Day 9 Drive to Sahara

We embarked on an 8 hour drive from Fez through the Middle Atlas mountains to Erfoud, a town on the edge of the Sahara desert. Because of the climate (cooler summers and snowy winters), the Atlas mountains are a popular destination in both summer and winter. We drove trough a lovely town of Ifrane that looked almost like a mountain resort in Austria or France. Once we got to the desert, the landscape looked very much like the Mojave desert. We passed some nomads living in tents and saw many herds of sheep and goats. Villages were the color of clay and looked like Indian pueblos from a distance. Actually, we saw a lot of new construction, including a big, brand new city, which is the administrative center of this area. In some cases, it was hard to tell if what we saw was old crumbling buildings or shoddy new construction that has started to crumble. The hotel we arrived at is quite large and caters to tours. Several tour busses of people arrived at about the same time and we all had the same buffet dinner in the huge dining room. It seems to us that Morocco is modernizing very quickly and who knows how long the traditions, customs and crafts we associate with Morocco will be alive and real. Soon, they may be relegated to tourist places and available mostly for tourists’ amusement.