Adventures!

Sarah and I have cheated. We've brought enough clothes for the whole trip. Keith hasn't, and so has to answer the world traveller's question: "how do I get my clothes (esp. pants) clean?" He handed his laundry over to the hotel, at a cost of 30GBP for less than 10 small items (i.e. more than it'd cost to buy new in Tesco, but Tesco isn't here). He has to wait until after the noon checking-out time before their return. Not a success.
We top up with fresh food at a supermarket in expectation of five nights' camping between Fes and Marrakesh. They seem to have everything normally seen in a supermarket in France or Spain, except alcohol. I try to ask two assistants for spaghetti in a tin by means of visual aids, but have to give up after confused looks and twice being offered bolognese sauce.
We drive south toward Midelt, weaving up into the Atlas Mountains with some impressive views. We're crossing a high plain when torrential rain starts. Visibility comes right down and we're soon peering out to spot rivers of water streaming across the road. A couple of times muddy water splashes right over our windscreen, blinding and disorienting us. We try to pick our way forward gingerly, but minor landslides raise our fears that the road could have been washed away, as Keith saw when 4x4ing in Australia, and we're forced to park in the middle of the road and sit it out.
Eventually the rain slows and stops. We find that only about 100m in front of us a fair covering of rocks and mud has been thrown across the road. There's still a river running across the road and, of course, it must have been rather stronger when it moved the rocks. We clearly stopped just in time.
Sarah and I get out and walk through the obstacle to check the depth. It's OK, but Keith drives through before I can get in a good spot to video it. We traverse similar places until, in the advancing nightfall, we pass a couple of people standing beside the road. We have no common language, but they tell us of a problem just ahead. A bridge has partially collapsed, taking most of the width of the road's tarmac strip with it. The remaining ground is just wide enough to pass over on a diagonal. All around there's gaps where there clearly used to be earth.
With about 15 minutes of daylight left, the prospect of trying to pitch the tent right in the wide open, beside the road and on very rocky ground, is extremely unappetising. Then we come across a big landslide, maybe 50 metres across and including rocks up to two feet in size. One vehicle is stopped opposite, with another bogged down having tried to cross the least bad bit. Half a dozen men are trying to lift it out and I help with the final heave.
A chap named Mohammed introduces himself and invites us to stay at his house 9km away. We give a lift to him and an old man with twisted foot and arrive in full darkness.
Mohammed's house is a long oblong single-storey building. It looks so square and substantial that he has to explain it's build of packed mud with walls 50cm or more thick. The first thing I notice is the satellite TV dish outside.
Mohammed makes us very welcome, with sweet tea, which he teaches Sarah to pour (from a height so it cools and mixes, first cup poured back into the pot). We also have sweet Ramadan "breakfast" pastries, bread and a sweet, brown dish of paste tasting of peanuts. Big "sweet tooth" thing going on here!
There is no mains anything, but that's hard to spot. The plentiful and clear water comes from a well several hundred metres away, pumped and transported by vehicle to a tank on the roof. The electricity is from solar panels, charging a battery large enough to run films in English with Arabic subtitles on a colour TV until I went to sleep on a matress in Mohammed's sitting area under the warmest blanket I've ever felt and, Keith tells me the next day, the Moslem Prayer channel played on a black and white TV all night long.
There's a stand-up toilet inside the house, behind a curtain, but the smell doesn't reach beyond.
I suppose it's time for a word on communication. In general I don't claim any foreign language prowess, but I've actually retained a fair amount of my schoolboy French and Spanish. Desperately inelegant and ungrammatical, but enough to be understood at the second attempt. I didn't foresee it, but most of the communication with locals on our holiday has used this, with most of North Africa having been French colonial possessions. Last night's discussions with Mohammed, which required my non-prowess in French, included explaining his family album (after asking if he had a photo of his 3-month-old daughter), British visa restrictions (3 million Dirhams or a "white" green-card marriage), Plutonium's critical mass and the certain fall of America by 2020 (the last two unrelated, I'm sure). By the end I was quite tired.
Breakfast involved bread and olive oil, usually an evening starter for me.
After that, we chose to go for a walk, to see the local plateau and caves, plus a stone of which Mohammed has a photo on his wall - something to do with an ancient father. The walk is advertised at 2km, which I interpret as 5km and (we think) turns out as 8km, all between 11am and 2pm in the heat of the day. The views are genuinely interesting, and we don't regret it, but Sarah suffers from sunburn for days to come.
One of the most interesting parts for me is the way that the next village is using a cistern to irrigate areas and grow maize, tomatoes, etc. beside the desert.
Mohammed introduces us to his friend and neighbour Mohammed, who invites us to spend the next night with him. We get the idea that we could spend days here, but decline gratefully and get lots of fresh figs to eat - lovely.
When we leave, we give Mohammed a lift into Midelt and say farewell fondly. He's hardly gone 30 seconds when someone else is trying to sell or swap a hollow stone containing attractive crystals. Cigarettes are one optional currency - I wonder how many it would have cost?
Going South toward the desert, the camping book we bought with our ferry tickets in Spain suggests a place in the mountains, the Jurassique (c/f local fossils). I'm hesitant to criticise, as the proprieter is friendly and we make good friends with his son Salaam, sharing food together. However, the camping area of the turns out to be a wind tunnel and mid-way through cooking the evening meal we have to abort due to wind force, and eventually complete cooking in their lounge (this is apparently not the first time)!! Somehow we manage not to set light to anything!
Sarah and I take rooms, as the wind is too high for tents or raising the roof of the bus. My towels and bedclothes don't smell fresh and the hot water, indicated by a red light on the heater, doesn't reach the shower "head". The facilities for actual campers, as in Keith, seem to work properly. Salaam assembles us a breakfast with Berber sweet mint tea, honey, apricot jam and substantial Berber bread, which is really nice.
We head on toward the desert, past a beautiful blue lake between orange cliffs in the Valley of Ziz.