Rural and Regional Morocco

We've been seeing these carriages round about in this charming town of Taroudannt, so we thought we'd hop on to see what it was all about. Putting our misgivings about the touristic nature of the expedition firmly to one side (note: locals use these as taxis), we took a 1-hour ride around this town of 60,000 people, all of which is still contained within centuries-old walls.

But the start was not without its difficulties - apparently the carriage we chose was not the "first" one, so after a heated discussion between several carriage-drivers and much posturing of mobile phones (we can only assume the threat was to call the head honcho carriage-driver), it was decided that we were to swap carriages. That dealt with, we were on our way.

Despite the above, the atmosphere here, like in Chefchaouen, is much more relaxed than in the bigger cities (especially compared with Marrakech) and the locals are genuinely friendly. But it is hot. It has been getting close to 50 degrees Celcius during the day here, but thankfully it cools right down to the 20s in the early evening (which, for abundant clarity, is when we took our ride).

But I digress. We saw plenty on our ride, including some more chicken and meat shops, the walls (including where old, dilapidated wall meets new, renovated wall), lots of Moroccan flags and photos of the king, who they all seem to love and whose coronation celebrations are occurring next week, as well as white sheep with black faces (crazy, I know).

At one point, one of our drivers (there are two on every carriage) hopped off and someone else hopped on (the driver's cousin) who could speak English and who gave us a bit of a rundown of the sights. Then we headed back into the walls and the driver started getting a bit annoyed at our horse, which appeared to be collapsing from fatigue, or lack of water, or both. Anyway, we made it back to our starting point, despite the driver's whip and all the cars honking their horns at the horse (although I'm not too sure whether the horse will ultimately pull through).