Tamezmoute? Or Not Tamezmoute? That is the question.

We left Marrakesh early in the morning and headed south east over the the Atlas Mountains. We were looking for a Peace Corps Volunteer named Garren who was living in a village 11 hours away near the Draa Valley. A friend had arranged for us to meet up and head out to the desert together. I had never met Garren before and the directions he had written down for my friend a couple of weeks earlier went something like this: "Go for a few hours past Ourzazate until you cross the river three times, then go past three villages. Ask for me at the cafe of the fourth village." Sounds simple until you cross the first few bridges over dry river beds and wonder "did those count as rivers?" or past a few houses or buildings along the side of the road and try to figure out if they were considered a village or just some houses. So after hours of wondering if we had traveled far enough or gone way too far and pretty much giving up on finding him altogether, we drove through a sleepy, dusty, sun baked little village and heard something unusual. Almost everywhere I had been in Morocco the default musical soundtrack usually consisted of a mix of Moroccan pop music, Algerian Rai Music, Berber folk tunes, or even Adalusian Flamenco guitar which could be heard wafting from cafes, taxis, street vendors, and buses. But here was a different type of sound, both strikingly out of place and yet very much at home at the same time. Filling the air of this seemingly deserted little village was a music that sounded at first to have little form but slowly coalesced into something very familiar to me. The unmistakable little voice, and the oddly beautiful sounds of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead's "Here Comes Sunshine" rolled down from a cafe with a shade arbor under which sat a light-skinned, bearded man sipping tea and talking with a berber man. We had found Garren. We relaxed for a while sipping tea and just absorbing the setting before Garren joined us on our trek to the desert, beyond Zagora, where we ended up in Tinfou and spent the night sleeping in the courtyard of the Auberge du Repos de Sables. After our adventure in the desert together we brought Garren back to Tamezmoute where it happened to be the day of the weekly market. We walked with him as he did his shopping for the week. View Larger Map