Morocco, Morocco, Morocco

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind in the past few days, so I owe Morocco a blog posting. I’m almost recovered from sleep deprivation in that country, but I’m now missing out on sleep aboard the ship because there are parties, alumni balls, goodbyes to be said, and the realization that so many of the folks aboard the ship are leaving in two days. The Spring 2013 semester ends on Thursday April 25, and almost all of the students are hopping off in Barcelona and dispersing into Europe or heading home. Ellen’s library assignment continues on the ship, so we’re staying aboard for the first two portions of the Enrichment Voyage. There won’t be college classes, and I’m already missing my Women Writers Around the Globe and Biomedical Ethics classes. The Enrichment Voyage will have a wider mix of ages, seminars rather than college-credit classes, and a more rapid-fire schedule with fewer days of sea travel and lots of short single-day visits to European ports.

I learned an acronym in Morocco that fits the country well: FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out. Travel so far has been essentially FOMO. There’s far more to do than is possible, so you try to make the most of each port as well as life aboard the MV Explorer. It’s quite a balancing act to see as much of each new culture as possible along with maintaining equilibrium in family, work, exercise, sleep.

So, Morocco. I got to see a small slice of the country, and what I experienced was nice and amazing in ways unexpected. We were all a bit frazzled after Ghana: lots of work to wrap up the Spring semester in the library, classes ending (I wrote my papers but skipped final exams), anticipation of another country with hard-core haggling, and some unexpected family drama. See, we all signed up for a four-day hike in the Atlas Mountains to see the Berber villages, and the morning we landed in Casablanca, Sandy fainted in the immigration line. Standing around in hot conditions seems to exacerbate his low blood pressure, so after about a half hour he felt faint and I caught him as he dropped. Recovery was pretty quick, but I talked him out of the hike. Basically, once we all got through the immigration line and had our passports, we had a handful of minutes to figure out from the vague description of the trip how much hiking there would be, what altitude, how hot during the day, how cold at night, how far, and if it would really be doable. Ellen and I encouraged him to err on the side of being conservative and not attempting a long hike. So, on the spot, we decided that Jasper and I would go on the hiking trip and Sandy and Ellen would do some single-day trips in Morocco. I think it was a good call.

 Jasper in front of a car wash. It's French, no?

 

Jasper with a headwrap above. Here he's on the donkey with Hassan and Mohammed, ready to head up into the hills.

I'm in front of some ruins at the start of our hike, holding two clover flowers that Jasper picked.

Medina by day...

Medina by night.

Medina stall with vibrant colors of fruits, veggies, and olives. 

Mountains where we hiked. Snow covered peaks that hit close to 14000 feet are in the background. We hiked to about 5000 feet.

 I got a henna tattoo at the first house. It lasts a few weeks.

Street festival in Marrakesh. Jasper liked that KFC and McD's were in Morocco.

 

Prickly pear cacti were prevalent along the hike. According to our guide, they're tasty but constipating if you eat more than, say, four. Good to know.

 

 Dusty singletrack.

Rooftop of the first house we visited. We slept up here under the stars.

 

Fields at the start of the hike. I think that the thorny brush in the foreground is placed there as fencing, and it seems pretty effective.

 

 Writing on the wall in the second Berber village we visited.

It was a little stressful to be away from Ellen and her dad while Jasper and I went off into the middle of nowhere with no phone or way to check back in on our family, but we figured if Ellen needed to reach us she could contact the tour company. I alluded to the family drama, and it was a culmination of events that was stressing us out as we approached Morocco: the attack at the Boston Marathon, homesickness, difficulty with homeschooling, being cooped up with little private time after 100 days at sea. Really, what we needed was to get off the ship and make it back in one piece. So, Ellen and I said a quick goodbye and she asked me to take it easy and be patient with Jasper.

Yeah, it was a bit of an unexpected twist to split up, but Jasper and I had a great time on the hiking trip. I’ll post pictures to help describe what we did and saw. For this particular trip, we caught the bus at our dock in Casablanca and didn’t actually get to see anything in Casablanca other than the train station. We rode first-class in a non air-conditioned compartment for a three-hour ride to Marrakech; a bit hot with the AC on the fritz, but I caught up on some sleep. Jasper and I got our room key and threw our bags into our double hotel room with a full bed, and he did what he always does in any hotel room–clicked on the tv and found a channel with cartoons.

We got to see some of Marrakech that afternoon, including a few mosques, a town square with a parade going on, and the medina. I was a little battle-scarred from haggling in Ghana and was expecting medina vendors to be difficult, but we looked without getting pestered or cornered. Jasper gets a little spooked by crowds, and I guess I do as well, but it was nice to wander around and look at the snake charmers, henna artists, and stalls at our own pace.

I liked seeing the medina in both daylight and night. Next up on the itinerary was dinner with a belly dancer at 8pm, and I got a snack before dinner and watched the sky go dark around the medina as I had some olives and bread. Dinner at the restaurant was passable but really not as tasty as the simple snack I had a few hours earlier, but it was fun to share the plates with the students at our round table. Jasper ate a little bread and that’s all. The restaurant was touristy with somewhat abrupt waiters and lots of French people at the other tables, but it was a blast hanging out in the lavish open courtyard, and then the belly dancer showed up.

Jasper about had a conniption when he saw the dancer pulling folks out to dance, so he hid under the table. She danced with a portly French or perhaps German tourist then two female students at the next table. Then she came over to our table and grabbed Michael’s hand and then my hand to lead us out to the courtyard. We did the bump and tried to mimic her moves, but mainly I was transfixed by her skimpy top straining to contain her buxomness. Awesome.

Next day we took a short ride to the hilly desert outside of Marrakech with our guides Hassan and Mohammed to drop us off for our hike. Jasper and I brought our backpacks and handed them to the mule drivers who put everyone’s bags on the backs of the animals, and we set off on our hike through dry riverbeds and through olive groves. The terrain was a beautiful mix of arid and green areas, and Moroccan farmers are incredibly skilled at irrigating fields with runoff from the snow-capped mountains far off in the distance. We had lunch in an olive grove–Jasper ate some bread–and then we reached our home for the evening a couple hours later.

The village was small with perhaps a dozen buildings including a few homes and barns. We stayed in a home with a courtyard and had a really tasty meal with bread, olives, and tagines.  Tagine is a Moroccan dish made in cone-capped ceramic pots that steam couscous, veggies, and meat. After dinner, we walked around a bit, played some games with the students (mafia, big booty, etc.), and set up our beds on the rooftop. I guess it’s a touristy thing to do, but I sure wanted to sleep under the stars, so I picked a spot and grabbed one of the taller mattress pads that Mohammed passed up to the rooftop from the courtyard below.

Well, I sort of slept. The donkeys brayed back and forth every 20 minutes or so, and then a loudspeaker blared out a call to prayer at 3:50am. Yep, I checked my watch.

Our hike the next morning was at 8am through another dry riverbed and up the mountainside. The terrain was loose and shale-strewn, and it was hot in the open hills. Once we got above 1500 meters, there were no trees, so it was hot and exposed. Lunch was in the last grove of pines that we reached, and we had an hour nap afterwards. I could get used to that. A couple more hours of hiking and we reached the second Berber village.

The second village was similar, and we stayed in another home with a courtyard. Dinner was fantastic, and I know I was starving after about 7 hours of hiking, but the chicken tagine and vegetables were beyond delicious. Accommodations were rough, and we had no running water. I didn’t mind, because the rooftop view was spectacular, stars were out, and no cars were in the village, no planes overhead, and the only traffic was goats and sheep being herded back to the barns. We got even less sleep this night because the donkeys were braying extra loud (I think there was some unrequited love between the donkeys separated and tied to short ropes), there were two calls to prayer, and the chickens and dogs got in on the symphony of noise.

Probably the most tired I’ve been at the end of a port, and I’ve been napping off-and-on since getting back aboard the ship. Ellen and her dad had some really nice day trips into Casablanca and Marrakech, and we’ve all caught up on our stories and pictures. Tonight is the Alumni Ball for everyone aboard the ship; it’s the last day of class, so everyone is an alum at this point. We passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and refueled yesterday, and we’re making the short trip slowly to Barcelona in two more days. I know I’m going to be sad when so many of the people that we know so well after out spring semester disembark, but we’ll be aboard another month and get to see lots of ports in Europe.

I’ll blog about Spain and points afterward starting in a few more days. Hope everyone at home is well and peaceful.