Morocco: looping da loop

One last Morocco post, written in an upper-respiratory-non-COVID haze on the eve of the 2024 elections in America! Hooray/augh!

Back when I planned the Morocco trip the first time, aiming for December/Jan 2020-21, I had schemed it around my hubristic notion of "it'd be nice if every other New Year's Eve I celebrate somewhere I haven't been before!" So hey, we already did a temple on a mountain in Japan, what if this New Year's got rung in... in the Sahara??? Great plan for 2020! Ha ha ha, in my opinion, although in a way I still held to the plan... I had never celebrated a NYE in my Rogers Park apartment prior, and I certainly had never steamed my own crabs and made homemade pasta had champagne and fancy little treats at the kitchen counter while occasionally Zooming with other friends isolating in other locations. So um. ANYWAY.

 Flash forward to Christmas 2022 and the vagaries of academic scheduling plus the availability of the operators who organize trips into the desert, and it quickly became apparent that New Year's would have to be rung in elsewhere (in Fes, as it turns out, which was still mega-lovely!) but that I could head into the Sahara shortly after. And so I did! Deets after the video, and after the jump!

As I noted in my last post, I felt a little conflicted about this wave of the trip; for this loop, what I realized was that the groups who organize these kind of trips tend to assume a tourist who is, as in Marrakesh, largely interested in buying stuff and taking photos. I'd approached a few operators and had a back-and-forth in not just sifting their quotes, but really having a conversation about what I hoped to get out of the trip; in hindsight, I think I was excessively midwestern-polite and should have been more clear and forceful in this early stage, before I was on the road with the driver/guide they arranged for me. It was a decent amount of work to convince this (extremely nice and chill!!) guy that I was more interested in learning and having conversations than in photo ops, though obviously everything was stunning and obviously many photos were taken.

Among other photographic obsessions: the hyper-precise animal-crossing signs in the south of Morocco. This is only about half of the types I noticed on this run!

 But the other reason to feel a little conflicted is that, as with my years-ago "what if we see a bunch of Balkan countries in like a week and a half" spin, this was simply faster than I like to go for the amount of territory we covered. That naturally turns you into somebody who can only snag a bit of surface charm; that's ample, but I did find myself, having completed the loop from Marrakesh back to Fes, thinking "now that I know the lay of the land a bit, I'd rather DIY everything except the actual Sahara piece of this." Perhaps next time, should it come!

In any case, what are we talking about? A few things:

A long driving day through the Ounila valley to Ait Ben Haddou, one of the best-preserved kasbahs, mostly known for serving as a filming location for numerous Hollywood epics (Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator, etc.). The highlight on this day may actually have been Telouet, a kasbah that looked like a remnant of medieval times, but had in fact been built in the 20th century and occupied as recently as the 80s; its mud construction meant that even intermittent rains in the succeeding decades had left it looking ancient, and the tour of the space gave me great context on the colonialist overseers' strategy of subcontracting brutality to local strongmen. Fun! In a specific sense of the word! (Another fun thing: learning the codes of the road; my guide, any time he passed a speed trap on the highway, would flash his lights and make a hand gesture to the oncoming driver to give them a warning so they knew what was coming. Solidarity, brother!)

Telouet views: not bad for a toppled despot's abandoned shack!

The second day continued our drive through the Draa valley, with a wish-I-had-more-time stop in Tamegroute, which has one of the (if not the) most significant koranic collections outside of Mecca. A gorgeous library, which like the Chester Beatty library left me in awe of the precious nature of preserved books like these, which was only a short drive from the city's other major legacy, a deep-green-glazed local style of pottery. Neat! And briefly visited before we went off-road to get out into the deserrrrt.

 

The road to the desert: NOT atmospheric, NOT forbidding, NOT remarkable!

Here's the thing about the Sahara: it's beautiful and otherworldly and peaceful. No two ways around it! And I felt extremely lucky, because my first night in the camp I stayed in, I was the only guest. Perfectly quiet, perfectly contemplative. The folk running it were kind and personal (the guy who ran it got into an argument with my driver about whether he could have me visit his family for lunch on our way back, since he was getting a lift when we headed back north) even if those barriers I mentioned in the last post were acutely present at times. So yeah: some cliche "let's ride a camel" times, some cultural visiting (a school for nomads, a farm housing a family of goats), some maybe-a-cliche-but-what-a-gift reading a book on a dune, and lots of time to meditate on the year to come, which would prove to be all kinds of unexpected. A good stay, if complicated.

This was, in hindsight, a very good day!

 

After this stop, we made our way up to the Todra gorge, where I was able to have a nice long walk while my guide got some Him Time before eventually making our way up to the Auberge Le Festival, a wild cavern hotel dug into the side of the mountain, which was all kinds of magical - tho again, on a DIY circuit I would have loved more time throughout this region.

The last days were a blur, heading back into the mountains and the slightly more familiar-by-now medium-sized-towns of Morocco, a visit through some forests with some real nice apes hanging out in them, and one last stop in Fes, where I convinced my guide to drop me by a worker's cooperative to do my minimal shopping at the end of the trip.

NOT a worker's co-op in Fez; if memory serves, this gorgeousness was in Midelt.

As my last post indicated, I'm still chewing over Morocco; as with my time in the Balkans, I feel more intrigued and curious than anything else, and can't help but feel that I'm missing an ocean that I wish I'd been able to tap into. But I'm grateful to have had the time, to have cracked the door open to another kind of travel, and to learn about myself, and how I want to grow and evolve who I am as a traveler. More of that in the years to come, I hope!

Coming up next: Colmar and Luxembourg, as spring break 2023 inches us ever closer to being only a year behind on this blog! Wowie zowie what a time! Maybe even an update on life in Spain?? Who knows, please stop being so greedy about everything! Go vote against the nightmares! Aroo!

Let's stride into the future on our freakishly long and muscular legs!!!