Travelling Hopefully - Fuck That Hurts Edition

 OK it has to be admitted that I pushed my flabby, aging body a bit far with the shrine walk.  It was only eight kilometres but it was mostly up and down on unstable ground and the next day (and for a number of “next days” after that) I was in a goodly amount of pain.  Also pretty much every muscle from my diaphragm down seized up.

The next day started with a happy jaunt from our accommodation down to where we left the bus.  Once again mules did the heavy lifting which was convenient as I could barely lift myself.

Somehow I made it to the bottom.  The same young members of our group who had breezed up to the shrine now breezed down to the village while the halt and lame hobbled behind them.  As a charter member of the halt and lame I cursed them with every breath or at least I would have had I possessed sufficient breath to do so.

Eventually we arrived back at our bus where a group of recently unloaded mules stared at me with smug contempt.  The bus trip was a blur.  We went up things and down things, possibly the same things.  Gradually the scenery changed as we left the Atlas Mountains and entered the Ounila Valley, our destination was the village of Ait Benhaddou once an important stop on an ancient trade route leading to the Sahara.  Salt from the surrounding countryside was traded for gold coming out of the Sahara.  According to our guide the exchange rate was one kilo of salt bought you one kilo of gold.  I was surprised as I didn’t realise they had the metric system back then.  It’s an indication of exactly how valuable salt was back in the day particularly in the Sahara where supermarkets are thin on the ground.

Nowadays of course that trade is gone and Ait Benhaddou seems to make a lot of its money simply from being picturesque.  If you’ve seen Gladiator or Game of Thrones for example then you’ve seen Ait Benhaddou.

There was a walk through the old town when we arrived because of course there was.  A tall imposing building sat alone on the top of a hill and without even asking I knew that would be the destination of the walk.  Given that I could barely move I was going to give it a miss but Pam who is a few years older than me and also did the shrine walk filled me full of Advil which brought a temporary spriteliness to my creaking limbs and enabled me to do the walk.

Over the next couple of days it was the presence of Pam and a packet of Advil that allowed me to walk at all.  She took pity on me because in her words “I looked like death.”  Thanks Pam.  

So we walked, we climbed the hill, took sunset photos from the top of the hill and then descended again.  After which I had just enough energy left to eat dinner and crawl into bed.

Incidentally the imposing building at the top of the hill was once the bank.  It was built at a time when banks needed more in the way of security than silent alarms and chaining the pens to the desk.  Here a dominant hilltop position surrounded by a defensive wall was considered the minimum necessary to protect depositors funds.