17 November: Imlil to Aït Benhaddou

Aargh. Had a truly dreadful night last night, I barely slept at all. It was pretty chilly in the evening but I was warm enough in bed. Unfortunately yesterday I seem to have picked up the cold that has been going around the tour group and was constantly coughing & sneezing.

At about 3:30am I raced to the bathroom to throw up (all the mucus, I imagine) and after that I managed to get some sleep at least.

But unfortunately I have spent the day feeling pretty crummy. Plus I did not get a shower before leaving Gite D'Etape because there was nothing but icy water. The walk back to Imlil was lovely tho.

Once back in Imlil, we had a 5 hour drive to Aït Benhaddou. I tried to sleep some of the way since I was feeling rather fragile. Plus the driver was driving in a particularly hair-raising way around some very high mountain bends.

We stopped for lunch en route and I'm upping my fresh orange juice intake since there is plenty of it here. I'm hoping the Vitamin C will head off my cold sooner!

We arrived in Aït Benhaddou at around 4pm. We're staying at Hotel la Kasbah and I was thrilled to take a shower on arrival! After that, we took a stroll in to the village for sunset. This is where a few scenes from Gladiator (and plenty of other movies!) were filmed and it is quite a cute little place.



I went for a very quick cous-cous and tagine cooking presentation this evening. Both seem to entail a very lengthy cooking process. Our cooking presenter called himself "Action" because he's been an extra in 10 of the movies filmed here.

After that Varen & I had dinner at the hotel restaurant. He had a very yummy meat tagine and I just had some Harira (soup).