As mentioned in the last posting, two weekends ago we postponed our day hike in the nearby cedar forest and opted to go to Volubilis instead. This past weekend, however, worked out much better for the day hike anyway, since the weather was gorgeous, and our friend Julia (who has a car) wanted to go.The "day hike" became more a of a "day wander". We first made our way to the Cedar Gouraud, a gigantic cedar tree surrounded by trinket shops at the end of a dirt road between Ifrane and Azrou. I have a brochure from the tourist office in Ifrane, which claims that the tree is the oldest Atlantic Cedar in the world. Of course, the brochure is in French, so my translation may be off. And it wouldn't surprise me if this was something the tourist office thought would be cool to put in the brochure, true or not. "Gouraud" is not a French word, but it was the name of a French general, Henri Gouraud, who was stationed in Fez and put in command of all French troops in Western Morocco in 1914 (thanks Wikipedia), so I'm guessing that's how the tree got its name. A little piece of water resources irony: around five years ago, water was diverted in the watershed for agriculture and this pillar of Middle Atlas tourism died. There are many other huge cedars in the area, so someday soon, one of them will replace the Cedar Gouraud as the largest Atlantic Cedar ... and I'm going to do everything I can in our last month here to have that tree named Cedar Shaub.
We didn't focus too much attention on the giant, dead tree, however, because there were monkeys all over the place! They're called "Barbary apes", but they are actually monkeys, a mistake which is accredited to their ape-like lack of a tail. So, picture a visitor to the US who's never seen a squirrel spending multiple hours in Central Park pointing at every squirrel that ran by, laughing, gasping and taking pictures ... that is exactly what we were like to the trinket shop owners. One of these shop owners picked up a rock and menaced some pesky monkeys away that were hanging around his shop. The monkeys are all over in the woods, but some brilliant soul decided it was a good idea to start selling peanuts to feed them, so they now congregate around the trinket shops during the day. And idiots actually buy peanuts and hand them to the monkeys, pretending they are cute, tame house pets, helping them overcome their aversion of humans and kindling a hankering for human food. (I'm picturing the sign at Yellowstone showing a bison goring someone who got too close.) Unfortunately, Sam, Julia and I could not help but join the ranks of such idiots. It must be something in the tap water. (We've heard tales of the zoo in Rabat where people can feed the monkeys AND the bears, lions, etc.) These little buggers would take peanuts from you and one even grabbed ahold of and drank from my water bottle, but they were still pretty skittish and ran off if you moved quickly.
After hanging with the monkeys for a while, we had a picnic on a bench a little ways away from them, and amazingly, not one monkey came and tried to eat our food. However, a couple wild dogs hung around for a while and got the remains of Sam's veggie burger (home made by Julia). At some point, a group of Moroccans materialized at a nearby picnic table, making quite a bit of noise and taking rides on the decorated horses and donkeys that some locals bring to the area for tourists. Gotta say it was both sad and hilarious to see two grown men being slowly led around on tiny donkeys ... one guy was talking on his phone and nearly got bucked.
Perhaps the coolest part of the outing was the walk we took after lunch. There really weren't any clear trails, so we just walked back in the woods and paid attention to landmarks. At one point, we got to the top of a good sized hill and got a decent panorama of the area, which is really pretty beautiful. As we were heading back, we ran into a large group of monkeys playing around, so we hung out amongst them for a bit. They didn't seem to mind our presence in the slightest, and every so often one would walk over and pull on our pant leg for a peanut. Julia and I both had monkeys climb up us for peanuts we were holding in our hand, which was a bit bizarre. We think that it was monkey mating season, because of the swollen, inflamed rumps of the females, the several territorial fights we saw between the males and the couple of free, XXX peep shows we stumbled upon. But what do we know about monkeys?
Our day was capped with a trip to the nearby Berber village of Azrou. We hit one of the shops there for a little bit so that Julia could buy a hookah, then we grabbed some tea and coffee at a cafe before heading back to Ifrane for dinner. Really a pretty chilled out day ... check out the pictures: Barbary apes.
No comments:
Post a Comment