My "Saharagelber" 300TD

When leaving the hotel after a good night sleep we were packing the car and preparing to leave. And old man explained to us we had to pay him because he guarded the car all night. I told him the car has an alarm and pointed at our room where we slept.
‘I watched it myself and did not ask you to watch it, so forget about charging me, we did not arrange anything and this is not how it works in Morocco’ I explained in my best french. Apparently he did not agree and was leaning against the car.
We told him we weren’t going to pay anything, He was demonstratively pointing at some badge where his photograph was on it too. I told him I didn’t car, I repeated what I said before and we left. The man got angry but did not jump on the car or something
We bought ourselves 3 pizzas and hit the road.

Beautiful door. Chefchaouen, Morocco

Today we took all kinds of small roads and wanted to take a beautiful route through the rif mountains. We drove via a lot of country and small village roads. We took the smallest routes and enjoyed the countryside, the moroccans were clearly not used to tourists here and this showed they then behave different from what we’re used to: They don’t scream at you and they don’t bother you, they’re just curious and very friendly. When you stop they come over and just watch you and try to be friendly, without any commercial interests.

Rif mountains

A touristic route we took today.

After a while we were in the mountains again, driving over dirtroads which were winding through the landscape. Then we were very luck, as bird watchers we were stunned by what we sawn then. Golden Eagles! They do live here but as our birdwatcher book told us, it’s a very rare sight in the Atlas.

Enjoying the small roads through the Atlas. At this place we spotted some golden eagles, very rare!

We ended up in Ouezzane today and parked the car on a guarded parking lot. Then we tried to find the cheapest hotel around, but that was a bit too miserable. The rooms were filthy and the shower on the roof which we had to use in the morning, was used as a toilet too, the shit was on the floor and this was a bit too primitive for us
We managed to find another simple hotel, only beds and no shower but we had a washbasin in the room, pretty clean and enough for us, which was important.
The room costed us 80 Dirham, no discounts. According to the hotel owner, there had never booked any dutch person in this hotel. We checked in, filled in the paperwork (which needs to be done at every hotel) and ate some shitty fries at the cafe downstairs.
While eating the crappy fries, we sat in the middle of the live on the streets. There were only men outside in the evening. The local nut hang around here too. They seemd to care for him, one of the people around took his stone which he was carrying in a plastic bag, trying to explain him he mus not walk around with it. This man threw the stone away and warned this man again (or so I think). After some time, we saw the local nut wandering around again with his stone in this plastic bag.
We then went for a walk through the main street. This street was full of life in the evening, we did not see any tourist around here the whole night and we seemed to be an interesting topic for them. They stared at us, when we stopped by to find some slippers, and dealing about the price was funny for them . they stared and laughed at us, as if we were walking around naked,
After some research we found that the first one offered the slippers for 20 dirham, the secnd for 100 dirham and the last for 25. So we bough them for 25 dirham at the last place. The moroccans were in fact were very friendly. We all enjoyed it very much on the market and when we were done we went to some odd place and drank a mint tea (of course).
When we were back at the hotel we drank some wine at the balcony and stared at the same street again where we sat and saw how the restaurants cleaned up for today and backing the last meat and then putting back the decorative lettuce leaves again after they cleaned those display cases, great All the waste was neatly put into garbage bags and put at the roadside. After a while the streets were quiet and everyone went home.
We sat there on the balcony for quite some time and saw how first recyclers came on the stage, the homeless people. They opened the bags again and started to pick things out and consumed what they thought they could eat. After they disappeared the next participants entered the stage: The dogs. They ripped open the garbage bags and started to look for their food and consumed all they could, leeaving the place scattered with old garbage and teared open bags. When the dogs disappeared, the cats came by to see if there was left something for them.
It ended up as a big mess on the streets, and we were wondering if they did not think about garbage cans or something.