Watch out for the goats

I can now confirm that if we hadn’t got a guide for our hard core hike, our frozen skeletons would definitely have been discovered weeks later. Instead, our warm bodies were sitting in front of the fire that night at the guesthouse, eating delicious tagines and chatting with the other travellers.

We set off at 9am with three layers of thermals on and hiked straight up the side of a very steep mountain. We were feeling pretty happy when we reached the pass at the top, which was the highest point of the trek.

We then went back down the other side….and all the way up again….then back down. And at that point, we knew that the only way back was up….then down. We shed thermals, beanies, gloves and jumpers as the sun got hotter, and puffed our way through villages perched on the sides of mountains, passed herds of goats, watched women washing their clothes in the river, crunched through snow, and squeezed our way around donkeys that we wanted to be riding. The views were spectacular and we covered more ground than we thought possible. There is no way that we would have figured out all the twists and turns and found the path when there didn’t seem to be one.

The last part of the trek, when our legs were really starting to buckle, turned out to be essentially a goat track on the side of the mountain with a drop hundreds of metres to the bottom. I stopped admiring the view and just concentrated on where my feet were stepping….and wished I didn’t inherit my mum’s fear of edges. The guide tried to be helpful by holding onto my hand in the parts where I was sliding on the loose stones, but he really just ended up dragging me behind him so fast that I couldn’t see where to put my feet, and wrenching my arm out its socket when I slipped.

He reassured me repeatedly that I had good shoes so I would be fine. Perhaps that meant that I could just run down the mountain instead of plunging off the side. Josh, who was weighed down by the daypack, was left to his devices to navigate the goat track. Since all the men in Morocco address all their questions solely to Josh, as the man is obviously in charge of everything, I thought it would be shaming for him if his wife was seen carrying the day pack. Also it was very heavy and I didn’t want to carry it.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when we got back to the ground. We celebrated our safe return to the guesthouse by getting into bed in every piece of clothing we brought, including puffy jackets, and reading our kindles with headtorches until dinnertime (the power had gone out and our precious tiny heater was therefore not working).

Next stop: an upmarket ecolodge in Ouirgane in another part of the High Atlas, as a special treat for our fifth anniversary, belated honeymoon and New Years Eve. Fingers crossed for heating.