A Walking Lunch

Today I learned that “Hey, want to grab lunch” actually means “Let’s go hiking.” Am I crazy or is there no real link between those things? Needless to say, anticipating a quick walk/drive to a restaurant or food stall for lunch, I dressed appropriately in my only pair of jeans, a t-shirt and flats. Casual lunch clothes. Not hiking clothes. So imagine my surprise when the car left downtown, where most of the food is, and passed the city limits, passed the water park (We have a water park! Who knew?) and after miles of desert, snaked up into the Atlas mountains, to a little (unfortunately well known to the tourist industry) town named Ourika.

Ourika is a “relatively unspoiled” Berber village built on the banks of the Ourika river which, as you can see, is low enough to walk across in the summer, but rises quickly during the rainy winter (in fact, several residents were killed and a few houses were destroyed in Ourika in the same unseasonably heavy rain that flooded my apartment a few weeks ago). So every 100 meters there’s a bridge you can cross to get to the other side, which are generally made of scraps of wood held together by twine. This is by far the most stable bridge we found and it still jiggled too much for my taste.

In all fairness, we did eventually have lunch, at an adorably brightly coloured table along the river. But first we enjoyed fresh mint tea (which must have some kind of addictive property because I cannot get enough of it) and fresh walnuts, with our feet dipped in the sub-zero temperature water of the surprisingly fast moving river. I stalled for as long as I could, racing walnut shells down the river and playing with the increasingly wet and frantic dog, until eventually it could wait no longer. We were to hike to a waterfall, and I was to do it in my work shoes.

Personally, I feel that “hike” isn’t really an appropriate verb to describe what we did, “scramble frantically up enormous, incredibly slippery boulders while being constantly harassed by people selling tourist crap” seems more accurate. However, the scenery was beautiful, the air was clean and it was lovely to be out of the city for a while. It got easier when I made the executive decision to take off my shoes and do the scrambling barefoot. Although it did result in a couple of potentially questionable scraps on the bottom of my feet, it was vastly superior to smashing open my skull slipping off a rock, as I was bound to do with my shoes on. 

Eventually we got to the first waterfall (apparently there are 7, but we’ll visit those another time, when I’m a little more prepared), which was both beautiful and breathtakingly cold (snow melt).While eventually enjoyable, this pretty accurately depicts my feelings about the spontaneous hike, essentially “Why the hell are you doing this to me?”

After a celebratory coke and some unnecessary splashing, I made the executive decision to descend the mountain food-wards, in an attempt that can not exactly be called graceful. Despite a couple of almost fatal slips and some high pitched girly shrieking that seemed to be coming from me, we made it back down to the restaurant in more or less one piece and enjoyed some piping hot tajine and thoroughly addictive tea over a rousing discussion of gender roles (which rendered me nearly catatonic with rage).