The next day, we woke up bright and early and had free breakfast at our hostel which included, bread, pancakes, and more bread! Moroccans love bread. A little feral cat decided to join me for breakfast.
The pictures below are of our hostel. I just wanted to show you how nice it was! For about 15 euro a night, we really lucked out with a beautiful place to stay. There were lots of little common areas like the ones below for us to hang out and rest between adventures.
Our personal van with just enough room for the 11 of us, and Mohammed on our way to the Ourika Valley. The drive to the valley was about an hour and a half but we made a couple stops along the way. Our first stop was to get our first look at the Atlas mountains and the Moroccan countryside. I was really surprised by how green everything was, because I was expecting desert everywhere.
Sofia, Jenna, Me, Kaity, and Jordan
The boys: John, Roy, Joe, Morgan, Amit, and Gavin
(These boys are all juniors at USD also studying in Madrid)
The whole group of hooligans. The whole trip we all just kept looking at each other saying "How are a bunch of idiots like us lucky enough to be in AFRICA?" We felt incredibly lucky and didn't take a second for granted. It was a great group of kids (or i guess we're all almost adults now) to experience this with.
Our next stop was at a Berber house. The Berbers were nomads who were some of the first people to live in Morocco. The house we stopped at is a traditional Berber house with about 15 people living in it. Muhammad told us that a year ago, a man visiting from France offered to buy the house for 1 million euro, which is a really insane amount of money for anyone, and the woman of the house turned him down. She said that she was raised in this house, and she intended to raise her family, and their children after that in the house as well. I thought this was really beautiful that her culture and her history meant so much to her. It also showed how little value money has in their culture.
In the house, the first floor was home to the livestock. I made friends with a little cow.
We went out to an open deck with a beautiful view of the Atlas mountains for a tea ceremony with the woman of the house, Malika. Her granddaughter was quite enamored with our friend Morgan and wouldn't get off his lap the whole time.
Malika showed us how the tea is made and went through the whole ceremony for us. It was delicious and we drank it with some homemade bread, butter, honey, and olive oil. It was a great treat on our way through Ourika.
We got to our final destination in the valley, which was a hike up to the water falls. We all discovered the hard way the canvas Toms shoes are not ideal for hiking. The hike was a little less than an hour. For a large part of the way up, there were vendors along the sides of the trails. This one pictured above was selling hand-carved stone figurines.
We also learned the hard way about the "all natural toilets"... basically a hole in the ground. Good thing I packed toilet paper for everyone. (Mom, I felt like you when I was distributing it to all the girls.)
Moroccans supposedly invented the wooden bridge.
After our hike and stopping for a lunch of more vegetable couscous, we stopped to ride some camels!! I had no idea how tall camels are and honestly it was really scary to be up that high. All of them were incredibly sweet animals and they gave me lots of kisses. In truth, it was kind of a sad experience because they did not treat the camels very well. I tried to make them feel better with lots of hugs though.
When we got back to our hostel that night, we were all exhausted so we just went up to the roof deck with a beautiful view of the city and rented some hookahs.
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