Let’s continue the recap of my trip: Morocco Uncovered (with Intrepid). I took this trip in December/January. For previous posts (I recommend you at least skim them!) look at the following.

• Day 1: Travel and Casablanca
• Day 2: Casablanca and Rabat
• Day 3: Meknes and Volubilus
• Day 4: Chefchaouen
• Day 5: Fes
• Day 6: Midelt
• Day 7: To the Desert
• Day 8: I get to ride a camel!

Day 9: I woke up and got ready for the morning’s activity, which was a hike through the valley. Breakfast was in the “cave room” in the hotel, which I forgot to get a picture of. We had Moroccan doughnuts with various jams, yogurt, fresh squeezed orange juice, coffee, and maybe hard boiled eggs?

We would not be riding on the van at all today, which was very exciting to know…the van is fine, but we had spent a lot of time in it over the previous two days, to and from the desert.

We met our guide (who also worked at the hotel, everybody here seemed to have multiple roles) and headed out through the village into the mountains.

The mountains reminded me of Utah, particularly Capitol Reef Park. Our hike was pretty easy, but I watched my feet. I just wore sneakers, since I had decided not to pack hiking shoes for one hike, and found it was fine. The dirt would stain shoes a bit, so if you are taking this same trip, keep that in mind.

We walked through the valley, and then got to a river with a bridge over it…the river was flowing pretty well but the bridge was just a log.

It was a little scary, but we all managed to cross without incident. Check out this video to see my crossing.

After that we headed up to the top of a mountain to view the village from above. We could see snow covered mountains in the distance.

Then we walked back down along the river and finally back to our gite.

We had a short amount of time to clean up and then all met for lunch on the roof terrace. We ate berber omelets, cooked salads, chicken skewers and fries.

The afternoon was free for us to do what we wanted, but there wasn’t much to do. I read in the sun and took a short walk around the village, but I didn’t enjoy the walk because some kids started following me and yelling out, madam, madam and I wanted to ignore them (sorry kids) but it was annoying. It was a nice afternoon though, and the weather was beautiful.

I also explored the gite and took photos.

We met in the late afternoon for henna tattoos: a young woman drew on my hand and we had more tea and snacks like the day before.

Dinner was soup and chicken couscous, with fruit for dessert: sliced oranges and pomegranates. The food here was very good.

And that was the end of the day. I went back to the room to organize my things since we would be leaving the next day, and I read after that. I finished reading the Correspondent, which was a really good book. The ending was very sad and I pretty much ugly cried through it for 20-30 minutes. I started worrying at one point that my neighbors would hear me and think something was horribly wrong, haha.