Atlas Trekking, Part 2: Summiting Mt. Toubkal

Last January, I started formulating my trip to Morocco as I was finishing two months in Nepal, and hiking big mountains was a priority. The Atlas Mountains may not rival the Himalaya in grandeur or elevation, but they are spectacular, and the hiking offer no shortage of trekking routes. But, not so much in winter. Still, I was thrilled to finally meet this goal in late March, near the end of my time in Morocco: climbing Jebel Toubkal, North Africa's highest summit at 4,165 meters/13,745 feet.

When I first started nosing around for advice on hiking Mount Toubkal, a friend who had recently done it suggested, "It'll help if you know how to use crampons and an ice axe." I didn't. But now I was DEFINITELY not letting go of this goal. Crampons? Ice axes? Heck, yes!

Cold and snow limit the distance and days of guided hikes around Toubkal in March, so I took the speedy two-day option. We were a small group: just me, Tayla and Tom (a British couple with a little mountain experience but plenty fit and full of affable gumption) and our guide Youssef. The route was pretty standard: mid-morning start on Day 1 from Imlil and through Aroumd, late afternoon arrival at the refugios at the base of Toubkal; pre-dawn start on Day 2 from the refugio, to the summit, back to the refugio, back to Imlil. Roundtrip about 26 miles, most of which we covered during the tiring-but-inspiring effort on Day 2.

The changes in terrain from Imlil (1,740 meters/4,532 feet) to Toubkal (4,165 meters/13,745 feet) are dramatic, and leave you with a satisfaction that you're covering a significant distance. As in my previous Atlas trek, our packs went ahead with a muleteer and we walked without burden on the trail from Imlil to the lovely village of Aroumd not far up the valley. We stopped there for a tea break at Youssef's family's house (Tayla, Tom and I had tea and took in the view of walnut trees and the mountains up ahead, while Youssef quickly gathered his gear for the trek).

Warm, dry air and blue skies prevailed and made dressing in layers a clutch strategy for the hike. We were roasting in the sun before too long, climbing first along the eastern flank of the valley wall, and then crossing the river to continue upward along the western side of the valley. Juniper shrubs, goats, pack-laden donkeys, long views up and down the valley -- the walk was utterly enjoyable.

Somewhere up there is the highest mountain in North Africa.

Hikers and polyglots welcome.

Aroumd sitting pretty on the hillside, overlooking the village’s farmfields.

I fell into step behind Youssef and peppered him with questions about Toubkal, hiking, Berber culture. Toubkal is a popular destination and generally safe, but not everyone who attempts it is up for it, and not everyone who is up for it keeps safety in mind while hiking. He was kind of a school marm about safety, which was mildly annoying but totally understandable. Further up the trail, we heard helicopters flying overhead and then encountered several military escorts who were accompanying the governor of the province on a walk down from the refuge, where his helicopter had deposited him. The official visit to the mountain was meant to send a public signal about safety protocols and make sure that the guides (some certified, some not...) and hikers on Toubkal are following best practices.

Hey, governor!

While the icy, steep slopes weren't yet underfoot (and were, frankly hard to imagine in the dusty heat of the lower valley) Youssef told me that in recent weeks one hiker had died on Toubkal and another had fallen down a steep slope, breaking and dislocating bones and requiring a medivac helicopter. They were separate incidents, but shared the common thread of being avoidable and caused by willful, overly confident mistakes. It had been months since I was in tip-top Himalaya fitness, and I was constantly assessing my readiness for the terrain ahead, and calibrating my preparation against the other hikers we encountered.

Patches of snow made an appearance a mile or two from the refugio and then spread steadily to cover the parabolic slope of the valley. The sun still felt warm in the clear skies, and the afternoon had a feeling of spring skiing. My refugio expectations were keyed to the experience Liz and I had at the "git" in Ait Aissa in February -- I was prepared for cold, uncomfortable, Type 2 Fun accommodations. Instead, the April-at-Sugarbush vibe prevailed, and we walked into a massive stone and timber dorm that wouldn't look out of place at ski resort in the States. We joined  other hikers in the small dining room, and wolfed down the popcorn, cookies and mint tea that the muleteer served up. The sun was passing behind the mountains, and the temperature dropped fast in the expanding shade. Youssef dislodged us from warmth of the fireplace to give us a crash course in ice axes and crampons. This is what we came for!!

I purchased hiking boots at the Decathalon sporting goods store in Marrakech a few days before this trek, and I could feel hot spots on my heels warning of the blisters to come as we walked outside with our gear. I had walked approximately 20 feet in these boots up and down the aisle of Decathalon's shoe department before starting out that morning, but I silently thanked myself for risking new boots while Youssef tore into Tom for wearing trail running shoes. They were fine for the terrain we covered today but they spelled doom, apparently, for tomorrow's climb and made the crampons fit poorly. Mind you, Tom's trail runners were more substantial than the ones I would have been wearing had I not opted for boots... Youssef criticized my hiking pants for having loose cuffs, a tripping hazard when snagged by the cleat of a crampon, but was satisfied when I assured him I had gators -- a last-minute piece of equipment that an American friend in Marrakech loaned me with the assurance that I would not need them. Whew, dodged that! Back in the dorm, Tom, Tayla and I hunkered down with a few other hikers we'd just met and tried to figure out, have we unwittingly gotten ourselves in way over our heads with a mountaineering challenge that we're laughably unsuited for?

More than a refuge, pretty comfortable digs!

Crampons. Bring it.

Last light and now so, so cold.

Looking down the valley toward Imlil, from whence we came.

The next morning we started before dawn, headlights illuminating the icy snowfields around us. We started up, up, up, each of us cocooned in layers of clothing and our own quiet beams of light on the trail. The crampon cleats made a satisfying crunchy, slicing sound with each firm footstep, the metal blades cleaving evenly through the surface and creating a firm hold on the narrow single track through the snow. I talked to myself as we trudged uphill, thanking my hands for staying warm so far, thanking my boots for their traction despite the blisters, and reminding my lungs that no matter how hard this feels, it's worse for Tayla. She of the incredibly stiff upper lip, Tayla had been suffering with food poisoning from the moment she woke up the previous morning in Marrakech. She barely mentioned how miserable she felt, and was unwilling to abandon the goal, and so on she hiked despite bouts of skitters and upchuck.

We couldn't see the sunrise from inside the bowl of high peaks, but we watched the sky transform from ink to pale blue and paused to take it in. The next long stretch of the hike covered an open, icy snowfield that kept climbing up, till we reached the edge of the snow just below a ridgeline. We stopped here to take off our crampons and the sudden loss of awesome cleat-powered traction had me stumbling and sliding in the rock skree and loose dirt. The ridge formed a shoulder that led to the final ascent up to the summit, but from here we could already enjoy a commanding view of the Atlas Mountains -- infinite peaks that pierced the low clouds and left us breathless, literally and figuratively.

The summit of Toubkal, when seen from the trail just below it, is made of long, rounded rocks stretching upwards to the official top of the mountain. The trail threads through rocky passages and curls counterclockwise up to the top. Toubkal's distinctive summit marker is a massive triangle perched on stilts, an unmistakable sign that you've made it. We grinned, took photos, scarfed down trail mix and sat in happy satisfaction with the accomplishment. So fantastic!

Look closely at the center bump of the ridgeline and you’ll see a tiny speck that is the triangle summit marker.

Victory!!

Three lovely companions for the hike.

Long, easy slide down to the refugio.

Sitting at the summit, we could see forever in every direction, and I could just barely visualize some of the long-distance treks I had read about, weeks of point-to-point walking and climbing over mountain passes and through shaded valleys, eventually crossing this summit and continuing onward. My short, short time on Toubkal primed my fantasy of coming back to the Atlas Mountains for a BIG hike someday. For now, I have good memories, and even gained a friendship Youssef despite his insistence on doing everything by the book, and left the mountains feeling grateful for the experience there.

[Mt. Toubkal, March 26-27, 2018]

Journalism Reality Check

The managing editor of Ocean FM, in her radio station's control room.

"Everyone listens to you, everyone knows who you are, but you don't make any money." This was how one radio journalist characterized her father's lament that his smart, talented daughter insisted on being a radio reporter.

The U.S. Embassy in Cotonou, Benin, invited five Beninois women journalists to a roundtable discussion with me about what it's like to be in our profession, and what we can learn from each other. The pretense of these setups always worries me — that I have indispensable wisdom to impart, or that the strategies and tactics I've learned in the U.S. will be applicable to their circumstances.

A report by Freedom House describes Benin's press freedom as not great, but better than its neighbors. The problem of access journalism — the ability of reporters to directly question and get honest answers from people in power — is familiar, but the consequences here are more dire. In America, over reliance on access can lead to stories that lack important critique or stories that curry favor with the very politicians who should be covered critically. Here, critical reporting might lead to the government shutting down your newspaper for a period of time, as happened to the major publication Le Matinal.

The confluence of social media and “fake news” is also creating problems for news media here, which these women described with grim expressions. The encrypted messaging service WhatsApp is used widely in Benin, often with large distribution lists circulating dubious information. On the one hand, accurate information can spread so easily and quickly that it leaves journalists wondering what their own role is in distributing information; on the opposite hand there have been numerous fictitious stories that spread on WhatsApp, and that then were repeated in mainstream media by poorly skilled reporters who didn’t ground truth the story.

And then there is the problem of per diems. This isn’t unique to journalism, many people in Benin are not paid salaries but instead receive per diem payment for work. For reporters, it means someone is paying you to report a specific story, or not report it. (The Freedom House report names this what it is: bribery.) It puts reporters in the position of getting paid, or not getting paid, in dubious circumstances.

On the surface, many of the problems they face would make their American female colleagues nod in solidarity. Dealing with squirrelly politicians. The metastasis of fake news. Low pay.  I listened and took notes as they spoke through an interpreter about their specific experiences with these problems, and it left me feeling like.... wow, do we (Americans) have no idea what our colleagues are facing around the world, even in relatively good circumstances.

And then there is sexism.

Their stories unfolded gradually, their trust in each other growing the longer we spent together. One woman would obliquely refer to the sexism she faces being one of the few women working as a political reporter, and everyone would nod. The next woman would add a little detail, noting that women reporters were passed over for the plum assignment to cover the opening of the parliament that week. By the end of the discussion, one woman had explained that men would sometimes demand sex in exchange for giving her an interview, an anecdote that elicited entirely too little reaction from her peers. They hadn’t had these conversations among themselves before, and they hadn’t yet found support and solidarity with women working in competing newsrooms. Yet they bonded in the shared frustration of trying to pursue their work in an ecosystem that wasn’t built to to honor their integrity.

As they talked, I was thinking of the countless hours I've spent reading and discussing the #metoo stories that eviscerated U.S. newsrooms and shattered journalists' trust in their own institutions. The response to those stories was outrage, and that demonstrates the difference between what U.S. journalists are dealing with and what faces these colleagues in Benin. Meanwhile, I was also internally cataloging the minor grievances and petty rivalries that can preoccupy a break room or give rise to secret Slack channels back home, and I was feeling ill over how those slights compare to the egregious circumstances these women matter-of-factly described. And even as I counseled myself that it's unproductive to compare indignities, I knew in the back of my mind that I am lucky for the things I have to complain about.

Five of Cotonou's journalists explained to two Americans what it's like to do their work in Benin, but still had energy to smile afterward.

[April 2018]

Radio Free Benin

When you are a radio pro on a tour of a radio station and the director of a live show asks you, “Want to go on the air?” The answer can only be, “Absolutely!” 

Ocean FM is owned by the same Cotonou, Benin, media group that publishes a major newspaper here, Le Matinal. The offer of a tour sprang from a talk I gave earlier in the week; I had hoped I might be able to visit a local radio station, and a few days later I was standing with the managing editor of Ocean FM in their control room, on the guest end of a spontaneous booking process.

A public affairs officer from the US Embassy here had arranged my visit to Ocean FM and she balanced my "yes, obviously" with a hesitant, "ok but...." The co-hosts would ask me questions in English, and presumably interpret some of the conversation into French. The PAO didn't want to be on the air and she sat away from a mic went we got into the studio. But the free-wheeling nature of the show didn't conform to those subtleties and sooner than later the host was lobbing her questions, too.

I don't speak French or any of the several local languages in Benin, but I do speak control room, and it felt great to hang out here.

Ocean FM isn't exactly a morning zoo format but it was loose enough that the host riffs unscripted on the news of the day, takes listener calls and is clearly comfortable spending a few minutes with impromptu guests who weren't pre-interviewed. Three topics emerged from their  questions to me: What do you think of our radio station? How can our journalists get training in the U.S.? Why is radio important?

The second question is a variation on a theme that I encounter frequently, and it stabs me in the heart a little every time. It lays bare the truth that opportunities aren't equally distributed; that people in developing countries are rightfully ambitious and unflinching in seeking advancement; it belies the curiosity that people are still keenly interested in coming to America, even though some parts of America clearly aren't interested in welcoming them; and for me, it stirs up a nest of unresolved feelings about how the place of your birth sets a course of fortune or misfortune that can be hard to disrupt, and why some people are born with the luck of geography and others aren't.

"How can we come to the U.S.?"

My thoughts on this are so tangled that I can feel my chest fill with emotion, and yet my answer in careful English is entirely anodyne and superficial. "I know there are training programs that exist for journalists, and I'm sorry I don't have details about them." Ugh. Pathetic dodge.

I was on more comfortable ground with their other lines of questioning. So much of the equipment and setup of Ocean FM was familiar. The studio mics, the desktop editing software, the mixing boards -- you'd find versions of this equipment (maybe slightly newer) in most radio stations in the U.S. One small workroom had tables around its perimeter with computers and mixers where reporters and producers wrote and mixed their stories. The larger workroom had a large common table at its center, but everyone's attention was oriented to the assignment board that filled one wall. In the workrooms, lazy ceiling fans half-heartedly dispersed the heat and humidity, but the studio and control room were noticeably cooler, preserving the temperature-sensitive equipment.

I do love an organized assignment board!

Why is radio important? In America, my answer would resemble a lot of what you hear people like me tell you during public radio pledge drives. But my brief introduction to Benin led me to this conclusion: education levels are low and poverty is high, but Benin is still one of the most stable republics in West Africa. This is exactly the kind of place where reliable, solidly reported news on the radio can make an important impact on how citizens relate to their government and their communities. Good radio is democratizing: you do not need wealth to hear it, you do not need literacy to learn from it and it can reach nearly everywhere.

[April 2018.]

News In The Garden

This is what the sky looked like, almost every single day.

"Our president just fired our secretary of state."

I was sitting at the wooden table under one of the gazebos with the purest of blue skies overhead, in the midst of a carefully designed rock garden surrounded by orange trees. The shocking fuchsia blooms of a bougainvillea cloaked the nearby stucco wall. This place is idyllic. The news was not.

"I'm so sorry!!" Oumaima exclaimed sympathetically, as if I personally was the one who just got axed on Twitter.

My volunteer gig at the nonprofit Amal Association in Marrakech was to help them rebuild parts of their web site, and being constantly online meant I could also enjoy a steady feed of news all day while I worked. I could start the day with Monocle and BBC, and then around midday Morocco-time I transitioned to public radio as the east coast of the US woke up. Sitting in a beautiful garden, helping incredibly good people who do inspiring work, mainlining global and political news -- this is pretty much as good as gets!

Oumaima is the director of Amal's Targa Center, and the garden was my workspace during the time I volunteered there. The wifi from the upstairs office reached far enough that I could sit in the warm shade amidst the plants and birds while I built web pages, rewrote copy and edited photos. From here, I could watch the daily rhythm of the tourists coming in for cooking classes, the trainees hurrying to their kitchen stations, the kitchen prepping and dispatching meals. At predictable intervals, staff and trainees would congregate for sweet mint tea, and to eat fresh bread dipped in honey and olive oil. At unpredictable intervals, Oumaima would appear full of excitement for new ideas, rushing from meeting to phone call to meeting, but always taking time to focus her attention on the person in front of her. (Even when the person in front of her was focused on what's happening in the White House on the other side of the planet.)

While energy swirled through the classrooms and kitchen each day at Amal, I found my groove outside. When I hit an HTML snag that I couldn't solve or just generally reached my limit of screen time, I'd leave my laptop in the front garden and take my earbuds with me to the herb and vegetable patches in the backyard... and I would pull weeds.

The 'Solidarity' gazebo was my outdoor office, more often than not.

Honestly, pulling weeds was more fun for me than building web pages, but that wasn't what they needed from me most. Pulling weeds was a treat, the web site was my job.

The first time I visited Amal it was February, and the garden beds had tiny sprigs of green that seemed adorably optimistic in the vast tracts of brown dirt. By mid-March though, the tiny shoots had transformed into self-respecting plants and by April the green had overtaken the brown completely, with stems and leaves and vines rioting in defiance of their garden beds' neat edges.

I would happily spend hours in that garden, carefully teasing out individual weeds out from among the coriander, sage and spearmint. I would attack with vicious joy the noxious creepers that overtook the gravel walkways, and feel satisfied when their eradication was complete. While I worked, I would not come close to draining the reservoir of news podcasts on my phone, but I would occasionally instead crank up the Hamilton soundtrack and sing along (badly) while I freed the potato plants from the crab grass that encroached their space.

The staff and trainees at Amal seemed partly amused and partly mystified by my love of weeding; only the head gardener was unambiguously delighted by my hobby. I loved the satisfaction of applying just the right amount of tension to a reedy, annoying stem and seeing its full root emerge from the ground. I loved the immediate difference that was visible -- rows of beautiful greens in fluffy soil, free of pestering interlopers. I really loved the massive haystack of weeds that would pile up at the edge of the garden as I worked.

I think Rex Tillerson's firing stands out among all the news stories I heard during the untold hours I spent in those gardens for two reasons. First, Oumaima's response was uniquely un-American in that she was thinking of me personally, rather than reacting to the information itself. If I had relayed the same breaking news to an American, it would have been met with a highly charged opinion -- about the president, the circumstance, Twitter, something. So that fact that she said, "I'm so sorry!" struck me as humorously unusual, and also very kind.

But second, my departure for Morocco and West Africa was only weeks away when President Trump reportedly demanded to know why the US should accept immigrants from "shithole" African countries. And now Rex Tillerson was in Africa, apparently to smooth over the fissures that statement caused, and he gets called back to Washington in time to read his firing on Twitter.  I felt a personalized proximity to the bookends of this news story. And I listened to coverage of the fallout while working in a beautiful garden, surrounded by an incredible group of people who are truly making the world a better place every day.

[March 2018]

Amal: This Is What Empowerment Looks Like

"These women have faced every disadvantage you can imagine - orphaned, divorced, single motherhood." Oumaima doesn't mince words about the stigma and dead ends faced by the women who are enrolled in the job training program that her nonprofit offers. Amal Association trains disadvantaged Marrakech women to work in professional kitchens, employment that is a pathway to financial independence. Some of the trainees have experienced domestic violence and assault, many have little or no education, all of them have little or no means to support themselves.

"Here at Amal,” says Oumaima, “for the first time, they don't feel judged. They know that we are all here to change their lives."

Fatiha stokes the fire in the clay bread oven in the garden at Amal Targa.

Here's the premise of Amal:

Women, especially single women with children, face extraordinary social and economic barriers in Morocco that create a feedback loop that grinds them further down. But with the right skills, these women can get good jobs in Marrakech’s thriving hospitality industry. Amal selects women in need of support, provides them with rigorous culinary training for six months and then connects them with work when they graduate. Amal runs a top-rated restaurant, a catering service, a school lunch program and cooking classes; these revenues streams support the training program, and the businesses are staffed by the trainees who learn and work under the direction of their instructors.

The new cohort of trainees show off the school bags they painted with a visiting art teacher.

My time volunteering with Amal coincided with the start of a new training cohort — 30 young women full of first-day nerves, nearly silent and (I imagine) totally stressed out about messing up. Three days of orientation, team building and the donning of official kitchen uniforms gave them a boost of confidence; soon they were quicker to smile and laugh with each other, and moved around the kitchen with more assurance.

The kitchen is an incredible place to observe, preferably from a corner where you won’t be in the way. Amal’s Targa center makes 120 multi-course school lunches for two private schools in Marrakech; Amal’s Gueliz restaurant serves one of the best lunches in Marrakech to scores of diners. The instructors have high standards as they issue orders along with explanations. Every kitchen station is a blur of organized, constant activity. Watching the head chef run the kitchen is a master class of women in leadership: Karima takes no crap, has exacting standards and tells trainees exactly what they need to do and how to do it. But even at the height of stress she has an easy and supportive smile for the nervous trainees she’s managing.

In the garden at Amal Targa, Warda explains their environmental and conservation practices to tourists enrolled in a tajine cooking class.

I can share similar observations about all the women who work and teach at Amal. Warda is tiny in stature but she commands a room with her clarity of purpose and ease in speaking (four, five languages?) in front of large groups of foreign visitors. Fatiha is quiet but she conveys incredible confidence, warmth and kindness without using a lot of words.

And Oumaima.

My god, she is a force of nature! Just try keeping up with her for half a day, I dare you. In any given moment she’s making staffing decisions, giving feedback on a new recipe, taking phone calls from a landlord for a new cafe that Amal is opening, negotiating with vendors and noticing the weeds in the garden. Her degree is in engineering and she's enrolled in an MBA program; she, too, speaks several languages perfectly, including sign language. Because that new cafe she’s helping Amal open? It will be staffed by the deaf and mute women that Amal is now training.

Seriously, these women are unstoppable. 

Throughout the time I’ve spent in Morocco, I have been interested in gender roles here, sometimes fully preoccupied by it. I’m loathe to wade into cultural judgment but I am intensely interested to hear how these women think about the gender expectations within their culture, and why they do not have the patience for it. 

Spend even a little time at Amal Association and you will come away inspired and a bit teary-eyed at what these women are accomplishing. I had the honor of volunteering for just a short time, but they made a profound impression on me.

Warda and Oumaima humor me with a selfie.

[March 2018.]

Pretty City: Chefchaouen

Inconvenient to reach but all the more attractive when you arrive, Chefchaouen is among the most photographed towns in Morocco for a good reason: it’s blue.

Like, really blue.

For reasons not reliably documented, people started painting their houses and businesses a eye-popping shade of cerulean a hundred years ago, and now the historic heart of the city is entirely blue. Walls, sidewalks, doors, passageways… blue, blue, blue, blue. The shades range from pastel robin’s egg to a deep, saturated royal. The collective effect is so striking that even when viewed from a distance on the highway, Chefchouen looks blue. The eastern flank of town is marked by a quick-moving river that cascades over rocks and terraces, making a cool spot to relax with mint tea and enjoy the sound of rushing water.

Chefchaouen was also my last chance at hiking before leaving Morocco. The town itself is built on steep hillside, not unlike Moulay Idriss; climb up to the top of the town, and you emerge into a wooded park with a small ecological museum and access to trails and jeep paths. I kept walking from there, occasionally encountering other hikers or locals, and eventually climbed up the pass toward Jebel EL-Kelaa.

I was following spotty directions, but a goat herder helped set me straight when I missed a turn on the trail. From there, I could follow a solitary hiker with a bright turquoise shirt a half-mile ahead, and he served as the perfect wayfinding beacon to stay on the trail to the peak. Sadly for me, he was fast enough that we crossed paths as he was coming down from the mountain and warned me the trail was a little tricky up ahead. I spent at least 30 minutes scrambling over boulders and trying to gain footing among roots while looking at my surroundings and thinking, “this is definitely not the trail.” I had given up on the peak and decided to make peace with views I already enjoyed when my effort to get back down intersected with the trail I should have been on. Reaching the top of Jebel El-Kelaa was easy from there, and the walk down a bit smoother, too.

In addition to the blueness and the steepness, the cats made me smitten with Chefchaouen. Cats are everywhere in Morocco, living comfortably on the edge of tame and feral, enjoying the privileges of pets by wandering in and out of homes and businesses but without really having a ‘home’ anywhere. Chefchaouen was small enough that in my four days there, I recognized some of the cats — the one with a scar over its eye was sitting on a pile of carpets in a shop one morning, and that afternoon was sleeping on a pile of receipts on the desk of another store down the street. “Is that your cat?” I asked the shopkeeper. He kind of shrugged, yes and no. One shop was crawling with kittens after a momma cat had chosen it as the ideal spot to hunker down and have her litter. They hid and tumbled amidst the lanterns and wood carvings, curled up on the carpets, and probably drummed up business from tourists who wanted to giggle at the kitties and then felt like they ought to buy something while they were there.

[Chefchaouen: March 2018]

Pretty City: Volubilis and Moulay Idriss

Before there were Arabs but after there were Berbers, Morocco also had Romans, and man did those Romans like to build stuff all over the place. At the entrance of Volubilis, a map shows the fantastic spread of the ancient Roman Empire across Europe, the mideast and north Africa, and put context to the stone ruins that have sat for millennia on this pretty hillside in central Morocco amidst the tall grass and wildflowers.

Volubilis is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and rightly so. The ruins reveal how houses were arranged along a main street, where public spaces existed for worship and government, and how water and heating were manged in the unrelenting Moroccan climate.

I had taken public transportation an hour or so to reach this spot, and among the busload of locals were two people I marked as fellow travelers. As we exited at Moulay Idriss, we realized we were also neighbors: they were father and daughter from a Quebec town just over the Vermont border. We spent the day walking among the ruins, picking over stones, resurrecting in our minds what stood here, marveling at the engineering of it all.

A short taxi away was the hillside town of Moulay Idriss, a village so central to the origin story of Islam's blossoming in Morocco that non-Muslims weren’t allowed in the town until 2005 and a wooden beam bars them still from getting too close to the Mosque. This reminds me of Soviet cities that were closed to foreign visitors for the importance of the military or research secrets that were held there, and I spent a good part of the steep uphill walk to the top of town pondering the human impulse to barricade and encircle ourselves — whether to keep us in or others out, and what’s the difference exactly?

Moulay Idriss occupies a hillside, with white plaster houses stacked neatly in terraces cascading down from the top of a hillock. We climbed and wended our way through small residential streets with the help of little kids who tagged along hoping for a coin or piece chocolate, all of us babbling the same conversation about directions to our destination: “Grande terrasse?” “Oui, grande terasse!” From the highest, largest terrace, we sat with a commanding view of the rolling hills below us and Volubilis a few miles away.

[Volubilis and Moulay Idriss: March 2018]

Pretty City: Meknes

A quick train ride and a welcome escape from Fes, Meknes was a joy. Perhaps less “important” in architecture and history, the crush of tourism in Meknes was significantly less than in Fes. But fantastic examples of architecture were everywhere in a city that felt more open to the sky and the surrounding countryside.

Meknes is a bit bereft of great places to stay at low price, but I sacrificed convenience for a fantastic riad tucked into a residential quarter deep in the old city. My short stay here had me drawing quick and superficial comparisons to other places I had been - the main square is like Jemaa L’Fna in Marrakech but smaller and less frantic; the medina and madersa is like Fes' but smaller and less confusing.

A long walk around town led to the horse stables and a lovely reservoir where families strolled and popcorn vendors took a laid back approach to their task. Near the main square, I fell into the stream of locals shopping for goods at the outdoor market -- tables of tennis shoes, housewares and toys filled the center of the wide alley, lined on both sides by stalls selling Western and Moroccan clothing. I let the flow of the crowd pull me into the shaded medina, where the stalls were modern florescent-lit bodegas fitted into an ancient neighborhood.

Eventually I found my way to the madersa, similar in style to the one in Fes but one major upside: the vibe here said, come poke around and check out the place. Visitors could climb up to the second floor and peek into the tiny dorm rooms where the boys would have lived in pairs while they studied and worshipped here. Keep climbing up, and you emerge onto the rooftop where no one stopped you from walking around the top of the building and staring across the rooftops of the medina and the rest of the city. On a blue-sky day, I sat in the sun on the roof next to the green-tiled eave of the mosque and stared at the minaret just a few yards away.

It would be mischievous and magical to portray this as a secret foray, but really this is just Morocco. A handful of others came and went from the roof while I was there, everyone pleased to rest awhile and take in the view.

[Meknes: March 2018]

Pretty City Blitz: Fes

In the last weeks of two months in Morocco, I stared at the long list of places I had imagined visiting but hadn’t managed to yet, and crammed them into a frenetic itinerary built of bus and train schedules and fear of missing out.

From Marrakech, I took a daylong train to Fes, a historic city that had loomed in my imagination as an endless wander among plaster and tile buildings in the classic Moroccan style, intricately etched with centuries of history. I rolled my eyes at the warning that I would get lost in the Fes medina, and that I should hire a guide. Medinas, I’ve seen a few, and this wasn’t my first rodeo.

But in my short stay there, I learned first hand that yes, the Fes medina does exert some kind of disruption of the three dimensions that makes it nearly impossible to navigate. The predominant colors of the medina here are white-washed walls with dark wooden trim, and the tops of the two and three-story buildings reached out to each other over the twisting alleys that separate them, creating an ancient urban canopy that obscured my sense of north-south, left-right. I would walk confidently in one direction for 20 minutes, and find myself back where I started.

And the advice on hiring a guide was frustratingly ubiquitous: guides were everywhere, ready to “help” lost or confused tourists wandering the medina. We were easy to spot, roaming aimlessly and unattached to the massive chattering tour groups that swarmed and eddied around historic buildings, filling the alleys, pushing everyone else to the edges. The Fes medina felt suffocating in a way that I hadn’t expected. It wasn't the getting lost that was frustrating, it was the crush of humanity accompanying you along the way.

But take a few steps away from the major sites, and the streets were calmer, cooler. You could actually look up and around and take in the place, without worry of trammeling someone underfoot or being trammeled.

Acrid-smelling dye vats of the leather tanneries.

Leather slippers #buylocal

[Fes: March 2018]

Bus People

This week, I took a city bus from Meknes for about an hour to visit Moulay Idriss, and back. These were some of the things I saw:

• As a blind man boarded, and another man got up to help him get to a seat. Later, two people helped him exit at the correct stop, and helped him down the steps.
• The bus was full, and every young person got up to offer a seat to elderly people and women with small kids.
• There were three of us who were obviously foreigners and the passengers sitting near us made an effort to find words in a common language with us. One man said to me, “You are welcome here.”
• Waiting for the return bus, we were encouraged to stay in the shade on the opposite side of the road until the bus came. The man who ran the corner bodega there was seemingly mute, but the kids buying candy from him communicated with him like it was no big deal, and we understood him when he gestured that the bus would be coming soon.
• A vegetable seller dropped off a huge sack of fresh peas and the bodega guy offered us a taste, then showed us how to turn the empty pod into a noise maker. He waved us a heartfelt goodbye when we got on the return bus.
• When the bus was really full, people sat on the steps in the aisle, and everyone helped everyone else stow their packages out of the way to make as much space as possible.
• Sitting on the aisle step next to me was a man of about 30 years. He saw that there wasn’t space for a woman with a baby and a toddler to sit. He beckoned for the woman to hand him the baby and it slept on his lap for the next half hour.
• Getting off the bus, people wished us well, waved at us. One woman kissed our cheeks and told us, "Peace be with you" in Arabic.

All of this humanity on a city bus.

On the same day, I also saw Volubilis and Moulay Idriss -- two ancient sites that have massive cultural and religious significance. But the 70-cent bus ride left a lasting impression.

Jarjeer: Retirement Paradise for Donkeys and Mules

When someone slyly refers to an animal “going to live on a farm,” it’s usually an euphemism for the death of a dearly loved pet that no one wants to admit is gone. In the case of Jarjeer, these animals weren’t well loved from the beginning, but they really do get to live out their days on farm where they can cavort and frolic, literally free from burden.

A charming and slightly eccentric British couple, Charles Hantom and Susan Machin, didn’t intend to build a haven for donkeys and mules on a pretty piece of land south of Marrakech in Oumnass. They retired from practicing law and meant to run a B&B here. But along the way, their love of animals made them recoil at the maltreatment of donkeys in the medina; they befriended a veterinarian and supported his work in treating these overworked and abused animals. The refuge started innocently enough when the vet had a donkey who had been brought back to perfect health, but was perfectly unwilling to be a beast of burden. The vet asked Charles and Susan if they didn’t want to take in a donkey on their large piece of land? Over the course of seven years, one animal became more than 50, and an open paddock was encircled with proper gates, fencing and stables; and then veterinary stables were added where they can treat animals with significant injuries and illness.

Visiting Jarjeer is like visiting the best petting zoo, ever. The animals in the hospital wing of the stables are in truly dire straights, but they are living in shaded comfort and getting close care from experts. Once you walk past that somber but hopeful row of stables, you emerge into two sunny paddocks filled with donkeys eager to socialize. Susan can recite the backstory of each animal, the circumstances by which they came here, the horrors they suffered up to that point, and the resurrection of the animals’ personalities as they came to relax and trust their new home. I walked into the smaller paddock where the younger animals are kept and they immediately surrounded me with curious faces and enormous dark eyes. We were all the same height, and it was slightly surreal standing in the middle of their eager, interested faces - all of them wanting to check out the new person. “Hey, who’s this? What’s in your hand, is that a camera? Your shirt tastes good, I’m going to gnaw on it a little bit. Scratch my ears! Scratch my ears!” I felt like a star athlete surrounded by fans, and while I don’t speak donkey I am certain they were asking for selfies with me. I tried to take their pictures but they were so eager to inspect and sniff at everything that the resulting photos are comical.

In the bigger paddock with larger animals, the same scene played out but with more social dynamics at play. These animals were older and some had been at Jarjeer for years at this point, while others were newer arrivals. They had a pecking order that became clear when one of the oldest animals kept inserting himself every time I tried to pet or photograph another donkey. He was to be first in line for getting attention, then the others could have their chance. Charles reemerged on the patio overlooking the paddock and explained this particular donkey rules the compound and everyone knows it. I think because I violated the social contract from the outset, he kept coming over to remind me to fawn over him as penance. The personalities and gentleness of these enormous, strong animals made an impression, as did the earnest respect and commitment of the Charles and Susan for rehabilitating them. It was lovely and a bit stunning to witness.

[Jarjeer: March 2018]

Marrakech Medina

me·di·na: məˈdēnə/ Origin Arabic; noun

1. the old Arab or non-European quarter of a North African town

2. literally ‘town’

There was a time long ago when I thought "Medina" was exclusively the name of a specific city in Saudi Arabia. A dictionary and two months in Morocco have forever taught me that a medina isn't one city, but rather the historic heart of every city in this region. The medina is also a collection of sounds, sights and shifting light, a feeling and an atmosphere so thick that it's tangible.

Of all the medinas in all the Moroccan cities I visited, the Marrakech medina has special vibe that sets it apart. Red seems to dominate this ancient quarter, unlike the blues of Essaoira's and Rabat's medinas, or the white of Casablanca's (hah, of course!). The narrow alleys are full of market stalls and decorative doors that conceal the riads behind them. High overhead, coverings provide shade and protection, casting a cool and comfortable dimness to the tangle of tiny streets. Scooters, donkey carts, bicycles and pedestrians all tread the cobble and brick pathways without pause, unless the pause is haggle over a price or indulge in toothache-sweet tea.

Locals will tell you that Marrakech's medina is for tourists, and this is largely true. Souvenirs for every budget are for sale from leather hassocks to wooden magnets. But all those jalabas aren't just for tourists to buy. Stray from the main routes through the medina and you'll notice it feels like a neighborhood, locals heading to work or school or home, and wondering curiously why you've wandered this way. And craftspeople are everywhere -- whether for the benefit of tourists or locals -- chiseling tiles, baking bread, painting plaster.

Spend long enough in the medina and the layout becomes familiar, if not logical. The restaurant with the good pastries is near the square where they sell turtles, which is around the corner from the riad and just down the street from the entrance to Jemaa el-Ffnaa. And everywhere, cats slink through the market stalls, keenly alert for scraps of meat.

Jemaa el-Ffnaa. In a city just shy of a 1,000 years old, this raucous main square was there nearly from the beginning. By day, it has the feel of the midway at a carnival - suspect food stalls ringed by street performers, snake charmers and young guys hawking cheap toys that spin and fly and flash. By night, it transforms into a collection of drum circles with exuberant Berber musicians and dancers pulling tourists into the mix. Vendors fill the plaza with lanterns casting fractured slices of warm light across the bricks. Tea glasses clink on the busy balconies of the Cafe de France, horse-drawn caleches rattle by, music mixes and blends together from groups of revelers.

By morning, all this is washed away, literally. An early stroll through the medina reveals a quiet place, slowly waking up and raises the metal gates on the market stalls. In city where water is precious, cleanliness is just as valued. Everywhere vendors are washing down and sweeping up the stone alleys they share, a slow ritual ahead of the crush of people who will jockey for space on these narrow paths a few hours later.

[Marrakech: February-March 2018]

Life Skill Unlocked: Grocery Shopping

Nothing makes me feel that I’ve cracked through the barrier of being a tourist like successfully doing mundane chores of daily life. Like taking the bus, renewing my Maroc Telecom account or picking up a few things at the store.

A high-end grocery chain here is Carrefour, and I’ve been to a few of them. It looks and feels so similar to grocery stores at home, but I was tripped up the first time I tried to buy produce. At the store near my AirBnB in Rabat, I put clementines in my cart, along with a few other essentials like coffee and cookies. But at the checkout, the young woman kindly held up the fruit and said, “No, madame.” She gestured to the register and then to the produce area. I realized there is no price on the clementines and I hurried over to the produce area to see what they cost. Of course, I can’t speak Arabic to tell her what the sign says, so take a picture on my phone and — feeling like a communications genius! — rush back to the register and earnestly hold up my phone to show her. She laughed (kindly) and said again, “No, madame!” and looked to her coworker for help. She hands him the fruit, he made a demonstration of carrying it back to the produce section and showed me the desk where it should weighed, put in a paper sack and affixed with a bar code sticker that shows its price.

I laughed apologetically (I do this a lot here) as he smiled and handed me the small sack, and the cashier laughed as she graciously received it at the register. “Oui, madame! Good!” If there had been a line of people backing up behind me, all of this would have been irritating for everyone, but instead it was a mildly amusing diversion in their afternoon. I stayed in that neighborhood long enough that I went to the store a few times, and I got an approving thumbs up from the two staffers whenever I managed to buy fruit correctly. I feel insanely proud of this accomplishment.

Other grocery store discoveries: Moroccans have an unbelievable variety of dairy products. I thought Americans were going overboard with yogurt choices, but Morocco is on another level. An extremely long refrigerated aisle, floor to ceiling with yogurt in colorful packaging. Except for the pictures of fruit on some of the containers, I have no ability to read the labels so I just buy different kinds to try them out. Same with milk. My first attempt at buying milk for my cereal left me contemplating a bowl of muesli and buttermilk, but I learned from it!

Alcohol is not readily for sale in Moroccan stores. It's not illegal, it's just not common. Some grocery stores that cater toward European tastes have a separate room in the store for liquor, wine and beer, and you pay at a cashier there. This reminds me of Vermont's quirky system of only selling hard liquor in designated state 'stores' that are sometimes inside a regular grocery store. (The Carrefour near me in Marrakech has an alcohol room called La Cave, and when I saw it I thought, "this is just like Mehuron's in Waitsfield!")

At the checkout, they expect you to have a bag with you, but you can buy one for one dirham if you need it. This is a good system, and I'm not sure if it's law, store policy or cultural expectation. Once I understood it, the fruit pricing system also made sense. Why exactly do we put a tiny individual sticker onto every. single. piece. of. produce. only to then peel the sticker off to eat it? One sticker for all the same fruit, slapped onto a paper sack -- not a plastic one.

And finally, the bike parking. I love this. In Marrakech, I would ride a bike to the grocery store, and at the end of the rows of modern sedans and SUVs was a parking attendant who looked after the mopeds, motorcycles and bikes. For one dirham, he would prop my bike against the fat palm tree with a few others and watch after it while I did my shopping. This was also a completely mundane experience that gave me so much joy. Walking out of the store, he'd see me coming (hard to miss the white foreign girl with uncovered hair), and set my bike out for me with a smile. I'd put my bag of groceries in the basket and exchange thank yous with him as if our lives were forever entwined, and pedal off feeling very accomplished.

Oh Hey, It Snows In Morocco! (Trekking In The Atlas Mountains)

There are a reasonable combination of factors that led me to think the High Atlas would not have snow in February. Or rather, factors that did not lead me to consider it as a possibility. First, Morocco=desert, right? Right. Second, the hiking guidebooks I read talked about avoiding the sweltering summer temperatures, and what's further from summer than February? And the more general advice was that the north is rainy in winter but that central and southern regions have good weather. And they do! And also, the mountains have snow.

Berber village! 

Liz and I met our hiking guide Hassan and our muleteer Mohammed (and our mule, Nora) at a trailhead near Imlil, a small town that serves as a good launching point for several Atlas hiking trails. Here's how backpacking works in Morocco: you hire a guide, the guide hires a muleteer and a mule; the mule carries everyone's stuff plus the food and supplies the guide has packed. Mohammed and Nora took a slightly different route than we did -- easier and more direct -- but we met him at a lunchtime meetup spot on the trail, and then again at the end of the day, which left us free to carry only light daypacks. At lunch, Hassan and Mohammed turned out a massive meal over a campfire fire, complete with sweet mint tea served in a tea set.

All of this is embarrassingly luxe, and I felt like my backpacking credentials were being underestimated. But in researching other options, we learned this is really just 'how it's done.' There are definitely hikers who go it alone, and now that I feel more familiar with Morocco, I can imagine doing this without the benefit of a crew. But even on our short two-day trek, we noticed there are no trail signs at all to differentiate the multitude of walking paths that lead over hills to different villages. We stayed overnight in git that was a very simple and pretty cold bunkhouse where Hassan and Mohammed made dinner for us in the communal kitchen; again, I'm not sure how I would have arranged that for myself.

Starting from Imlil valley, the day was like classic autumn weather in Vermont: bright sun that felt hot when it shined on you, but very cool in the shadows. We walked through Matate, a rust-colored Berber village built of mud bricks and fortitude, and Hassan told us about Berber culture while indulging my attempts at adding to my nascent vocabulary. Here, we're still walking on ruddy dirt trails, enjoying the scenery of snow-capped mountains in the distance. We climbed through scrubby junipers along with women who had climbed up from the village to collect firewood, and breathed in the piney air.

After lunch, the sun ducked behind gathering clouds and the trail climbed up through a snow patch in the shaded notch of the mountain pass. Soft snow falling on red earth made a red slushy mix, and Hassan was amused that we found this to be delightful (and so much prettier than the cold dirty slush that's familiar from Vermont in springtime). He was also a little distracted by helping Mohammed lead Nora through the snow; as we walked they altered our plan for the next day to avoid the mule breaking a leg in the snow.

Coming up to the top of Tizi Oudite pass, there was wide saddle so that the distant mountains beyond the valley below us revealed themselves slowly as we climbed higher. Once we stood at the center of the flat top of the pass, there were mountains upon mountains clambering for attention. Covered in snow but with juniper and rock faces pushing through to be seen, the Atlas mountains were stunning. And totally wintry.

The south-facing walk to the valley below put us back on rock and soil pretty quickly, and we had a easy but steep descent to the village where we'd spend the night. Hassan continued telling us about the area, and answering our thousands of questions about water irrigation and whether people are allowed to use the national park land that we were walking through. He explained the boundary markers meant that you can let your animals graze in the park, but they can't be sheltered there. Sometimes if a family has just one small animal, they'll keep it at their house in the village. At this point, Hassan is well versed in my entirely sentimental love of goats and I ask, "So I could live here in this village, and I could keep my baby goat with me at my house?" Hassan smiled ironically and answered, "Insh'Allah."

Goat, not for sale.

The guesthouse in Ait Aissa was cold and we huddled around the least efficient wood-burning stove I've ever met. I was sooo glad that I'd rented a sleeping bag, as sketchy as that idea sounds. Hassan had arranged rooms with mattresses for us to sleep on. (The British guys who were staying there with their guides hilariously had wooden pallets disguised with a blanket.)

Irrigation channel.

The next day we walked down Azzadene valley and hiked over Tizi n’Mzik, a harder and higher mountain pass (read: snowier) and then down into Imlil. The sun was bright and warm and we climbed up switchbacks with small herds of sheep and goats for company, and one runaway donkey that surprised us a little! Stopping among the juniper to soak in the sun and the views was pure bliss.

Hassan had told us that people ski at the top of the pass and we weren't really sure what to expect. First, exactly how much snow are we talking about? And second, cross-country skiing? Vocabulary failed us. I was a little worried that my trail running shoes would fail me, too -- they were totally adequate for the walk, were the walk not covered in several inches of wet snow.

When we crested the top of the pass, it was hard to choose where to direct my attention first: the incredible layers of steep mountains that poked at a jagged horizon as far as the eye could see, or the couple dozen kids on ancient downhill skills who were earning their turns at the top of the hill.

Marker at Tizi n’Mzik

We sat on a low rack wall in the sun to watch the skiers and eat the rest of the trail mix Hassan had made. (Seriously, this stuff was some kind of potent magical trail mix. We tried to replicate it later by buying a bunch of dates, nuts and seeds in the medina and it wasn't quite the same.) These kids, all boys, were pretty awesome. They had hiked up from Imlil, a pretty significant distance and very steep, carrying their equipment. At the top, they strapped on their skis (and the skis' vintage meant a lot of them had actual straps), skinned up the mountain even further and then skied down just past the hut where we sat cheering them on.

We watched them share skis and boots, taking them off and passing them around with little concern for size. Which made me think, Liz is a really good skier. She should totally just borrow someone's skis, right?

Hassan loves this idea. He grabs the kid nearest him and, near as we can tell, says, "Hey kid, give me your skis. And the boots, too." The kids calls to a friend who brings him some shoes and he shimmies out of the ski boots and hops over to put on (someone's?) shoes. These boots are way too small, but by now an interested clutch of guys are eager to find a pair that fit. They get Liz outfitted and she starts sidestepping up the hill to one of the spots where a lot of the kids have started from. A lot of effort for maybe 45 seconds of memorable skiing! Liz made it back to the hut without getting maimed by ill-fitting and unfamiliar equipment, or by rogue debris on the ungroomed hillside. (Note: I attempted to take a video but failed to press start. Just as Liz comes to a stop in front of the hut, I hit the red button to 'stop' the video, which actually starts it. So the only solid evidence of Liz's #skimorocco adventure is a few frames of her standing on skis and my off-camera voice proclaiming, "I took a video!!" I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize for that.)

We slurped through the wet snow down to Imlil, eventually dropping below the snow line to a rocky, scree-covered hillside. Nora and Mohammed had taken an entirely different (and snowless) route today, so Hassan made us a picnic lunch from the food he'd been carrying in his backpack. I made a few stabs at convincing Hassan to teach his young daughters to ski, and made Liz made an attempt at saving me from bits of lunch that I didn't like.

C’mon, let the girls ski!

We walked into Imlil in the late afternoon, just as the temperatures were dropping and the clouds were starting to spit rain. Hassan deposited us at Dar Adar, where comfortable beds, hot showers and a competent wood-burning fireplace awaited us.

Plus, cute baby goats in the neighboring yard.

[Trekking from Imlil: February 17-18, 2018]

There Are Three Kinds Of Camels, This Is One Of Them

The dromedary. A sturdy beast, yet gangly and deliberate in its stride. Not foul of odor but indeed a little grumpy. And you would be, too, if your job was to carry tourists across the valleys and ridges of fine Sahara sand dunes.

Dromedaries are the one-humped camels that cast an evocative silhouette. Their cousins are the Bactrian and wild Bactrian camels, both of which have two humps and one of which has a radically different hairstyle. In North Africa and the Middle East, you will find dromedaries; the other two camels make Central and East Asia their home.

Far out at the eastern edge of Morocco is the town of Merzouga, surrounded on three sides by flat expanses of desert and on one side but luminous sand dunes that look painted on the horizon. Here, we and few other tourists gathered in fine, silty sand and got our first look at the camels that would carry us over the mountains of sand to the tents we would sleep in for the night.

We stood curious, amused and uncertain as the camels shifted on their large padded feet and snorted their objections in no obvious direction. The camel handlers lined them up and looped the rope lead from one camel's neck to the saddle of the camel in front of it, creating a small camel train, and coaxed them all to sit down in the sand. Their legs folded under them in a confusion of joints that seem to bend in the opposite direction you'd expect, until they settled on their calloused haunches, bellies in the sand. Their singular humps were obscured by a saddle covered in thick piles of blankets, with one metal horn sticking out for the rider to hang onto. We each had one quick chance to swing a leg over the saddle and get in position, because the movement spurred the camel to immediately stand, bucking forwards and backwards as it lumbered to its full height.

Three Berbers watch the day’s camel preparations just after sunrise. 

The guys working with the camels were Berber, wearing traditional blue Berber robes and head scarves. Several of them were from nomad families and lived as nomads through part of their childhoods. Once we were all saddled and tied together, Mustafa took the lead camel's rope in hand and starting walking away from town and straight into the dunes.

"Les dunes de sables de Merzouga" create a vast landscape of saffron-colored peaks, with the footprints of camel trains marking pathways to tiny Berber camps hidden in the dunes' valleys. Our vantage point on the landscape shifted as we rode up, over, around, and down through the dunes, sinking us low among smooth hills of sand, and popping us up high on a crisp ridge with a view to the far off horizon and the Algerian border.

There were eight of us in the camel train, Americans and western Europeans, exhibiting various degrees of nervousness. Not too far into the trek two of the camels were switched out, accused of being too tempermental. Our camels walked nose to tail, and followed each others' cues closely. Liz was riding behind me and every time we paused, her camel moved forward an extra step and nuzzled its face alongside my saddle. Such a cutie!

We didn't ride more than an hour before we arrived at a group of square-framed tents made of heavy wool blankets. They were grouped together forming a tiny encampment attached to a large dining tent. Nestled in the sand low in a valley with a dune towering above it, this was our home for the night.

At sunset, we hiked to the top of the highest nearby dune, each footfall sinking deep into the fine sand. We sat along the dune's ridge and watched the sand change colors in the waning light. One of the Americans had grabbed the beat up vintage snowboard from the Berber camp and we took turns "sledding" down the sand dune. Totally undignified and very fun way to fill your clothes with sand.

After a tajine dinner, everyone in the camp gathered at the fire pit and our Berber hosts sang and played goatskin drums and krakebs, iron castanets. A small group of us hiked back up to the top of the dune to take in the stars on a night that defied the warning that the desert would be very cold after sunset.

And in the morning, one more hike up our neighborhood dune! Sunrise was beautiful and quiet. We sat on the sandy ridgeline watching the colors of the sand shift and glow as the sun grew brighter and cast sharper shadows.

We are tourists and we wanted to ride camels. For sure, that is exactly the experience we got - tourists riding camels. But even still, watching these fabulous, funny animals up close was a treat, and peaceful hours contemplating the endless stretch of sand dunes was time well spent.

Americans! On camels!

[February 20-21, 2018]

Scenes From A Desert Road Trip

Skirting the southern fringe of the Atlas Mountains, Morocco's geography changes dramatically. Snowy high peaks melt into flat desert and if you keep going far enough, that hard-packed arid expanse loosens into saffron-colored sand dunes.

Last month, Liz and I loaded our backpacks into an SUV and our guide-driver Rashid cranked up an awesome music mix as we headed down from Imlil to cross over the Atlas Mountains and head to the desert for a four-day road trip. The landscape was ever-changing but constantly mesmerizing.

These were some of the memorable moments:

• Berber villages are unusually beautiful. Their architecture is somewhat uniform -- square angles, straight lines, simple rectangular forms punched with many small square windows. The buildings seem attached to one another, extensions built onto additions. Their colors harmonize with each other and their landscape better than any southern California homeowners association rules could enforce. Rusty and muddy reds prevail, along with peachy, earthy, taupey hues. The oldest houses are built of mud bricks, newer ones of concrete.

• Water! Nomads and civil society have created ingenious irrigation systems out in the empty desert. We stopped at an active well, dug by the government, where Rashid pulled up a basket of water and showed us how nomads pour it into a concrete trough to water their animals. Nearby, we visited a demonstration well that explained how it used to be done: an underground aquifer tapped by hand-dug wells, marked by earthen mounds built side by side across the desert. Walking through the underground tunnels that used to hold water reinforced the preciousness of the resource.

• The Dades and Tougda gorges are carved by water and millenia, and now are marked by winding roads and massive rock walls. Pockets of palmeries nestle into valley floors here, groves of palm trees heavy with dates that give the red landscape an unexpected shot of green.
• Looking at the valleys as a catchy Moroccan pop song bares from the stereo.

• Encountering the first truly offensive tourists we'd yet to meet. Twenty-something and French (neither of these is an indictment), they were a large group that slept roadside in unkempt camper-vans. We were horrified when they stumbled out in their underwear, scratching themselves and yelling at each other. I would think that if you were visiting a country that your country used to colonize, you would make an extra effort to be respectful.
• Riding camels across the sand dunes at Merzouga -- more on that in another post!
• D'raa Valley, framing Morocco's D'raa River, is an astonishing panorama of rock formations, valleys and vistas. The forces that shaped the land here left scars from their intensity, such that the rock walls seem to betray a fluidity of movement within them. Completely stunning.

• In one town, we were stopped in a flowering almond orchard and noticed the nearby call to prayer sounded unusually melodic, prettier and more soulful than the calls we'd become accustom to. A bit later we learned it was a funeral service. As we drove through town, we watched a procession of men walking behind the ambulance that carried away a loved-one to be buried.
• The Berber villages have a narrow palate of colors, save for one specific building: the school. Driving through towns, we could spot any school from a distance - the building and surrounding walls were always painted a riot of colors, brights and pastels.
• Rally cars! Out of nowhere, we saw across the empty flat desert trails of sand whipped up by tiny little cars racing each other to a checkpoint. This off-road race in little compact cars is apparently a thing.
• Ourzazate film studios, so entertainingly odd! The ruins and remainders of Hollywood and Bollywood movie sets stand surrounded by real desert landscape. Walking through the sets was a quick trip through pre-annexation Tibet, ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, medieval Europe. Everything is made of fiberglass and scaffolding, and the peeling paint gives the fake scenery an added layer of unreality. (I was reminded again that I am the only person in the world who hasn't watched Game of Thrones, which has shot scenes here.)

• The French kids again! We recognized them immediately in Ourzazate by their vulgarity and swagger. Wandering through the film studios, they hollered to our guide, "Hey, you a guide?" We were totally delighted when he looked at them and said, "No."
• Driving out of Ourzazate into the desert mountains as "Despacito" blares from the stereo.
• There is a place in Morocco called Ait Ben Haddou that you will find on any guide book's must-see list. I think it was a photo of this kasbah that formed my first distant idea of what Morocco would be like. We arrived there late in the day to see the sunset leave the valley in a cool shadow, and the next morning we climbed through the mudbrick stairs and alleys of this ancient fortress. In its heyday, an entire village lived and toiled here, protected by a chieftan. Most families long ago moved across the river into new housing, but a few still live and work among the UNESCO-protected remains of the original kasbah.

Rock the kasbah: Ait Ben Haddou.

• Kasbah Telouet is just down the highway from Ait Ben Haddou, and a totally different experience. Whereas Ait Ben Haddou looks deserted, Telouet is visibly in ruins. But its broken walls and crumbled exterior conceal astonishing rooms that evoke the fortress's past grandeur. Tiny ceramic tiles are fitted together into mosaics that cover walls soaring 30 feet above. Intricately carved wooden ceilings and door frames are painted in such detail that I can't imagine how tiny the brushes must have been. Sunlight streaks in through the windows, illuminating the tile and stone floors with a dull glow. It is easy, easy, easy to sit here for a quiet minute and imagine what life must have been like when these rooms were alive with courtesans.

This was the third big road trip I've taken since I've been traveling, and the wild desert scenery and great company made it unforgettable.

Essaouira’s Working Port

Seagulls shriek and cats skulk around the tables of fresh fish displayed under umbrellas right on the dock. Blue wooden rowboats knock against each other a few feet away from welders at work on dry docked steel fishing boats. The smell of fish and machinery permeates the harbor, but a steady breeze freshens the air. Head up to the stone ramparts left behind by King Mohammed III in the 1700s and you can take in the entire scene: to the north is the medina, protected from crashing waves by a high stone wall; to the southwest, an unoccupied island and the Atlantic Ocean beyond; to the south the harbor juts out into a hook, creating a protected wide beach that stretches a few miles down the coastline. Parasailers and surfers makes use of Essaouira's stiff winds as steady sets of waves role into the beach, where soccer players are also taking advantage of the summer-like conditions.

Rabat Medina

Medinas and souks, I've seen a seen a few. Not so many that they've lost their allure, but enough that their charms don't always overwhelm their aggravations.

My initial encounter with the Rabat medina was an unfair first impression - I was very tired, I was carrying my full backpack just off the train, and I was walking through the busiest alley at a busy time of day. The slow-walkers ahead of me browsed stalls of household goods and trinkets, and they were In. My. Way.

The next morning and a few times since, I've had blissful wanders through the medina here. The blue-and-white walls lend it an airier, seaside feeling compared to the crowded red and browns of Marrakech. My favorite alleys were empty, save for the occasional pedestrian or cat, where every arched door was a work of art.

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I Am Illiterate In So Many Languages

I was recently driving in a car with an acquaintance who was finishing a business call on speakerphone. As she and her colleague ticked through a few decisions, they slid effortlessly among Arabic, French and a little English. There seemed to be no reason that one phrase or word or reply to a question was in one language or another, it was just a slipstream of linguistic dexterity that they barely recognized. When she hung up the call, I felt like applauding at the conclusion of a performance.

Morocco's mix of cultures was one of its chief attractions for me, and with that comes an astonishing patois of languages. Arabic and French are listed as the two official languages spoken, and while that might already seem impressive to a monolinguist* it belies the real complexity of language here.

My attempts at speaking a few self-taught words and phrases in classic Arabic are usually met with appreciative curiosity and an explanation that, we don't really say it that way here. The Moroccan dialect of Arabic is Darija, and as I pick up more words and phrases from conversation, I'm increasingly uncertain of exactly what language I'm actually learning.

Because it also could be Berber.

My first weeks here were is hardcore Berber country, the cities and villages in the Atlas Mountains and desert. The people I interacted with proudly Berber and were eager to point out, sure you can "shukran" (thank you) but you can ALSO say "tanmert!" Their excitement in teaching me Berber accelerated my interest in learning it, such that by the time I was back in a region more dominated by Arabic culture I was chastened by the odd looks I got when I proudly offered a few Berber phrases.

And then there is French, a language with which I have the faintest acquaintance. Most of the words I know in French I learned from studying Russian, which borrowed liberally from French during the critical years of Enlightenment hero-worship. The shared DNA of Western European languages allows me to piece together more comprehension of French than I rightly should, driving home how utterly hapless my language comprehension is in general.

Most days and most places, I can get by on a mix of a few words in Arabic and French, the respectable knowledge of English that many people have here, and a lot of dramatic gestures that require checking your self-conciousness at the door. I also throw in a near-constant apologetic smile. I sometimes I try to imagine how I appear to strangers here: as an idiot savant, maybe. Gleefully using charades to communicate what my language can't and repeating the same few phrases I've mastered whether they fit the situation or not. (Me: "Good morning!" Storekeeper: "Good morning ma'am, what do you need?" Me: "Good morning!")

Being in a foreign language environment has compelled two strange reactions in me. The first is that my command of English is deteriorating, as I strip my spoken English to the simplest nouns and verbs to be better understood. (I note here my gratitude and respect in finding someone who speaks English at all, likely their fourth or fifth language.) When we were hiking, Liz and I had a mule carrying our gear, that we named Nora. And we'd ask our guide, "Where's Nora?" And He told us once, "Nora is break." This is alarming because he had worried early about how hard it is for mules to walk in deep snow, which we encountered. Nora broke her leg?! No, Nora is taking a break, she's resting. From then on, it became easy to lapse into minimally correct English. Nora is break. Liz is dinner. Patti is Internet.

And second, my original foreign language, Russian, keeps rising irrepressibly to the surface. No matter the language barrier I'm navigating, I find myself reverting to Russian impulsively, as if leaning on the memory of overcoming a language difference once. Countless times, I've found myself answering in Russian, when I finally understand what someone is saying to me in French or Arabic. It's a weird tic that may stay with me for the rest of my life.

Mastery of Arabic, Darija, Berber or French will elude me during just a few months here, but one lesson has penetrated: the ability to communicate in many languages isn't just a nifty skill, it's how the world gets along.

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* I met a Berber man who grew up as a nomad until he was 9 years old, when his family settled in a town. He's taught himself four European languages in order to make a living in the tourist industry, and knows quite a bit of several more languages. I told him this well-worn joke: 

What do a call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do a call person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who speaks one language?

American.

Quad-fecta! Arabic, Berber, French and English.

Just Me And Coco Chanel

Weather update: it is intensely windy and rainy today in Rabat, Morocco, conditions that you have to physically battle against as you try to walk down the street. This is a reading inside day, a watching Netflix day, a reorganizing my meager belongings day. 

During a break in the rain, my AirBnB host walked over to the guesthouse I’m staying in with toast and jam, because she is the nicest person in the world. “The weather!!” Sandrine exclaimed in heavily acccented English, as wind whipped through the yard.

Her cat, Coco Chanel, looked full of regret that she had followed Sandrine outside but as she lurked at my door, she knew that she might get a shot at the food. I’m an easy target.

Coco and I agreed that she should not eat the butter, and the marmalade disinterested her. But after appraising the available blankets, she has decided to make herself comfortable here. I’m not sure what the appropriate amount of time is before I have to return this borrowed cat, but I really hope her adorable tiny kitten sneaks over first.