Morocco Ski
Expedition: Preparation
Dates and Apricots for sale
While
still in Marrakesh we had to run a few errands to get some food before heading
up into the mountains. We decided
against going to a big supermarket in town and instead visited the local markets
around our hotel. Our idea was to buy
the kind of things such as veggies and meat that we could make our own tagine
with, along with some snack stuff for lunches.
The first thing we bought from the market was veggies from a small
stand. We purchased potatoes, carrots,
zucchini, and onions. The man at the
stand weighed ever thing with his little scale and we paid. He seemed a bit surprised to be selling so
much produce to a couple white guys, but didn’t seem to mind overall. Next up, we needed some spices, so we headed
to the spice shop and purchased some paprika, coriander, cumin, and curry. We weren’t entirely sure which spices we
would need but this seemed like a pretty good assortment. Lastly, that evening we bought some dates,
walnuts, and figs. The dates were
absolutely delicious were almost like candy.
We tried to reframe from eating the whole bag in one sitting as we were
a little scared what might happen if we downed all that fiber in one sitting.
The
next morning we woke up and still had a little shopping to do. We needed some meat for our tagine. We first visited the lamb guy. In his little shop he had some lamb hanging
there and we told him in some broken English that we wanted some. He hacked off about 1 ½ kilos and we were
almost done with the shopping. Our last
stop was to get some chicken and this is when things got interesting. The day before we had stumbled upon the guys
with live chickens who were butchering them for the local customers. After seeing this, we knew exactly where we
had to go for our chicken. The chicken
butcher was located in an alleyway and on one side the guy had a cage full of
live chickens and he throws the chickens across the alleyway to the guy who
actually butchers it. The guy with the
live chickens thought we were there to just watch the show as we had the day
before and offered us some tea. We
sipped the tea he offered and told him we wanted a chicken. A look of surprise came across his face and
he tried to make sure we wanted one that would be butchered. Of course we wanted one to butcher, what were
we going to do? Buy one and let free on
the streets of Marrakesh? He took one
out of the cage we gave a nod that it looked good. He took the chicken and
threw it across the alleyway to the butcher. With a big grin on his face and gleam in his
eye, he took the chicken between his legs, lifted it’s little throat up and
slit it in one clean motion. He then
plucked the feathers and chopped it into manageable pieces for us. Not exactly how they operate at
Alberstons. Now that we had our
provisions we were able to head up to the mountains.
Lamb
We
inquired around town about the use of mules to carry our stuff into the Lepiney
hut where we had planned to stay, but everyone told us that the snow would be
too deep to get mules in there. Well
damn, just a few weeks ago we were worried that there might not even be any
snow and now there was too much snow to get the mules in. The folks around town said that porters could
take our stuff into the refuge, but with what they were telling us about snow
conditions and prices being more for porters we decided against that. I could just see the porters wallowing in the
snow and demanding more money to take our gear in. We tried to slim our gear down as much as
possible but it was still going to weigh over 50lbs. Along with that, I had only brought my small
ski pack so I had all kinds of things hanging off of it. However, we were optimistic. I mean, we carry heavy stuff around as part
of our job description. How hard could
it be? We were soon to find out.
Mountain town of Imlil
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