Morocco 2

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.

From my door

Looking down into the internal courtyard

My room, called ‘Tigrite’, ‘Little star’ in Berber.

View from my room

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.

North African Chaffinch

Approaching the village, Tighanimine el Baz

Moussier’s Redstart (male)

Sardinian Warbler (male), photobombed by some other flying creature

Moroccan magpie. Note flash of blue behind its eye. It’s actually bare blue skin.

Black Wheatear

Little Owl

Dried-up river bed, of which we saw more during the week than those running with water.

Why these ants are moving larvae around on the oleander, I have no idea.

Dried and drying prickly pears, mainly

A cactus from Peru, not native to Morocco, Austrocylindropuntia subulata.

Turning back, impossible not to notice and take a photo of the lodge in the distance.

Castor oil plant and oleander

Castor oil plant flowers, and visitor

Sadly, there was a lot of rubbish around. Someone remarked that we used to live like that a couple of centuries ago. A couple of centuries ago we didn’t have plastic.

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.)

Greenfinch. I snapped it because I never see them in my garden these days. They used to be so common.

Return to Aigas 8

Tags

Aigas, Arctic skua, eider, Gairloch, Golden eagle, greenfinch, grey wagtail, Loch Ewe, Meadow pipit, oblong-leaved sundew, primrose, red deer, red-breasted merganser, roe deer, Round-leaved sundew, sea eagle, sedge warbler, Slavonian grebe, Strathconon

The two final days at Aigas in one post.  Accounting for Thursday will very be short. We drove over to the West Coast of Scotland, to the Loch Ewe and Gairloch areas, returning by way of Loch Maree.  Here are a couple of views we saw on the way there, and a very short video.

From these it can be seen that the weather was not exactly ideal, and I have already indicated that I was not well-equipped with bad weather gear.   Having had our lunch we walked along the seashore for a while, in a howling gale, hoping to see sea eagles.

The sea and the grass show how windy it was, and I chickened out again, being absolutely frozen, and made my way back to the bus.

It was quite a time before my colleagues returned and I hoped they were having luck with the eagles.  They weren’t, but they did see a ‘bonxie’, an Arctic skua, which was a plus.

On the way back to Aigas, we had two unexpected sightings at the same place.  The stop was for reasons of nature other than wildlife, and we weren’t expecting to see anything special, but to our surprise we saw there a large group of eider duck, and a red-breasted merganser, swimming on the sea.

This is only part of the group of eider

Red-breasted merganser

And it was a treat to see a greenfinch, that increasing rarity in our gardens because of a rapidly spreading disease.

Friday was our last day, and was spent along Strathconon.  A pleasant morning:

Roe deer

Meadow pipit

Meadow pipit with insect

Red deer

An after-lunch stroll:

Round-leaved sundew. Each trap is no more than a centimetre across

Primroses -in June!

There are both round-leaved and oblong-leaved sundew here

Grey wagtail

The very same making photos easier

But the best was yet to come.   I wasn’t able to get pictures of an osprey perched in a tree, because sadly someone had not understood the instruction to keep within the outline of the bus when we got out, so it was spooked and flew off.  But I had been able 30 minutes earlier to get a few pictures of – at last – two golden eagles!  Sadly, in terms of wildlife the fact that we saw two of them flying around was not a good thing, because it meant there were no chicks on the nest to be looked after by one parent. But it was a thrill for us.

View from a bridge…

… which was really a hydro-electric barrage

The afternoon’s sightings were completed much nearer our base by some Slavonian grebes and a sedge warbler.

Sedge warbler

 

A last drive back to Aigas through the Highlands

Up very early on the Saturday morning for the 8.55 flight from Inverness to Bristol.  What will be the next photographic experience I post here?  At present I have no idea!