Waterfalls or Disgusting Tourist Oasis?

Posted by Emily

Not too far from Marrakech, there are some famous waterfalls calls Les Cascades d'Ozed, or something similar. We decided to check these out last Saturday and joined up with the agency we had gone to the desert with for our transport. There were about 14 who went, many of whom were women about our age who appeared to be on spring break, meaning they looked WAY too cute to be traveling (Nicki and I have a wardrobe of about 3 shirts and 3 pants and they are not always that clean!!). Off the subject, one thing that has really surprised me about Morocco is how touristy it is! It's actually quite disappointing. I guess I never appreciated the fact the Senegal keeps out all but the more hard core tourists (or at least the rest of them stay far out of site at Club Med or a tour bus or the like).

Anyway, the ride there was fine. We were a little tired of sitting in buses and driving but the scenery, as always, was beautiful. We arrived at about 11 am and were to leave at 3:30 pm. Turns out that was quite a lot of time to kill!

We were dropped off at the top of the falls. We discovered this when we hiked over the edge of the cliff and looked over to find a very steep drop off! As we have discovered from previous excursions, just follow the tourist shops to wherever you want to go! This was the most intense line of tourist shops and restaurants that I have ever seen and was really quite depressing. All the way down the hill (it's a long ways down) are shop after shop an restaurant after restaurant. A few beggars and children selling herbs to try to make a little money. It was very obvious how this tourist attraction had ruined the entire area and had taken them from whatever they used to do to make a living, so catering to tourists and becoming dependent on them. It kind of soured the whole experience for me. So did the THRONGS of people.

However, the thing that dampened the experience for me the most has to be the girl who fell off the waterfall. I didn't see it happen, but apparently a tourist, about my age, fell from the top of the waterfall (the cliff with the steep drop off that I mentioned before). As we were walking down to the bottom of the falls, we turned around to see 3 men in the falls. I couldn't figure out what they were doing at first and I thought maybe they were just dumb tourists who were going to jump down to the next level of the falls. Then I realized that it looked like they were wrapping a body. Later I found out that the woman had fallen and 3 local guys had jumped into the water, wrapped her body in a blanket and gotten her out of the water. I'm fairly certain that she didn't survive, and even if she had still been alive after the fall, as Nicki pointed out, there was no facilities anywhere NEAR there to deal with such a trauma. Very scary and made me uneasy for the rest of the day.

Eventually we hiked out past the major tourist area along a path to the other side of the falls. There were still a few tourist restaurants and camping sites but no where near as bad as the initial area we had gone through. There were quite a few Moroccan families gathered there to have lunch for the afternoon. We found a shady spot under a tree to sit and relax to kill the time before it was time to leave. Overall, it was a very beautiful place to visit, it was just disgusting to see the impact of the tourism (I forgot to mention this before but there are monkeys native to the area that have become tame and eat food that tourists give them, despite the signs that say "don't feed the monkeys and don't interact with them because it changes their natural behavior. That was also very sad to see. People can be SO stupid and it makes me SO mad!!)and upsetting to know that someone had fallen off the waterfall.