We were up at the crack of dawn, which isn’t that much of a chore as it is at 7:10 am, but nevertheless. We wanted to visit Ait Ben-Hadou about 40 kilometers from the campground.
Ait Ben-Hadou is a famous Ksar which were fortified towns along the camel caravan routes between central Africa and Marrakech. The construction is of adobe and the interconnected buildings wind up a hill.
We wanted to arrive early as Ait Ben-Hadou is the most famous of these towns and thus one of the most visited. It has been featured in many movies and TV shows including Gladiator and Game of Thrones and is a UNESCO site. Which also accounts for its popularity.
We were there before the crowds, one coach load of German and one van load of Chinese tourists where the only ones in the town besides us, so Ton could get some nice shots.
It is not a large place so we were able to walk it from top to bottom in around 90 minutes. It would have been a good place for a tea or even a meal but we are being cautious with our stomachs for another day.
It was about 10 am when we arrived back at François only to see several hundred people arriving in vans and busses so we were happy we had arrived around 8am. After some discussion about whether to go back to Ouarzazate and tour a movie studio, or move on, we decided to move on.
Google told us it was 368 kilometers to Merzouga so I told Ton it would be a longish drive but doable. The roads in Morocco have been as good as Europe and each time I thought we would hit a roughish road we instead found a well paved multi-lane highway.
Today we found the roads we had been expecting all along so it took us about 6 hours to cover the 368 kilometers. It’s not that the roads were bad, they were generally good, just narrower and a little rougher pavement than the other roads. So instead of averaging 80 kilometers per hour we averaged around 60 kilometers per hour.
A long section of the road followed the old camel caravan route so there was a fairly substantial town every 20 to 40 kilometers with a lot of desert in between. We saw a lot of adobe homes deteriorating as more modern buildings using block and stucco are being built in their place.
While the drive was fun I did have to pay a lot of attention to the road surface. After about 4 hours I was wishing we had picked a half way point, and we did see several places where it looked like we could have parked up. But the Sahara was calling us so we pushed on.
We arrived at Merzouga about 4 pm. As you drive into the town you see huge dunes of the Sahara just behind the town, and at that point I didn’t regret our decision to push on.
