Day 14: Spelunking

Today we had an adventure. But before that, let me begin this post on a somber note. Some insensitive person in South Florida got access to my debit card information yesterday and spent over $400 of the money I had saved up in my checking account. Luckily, with the help of my parents and my bank, I was able to make some collect phone calls to deactivate the card and have a new one sent. We're also in the process of working with the claims department to get it all back. Thanks mom and dad for being such a big help.

Anyways, so we asked Si Abdellatif, the ALIF program director, the best way to get to Taza. We had planned on taking the train and then using taxis to get around, however, he suggested we just rent a small bus like we did for our Volubilis trip for 230 dh a person. This ended up being a great plan for two reasons: 1) we had our own driver all day so we could come and go as we pleased and 2) the caves we were planning on visiting were 26 km into the mountains outside the city so we never would have gotten a taxi to take us home. 

But back to the story, so we left from Batha at 8:30, the 10 of us students and our driver. This was an excursion we planned for ourselves outside the itinerary of the trip, so that's why Lla MJ and Si Ron did not come with us. We drove 1.5 hours to Taza where we stopped at a hotel for a bathroom break. They had the smelliest squat toilet imaginable. Afterwards, we drove through the heart of the city and began to climb our way up the mountains. It was the windiest two lane road, but our bus driver excelled and got us to the top safely. We climbed up some valleys and then when we crossed the ridge of the mountains, we found ourselves on a huge plateau with more mountains looming in the distance. We drove along the plateau some until we found our intended goal, the caves. 

The caves have a name, but I can't remember them. Anyways, it was 60 dh each for a helmet, flash light, and a guide to take us down into the caves and to explore the darkest recesses. This place was gorgeous. We walked through a door in the side of the mountain, descended some stairs, and found ourselves in a giant cave with a sun hole in the top, most likely the result of an earthquake. The cavern was over 600 ft deep and a couple hundred feet in diameter. It was gorgeous. We climbed down over a thousand steps to the bottom of the cavern. Our quads were BURNING. The coolest part was that there was water dripping through the hole in the ceiling and watching the individual drops fall all the way from the top in the sunlight made it look like they fell in slow motion. At the bottom, our guide took us to a crack in the rock (like literally a crack in the rock) and made us shimmy under it. Christie and Joe decided they didn't want to pursue the adventure any further, so they just hung out in the big chamber, but the other 8 of us climbed in. At this point, we entered pitch darkness. Our guide, who barely spoke English, led us through the dark, pointing out stalagmites in the huge chambers we found ourselves in and keeping us from plummeting into the dark. It was a really neat experience and we took lots of pictures. It was also very strenuous, involving lots of stairs, ladder climbing, walking on rocks, and even some small rock-climbing. There were a lot of times for each of us when we felt like we would fall. Unfortunately, my camera was dead, so I didn't have it with me, but Meredith and Marissa have a bunch of cool shots that I'll repost once they put them up on Facebook. The other two issues with our voyage were, firstly, that I fell once, cutting through my pants and cutting open my calf just below my knee. Not a super big cut, nor a very deep one, and I'm more upset about the ripped pants that I don't know how to fix! The other reason was that Marissa fell when we were deep inside the cave and hit her knee really hard. She had trouble walking from that point on so we decided it was time to turn around, having spent about an hour trekking through the dark. We made it out to the light, covered in dirt and mud and lusting for showers, only to realize the hardest was yet to come. The thousands of stairs back up to the top of the main cavern were a huge test of our willpower… and of our cardio! We all made it out though, even if we were a little more beat up than how we went in.

We then drove back down to Taza and had lunch at a restaurant we found called Blondy Palace. I had a decent chicken pizza, but the restaurant didn't do a good job with our orders, most notably putting bananas instead of pineapple on both Joe and Meredith's pizzas! Having eaten our fill, we began the long drive back to Fez, arriving back at the medina at 6:45. 

Neither of my brothers were home, so I spent some time telling my host parents about my American family and showing them pictures. While my communication wasn't perfect, I used google translate to translate some statements into French and then to read them out loud to my parents so that they would know what I meant. Very handy tool. I had some potato cakes with meat balls and bread for dinner. It was all delicious like usual. After dinner, Lotfi came home to eat with another friend of his  also named Reda. After dinner, we went up to the roof to look at the medina ll lit-up and to see the stars. It was so cool. Then, I read some steve jobs, listened to some music, and went to bed, excited to sleep in for the first time yet and to recover from such a strenuous day.

EDIT: I got a photo from google images and put it up of the main chamber