Last Halloween weekend a few volunteers gathered to celebrate as best as we could one of our most endeared pagan holidays. We weren't able to go trick-or-treating or to wear any of our superhero costumes; so, our host, Steven, suggested we just do scary stuff the entire weekend. He suggested we check out a cave near Taza that all the Tazies talk about and then catch a horror flick in the evening.
I headed out to meet everyone late Friday night. We had dinner at a nice restaurant in the heart of Taza's
ville nouvelle. I got myself a tuna pizza that was nice and crispy with plenty of marinara sauce and cheese to complement the tuna. Shortly thereafter, we took a brief walk around town. The Taza
medina (old city) is quite stunning with its medieval fortress walls illuminated at night and sitting atop a towering plateau overlooking the sprawling
ville nouvelle (french for new city).
In the morning we took a petit-taxi past the
ville nouvelle, onto the Taza medina plateau, around the medina arriving at a taxi stand where a number of tan station wagons waited for passengers. We met up with Aziz, an employee of Morocco's Ministry of Water and Forests who also serves as a counterpart for a number of Peace Corps volunteers in the region. We also ran into a couple of tourists, one American and another from the Czech Republic, who were looking to go to the cave, but were waiting for others to fill the taxi. The two young ladies were doing an internship at a veterinary clinic in Fez. So once we were all together, Aziz bargained with the taxi drivers for a bit and then we were on our way to the Grotte Friouato.
After a 30-minute uphill journey zig-zagging through some beautiful, dense forest passages of pine trees and rocky terrains dotted with stone-stack houses and tiered farming on the sides of the mountains, you come to a wide, open expanse that supposedly is a rain-season lake where winter grains are grown in abundance. We arrived at the base of the Grotte Friouato, checked in with the reception desk, paid 35DH for a flashlight and for the tour, and then made our way to the entrance of the cave.
Not having read anything about the cave, I didn't know what to expect. My only point of reference for this expedition were pictures of the Ozark Caverns in Missouri that I had seen on billboards on I-44 when my family would make the trek from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania for our annual church convention. In those billboards, there was always a little kid pointing to some really cool rock formations as the entire family looked on in utter amazement. The brochures I would pick up from various rest stops also photoshoped the same shot of the kid with his family on a background of wide passageways with railings and lighting that accentuated the rock formations and the many cave pools. The publicity also showed what looked like a golf cart in one of the shots, and the tour guide and tour group were all equipped with a hard-hat. I wasn't expecting a replica of the brochures here, but when I heard that a number of tourists frequent the cave every year, I figured that those managing the site and the tours were taking precautions to ensure that tourists keep spreading the word.
Aziz accompanied us to the reception and then walked us over to the entrance of the cave upon which he said goodbye to us and wished us good luck. When asked why he wasn't accompanying us, he smiled and said, "Oh no, not me." We entered the cave to a warm stream of air that seemed to be channeling through the entrance. We began our descent to the cave. For the first couple of hundred steps, there was railing available, but then as we reached a more gradual grade, no railing was around and it could have been useful given the uneven and worn concrete steps.
It was interesting to experience the change of temperature as we descended. It was as if two masses of warm and cool air were sitting idly in the cave, and once you stepped into the cold, you only felt the cold. It wasn't too chilly, but just enough for a fleece.
We took a brief break at the base of the cave, which was actually the entrance to what would be our journey to the center of the earth. I was already feeling my knees shaking a bit after the 500 or so steps we hiked down. Then, our guide said, "
mn deba l-foq, triq saib swiya" (from here on, the way is a little difficult) and he wasn't kidding.
The entrance to the cave was one of the most challenging parts of the journey. It was literally a tunnel that you had to squirm, twist, and turn in awkward ways trusting the person in front of you to place your feet on the next step as the view was obstructed by the narrowness of the tunnel and because you could only descend face down meanwhile attempting to retain some balance by grabbing onto the muddy walls.
It was a wake-up call because it made me realize that should anyone twist an ankle, injure their tail-bone or back, or suffer any other accident, there would be no way to get anyone out. This was just one of the many points during the hike where we looked to the guide and to each other in dismay and wondered if it could get any worse.
We kept descending down some more steps onto some amazing rock formations. There was sparkle everywhere. Who on earth had come here and sprayed sparkle all over these rocks?
Brown and white rock icicle-like formations with water drops at their tips, boulders with coral-like surfaces, and undulated cave walls that resembled my mother's vanilla or chocolate icing on the many a birthday cakes she made for me were all part of the amazing show we were witnessing as we descended further and further down into the cave.
Without any sort of markers along the way, we were completely reliant on our guide. When I entered the cave, I thought how would we be able to get people out if we injured ourselves. As we kept going down I thought, how the heck would we get back, God forbid, anything should happen to our guide, and the chances of injury weren't unlikely. The cave floor and the walls we used for support were muddy and very slippery. There was no light in the cave save our flashlights, no railing anywhere to be seen, and for sure no way to communicate with anyone on the surface. Fortunately, our guide was fearless.
He led us through the nooks and cranies of the cave with ease, lighting passageways, and cautioning us to
thalla f rask, which generally means to take care of yourself, but in this particular instance, he meant each word literally:
thalla is the transliteration for the verb to take care; the "f" sound is the preposition that follows the verb;
ras is the word for head, and the "k" sound attached to the word adds the possession "your". After banging my head a couple of times through the tunnels, I began to understand why those silly-looking hard-hats were on the brochure and made me wish I had one.
Later on with tired knees, we reached what I deemed to be the Bridge of No Return. It was a 2x6 wooden plank placed over a deep crevice that you could not see the bottom to, and to make matters worse, the plank was not bolted or holstered. Our fearless guide walked through it so easily I believe he could have performed several scissor kicks and back flips without a glitch. Then came Steven, he looked at it and looked back at the group and could only laugh. I was genuinely freaked out. My knees were already trembling a bit with every step, and now I faced this wobbly plank. I took a deep breath and took baby-steps to the other side. We all made it safely,
hamdullah (thanks be to God).
After we crossed the bridge, we came upon a number of shallow cave pools that at the time were a little empty. To cross each pool, we would walk around the narrow fringes of it and we encountered more wobbly planks, but it was not as terrifying because we could at least see where we would fall.
We finally reached the end of our downhill hike to the center of the earth. We had descended nearly 2 kilometers. Surprisingly, there was railing at the end of the hike signaling that this was the furthest one should go, but technically the cave goes down even further and I believe they have yet to reach its bottom as of yet. We turned off our flashlights for a bit to experience the pitch-black darkness and silence that surrounded us. It was one of those overwhelming moments that your mind has a hard time grasping.
We thought at first that it would be a difficult uphill climb, but it turned out to be a much easier trek. We tip-toed across the cave pools, took our time crossing the Bridge of No Return, powered through the steep inclines, and snaked up through to the cave entrance until we saw the reassuring light at the end of the tunnel. We took another deep breath and marveled at our feat. I walked over to the guide and asked him how many times he has gone all the way down and he said that he did it at least twice a day in high season. Anyhow, I still felt that I had accomplished something. Now at the entrance to the cave, I felt that should I injure myself that I would have a chance of surviving.
Finally, to celebrate our journey to the center to the earth and back, fittingly we took ghetto-esque shots and then climbed to the top of the mountain for some sun salutations.
Right next to the cave's main entrance, there was a balcony cafe that we crashed for a bit. The park staff served us the classic sweet-as-molasses mint tea and then we busted out some bread and tuna. After getting our fill, we took a brief ride to Bab Boudir, another forest preserve where the East and Middle Atlas Mountains converge.
Our taxi took us back to Taza where we parted ways with the two veterinary students. I headed back to Steven's spot with the other volunteers where we proceeded to cook some dinner and carve a pumpkin. To cap the night, we watched an old Halloween classic: The Exorcist. It was a good ending to our more than scary perhaps reaching the level of terrifying Halloween weekend.
To learn more about Taza and the Grotte Friouato, please visit this link:
http://www.morocco.com/blog/taza-and-gouffre-du-friouato
Photos are a compilation of PCV shots and those of our veterinary friends.
More pictures and stories about the rest of the trip on the next blog.
