Ifrane – Azrou – Ziz Valley – Merzouga: Desert Tour (1)

November 2018 itinerary link

YK has arranged for a 4 day, 3 night desert tour that would pick up the 7 of us and eventually deliver us to Marrakesh. In many ways it was the highlight of our Morocco adventure.

Heading south, our first stop was the town of Ifrane (population: 73,500). It is modeled after a Swiss village with lots of expensive Swiss styled houses. It even features the Lucerne lion carved into a stone.

After our stop in Ifrane we continued south for a short while, stopping in a grove of cedar trees outside the town of Azrou. The grove is inhabited by a band of monkeys (actually Barbary Macaques). They are not native to the area but were introduced and make a very nice living from the food donated by a stream of tourists.

From Azrou we continued south, on largely empty roads, for several hours with the Atlas Mountains in the distance.

We stopped for lunch at a roadside restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

Again, we continued south, stopping a few times at lookout areas.

Late afternoon we reached our hotel at the edge of the desert.

the rooms were spacious and comfortable; you could even get WiFi signal if you stood at the right spot in the property

We began the next day with a stop at a Berber village for some traditional music.

Next we drove out to and onto an ancient lava bed.

We spent the rest of the day visiting some small desert towns where we had lunch and the opportunity to shop for spices, fossils, clothes, and, what I call, camel handlebars.