From Tafraoute the road winds perilously up high slopes, around hairpin bends and down into silent valleys you are thankfully not travelling through in any other season except Winter.
The heat beats down on my head through the windscreen. It's hot. And before I can blink another vehicle appears from around the bend and narrowly misses colliding with me head on. The whole thing happens in a split second. The moment, however, unfolds in slow motion ...I'm waiting to experience the impact but manage to swerve just enough to avoid the other car - thanks be to Allah.
We continue on through a landscape full of massive, red boulders ...
...into gorges with towering crags and continue to climb even higher mountain passes.
In such a desolate place you hardly expect to come across any greenery except for the occasional desert succulent amongst the millions of rocks carpeting the mountains. There are the blackened stumps of almost dead argan trees along the side of the road, some scrub, a tumble weed or two rolling through a lonely village.
A squat palm appears in a dried out river bed, then a few more and then suddenly the road drops down from upon high into the oasis of Ait Mansour...
We stop for thé à la menthe at a Berber roadside cafe and continue through the palmerie to Souk el Hadd Issi. The palms start to give way to dramatic rock formations again. There are villages huddled against the sides of barren mountains, new buildings built upon the crumbling foundations of former ones.
I remember as a child being given a bottle of coloured sands and wondering how the different coloured layers managed to sit one upon the other. The multi hued striations of the mountains remind me of them.
The landscape has been formed by unimaginable forces over eons.
Looking at these pictures only a few hours later I pinch myself and wonder if I really was there or was I just dreaming?
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