moon was full and at its brightest and we could just about make out the oasis beneath us as if etched in silver. While Mohamed's donkey crossed the wadi laden with our luggage, I simply could not believe that places on earth like this still exist. In fact, nothing prepared me for the panorama that hit me between the eyes as I popped by head out of my tent the next morning. The reds and browns of the cliffs and huge boulders that surrounded us were sharp in the early morning light while the clumps of graceful dactylipheral palms beneath us looked like arboreal ballerinas in a choreographed tableau.
A man on a donkey waved to us from a narrow pathway at least 200 metres above our heads. A rivulet ran lazily between the trees as I examined Mohamed's herb garden and compared the names in Moroccan and Maltese. Tursin u nanieh sound surprisingly similar but by then we realised that Maltese and Moroccan have much more in common than we thought. With a healthy dose of schoolboy French and workaday Maltese one can communicate beautifully.
It was, however, the lands that surround Ouednoujoum and Ouarzazate that have made it a film-maker's paradise. The Atlas range, all still snow-capped, dominate a vast landscape that is ridiculously dramatic and offers panoramas that are as pristine as they were thousands of years ago. Apart from Brad Pitt's personal contribution of electricity to the village that hosted him in Babel, there was nothing to deter one's imagination from running riot. Bandits ambushing armies riding tetchy Arabian horses and complaining camels, crusaders sporting red crosses on white surcoats and Saracen armies in fluttering silks to the sound of cuirasses and neighing horses haunt these barren and empty gorges, valleys and cliffs where all of a sudden one stumbles across an oasis like Ouednoujoum.
Dawn is breaking and the sky is full of cotton-woolish silvery pink clouds. The birds in the garden are noisily serenading the emerging sun. We will see what the day brings...