THE HIGH ATLAS MOUNTAINS OF MOROCCO — You have to wonder whether it's a setup when you're in a Muslim country and someone asks, point-blank, "Are you lot drinkers?"
Despite the hooded djellaba he was wearing, John Horne, who was doing the asking, looked as though he had guzzled a few in his time, so I took a calculated risk and confirmed that yes, we lot were drinkers.
John is a Brit, a bespectacled, erudite, eccentric and highly amusing Yorkshireman who has spent the last 40 years circumnavigating the globe. He lived in Marrakech, working for a tour company, and he was about to join my two friends and me on a six-day hike in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains.
"Right, then," John said, visibly relieved. "When you've walked all day, by God, you really need a pop at night. Got to bring your own, though. No pubs up there." John impressed us as a man who knew a lot about North Africa, so naturally we felt obliged to take his advice. We turned the car around and beat a hasty retreat to purchase rum and wine. Moroccan wine, in fact.
That we could buy locally produced wine easily in Marrakech but not in remote mountain villages exemplified the dichotomy that is Morocco. Cities such as Marrakech, which has a population of more than a million, are startlingly modern -- and the ban on the sale of alcohol to Muslims is not enforced. In rural areas, however, people live as they have for centuries: The beverage of choice is nothing stronger than mint tea.
My friends -- artist Susan Burks and photographer Kodiak Greenwood -- and I were in the country not only to exert ourselves in the Atlas Mountains but also to be among traditional Berber people. Apparently, they tolerate the drinking habits of nasrani (non-Muslims) and are used to them rocking up to their villages with their own mule-borne bars.
Unlike the Himalayas, the Atlas Mountains aren't impressive from space. It's said that they look like a poorly healed scar. But what they don't achieve in height they make up in breadth, stretching 1,500 miles through Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. In Morocco, they're divided into three parts -- the Middle Atlas in the north, the High Atlas in the central-south and the Anti-Atlas as they taper into the Sahara Desert.
Jebel Toubkal, in the High Atlas, is North Africa's loftiest peak at 13,671 feet. We would hike toward Toubkal, popular with peak baggers as a challenging overnight climb. But slackers that we were, we had chosen not to summit. We felt more inclined to spend time in Berber villages than shuffling upward in thin-aired privation.
