Day 7: Milking, cooking, and donkey riding

This morning we help out with the chores; milking the cow, feeding the goats, finding out how to make a carpet and learning how to make Berber Pizza (and how not to in my case), which we then eat for lunch.

After lunch, we head off, with Said and Kira from the hotel, for a walk / donkey ride through the oasis to a ruined kasbah with a stone olive press outside and a well inside. Iza and Jasiu decide they will ride the donkeys as Marcelina isn't keen and I worry about animal rights protests if I subject one of the poor beasts to my weight.

Iza's donkey makes the most of her gentle handling and constantly veers off the path into fields of tasty crops. The kasbah is, amazingly, still inhabited, despite half of it having fallen down.

We wander back and then Kira drives us to the source of the oasis, a spring near Errachidia which has been turned into a small outdoor swimming pool next to a campsite. The campsite is full of RV's with Dutch and French numberplates, the owners apparently staying in the area for the winter to escape the European weather.

There is one last stop at a viewpoint over the oasis where we watch the sun go down whilst a gang of small children try to sell us models of camels made from reeds, running precariously along the edge of the gorge in an attempt to follow us until we retreat from the viewpoint in case we inadvertently cause one of them to topple over.