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    markusmeyer.photo

    Advisor, operations lead and occasional photographer. Based in Porvoo, Finland.

    As Far as the Day Would Take Me 14 Jan 2015 The d As Far as the Day Would Take Me
14 Jan 2015

The drive from Aït Benhaddou to Zagora wasn't long, but afternoon glow had set in by the time we arrived. The sky felt wider here, as if the horizon had stepped back. In the riad's inner garden the tiled floor was still warm, and the air carried something faintly sweet I couldn't name.

I settled into the lounge. A cat napped on a low bench, paws twitching in some private dream. Tea arrived in a slim glass – scalding, sugary, steam rising into the dim light. I held it for a while and listened to the faint sounds from outside as the afternoon began to slip toward evening.

Looking back on the morning's mountain passes, I could feel something had shifted. The drive was no longer just scenery, or a challenge met. Somewhere between Marrakech and this small oasis, the familiar coordinates of home had begun to recede with each kilometre of road.

From the kitchen came women's voices and singing: unhurried, bright, threaded with laughter and the clatter of pans. Cupboard doors closing. Bread heating. Something savoury simmering. Omar appeared in the doorway with a smile that carried no urgency, just an easy hospitality that matched the pace of the house. He checked that I was comfortable, then vanished back into the rhythm of preparations.

The message, unspoken but clear, was simple enough: stop here and rest. This was as far as the day would take me. Tomorrow the road would push deeper into the desert, toward names that were still only vague shapes in my imagination. But for this evening – alone in a nearly silent riad, with songs from the kitchen and the last daylight sliding off the walls – it was enough to sit still.

The cat shifted, resettled, and was gone again.

#MoroccoTravel #Zagora #SaharaJourney #RiadLife #SlowTravel #DesertMorocco #TravelStories
    Aït Benhaddou 14 Jan 2015 By the time we rolled u Aït Benhaddou
14 Jan 2015

By the time we rolled up to Aït Benhaddou, the land had settled into a broad plateau. The ksar sat on its hill above the river, waiting.

We found lunch on the modern side: mixed grill with rice at a place that did steady business off the road. Smoke, salt, fat, the low clatter of plates. It wasn't memorable in any curated sense, but it put weight back in my limbs.

Omar settled in with his phone and a glass of tea, and a guide appeared with professional timing and an easy smile. I let myself be folded into his routine. We crossed toward the old hill, stepping over the shallow river and into the stacked maze of the ksar. Alleys narrowed and flared without warning; doorways yawned into cool interiors.

I climbed through the layers one terrace at a time, zigzagging between mud-brick and sky. The sun had real intent here, but the air on the higher ledges carried just enough freshness to keep it from turning brutal. By the time I reached the top, the modern village and the road had receded into background. What remained was a loose grid of roofs below me and, beyond that, a wide sweep of stone and dust running out to the horizon.

Up on the crown of the hill, with the warmth soaking into my back and the breeze threading past my ears, the place felt less like a landmark and more like a lookout post. Caravans, feudal lords, film crews, tourists with day passes – all of it stacked and compressed into these same walls, this same vantage point. The present felt thin, like a translucent overlay someone had forgotten to remove.

I stood there for a while, letting the light do its slow work. No prophecy, no grand realization – just the quiet fact of standing on a hill that had watched people arrive and leave for centuries and never seemed particularly impressed by either.

Eventually the guide mentioned tea and the spell thinned. I followed him back down through the alleys toward the road, the ksar retreating behind me, still facing the horizon like it was waiting for the next caravan to come into view.

#AitBenhaddou #Morocco #TravelMorocco #Kasba…
    A side channel in time 14 Jan 2015 Omar ducked of A side channel in time
14 Jan 2015

Omar ducked off the main road onto the old Ounila line, and the valley tightened around us.

The river had carved a narrow seam through the ochre-red slopes, laying down a bright green ribbon that looked almost indecent against all that baked rock. Date palms, small fields, a few ragged poplars — all of it clinging to the water's edge like it knew there was nowhere else to go. A few metres past the irrigation channels, the world snapped back to dust and stone.

Villages and kasbahs crowded close to the river, built from the same reddish mud as the hills and only slightly less eroded. Some of the old strongholds still threw their weight around from the ridges; others were slumping slowly back into the ground, former power returning to raw material.

Most of the traffic had long since been bled onto the new highway, so we had the Ounila road almost to ourselves – a side channel in time, the same seam the caravans had taken for centuries. 

Little by little the slopes eased off, the canyon walls stepping back to reveal more sky, more distance; the tight corridor of rock and mud-brick loosening into a broader, sun-blasted basin. The road uncoiled toward Aït Benhaddou, and Omar drove on without saying anything.

#Morocco #AtlasMountains #OunilaValley #TravelPhotography #Kasbah #SaharaTravel #NorthAfrica
    The Handover 14 Jan 2015 Past the notch of Tizi n The Handover
14 Jan 2015

Past the notch of Tizi n’Tichka, the mountains loosened their grip. The road tilted south and unspooled downhill, and the air coming in through the cracked window shifted gear – drier now, abrasive, scrubbed of anything soft. Whatever green had been clinging to the slopes thinned out, then gave up entirely. Bushes turned to scrub, scrub to scattered tufts, until even those were hopeful smudges on ochre and rust.

The palette slid warm: baked browns, iron reds, the flat, indifferent yellow of old bone. The hills opened into wider, eroded flanks and dry gullies – rock, gravel, and the memory of water that hadn't bothered to show up in a while.

It felt less like leaving the mountains than being slowly handed over – traded from one kind of emptiness to another.

#Morocco #SaharaDesert #AtlasMountains #DesertLandscape #TravelWriting #NorthAfrica #TiziNTichka
    Tichka pass 14 Jan 2015 Tichka pass, a high notch Tichka pass
14 Jan 2015

Tichka pass, a high notch in the High Atlas, is the main crossing between the cooler north and the hotter, drier south.

The landscape pulled itself apart into layers. Fractured rock and stubborn scrub clinging to steep slopes. Beyond that: terraces carved into the mountainside, narrow stripes of cultivation that looked less like fields and more like negotiations with the land. Further still: a stack of ridges fading from rust to mauve to a pale, washed‑out blue.

The tarmac itself felt almost obscene in its certainty, a black ribbon slicing into geology that had clearly been here long before roads, cars, or my restless need to be somewhere else.

At one of the wider bends, we pulled over beside a small cluster of tea and snack stalls. When I stepped out, the stillness was almost physical. The world fell strangely silent as the engine cut out, the sudden absence of mechanical noise making the mountains feel louder. No city hum, no overlapping voices, just wind worrying at the rocks and the occasional distant bark of a dog from some unseen yard.

Standing there in the cold sun, I realized the pass wasn’t really a place in the usual sense. It was a threshold. A drawn‑out crossing between one world and another — city to desert, noise to space, familiar to not‑yet‑known.

We didn’t stay long. A quick mint tea, overly sweet and shockingly hot. A few exchanged words between Omar and the stall keepers, the easy rhythm of people who live on opposite sides of the same road. Then back into the Land Cruiser, doors thudding shut with a dull, reassuring weight.

The descent began almost casually, curves flowing into each other as the landscape opened up toward the south; ahead of us, the Draa valley and the promise of open space.

#TichkaPass #HighAtlas #MoroccoTravel #AtlasMountains #MoroccanLandscape #MountainPass #TravelMorocco
    High Atlas 14 Jan 2015 At some point in the climb High Atlas
14 Jan 2015

At some point in the climb, without fanfare, we were simply there: in the High Atlas proper.

The air through the cracked window felt different here. Not colder, exactly, but stripped down. The warmth of the lowlands had been peeled away layer by layer as we gained altitude, leaving something cleaner, harsher, and oddly clarifying. Breathing it in was like rinsing the inside of my head with mountain water.

The engine worked steadily beneath all this, a low mechanical heartbeat holding its own against the scale of the mountains. Omar had fallen into a quiet that matched the road — no commentary, no small talk, just the occasional downshift and the rising hum of the engine before another tight bend. His focus was outward, tuned to the curve of the tarmac and the mood of the weather. Mine kept slipping between the outside and the inside, the landscape and the static.

Ahead, somewhere beyond the next set of bends, I knew the Tichka pass waited — the high, narrow threshold that would tip us over toward the desert and the promise of open, empty space.

#HighAtlas #Morocco #AtlasMountains #MountainTravel #TravelMorocco #MoroccanAdventure #MountainRoad
    The Amazigh 14 Jan 2015 Berber villages in the Hi The Amazigh
14 Jan 2015

Berber villages in the High Atlas are the mountain strongholds of the Amazigh people, the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa who were here long before borders, nation-states, and package tours. While empires and dynasties traded flags in the cities, Berber communities dug in higher up, keeping their own languages, customs, and rhythms of life.

These settlements, despite the spartan surroundings, each held its ground with a stubborn, almost spiteful dignity. Scattered along ridges and riverbeds, they grew out of a very simple equation: if you want to farm, herd, and survive in this part of the world, you go where the water runs and the land doesn’t collapse under your feet.

As we wound through the umpteenth switchback the first village appeared and disappeared without warning – a cluster of square silhouettes on a ridge, a sudden flash of laundry on a rooftop, kids chasing a scuffed‑up football in a patch of dirt that passed for a field.

There was no romance here in the postcard sense. No curated authenticity, no handcrafted narrative about “simple mountain life.” Just the hard fact of existence at altitude: water, stone, sun, and the daily negotiation between them. Roofs patched with whatever material survived the last winter. Satellite dishes bolted onto centuries‑old walls, quietly siphoning in the outside world.

The people moved slowly but with a kind of unhurried precision, like they’d already seen every version of the fool’s errand I was on. Old men in wool djellabas watched the road with eyes that had measured a thousand travelers and found most of them wanting. Women disappeared around corners with baskets and secrets. Children stared with open curiosity until the Land Cruiser passed and the spell broke.

From the window, with the engine growling and the road curling under us, the Berber villages felt less like destinations and more like checkpoints on the edge of some older, slower reality – one that didn’t care who you were, what you’d left behind back home, or what you thought you’d find beyond the next pass.

#Amazigh #HighAtlas #BerberVillages #NorthAfrica #MountainLife #AtlasMountains #Morocco
    Climb 14 Jan 2015 As the road rose, the last scra Climb
14 Jan 2015

As the road rose, the last scraps of fog pulled away from the slopes, revealing folds of rock and scrub that had been there all along, waiting with the slow patience of geology.

The green foothills below unraveled into serpentines of tarmac, the road coiling back on itself in tight, insistent switchbacks as we gained height.

Marrakech, with its low murmur and warm, crowded air, was now somewhere behind a bend in the world.

#mountains #morocco #travel #nature #adventure #landscape
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