Morocco - Desert

We spent a few days driving,out to the desert. We visited a casbah, which was an ext need fortress where a family used to keep animals within an amazing utter wall over night to protect them from predators - both human and animal. This casbah dated from around the year 1200, and was part of a chain along a series of oases that formed a caravan route from the Sahara. 

The Moroccan roads over the high Atlas Mountains were very impressive. 

And so were some of the gorges that sliced through the mountains. 

The Todra gorge is the centre of climbing in Morocco. Pretty cool limestone!

We rode on camals for an hour to stay at a camp in the desert. I will NEVER be a big fan of riding camals! Their gait is oddly jolting and they are so wide that they hurt your legs. 

However, it was super cool to spend a night out in the desert. 

Morocco - Atlas Mountains

It doesn't rain often in Morocco, but it is pretty cold and miserable when it does!

The High Atlas Mountains are pretty rugged and beautiful. We did a four day trek supported by a cook with a mule. 

Being supported meant that we only carried day packs, and the cook made all of our meals. Pretty luxurious!

The high light of the trip was the ascent of the highest mountain in Northern Africa, mount Toubkal at 4137m / 13,652'. 

It was a pretty easy mountain technically, but we did need crampons near the top. We were the last group to leave the hut, and the first group to summit! Not bad for a couple nearly middle aged Canadians. 

Off to the Sahara desert next!

Morocco - Marrakech

I have always wanted to go to Marrakech. It just sounded so cool, so different, so exotic. The real thing did not fail to impress. It is such a wild mixture of the old and new. 

Five hundred year old buildings topped with satellite dishes. 

Men in traditional robes that have not changed in centuries. But the shades are new!

Who has the right of way when a pedestrian, a bicycle, a motorbike, a taxi and a bus all run into  a donkey cart?

One of the biggest surprises we had was the Majorelle Gardens, which were originally created around 1920 by a French artist and later restored by Yves St. Laurent. 

Neither of us are really big "garden" people, but the cactus collection there was amazing!

We stayed in a Riad, which was a converted family home centred around a court yard and a small swimming pool. It was down three back alleys from the souk (market place) in this picture. One of the Riad staff met us where our car dropped us off to lead us to the Riad, because we would have never found it on our own. The owners do not know how old their building is - it might date from the mid 1899's but the street in the picture above has 500 year old buildings and was originally laid out 800 years ago. 

Our dinner one night was a beef Tangia - beef and spices cooked all day in a clay pot in a local hammam ( public pool / bathing / massage facility). The guys who run the furnaces make a couple of extra bucks by cooking this stuff up. The owner of our Riad sent his neighbour (pictured above) to pick up the dinner. 

Which was exceptionally delicious! We also took advantage of a private hammam inside our Riad. Steve had a male masseuse; Jackie had a female one. In either case, they wash you, scrub your body, wrap you in clay, wash you again and then do a local form is stretching massage called Iqubal - kind of like partner yoga paired up with a few Cirque du Soleil moves!

We both really enjoyed the El Fna square,which is a full on market, food court and circus. " El Fna" is roughly translated as Assembly of the Dead or Mosque of the Invisible. The snake charmers were charming, the music was bizarre, and we were convinced that most of the veiled belly dancers were men. 

Yup, lots of really impressive old buildings too!

next we are off to the Atlas Mountains. 

Northern Ireland

  

We drove up to the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.  The scenery along the way was beautiful- rugged cliffs, stunning beaches and eerie castles. 

 

The giants causeway is a collection of unique basalt could columns. The legend is that an Irish giant (Finn McCool) built the causeway to travel to Scotland to fight a Scottish giant. When Finn got to Scotland, he realized that the Scottish giant was much, much bigger than him, so he ran back to Ireland. The Scottish giant followed him, but when he got to Finn's cottage, his wife had dressed Finn up as a baby. The Scottish giant figured that if Finn was the baby, his father must be enormous, so he ran back to Scotland in terror and destroyed the causeway behind him. 

There are approximatelyt 40,000 basalt columns that make up the causeway. Most are six sided, but five and seven sided columns are also common.  They were formed as volcanic lava slowly cooled hundreds of millions of years ago. 

We also visited Belfast, and took a black cab tour of the murals - giant paintings that were used to make political statements about the time of "the troubles", when violence between loyalists and republicans tore Northern Ireland apart. 

The violence has mostly ended, but there are still places in Belfast where 45' walls separate Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, and giant gates shut every night between them. 

One of the hotels in downtown Belfast has the record for being the most bombed building in the world. It was bombed 27 times, since it was the only fancy hotel downtown so senior British government figures stayed there. Since the peace accords of 1998, 35 new hotels have been built here and Dublin has the record for being the second safest city in Europe for tourists. 

We also visited the new Titanic museum. One of the stewardesses who survived the Titanic went on to be a nurse and served on the Titanic's sister ship, the Brittanic. She also survived when the Brittanic, which was operating as a hospital ship during WWI, hit a mine and was also sunk. 

And of course, there are great pubs here with incredible music! Tomorrow we are off to Marrakech!

Ireland- Jackie's Birthday at the Castle

We visited several castles in Ireland, including Powerscourt, which was listed as one of the top ten houses and gardens in the world by National Geographic magazine. 

For Jackie's birthday, we checked into the Ashford Castle, which was listed as the third best hotel in the world by Conde Naste. 

The castle's motto is "serving hospitality since 1228", which is when the first castle was built. 

Steve was required to have a suit jacket for dinner. There wasn't any room in cycling panniers, but the hotel lent him one for the evening.  

This is probably the only time in Steve's life that he will get away with giving Jackie a birthday card like this!

Ireland - the peninsulas

The most popular and scenic drives in Ireland are the south western peninsulas. 

Rugged, beautiful and reasonable for cyclists because the traffic is slow although there are plenty of hills!

Very cool roads!

Some of them are basically paved goat paths. 

The "ring of Kerry" is the best known route, but we found the Beara peninsula to the sout even more scenic - and virtually unoccupied. We only saw 10 cars in 3 hours of cycling. 

One of the coolest sights was Skellig Michael, a tiny offshore island. It was a monastery from 700 to 1200 AD. The Vikings used to like kidnapping the monks and torturing them to death - fun, I guess, if you were a Viking. Nobody knows why the monastery was abandoned. It was recently used for the filming of the new Star Wars movie. 

Now we have finished cycling, so it's off to a castle for Jackie's birthday!