Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 11th of September.

And of course, we remember the loved ones of the victims of the terrible terrorist atrocity on 9-11 in 2001, in which nearly 3,000 people died.

And I'm afraid today I'm talking about another tragedy.

This was a natural calamity, the 6.8 magnitude earthquake that hit the Atlas Mountains in Morocco,

south of Marrakesh, at 11 minutes past 11 on Friday night.

As we know, the death toll is now well above 2,000 people,

and sadly that looks likely to increase as the days go on

and the rescue efforts turn into, I guess, a recovery effort.

Our thoughts go to, of course, the families of the victims of that.

Morocco, very important from a tourism point of view, though.

Much of that is concentrated in Marrakesh, and I've been trying to build up a picture of what has happened there

because clearly an awful lot of people are very concerned about going to Marrakesh

in the wake of such a terrible disaster. It's natural that people would not wish to add

stress to the situation but it's interesting that the tourism industry appears

to be continuing as normal, flights going in and out as scheduled. Many holiday companies

saying, well, the holiday's there, And certainly if you're looking more than a

week or two in advance, it seems likely that the presumption is that the trip will go ahead.

It's a difficult position for a lot of people to be in. They may well understandably be fearful of

further earthquakes. They might simply not wish to be in a location

which has been visited by such terrible tragedy and they of course don't want to get in the way

of the operation to try to help as many people as possible. But tourism will carry on in the rest of Morocco,

despite the sadness and the nation is in three days of mourning for the victims of the earthquake.

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