Tags
Agadir, Atlas Kasbah, Black Wheatear, Castor oil plant, ecolodge, greenfinch, Little Owl, Moroccan Magpie, Morocco, North African Chaffinch, Oleander, Peruvian cactus, Sardinian warbler
With some time to spare before lunch on the Sunday, I wandered round the award-winning Atlas Kasbah ecolodge. This was the brainchild and baby of Hassan and Hélène, our lovely hosts, and was opened in 2009. Here is a little more of its story.






One storey up was the roof terrace. Three of my companion couples had rooms in the corner towers.


Going down to the ground floor I took a peek unto the salon (French is the alternative language to Berber in Morocco), where if you enter you must remove your shoes.

Wandering outside, I found this lady, who had multiple roles in the establishment, making bread – heavenly to eat – in the traditional oven.

She turned it over and around every few seconds with her stick. It took a couple of minutes to cook one flat bread.

My last discovery was another roof terrace, this time covered, where I was told we would be having lunch shortly. Food for the week was Moroccan, copious and, I suspect, a little westernised. For instance, every time we came back from an excursion, we were greeted with a small glass of herb tea, only slightly sweetened, whereas the locals would have taken five times the amount of sugar.

After lunch we were to go for another walk, and I took this photo from the terrace in our intended direction, towards and into the older parts of the local village.

We set off. I just could not stop taking photos of our so photogenic home.
















As I said to Philip, as we sat on a low wall waiting for the others to catch us up at one point, I felt it was good to start our week getting our local bearings, and not being isolated from the realities of Moroccan rural poverty. (I also felt it was good to get it over at the beginning of the week.)
