The cold wind of last night had abated.  Muhammed told us that when there is rain over in Marrakesh it causes wind in the mountains.  Luckily, what breeze there was in the morning was to our back, so we bowled along the valley until we came to another valley which we followed, eventually a few hundred feet above the valley floor and able to see all the terraced fields down in the valley, so green and verdant compared to the red and dun coloured rock of the mountainsides.  The valleys are very rural, lots of donkeys carrying fodder up from the valley floor, women hauling fire wood, herders looking over the sheep and goats who roam precariously up and down the mountainsides. The villages are not pretty, just mud brick and concrete brick, square flat roofed buildings, many half finished or in process of being built or renovated, often painted in a reddish brown.  I can't say that they are pleasing on the eye.  You have to go to the cities to see the kind of Islamic architecture you see in the magazines.  These places have electricity, they have mobile phone / data signal, but the way of life is still, l I venture, what it  has been for the last thousand years - herding, subsistence farming and getting by with what they have.  There are lots of ruins of the tradtional mud built houses,  but these seem to have largely been left to rot in preference to the breeze block new additions, which probably take a lot less looking after than having to renew the mud on the walls every year or so. Our end point was Ait Benhaddou, where I was last year, and is on the tourist trail because it has an old citadel and kasbah, which is used as a film set, apparently. It stands in for Western and dystopian type Mad Max films  The town was filled with minibuses taking tourists up and down the valley, lots of French, Italians and Spaniards, and a smattering of British who were easily identifiable by their pale skin and lardyness.  The females particularly.  I say no more.  

You can follow my route via my Garmin satellite tracker at  https://share.garmin.com/chrismarsden1954    Choose "View All Tracks" in the top right hand corner of the map to see the full route.

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