Boumalne Dades, Morocco - City to City Tour 049

After our camel trek through the dunes back to civilization, my mom and I met up with our guide and drove to the next destination. I'm calling this post Boumaine Dades because that's the closest town to where we stayed, but we didn't actually stay in that town. This is the hotel that we stayed in. It was part of a group of buildings next to the river and highway, but was actually fairly far from Boumaine Dades.

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The majority of the day was spent driving through the Atlas Mountains as we made our way toward Marrakesh. It was a beautiful drive with lots of cool and interesting sights.

Shortly after getting on the road, we came to a big gate in the road. It's a big gate, but it doesn't seem wide enough to accommodate big trucks.

We stopped at a little lookout area that had a great view of this lush valley and blocky town. It almost looks like something made in Minecraft.

A vendor was selling the colored cloth that is commonly used as head coverings in the area. The guy was a good salesman and I ended up buying one. I have it hung up in my apartment, covering one of my lights to make it less harsh.

During the trip, we stopped for lunch at a nice roadside place. We had tagine again which I was getting tired of. It was good though.

We also had some company to enjoy the meal with.

Later we stopped at this big ravine. There was a small river running through it and some restaurants and tourist buildings at the end of the path.

It was pretty impressive how tall and steep the rocks were.

This area also had a small donkey parking lot.

The drive was nice and relaxing. What was interesting to me was that our guide would be driving down a big empty highway then start waving and flashing his lights at an oncoming car. Then he was say that it was his cousin. Once we were way out in the middle of nowhere and a car approached from the opposite direction. We all pulled over and our guide got out to pick something up from his relative. I don't know how he could recognize the drivers in the other cars. Maybe I just don't pay enough attention when driving, but I never see the drivers of the cars going in the opposite direction.

We saw a lot of these blocky style towns. I can't tell if this one is abandoned or if it's still in use. Some of the buildings are obviously empty, but maybe some are still in use.

I don't know if this thing on the hill is a military base, prison, factory, or big house. Whatever it is, it looks awesome. I wish I could have seen it up close.

We were pretty far away from t. You can see how big it is compared to the rest of the town.

This is just a cool looking town.

We stopped to check out this rock structure. They call them the monkey fingers.

Close to our hotel is this awesome little stretch of road.

We eventually arrived at a hotel and enjoyed a relaxing evening there.

The hotel was beautiful. It was built on a steep hill and had a lot of little gardens and patios on different levels.

Our room was very pretty and comfortable.

I don't recall what we did for dinner when we stayed here. Eventually we went to sleep. In the morning we would drive the rest of the way to Marrakesh.

My next post is going to be the last post in Morocco. Even though we stayed in Marrakesh and Casablanca, I only have one photo from Casablanca. We didn't see anything very interesting there. It's just a huge, dirty, modern city.

So keep an eye out for my last post about Morocco tomorrow. After Morocco, I returned to Germany and moved out of my apartment and officially became homeless. Then it was off to Asia and an incredible 9 months on that continent.