Clare and Ross taste Eastern Europe and Morocco

After Mt Toubcal it was a gentle 4 hrs walk down the valley to our waiting transport. We had a final picnic lunch by the river at Aroumd, where the road ends, and then everything was packed onto two 4WD 's. We did the customary thanking of the muleteers and cook, distributed the tips (also customary) and took off by internal combustion engine to Marrakesh. Mohamed, Ahmed (cook) and the muleteers with Jean,Carol, Clare and I at the final lunch The next day we left by train to Fez. We had been told that Fez was smaller, more ancient and more authentic for arts and crafts. The market was a maze of interlocking alleyways that you could not navigate without a guide. Mohamed organised his friend Rasheed to spend the day with us showing us around Fez and especially the Souk (market). The 8hr train trip was made more interesting with some lively debate about gay adoption with a honeymooning couple from Romania. They were both lawyers and he also had a degree in orthodox theology. ...

This is a hard one to write objectively. My feelings about the climb changed many times during the day. We started at 5.45am so that we could finish early afternoon as the mountain gets more treacherous later in the day. Mahomed led and one of the muleteers, Lasheed, brought up the rear. Thirty minutes in we lost one of our party when she decided it would be to hard and returned to camp assisted by Lasheed. To our amazement Lasheed caught up to us again about half and hour later. During the next hour I considered returning myself more than once. We crossed several snowfields that were frozen and so turned to rock hard ice. The slope was somewhere between 30 and 45 degrees and so a slip would send us sliding at least 100 metres to the rocks below. I held out no hope of stopping myself with my walking poles. Guess what! no one slipped!. The remaining walk was rocky and steep with many sections of loose scree where we had to walk sideways for maximum grip. Our climb was 900 metres f...

we were well supported by a Morrocan Berber guide, Mohamed, six muleteers and their mules and our cook, Ahmed. Three of the muleteers were also called Mohamed. Each day we started with a very full breakfast of (to much food) oats and fruit, flatbreads or local crumpets. tea coffee and juice,eggs and olives, and honey and apricot jam. We packed our dufflebag which then went on a mule and we walked with our daypack of about 4 kilos. We took, water, rain and cold gear as well as hot gear (hats and sunscreen), hand sanitiser and walking poles. There were only four of us as a 50 something couple from Melbourne left on Day 0 to return home to a sick father. Our companions were a 73 year old lady from the midlands in England and a 62 year old from Sydney's northern beaches. Both were exceptionally fit for their ages and so their was no one but me to slow us down. Clare fitted in beautifully. Mahomed, our guide, was an inspiring leader. He was about 30, from a remote village in the...