We began the day at 8:00am by hiring a grand taxi. Now I had never taken a grand taxi before but I've heard about them and I knew they were more expensive and could hold up to six people. So I figured this would be some kind of SUV or van or something. Needless to say, I was surprised when a late 70's model Mercedes sedan pulled up to take us to Taza. In the U.S., we would say this car would hold five people. But in Morocco it holds seven. Two passengers share the front seat and four cram into the back. Luckily there were only five of us so Kyle and Jeff got cozy in the front while Hannah, Dustin and I were in the back. Here is a picture of the car and our driver, who, by the way, was very nice and I'd highly recommend him to anyone that needs a grand taxi. :)
The trip to Taza was fairly uneventful but it was amusing the way our driver didn't really know how to get to the caves. Once we got to Taza we would drive for a few blocks then pull up beside someone and ask for directions. Then we would drive a few more blocks and repeat the process all over again. We did this probably eight times until we finally got out of town.
Once outside of Taza the scenery was quite nice. Here are a couple of pictures of the scenery along the way and then a group photo of all us.
One thing I'd like to point out for future reference is that Hannah is wearing a nice white wool coat and as usual, carrying her white purse.
We arrived at the cave and paid 200 dirham (roughly $25) for a guide to show us through the caves. We walked through a small opening in the side of the mountain and then walked down 550 stairs to the bottom.
It was a pretty quick trip down and the bottom opened up into a rather large cavern. Here is the view from the bottom looking up.
And that is where the easy stuff pretty much ended. So far it had been a rather nice walk in the park going down stairs with railings and just enjoying the incredible view. Then the guide disappeared down a tiny hole in the ground expecting us to follow. And of course, being the uninitiated spelunkers that we were about to become, we blindly followed him into the hole. And speaking of blindly....you might notice in some of the pictures that there are power cables and lights on the walls for part of the way. However, these lights were never turned on so the only lights we had were the flashlights we brought with us. And Tina, in case you're reading this, my $50 flashlight was worth every penny today (Tina is my wife by the way, the same wife who thought I had lost my mind for spending $50 on a crazy flashlight...but I do like my gadgets).
The view from inside the cave was spectacular. Many of the walls were wet with calcite deposits dripping and forming on the sides of the walls.
In the beginning it was very nice. Lots of wide open caverns, fairly dry on the ground and easy walking. The stalactites were many and varied. Not only the kind you see on TV but many odd shaped ones as well. Quite a few of the formations actually looked more like a blanket of wavy rock hanging from the ceiling.
But then the easy part was over. Instead of smooth dry surfaces to walk on, we got smooth, wet, muddy rock. And we were literally climbing up and down slopes to continue on the trail. In quite a few places a simple misstep would have you falling 10 or 15 feet straight down onto nice hard rock. And one spot was a 50 foot drop-off (16 meters according to our guide) but that had a rail in front of it to keep people from falling in. Here is a picture of Kyle climbing down a slope being helped by our guide.
But this part of the trail was no joke. It was very steep, very muddy and very slippery. The climb up was equally hard and if you were to slip it would be a pretty bad trip down.
Now we were at the end of the tour and it was time to turn around and head back. I don't have quite as many pictures from the return trip because a) it looked almost exactly like it did going out, only backwards, and b) I was very muddy and didn't want to get my camera any dirtier than it already was. And speaking of muddy, here is Hannah at the half-way point. By this time we were all so muddy it didn't really matter anymore. It's a little hard to see but the bottom half of her coat was no longer white :)
Nothing terribly exciting happened on the way back except I kept hitting my head on the low-hanging ceilings (and was bleeding from the forehead by this time), Kyle took a wrong step and stepped into a big pool of water and I nearly fell into one of those 10 foot crevices. Luckily when I reached out into the darkness to keep myself from falling there was a rock there that I was able to grab onto.
And no trip to the caves would be complete without bats. These were the only ones we saw; thankfully they didn't wake up and bite us and turn us into vampires or anything.
Then finally, three hours after we started, we were back out into the large cavern. It was then that it dawned on us that those same 550 stairs that we so easy to go down also went up. Here are a few pictures of the stairs. Two of them are pretty much the same shot, only one is zoomed in but I couldn't decide which one I liked better so I am including both. And yes, I know they look remarkably like the same stairs I posted at the beginning of the blog but after hiking and climbing for three hours they looked much more daunting :)
Once out of the caves were were filthy and muddy but the taxi driver just laughed and said no problem as we climbed back in the taxi. We stopped part way down the mountain to take one more set of pictures. This is a view of the city of Taza and then another group photo, this one being the "after" picture.
And what better way to end this story than by showing a picture of the part of us that got the dirtiest :)
If you want to see the rest of the pictures from this trip, and ones that are larger in size, click on the link to the right to go to my photo albums.
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