On gorges, desert camps and grumpy drivers (my Sahara trip)

"You have 15 minutes to walk until the end of the canyon and come back!", the driver shouted at us. He sounded like a prison warden allowing an hour outside of the cell to his prisoners. Astonished, we looked at each other, the Brazilian guys just shrugging their shoulders and having a look around, while some sellers tried to lure us into buying scarfs and hippie pants. Once again, I had to look at my battered Lonely Planet book to find out where we were. It was a gorge, that much I could see, and it must have been somewhere between Dadès and the dunes of Merzouga. We didn't have a tour guide, and our driver was grumpy, with limited English, and not much of a help in puzzling out the mysteries of the pre-Saharan region of Morocco, with its unfamiliar architecture and weird rock formations.

Where were we?

It took me just a minute to realize that we were inside the Todra Gorge, but as soon as I got this, I closed my book and admired the landscape around me. The gorge was wide, the rocks of a brown rusted colour, with a small stream flowing in the middle. School children on a field trip, and Moroccan families camping with small stoves and colourful Tupperware containers completed the picture.



Camping at the Todra Gorge

"At least we got to visit THIS gorge", I thought, thinking of the place where we slept the night before, another amazing gorge that we got to see from the terrace of the hotel but never got to explore properly.