Camping Disney World – Azrou

We are parked up at Camping Emirates Euro Camp (N33.443254 W5.190994), a campsite that wouldn’t look out of place in Disney World but certainly doesn’t look right in Morocco!  The buildings are like a fairy tale castle and even the road up looks like it is paved with ‘Duplo/Lego brick’s!  The campsite is on 3 levels with spaces for tents, as well as up to 80 motorhomes. There are lots of electric points and although we have lots of gas left for 20DH extra a night we thought why not!  When we arrived we were the only ones here and thought what have we come to.  But it’s the only one enroute for us to Fes and by evening time is was full of French, German, Italian, Spanish, German, Irish and another Brit with lots of different shapes and sizes of motorhomes, converted Landrovers and giant trucks.

We have a great plot though, surrounded by some lovely trees and lovely views over the hillside and down to Azrou – where there are 3 mosques!

Camping Euro Camp - otherwise known as Camping Walt Disney

Our little plot overlooking the hills and Azrou

Panoramic view from the top of the campsite

We left the Ziz Gorge heading for Azrou a couple of days ago.  Passing through the Tunnel du Legionnaire (1225 metres above sea level), looking on the map we thought it was going to be something spectacular, but it was only 4m long!

As we cut through the High Atlas there was still a lot of snow on the tops – unfortunately my camera skills don’t do it justice!

We stopped at Midelt, which was a metropolis of fruit and veg stalls and little ‘counter’ shops.  We thought we had better stock up on bananas (1 kilo to be precise) as we were going to go through Barbary Macaques territory on the way.  It still makes us chuckle how they weight all the fruit and veg together to come to one price – only 50dh for all this (the chewing gum he gave us for free) so we were happy!

It was then on through the beautiful countryside of the Middle Atlas cedar forest and limestone plateau.

We followed this bad boy for quite a while.  A Dutch lorry transporting this gigantic off-road 4x4 rally truck that looked like it had been on some sort of rally in the dessert.

Then for about 10kms we saw loads of dogs all along the roadside, usually in packs of 3 or more – we came to the conclusion that this country has a serious problem with wild dogs!

Wild dogs along the roadside

The route des Cèdres takes you through a large section of the Cedar Forest and leads to a car park, where you find the biggest tree in Africa – the 130 foot high Cedar Gouraud – albeit a dead one!

You can just make Mel out, stood at the bottom of it.

There are also lots of Barbary Macaque (ape monkeys) to be found here as well, all looking to scrounge some food.

 This cheeky chappy swiped a banana right out of my hand, then then gave me a look to say “what are you going to do about it!”

This one looked like he was scratching a mates back!

Maybe he is saying: to the left a little, no up a bit and just to the right!!

Yesterday was washing and ‘spring cleaning’ day.  Two machine loads of washing and a thorough clean out of Sonny, who was still housing brown sand from the dessert!

Mel checking everything out under the bed- careful you don't get stuck under there!

We then took a stroll into Azrou.  Azrou in Berber means ‘rock’ and we were looking forward to seeing its defining feature.  We knew it wasn’t going to be as big as the Gibraltar Rock but it was somewhat of a disappointment, having trekked 4kms from the campsite to see it - even though it did have a crown on the top of it!

The Azrou Rock

People were clambering to the top but we gave it a miss and enjoyed the view from the lookout opposite the impressive Grand Mosque.

From the viewpoint behind the Grand Mosque

The Grand Mosque

We were looking for a butchers in the maze-like streets of the medina when we got approached by a shop owner who insisted on showing where to go and said he just wanted to speak some English with us.  Having been in Morocco 4 weeks now, we knew where this was going and knew we would end up back at his shop to look at his goods! We didn’t mind because (1) we wouldn’t have found the butchers without him and (2) we are now the proud owner of a cedar/lemon wood fruit bowl - haggled down from 250DH to 200DH.

Our new cedar wood fruit bowl

After that we needed a sit down and treated ourselves to coffee and cake in in a lovely pavement café overlooking the main square Place Mohammed V.  We couldn’t believe it when the bill came – 26DH (less than €2.60) Wow, what value, we were almost tempted to have another! 

Tomorrow we move on to Fes - and in the words of the famous comedian Tommy Cooper wearing his tasselled Fez hat - "just like that!"

Sally x