So I survived the three months of my surgery rotation only by imagining the promise of the San Juan Mountains in my future, and what a promise it was. Somehow all my wanderings around the Western U.S. had not taken me to them, and last week with trusty pal Dorothy I finally set off to correct this. Interestingly, my neglect of the San Juans and CO Rockies generally seems to be shared by my fellow Californians - we noticed a dearth of CA plates, but no shortage of TX, OK and KS.
The route, which was every bit as awesome as it looks:
(Geek point: to figure out the best trip, I prioritized what I wanted to
do, then used an online Traveling Salesman solver and added nodes
sequentially, seeing where there were significant jumps in travel time.
Not surprisingly, there was a jump in travel time for paying my respects to Caballo Blanco by going for a run in Gila Natl Forest or going to the Oklahoma Panhandle just because. I will definitely be planning future roadtrips this way.)
You will notice on that route a visit to Flagstaff, a cool town that people are unfortunately finally discovering; Wupatki Ruins (including the ball court and wind cave that I forgot about) and finally entered the Navajo Nation, which I seem unable to permanently escape. There we saw easily the most amazing rainbow of our lives. We stopped for the obligatory fry bread and passed through Monument Valley and Mexican Hat. Notes: don't eat fry bread with honey while driving. Monument Valley is oddly unsettling at dusk. Mexican Hat has a little restaurant (the Olde Bridge Grill) with great lamb dishes overlooking the San Juan River near the famous goosenecks. And finally: the Four Corners area does in fact close at night. But eff 'em because it's not really the Four Corners anyway.
Wupatki Ruins, north of Flagstaff.
A ball-court at Wupatki.
A double-rainbow in Navajo Nation.
We seemed to be driving into the base of it for 30 minutes.
I didn't ask what does it mean.
From there we passed through Cortez on the way to Durango. We decided not to go back to Mesa Verde and Hovenweep Natl Monument. Cool though they are, especially the coded steps, my travel companion told me that where she's from there are thousand-year-old dwellings all over the place so she wasn't so impressed anyway.
Durango bills itself as a Four Corners-area town but SW Colorado is the outgroup of the four states that come together in that region. Because it's higher it's greener; Durango just looks different. Once arriving in Durango we recognized that it apparently has a law that only awesome things are allowed to be there. The mountains and trails around it are of course spectacular, plus there are brewpubs and fun restaurants, plus there's a hiking train (!) plus just randomly one day there was a plane taking off with a glider in tow right next to town. Even the flea market is awesome (see the scorpion-lamp below):
Scorpion Lamp by Ron Howell. Check out bracelets, lamps and more here.
He's a cool guy and he only makes dragon and scorpion stuff. Ron doesn't screw around.
The only downside is that my Jeep Liberty kicked the bucket in February and there were a number of trails we couldn't get to without a 4WD. It's not like California dirt roads (i.e. getting to Holy Jim Falls and Santiago Peak in the Trabuco Unit of Cleveland NF) - when Coloradans say 4WD-only, they're serious. The first day: Engineer Peak, starting at Coal Bank Pass. Every day we got chased by thunder. In California we don't usually have this problem, but in Colorado every year people are killed by lightning. Lesson from this trip: when hiking Colorado peaks in the summer, start early. Early early early!
Famous image of a woman on a mountain observation deck.
Lightning struck within minutes of this picture being taken, badly injuring her. Don't put yourself in this position in CO in the summer, start early!
Post-glacial kettle-pond On the way to Engineer Peak.
A rock glacier on the north side of Engineer.
Landscape with sasquatch.
The area north of Durango, around Silverton where we did most of our San Juan explorage.
Afterward we headed into Silverton, a town which I absolutely fell in love with. Why am I so smitten by this struggling mining town full of eccentrics?
- It's full of eccentrics.
- At over 9,000', only Leadville is higher.
- It has its own 100 miler (the Hardrock 100), most recently won by Hal Koerner. (Go there for photos if for no other reason.)
- Of course it's surrounded by amazing hikes and climbs.
- As if to lure me in, the first business I walked into (an old Victorian Hotel) was showing Blade Runner, my favorite movie of all time. (Actually it kind of spooked me. Reminds me of that one bit from Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.)
- Finally, this tiny town has not one by two restaurants that serve Rocky Mountain Oysters. (More later.) One such establishment helped me trick my travel companion with a Jackalope, while serving us Durango Brewing Company's excellent blueberry beer. (Does anyone know where we can get this in CA?!?!)
Rocky Mountain Oysters, which we euphemistically called "nuts". Someone (not me) insisted on coming back a second night in a row for these, so delicious did she find them the first time -
which led to me on subsequent evenings to sleep uneasily in a protective position.
The next day, still in the San Juans, we headed up to Ice Lake, which may have been my favorite of the trip.
If you told me the world was created starting from this place, I might not be surprised.
It was during this hike that my companion advanced her controversial theory that people of Germanic descent enjoy and are better at trail-running and hiking in temperate or boreal forest because we are after all a post-glacial forest people. My counterargument to her: say no to drugs.
This fellow was insultingly relaxed.
As in, he actually relaxed at us seemingly to prove a point.
The lake was pretty cool, so we took some video, although we dared not dawdle due to the hail and thunder. Don't ask me what those people were doing camping up there.
We also took video of a less-relaxed marmot who lived by the lake and who was telling us what's what.
The next day we went up to Ouray (pronounced by locals "yeRAY" - people in Denver, take it up with them, not with me), where we hiked to the Bridge of Heaven. Not as high as the area around Silverton and a little drier - this was actually in Uncompahgre National Forest. Ouray is where much of the original True Grit was filmed. It was also the inspiration for Galt's Gulch in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, although there was no solid gold dollar sign hanging over the valley. (I did once see one near Cholame, CA once, but that's another story.) A great brewpub, real live cowboys, and of course more trails. Ouray seems to have developed better than Silverton.
I was sure glad to get above the gritty urban hustle and bustle of Ouray. (Above, lower right.)
The camera didn't believe how green these trees were.
I took a couple videos getting up near the top. When I was coming back down I decided to record a little bit of the run (sorry for the Blair Witch motion-sickness-prone among you). I had to stop and tie my shoe so as not to take the fast way back down to Ouray.
After we came back down we chillaxed by the car at the stream and looked at trees and clouds, after which time we headed up to Montrose.
Before leaving the San Juans, a geography note: Shotgun Peak in Rio Grande Natl Forest in the southeastern side of the San Juans looks very strange geologically. See all those valleys east-southeast of the msa? If you run across this article searching or by a news alert, and you have some clue, drop a comment - I'm curious as heck what's going on there.
Things change when you get north of Ridgway. You're out of the San Juans, and it gets very dry and flat and you feel like you're in New Mexico or Utah. Black Canyon of the Gunnison is there, and it is, as one hotelier put it, "Well...it's a big canyon." If you're in the area see it, but I wouldn't go out of my way.
It is at this point you will notice a dearth of (good quality) pictures - because Dorothy lost her phone at the Mt. Elbert Trailhead (if you see it email me! LOL!). The upside is that there are few pictures of me with a beard, which she made me grow. The only record is me at the summit, which a nice fellow on top took and sent to me.
So I've bagged the #1 and #2 peaks in the lower 48. SWEET. I also saw a pika during the climb, way above the tree or even the grass-line. We ended up racing back down as dark clouds gathered. Why? Thunder. Start early!
From there, we headed to Boulder to see friends Dave and Jacqui. It was really good to catch up with them (thanks guys) and good to experience some actual heat. On the way from Elbert to Boulder we realized we'd never hike all the NFs in Colorado. For that matter I still haven't been to Rocky Mountain Natl Park! But Dave took me on a nice run up the Flatirons right next to Boulder.
This is the knife that cut Joe Simpson's rope - i.e. the guy from Touching the Void.
In Neptune Mountaineering in Boulder.
From there, someone was too good to drive back to San Diego, so I took the Princess to DIA, leaving poor me all by my lonesome. Actually there was cool stuff on the way back. I finally got to drive up to Pike's Peak (wanted to see how the car did at 14,000'; would've run but no time); checked out the Garden of the Gods (red rocks below); and then drove the amazingly empty strentch of I-25 from the Springs to Santa Fe. There are two things out there, Jack and Sh*t, and a whole lot of 'em at that.
A special note on Santa Fe: what a cool little town. Again, somehow I'd passed by or quickly through this place in the past, in retrospect to my detriment. The old town and Plaza Mayor are gorgeous and Maria's New Mexico Kitchen is in the coolest little-big adobe with the tastiest food ever.
A church door in Santa Fe's old town.
It was damn hot south of Albuquerque even at night, so I shouldn't have been so surprised to see that sidewinder crawling across the highway in my headlights. Sorry guy.
At daybreak I got off the highway at Socorro to head over to the Very Large Array (VLA), a radiotelescope installation I've been obsessed with for a while. If you've seen Contact or 2010 or Terminator Salvation, you've seen the VLA.
This was a wall of post-it notes from visitors who wanted to leave messages for the astronomers who run the place. Below: this was my own helpful note, after having seen Terminator Salvation. But I think I was too late because the place was completely unmanned. I didn't see a single person the whole time I was there, even in the (open) visitor center.
Originally after the VLA I was going to head down to Gila NF to pay my respects to the late Caballo Blanco, but there had just been a fire there and it's out of the way anyway; I'll get there some other time. I'm not sad since I ended up being amazed by the greenness of western NM/eastern AZ at this time of year. This is probably the most surprised I've ever been by the way a part of the U.S. looks. They also have cool (weird) names for towns. Right after this one, I went through Omega also.
After that I paid a visit to the Mogollon Rim in Sitgreaves Natl Forest, Arizona. It was so green that there was a fern-filled valley in one place (sorry, no pics) and plenty of awesome trails; I got in one last run on my last day.
Above: the Mogollon Rim is that green stripe. It's the southwestern edge of the Colorado Plateau. The running was fantastic but pretty hot (90 F) even at 7500'; then again, let's not get carried away complaining since after all it was Arizona in August.
During the run I saw a fire starting on a distant peak, which by the time I was getting out of the Natl Forest toward Mesa had blossomed into a full-on fire. There was dry lightning all around.
The way back included normal Phoenix traffic, the endless emptiness of I-8 west of Phoenix, a sandstorm in Yuma, the fires in the mountains here, and almost hitting a flying owl on I-8. It was like a fantasy novel or something. I fought the demon horde, then crossed the Empty Quarter, survived the smothering sands, then braved the land of fire and darkness. One does not simply drive into Mordor.)
Yuma. It might actually look better when you can't see it.
Imagine all that grit in your teeth, which is what happens when you have to get out to pump gas.
Coming up the east side of the Peninsular Range on I-8. The fires to the left (from my vantage point, south in the range, in Mexico) were much bigger than what remained of the San Diego County fires at that point, although they were less reported here. The sunset they produced was spectacular.
This trip was a blast and was exactly what I needed to unwind after surgery. Thanks to Dave and Jacqui for putting us up/putting up with us on Friday night, Jason for hiking tips, and Dorothy for being the best road trip buddy EVAR!
[Added later for your enjoyment if you travel in the area as well as my own later consultation:
tl;dr, Fine, go to the post with just the best photos, or page down to the pictures of Ait Ben Haddou, the desert city on the side of the mountain. For the Canary Islands part of the trip go here; for the England part of the trip, go here. Go here for some humorous geology of Morocco and Pennsylvania.
Note that I consider Ait Ben Haddou to be the Leesport of Morocco.
Above: satellite map of Morocco, from Google Maps. Below: linguistic map of Morocco, from Wiki.
We went to Marrakech, in the south. Northern Morocco is greener and has more cities, closer together (Casablanca, Rabat, Fez and Meknes are mostly a few hours from each other.) One central European traveler even commented that he was annoyed by how similar the Middle Atlas seemed to the Alps. We wanted to experience the most Moroccan Morocco, so we went to Marrakech. And if I'm finally going to get a point for Africa (my sixth continent) and a Muslim country, it better not be like the Alps.
Morocco kind of strikes me as the California of the Muslim world - Maghreb literally means the West - in the sense that, out there on the western edge, they've kind of always culturally done their own thing (example: how many Muslim countries have their own wine-making tradition?), although this is also likely because the people and culture are an interesting mix of Arab, Berber, and even West African and European. Viewing the map above, you can see that as in many other other parts of the world, the earlier inhabitants (Berbers) got pushed into the mountains and deserts by the more aggressive latecomers. Morocco is an "associate" of the EU (not sure what that means), a member of the Arab League, but not OPEC - because they don't have any oil. And, trivia point, Morocco was the first country to recognize the independent United States.
I'd be lying if I said we enjoyed Morocco. I hate to say that because their economy is growing and their government seems to be making a lot of changes that are moving the country in the right direction. The highlights for me were seeing the Atlas up close, but even that is tempered by developing-world frustrations, and if you're interested you can read about that more at the bottom of the post. Visiting a Muslim country, visiting Africa, and running in the "Sahara" are all bucket-list points but in their concrete instantiation, at times not much fun. At least I was able to read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin while I was there. And acknowledgement to Rebecca M. for helping with suggestions for Marrakech!
PRACTICAL TIPS: If you stay in Marrakech I recommend the area south of the Tomb of the Saads, around Rue de la Kasbah. More locals, less intense harrassment by merchants, and generally less dirty and seedy than much of the rest of the city. People really do try to rip you off constantly, including (in one case) taxi drivers taking you to the hospital. We almost always got a reasonable price for physical goods by walking away (sometimes repeatedly) and then restarting negotiations with the merchant based on the much lower price he shouted in desperation when trying to get us to come back.
MARRAKECH
The Medina
If you haven't been to an old Middle Eastern city, you're imagining a maze-like assemblage of gradually narrowing alleys, with merchants hawking exotic spices and carpets, in places opening onto great squares where you can sit out of the sun, drinking your mint tea, to watch the snake charmers and citrus sellers while the criers call you to prayer - and Marrakech definitely is that. I'd never seen pure indigo, and they now produce hash-bricks of menthol from eucalpytus trees (one whiff of that will wake you up). These were the moments that reminded us we really had arrived somewhere different.
Evening call to prayer:
Above: a mosque near our riad (guest house). Below: a furry merchant.
But the constant clamor for your tourist dollars, not to mention the constant flight of loud fuming mopeds down these alleys (that are often about the size of office hallways) very quickly got to be a bit much, and lost their charm quickly. In particular if I never see argan in any form ever again, I won't be sad. (As for the taste - it's alright. Halfway between sesame and peanut.) I started to associate the medina shops with those boardwalk shops at the seashore. Walk a mile and you feel like you see the same store and the same five items over and over again. A frequent topic of conversation was the comparison to Mexico, specifically Baja - although there, at least you can still get a drink.
You want to see pictures of the snake charmers, right? Above, you can see the guy just you know kind of casually holding a cobra in his hand, and below you can see it coiled on the ground with its head raised. I don't have good photos because I didn't want to get too close to the cobras for any length of time, or to the snake charmers who would demand my money (one saw me fiddling with my phone and when I turned to leave, actually grabbed my arm to get me to pay up. Normal merchant behavior in Marrakech.) I should mention that normally I make fun of my wife's fear of snakes but the cobras in the Medina a) aren't even in baskets like in cartoons, they're just sitting out in the open on a blanket, b) the flutes appear to have no effect on their behavior at all, and c) apparently the cobras do bite and kill people occasionally. There are captive macaque monkeys too, which look absolutely miserable and made me really sad.
Above: Jem El Fnaa Square, the largest souk at the center of the Medina. Below: a sign with Arabic, French and Berber.
The old city is surrounded by a thousand-year-old wall with multiple gates (bab). In the bad old days, shortly before the last call to prayer at nine o' clock, the gates would close, and if you were out in the desert you would have to take your chances until morning with the bandits and other unsavory fellows those walls were built to keep out. Now the gates are used for traffic (amazingly, as they don't seem physically wide enough for cars.) Our riad was right on the city wall, and we could look down on the nearby gate (Bab Ksiba) or back over the sea of roofs behind us, watching the many roof cats in the moonlight, who often treated us to their screeching battles at three a.m. I wonder if the roof cats of Marrakech will speciate from from the alley cats due to reproductive isolation. You can submit your ideas on the adaptations of roof cats.
The old mosque right outside the city wall. The rows of stones are the remnants of the inside of an old mosque that was destroyed.
Funny stories: my wife is a tough bargainer. This appeared to bother some of the shop merchants, one of whom informed me, "She very strong. Very strong." Also when walking by myself, it was between 3 and 10 minutes before I was approached about buying hash. I started responding by pretending to be a dumb tourist and saying loudly and slowly, "YOU? *YOU* want to sell hash?" Then he gets shifty and says "No, I just-" (but now I'm pointing at him) "That's great! You, YOU are selling hash! You sell hash!" Other endearments to the locals included talking to them in Japanese to confuse them, which I did cheerfully and often. Another approach: at one point someone was following my wife cycling through greetings in every language and she ignored him; when he finally said in frustration "What language you speak?" she said "I speak the language of go the fuck away and leave me alone." He did. So what I'm saying is we made a lot of friends.
Above: a medina alley at night, with mystery! and peril! Below, observing commoners in the spice market.
One thing that did interest me is the broad range of appearances of Moroccan people. It really is at the boundary between "white" and "black", with every skin tone and facial feature in between. I'm always fascinated with these boundary zones, with humans (the gradual shift from South Asian to East Asian as you ascend the Himalayan foothills in Nepal) or with nature (the abrupt Pacific northwest forest to Western prairie transition south of Liberty, Washington). There's been a lot of movement around Morocco so I observed no obvious geographic pattern. The other striking thing was that people don't seem to react differently to each other based on these features either.
Below: the view from our alley. Note the loudspeaker near the top of the mosque that's used for the call to prayer.
Below, a typical morning at Bab Ksiba.
I found the construction of the buildings interesting. Years ago I think most buildings would have been made from adobe covered with stucco. The newer buildings are made of very thick concrete (1-2 feet) with stucco on the outside. This means that instead of furniture for holding books, candles, etc., you can just use the deep recesses built into the walls. More importantly, this thick concrete doesn't heat up very much during the day, and the interiors (2-3 stories) are open with a roll-back roof that is usually kept open, so the interior is passively cooled by 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit. In April it maybe got to 90 F one day and it still stayed reasonably cool inside, but in July, this probably wouldn't be enough.
One problem: in Marrakech you will often find that your riad is an M.C. Escher drawing, as you can see below. The difficulty of obtaining alcohol is perhaps a benefit in this regard, as I'm not sure I could navigate the fourth dimension to get to my room when intoxicated. The next five pictures are from the interior of the riads where we stayed; the first picture is from inside the riad (although from the openness, it looks like this might have been taken from outside.)
You want some more call to prayer? Neither did we, but here it is anyway.
Below: the view from the roof. That's smog, not storm clouds; the smog would noticeably gather during the course of each day, and when we returned from the Atlas in the late afternoon our driver pointed it out. This city has 1/10th the people of Los Angeles County. Emissions laws work.
Above: somehow when you see signs directing you to nearby cities, that always makes your location seem...more real, by reinforcing your context in a network. Below: the tomb of the Saads, the last royal lineage before the current royal family, which took over in the 1600s. Most of the time their grounds would have been razed by the new kings, but this was hidden and only rediscovered in the 20th century. There are differently marked tombs inside for Christians and Jews.
Below: cool robots at an art gallery near the tomb.
Next three pictures below: I noticed a lot of figures in wood in stone in Morocco with six-sided symmetry. These were old doors and window shutters from our second riad. These really remind me of hex signs on barns in Pennsylvania Dutch country. I have a pet theory about these symbols. When Spain unified they got very serious about converting or kicking out Muslims and Jews. Of course, even after the Spanish Jews converted (the conversos), Spaniards decided that wasn't good enough and got angry with them for trying to hide. (!) So people said enough of this, and went to Morocco, which until very recently had a big Jewish community (for a Muslim country). There were also converso families who left Spain for Mexico, and whose only links to the old religion are traditional first names like Rebecca or Abraham. Similarly, I've often wondered if Amish and Mennonites are really German conversos, late converts to Christianity under the guise of these odd new Protestant sects, and preserved some semblance of the old traditions by carving six-sided symbols. A project for another time!
The houses in the medina do definitely have a lot of cool doors, some of which an impressionable mind might take to be Doors to Hell. Certainly Marrakech is in a better position to make such a claim than say, York, Pennsylvania.
The next five are from the Tomb of the Saads.
Above: the Tomb of the Saads installed solar panels in the last year, and it shows you how much energy it's generating in real time.
As for the food: We got tired of tagine after about two days. I like tagine. It's fine. But I've had my fill for about the next century. Whether tagine really does showcase all of Moroccan cuisine, it was all the Moroccan cuisine you could get in restaurants in Marrakech. I had camel meat for the first time and pigeon bstila - yes, it does taste different with pigeon. I also had Moroccan wine, a red, which was fine, like a pinot noir without the unctuousness.
Obligatory food pictures. Above, mint tea, which I actually like. Below: I forget, but at least it wasn't tagine. You get served a lot of bread, which isn't bad, but between that and the sweet mint tea Moroccan food becomes surprisingly carb-heavy.
I think I actually found Marrakech's business district (above) more interesting than the Medina, as this is how more people live in Marrakech. We really enjoyed Al Fassia (where we had pigeon pie.) We saw a Chinese place but I couldn't convince the wife to try it. Video above is from a Thursday night, which I'm assuming is their busiest night as Friday is the day of worship so people have off from work. Very few headscarves visible there. Starbucks and the adjacent mall were overloaded.
THE HIGH ATLAS
Geology nerd alert: I was previously shocked to learn that there was igneous rock in southeast Pennsylvania, left over from the volcanic activity at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary that immediately preceded the opening of the Atlantic. That is to say, the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. was right up against North Africa at that time, and then the Atlantic started spreading apart. That means the land which is now New Jersey didn't have coastline, but rather was between Pennsylvania and Morocco - and that Morocco hosted the same volcanoes, the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province. The High Atlas are much newer as you can guess by their steepness, but still have plenty of igneous rock, which I collected. And now after two hundred million years I've reunited these long-lost cousins, who may have faced each other on opposite slopes just a few miles apart.
Western Atlas. I knew they would still be snowy but didn't expect them to be this lushly green, even more so than the mountains of coastal Southern California. The first hour or so of the drive from Marrakech continued the impression that we were in an Arabic-speaking Baja. The transition from greenery to desert is more dramatic even than Southern California, and it reminded me of the drier parts of the Mojave. Our trip was quite limited by illness, so we didn't want to go very far from medical care. The roads were often very bumpy though the High Atlas are steep, and building a road over them requires some real engineering.
Above and below, same village. Didn't have time to hike over to it as it was just a 20-minute rest stop on our bus to Ouarzazate.
Above: many parts of the Atlas reminded us of various areas of the American West. Below: my Ayn Rand tribute; i.e., an Atlas Shrug. ZING HEY-O
Eastern Atlas, in the lee of the coastal winds (therefore drier). Again this aspect reminded us of Southern California's coastal mountains. Of note, on the way back, I crossed the road at a bathroom break in the Atlas to see the sparse pine and rocks on the other side, and immediately five snarling dogs charged me. I have no idea where they came from. They must have formed out of the dirt.
Above: view from the deck of an eerily-isolated argan oil shop and bar. Below: cute and wholesome though this nursing doggy seems, I fully believe that she is no less than the producer of the vicious curs across the road that sought to rend my flesh.
Below: the High Atlas are steep and the road through them was quite ridiculous at times. There is a famous curvy road in Dades Gorge deeper into the Sahara that until this point I was actually a little disappointed I wasn't going to get to see. This soon changed to disappointment that I would have to come back on this road to Marrakech.
THE SAHARA
On the other side of the Atlas, where the Sahara begins, are several towns apparently named by sneezing people. (It's very dusty in the desert.) Of note, we had a turkey dish in Ait Ben Haddou, so I am glad this wonder-meat (the salmon of the poultry world) is being adopted by cuisines elsewhere.
Ait Ben Haddou:You thought it was only legend, my friend, but the Leesport of Morocco is very real. This very photogenic Berber castle town was built in a thousand years ago by a Berber warlord. It's interesting to compare to the southwest Puebloan mesa-top or cliff-side villages like Bandolier, or Mesa Verde, or Chaco Canyon. While it wouldn't be as difficult to enter with an army, it would be difficult to ascend through the village and the internal defenses would be more formidable. The guide hadn't heard of coded steps. Much to our chagrin, we were not the first intrepid outsiders to discover this place, as it has been used by movies like Lawrence of Arabia, Oliver Stone's Alexander the Great, and the Gladiator. There's an ongoing film industry presence there and in nearby Ouarzazate. Consequently, after traveling from California to the Sahara and finding yet another movie set, one begins to feel a sense of derealization, that nothing in the world is ever more than a backdrop. Even most of the local people giving the tours were aspiring actors. In Hong Kong, with its mile-long outdoor escalators and your financial status as your point tally, everything feels like you're inside a video game. In Ait Ben Haddou, an ancient desert city that has become even more itself to be an ancient desert city for movies, the world begins to feel like Umberto Eco's hyper-reality has eaten everything.
Above: we've crossed the river. Below: beyond the river, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
Above: reed roof construction. Below: ascending the carved out stairs of the city.
Above: view from the observation tower at the top. It might be difficult to approach in stealth by day. Below: view of the town, and more sands.
Ouarzazate: instead of going all the way out to Merzouga or Zagora where the ergs (dunes) begin, far from medical care, and riding camels and sleeping in tents, we decided to stay in Ouarzazate. If we want dunes we could go to Pismo Beach or Algodones back home in California, and sleeping in tents is over-rated. When we told the guides we were staying in Ouarzazate, they said there was nothing there. We objected that the Sahara seemed to also be nothing. They clarified that it was a type of nothing that they can charge for. (It turns out that the Marathon des Sables, a desert ultramarathon that I had once half-seriously considered attempting, takes place in the Sahara outside of Ourzazate and had just started the weekend before.) The inertia we slipped into there reminded me of the restless vacuum that J.G. Ballard's characters seek and endure in his creation of Vermillion Sands, except for the part where you're comfortable. The town does have some more nicely developed areas, as a result of the Western money associated with the film industry and the trendy attention it has been paid recently, as the king enjoys visiting. I asked around for where I could get a camel ride and everyone acted as if I was asking for a rocket to Mars, and said I would have to go to Merzouga or Zagora. From the people we talked to later who took the full tour, we learned that it had been (surprise!) a badly accommodated, poorly organized, hectic experience.
The old fortress in Ourzazate. You can see the mud and concrete layers. Ouarzazate is the kind of place that makes mud and concrete seem interesting. Below is an awesome ceiling.
Above: downtown Ouarzazate. Below: another neat ceiling.
Above: old meets new. Below: the back of the fortress area.
Above: another awesome ceiling. Below: Libya's gas station chain, which doesn't have Hohos or Diet Mountain Dew, so why bother. Price works out to about US$4/gallon, which is actually a bit more than it had been in Spain.
I had my chance to go running "in the Sahara". There were many more European than American tourists in Morocco, and the desert fascinates them much more. When they want "desert", they mean ergs, but I was fine with this. It struck me that the Sahara is so huge as to be almost abstract. In the U.S. or even Australia we would call it by multiple different names. I ran to the edge of town just to be in it, even though there was still evidence of habitation. I did not take thumpers with me.
Above and below: the very edge of the human world. Next time someone tells you about the anthropic principle, remind them of the huge uninhabitable areas even on the one planet where we know we can survive at all. There was a small creek that was keeping that stretch green. You might imagine (as I did) that where water is such a precious resource, people would treat it as sacred, but there was quite a bit of trash and broken beer bottles on the side closer to town.
Above: I have run out of Ozymandias references, clever or otherwise. Below: the Film Institute.
During my run out to the desert, I saw a few cars sitting along the road that looked like they'd made the off-road run across the Sahara, a desperate, dangerous and unpleasant trip if ever there was one, and didn't feel that I had missed anything. It did become apparent that a very un-Sahara thing to do was just march out a mile into the ergs, sleep there overnight and then come back. (Like going to a beach in the Northeast after Labor Day, but dumber.) The Sahara is a worthless place, and if you live in or near it, the best approach is to avoid exposure to it as much as a possible.
A Ourzazate story illustrating something of the Moroccan character (and my wife's):
We were waiting for the bus that would take us from Ouarzazate back across the Atlas to Marrakech. My wife went to a restaurant across the street and told a waiter that she needed food to go in less than 20 minutes, because her bus was leaving. They assured her it would be ready. (Rookie mistake in developing world travel. She should know better. I wasn't there when she ordered or I could have told her the promise meant nothing.) Of course it wasn't ready then and I started shouting across the street that the bus was leaving. The restaurant informed her that they still had to put the cheese on and couldn't understand that she considered missing her bus and having to live in Ouarzazate as a bigger problem than taking her order without cheese. She ended up physically forcing her way into the kitchen, shoving the cook out of the way, taking the food out of the frying pan and throwing money over her shoulder as she left. She's a peacemaker.
OURIKA
Ourika is a Berber town in a valley of the western High Atlas, not quite an hour drive from Marrakech. The written language (seen in a photo above) is based on Tuareg; these are the people that Frank Herbert based the Fremen on (Tuareg actually means "free men".) There doesn't seem to be a sharp ethnic line between Berber and not Berber, and it seems to come down to some combination of whether you speak Berber, are rural, and want to be defined as Berber. Probably some good trail running in Ourika; I didn't get the chance to (if you want to read some grade-A kvetching about this, read to the end.) There are also macaque monkeys there like the ones we saw in China (scroll down here for the photos, you can't miss them) but none were present that day. Overall, imagine "hiking" through a mall selling Third-World goods that happens to be located on a wooded hillside. Many of the trees look like quaking aspens but I think they're actually poplars. Cactus is a New World plant but you may already have noticed how widespread it's become in Morocco.
Best of all, I finally rode a camel. Even if it wasn't in the Sahara.
Above: snowy Atlas in back. People wait tables by carrying trays of food across those bridges. Below, ovens like the ones used in the American Southwest.
Above and below: some of the bridges aren't so much to look at.
Above and below: views from the head of the valley. We could be in Los Padres National Forest.
Above and below: the area around the falls. Very crowded. You can see the irrigation structure below.
Above: hard times have befallen the Jedi Academy if Obi Wan begging is any indication. Below: lunch by the river. Had a very nice time talking to a Danish furniture designer. I had kefta, basically meatballs and rice, which was the most un-tagine-like thing you could get.
Why did we hate Morocco so much?
We were quite happy to leave when the time came. Below is your handsome blogger, celebrating with a pre-9am beer. (Pennsylvanians - I couldn't even do that in PA! Creeping Shari'ah law!) Somehow Allah didn't stop me. Maybe he likes beer. (Wait, is that offensive? I guess this seeming paradox could also be solved by Allah not existing. ZING! HEY-O!) The Ryanair flight to Stansted was not as nightmarish as the one I reported previously. We then had another day in London, with pitchers you can see here.
Morocco is certainly not the worst developing country you'll ever visit - certainly not nearly the worst I've visited - and is even pretty laid back as Muslim countries go. It also has a pretty reasonable king who's shown that he's serious about extending women's rights (reformed divorce laws), and incorporating minorities into greater Morocco (making Berber a co-official language), and developing clean energy.
I've had my share of annoyances with developing world travel before, although never to an extent where it ouweighed the positives of the trip, and I think the reason for that is not about Morocco, it's about changes in me. First, when you get old and established professionally and otherwise, you get used to things. For example, I expect a working shower and you don't gain any life wisdom from enduring poor pressure or unpredictable temperature. I expect public safety. I expect things to be ready when people say they will be. (Of course this whole list could be summarized as "don't go to the developing world".) Second, it's very different traveling with my (sick) wife than alone or with male friends, in the sense that "roughing it" isn't fun. I want my wife to be happy and she's by no means a delicate flower, but when your wife complains about something, you want to fix it. In the past when I traveled with male friends, when they complained about something, you insult them for being weak, punch them, and carry on as before (or, he does it to you). Third, you get jaded. My wife and I have both seen a lot. She's been to every continent, and as of this trip, so have I except Antarctica. This does have an effect. For instance, we were really underwhelmed by the Sahara, because "we've seen deserts before". This is true, we have, and this wasn't the best. We tried not to be too cool for school because we were just robbing ourselves of a positive experience, but in the end we couldn't help it.
Finally, I have some very first-world hobbies, especially trail-running, and the spontaneity I'm used to in that and other pursuits is only allowed by the extensive First World infrastructure to which I'm accustomed (and thankful for.) Consider: I can suddenly decide I want to check out a new trail. I live in a country with clearly defined, well-maintained conserved public spaces. After less than an hour of reading (in my own language, on a good internet connection) I can not only find descriptions of trails (length, elevation, views) I can find directions on how to get there. I might even see discussions from local outdoorsy types about recent conditions; there might even be trail cameras for weather at higher elevations. I drive to the trailhead, on clearly marked roads with safe drivers. The trailhead too is clearly marked as being part of public land. Lastly, while I might worry about dangerous wildlife, the behavior of local people is nowhere among my concerns when I embark on my run.
Contrast with the developing world. First, it is possible that there are no parks or public trails; or, if there are, the people who live near them either don't even know that this area is supposed to be open to the public; or they do, but the boundaries are very fuzzy, and/or the locals consider it their family or tribe's traditional land, and they don't much like the government, so they don't care and they still consider you a trespasser; or even if they bear no ill will toward you, they still think it's stupid to waste all these trees and game animals as a "park" in a country where people need to eat, so they might be out rifle hunting when you're running through. If there is a park, good luck finding a trail map! And forget any description of trails and directions to trailheads online (even if you find those, if you don't speak the local language, you're still out of luck). So maybe you go to a local guide, which is now costing you extra money and starting to feel not fun or spontaneous. Trail runners and hikers are notorious for spending no money so local guides don't often waste their time with us - or, they tell you "yes yes of course I take you a trail" when really they mean "I take you to my brother-in-law's restaurant which has some trees around it and you can walk up the hill a hundred yards before dinner". Assuming you actually get to a trail, roads might be blocked due to a rock slide from three years ago, and the trail network may be very poorly marked. And of course in addition to people living inside the park who consider you to be trespassing anyway, there may be bandits waiting for idiots like you to come along so they can relieve you of your passport, etc. (For example, the forested volcanoes around San Salvador look awesome and do indeed have lots of trails, but I was warned repeatedly that if I ran on them I would 100% be robbed.) If you're female, you may have even scarier concerns. And if you do manage to get to a trail, you likely have to schedule out a day or two, with extensive preparation ahead of time, reserving guides who you hope actually show up, etc.
The one "hike" I went on in the Atlas was basically a very slow 60 minute walk through a hundred stores up on the hill, selling the same crap you can buy in markets in Marrakech. I'm sure there are better hikes to take, but as a non-Arabic speaking tourist I had absolutely no reliable way to figure out which is which or get there. On my vacation, I was literally fantasizing about running on the deserted Sierra trails near my house after I got home. (Having now done this and refreshed my memory, I can confirm they are better.) I guess the best vacation is the one you're glad to return from.
Solvitur ambulando! Note the thick brow-ridge and the death-grip on the beverage. You can email this handsome devil at mdcblogs@gmail.com. "[If you are depressed] go for a long walk...and if still depressed, then walk again." -Hippocrates ca. 410 BCE
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