dipping our toes into the Moroccan Sahara: day 1

 This map is to remind us all just how big the Sahara is.  It should inspire awe.



We were told that almost all of the trade between Europe and sub-Saharan African passed through the desert by caravan and then by ships at the port of Essaouira.  The border between Morocco and Algeria has been closed since 1972 though, so there are no more caravans on the old routes.

We took a long nauseating bus ride across the Atlas Mountains and arrived late at night in the village where the road ends, called M'hamid.  The next day we walked down the only street in town (practically) and let people propose outings to us for the second day.  After deciding on a guide, we suited up …



… and walked out of town into some small dunes …



… where we played in the sand …



… and took lots of pictures.



We wandered around within sight of the radio towers of the town.  There were lots of dunes and rocks and palm trees.  There were also a few camels and a bit of shade. 



We walked back to the edges of town.  There is less water than there used to be so the population of the town has shrunk and there were lots of houses being reclaimed by the desert at the edge of town.  We walked back to these …



… and watched the sun set.

flirting with Christmas in the airport

At the moment, we’re in the Madrid airport, on our way between Casablanca and Tel Aviv.  After one month in Tunisia and Morocco and two weeks in Hungary, Romania and Turkey, Spain (or at least this airport) feels positively cozy and familiar.  For one thing, it’s Christmastime here.  For another, we can read a bit of Spanish and muddle our way through, for example, a McDonald’s order.  Needless to say, Hungarian and Arabic were not so easy to manage. 

We've been flying between the last few countries and I’ve learned to abandon all of my expectations for airport procedure. 

On Air France, I spent about 5 minutes waiting to pass the beverage cart on my way back from the bathroom before one of the flight attendants invited me to simply pass by the cart.  My mind was blown by the forethought of making the cart sufficiently more narrow than the aisle.

Between Istanbul and Tunis we stopped in Marseille and currently we have a layover in Spain.  In both cases, we were surprised that we had to go through customs to enter and then immediately leave the European country.  Hooray for more passport stamps!

As we’ve used up all of our permitted 90 days in the Schengen zone, we were a little nervous.  Luckily, in France the agent didn’t look at any dates of entry and exit and here in Spain he didn’t even look at the picture page of the passport.  If one were brave, it would be possible to stay in Europe much longer than allowed.  But I’m not brave like that.  

Speaking of passport stamps, it seems that in Arabic speaking countries they can’t resist stamping on the first blank page they find at the end of the booklet, so things are quite out of order :)  I expect Israel will be the same.

Early on the morning we left Tunisia, a Tunisian Air plane was held up at gunpoint on the runway in Libya.  Therefore security was high and we had to shuffle along in a huge line to go through scanners with all of our luggage at the very entrance of the airport (Swiss Army knife and all).  In Marseille we went through security at a similarly unexpected point and then again, just outside our gate.  For us this meant guzzling the contents of the water bottles and then boarding the plain with full bladders and empty bottles (the horror!).

Oh and Air France gave us a delicious meal, the dears.

don’t forget to pack a recipe

 

If, when you travel, you are lucky enough to stay with people, it is essential that you bring ideas for what to cook them.  So far we have had three people say, “How about you cook us a typical American meal?”

We do cook at home, but I’m still quite self conscious about cooking for people other than Jack and myself.  To add to my general anxiety there is the challenge of making something representative of a culinary melting pot.  Also, it must be made with seasonally and geographically available ingredients, in someone else’s kitchen, usually without access to the internet, meaning no recipes I’ve emailed to myself and nothing from recipes.com.

In Corsica, we made steak, mashed potatoes, cucumber salad and our old standby - waldorf salad.  In Vienna we made stir-fried cauliflower and tofu and a a cabbage-apple-cashew-lemon salad we like.  A few days ago in Morocco we made beef stew with cabbage, carrots, onions and potatoes, baked apples and …. a waldorf salad with guava standing in for grapes.  It always feels like we’re winging it but so far it has gone okay.  I do with I had a recipe for snicker doodles or something though.

BELOW: A tall guy cooking in a short kitchen in Morocco

BELOW: It rained about 10 days before our visit to the Sahara, so we got to sample a desert green called something like roquette.  It tastes similar to arugula.

I checked some stores and then read wikipedia to confirm that kale doesn’t exist in Europe (or North Africa).  Their loss!   On the other hand we’ve had about five new kinds of guava, several kinds of greens and some delicious kumquats, which I don’t think I’d ever eaten.  Also, in Italy we ate several varieties of eggplant, I’d never seen, including white ones.

BELOW: a raspberry guava or possibly a cherry guava

all good but no email

We are at our Moroccan wwoof farm which is great but we will not have email until about the 21st so do not expect any news or replies for a while.

Happy Birthday to Janet and Kirk!

Cari and Jack

sweet sweet orange juice

 

One of the many delights of our week in Tunisia was the mandarin (and lemon and orange) trees in the backyard.  We made juice.

And then we drank it.

thanks yous

 

A big thank you to:

• Claude and Michel in beautiful Clermont-Ferrand
• Reni, Wolfi, Raphi and Helene for their hospitality in Vienna.  Thanks to Raphi for his bed!
• Peggy for a lovely lunch and tour in Istanbul.
• Burak for a night of dinner and dancing in Istanbul :)
• Thalia and Rick for a relaxing and fun week in Carthage

Seeing familiar faces along the way really, really refreshes us!  We also appreciated washing our clothes in a machine :)

Also, it’s been a few weeks since we sent out the last of our wedding thank you postcards in Hungary.  If you didn’t get one, please accept our sincere thanks and know that we did write to you!

superficial observations on Morocco

 

It is quite noticeable that people spend a lot more time with people of their own gender here.  Italy and Tunisia were the same way.  In our lives and I think the US in general, we spend most of our time with our partners.  I’ve read that people soak up more happiness through same-sex friendships than from romantic partners so maybe they’re on to something.

That said, Jack and I have now spent about 110 days together, where we’ve only been apart for four meals.  It’s great.

 

Most women wear headscarves here.  In Marrakech, it was nearly 100% but in Casablanca and Rabat, it is about half.  Only a handful cover their faces.  The most surprising thing I’ve seen is a few young girls (I mean around 7 or 8, clearly prepubescent) wearing head scarves.  Personally, I’m all set with long sleeve shirts, but I did take a bike ride in Carthage (Tunisia, not Morocco) in shorts and I felt fairly uncomfortable.

I’ve seen more dwarves in the past two weeks than in the rest of my life.

Most men, outside of Rabat and Casablanca, wear long cloaks with pointy hoods. 

Donkeys are not out of date.  Outside of the cities, the country seems to run on donkeys.  They are adorable.

Buildings in the medinas (old cities) are quite different.  The ones we’ve seen have been built around a courtyard, often several stories high with a partially open roof.  I guess this helps in hot weather.  Many rooms don’t have windows out, but do have windows in to the courtyard.  This is where we stayed in Essaouira.  To get to it you walked down winding little streets that were too narrow for a car.

We’ve been to several coastal cities now, and seen several restaurants where you pick out a fresh fish and they cook it for you on the spot.  We went to one in Tunisia and while it’s nice to eat such fresh food, we are not well practiced at eating around the bones…

As in most of the world, I suspect, babies and toddlers are strapped to women’s backs.  Strollers are rare.

If you have a truck, particularly a semi truck, the thing to do is to decorate it in bright colors.

I love mint tea, but I’ve been disappointed by it here.  Usually it is about half sugar and half tea and while it tastes good, drinking tea with someone whose teeth are visibly rotting out of his mouth is depressing.  Without the sugar it is undrinkably bitter, unlike what we buy in bags at home.  Too bad.

I think on the day of our outing in the Sahara we had mint tea five times and we skipped out on breakfast, which would have included tea as well.

Istanbul, Tunis and Rabat (Morocco) all have pretty light decorations strung up above popular pedestrian streets.  If I didn’t know better, I’d say there were Christmas decorations…

I thought Boston was bad about street sings, but that was before Morocco.  If a sign is present, half the time it is only in Arabic and if you’re lucky enough to have a Latin script label, it won’t necessarily correspond to your map, especially in Casablanca, where there’s a campaign to replace names of French origin with names of Arabic origin.

Lastly, I’m pretty sure hashish is an Arabic word and they sell all kinds of it in Essaouira.  It’s not my cup of tea, but I did appreciate the laid back atmosphere of the place.

paying for stuff: logistics

Visa is Decidedly NOT Everywhere We Are
For the last month, we’ve had the pleasure, read pain, of paying for almost everything in cash.
Most merchants and many hotels only take cash, which is okay if you can plan ahead.  The disturbing thing is the places that accept credit cards, but not American cards.  It was not possible to use a card to buy a train or subway ticket in France, Italy or Austria and in Romania our cards did not work anywhere, including the large grocery store and large electronics store we went to.

	Success rate with our Mastercard debit and Visa credit cards
Iceland	Merchants were happy to accept cards, even for small amounts and retry the card, if necessary.
France	Nothing worked in train ticket machines.  The train ticket counter accepted the debit card (sometimes after multiple attempts) and rarely accepted the credit card card.
Italy	Cards worked except for the train ticket machines.
Austria	Cards worked except for the train and subway ticket machines.
Hungary	all cash
Romania	Nothing worked but the cash machine, thankfully
Turkey	Visa worked at the hotel, else all cash.
Tunisia	all cash
Morocco	One of four hotels accepted the card, else all cash.

Because of the mixed success (inconsistent failures) of using the cards in France we actually got replacement cards, thinking that it was the combination of our old (worn out…) cards and less sensitive reader machines.  The new cards made no difference though. 

American cards have a magnetic strip and European cards have … some kind of chip.
As train tickets for two are often over 100 Euro, this can be a pain.  Near Nice we had to buy a ticket at a small station that had no ticket agent and a machine which wouldn’t accept our bills.  Fortunately some nice Germans bought our ticket and let us pay them back.

Exact Change is Annoying

The other thing we’ve found is that starting in Tunisia (actually in Corsica also), people don’t have enough money to give you change.  When all your money comes out of the ATM in relatively large denominations, it is really hard to pay for small things, and most of what we buy other than hotels and bus tickets is cheap.  Several times we’ve walked around, with our wallets full but the sense that we might as well be penniless for all of our purchasing power.

Currencies

We brought some American 20’s which we’ve used only to buy our entry visas for Turkey, where the price for Americans was actually in USD.  Otherwise we have taken all of our money from ATMs, without exchanging any currency.

We looked into the cards which advertise a lack of foreign transaction fees, but decided they were not worthwhile.  Our bank charges us only the 1% foreign transaction fee that Visa and Mastercard charge and because the ATMs don’t have a per-usage fee it’s actually less annoying than paying a few bucks to get out money in the US because any ATM will work.

Arriving by train in Budapest in the dark, it was hard to find an ATM, but otherwise they have been plentiful.
In Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco people are more than happy to take Euro, and it might have been nice to keep some for this purpose, but we didn't.

Oh and no one uses traveler's checks anymore.

Jack under attack

 

The thing about old buildings is that they have short doors.  Jack keeps hitting his head.  I hit my head a few times too.

BELOW LEFT: Jack after being knocked to his knees in Umbria.  Don’t worry, he’s crossing his eyes for comic effect.

BELOW RIGHT: our bungalow in the Sahara where we both hit our heads a few times

BELOW: The hardest hit resulted in this cartoonish bloody lump on Jack’s scalp.

Next up, is injuries from eating.  This looks like a delicious fish tangine, and it was.  However, an uncomfortable hour later I extracted this fish bone from Jack’s throat with my tweezers.  I could totally be a surgeon… lol.

 

The good news is, no food poisoning yet!

the first week in Morocco

This is where we’ve been so far.


We spent the first two days in Casablanca, which is industrial, large (about 3 million) and not very touristy.  It has some art deco buildings, some wealthy shopping areas, some slums and a medina that is decidedly not touristy.  People looked at us, but there was virtually no annoying tourist hustle.

The highlight was the Hassan II Mosque, which is the 3rd largest mosque in the world and one of the few that non-Muslims can enter.  I suspect this is because it was so exceedingly expensive.  It opened in 1993 and cost about $800 million.


    


Then we rode a train about three hours south to Marrakech, a city of almost 2 million that is a very popular tourist destination.  We made the mistake of staying in the medina, next to the tourist trap that is Djemaa el Fna square.  Yes, I mean trap literally.  I can say that Auberge Riad Douzi was one of the best hostels I’ve stayed in, in terms of social atmosphere.  I suspect this was because of the free mint tea on the beautiful roof terrace, the overwhelming desire to escape the bustle of the medina and the higher average age of people traveling outside of the summer holidays.

 

The only museum like thing we did was visit the Saadian Tombs.  We look happy and relaxed because the 10 dirham ($1.50) entrance fee cut out the rifraff.  These 16th century tombs were walled off and forgotten until they were rediscovered in 1917 by aerial photography.



Jack’s last post wasn’t an exaggeration – Marrakech really was an extraordinarily unpleasant experience because of the people.  The best interaction we had was this: we walked out into a busy alley and were immediately approached by a spa hustler.  We were in the middle of a heated discussion after two days of being constantly accosted so I just kept talking (in addition to continuing to walk, which I advise) and the guy kept talking and walking with us and I kept talking and I guess my volume and the absurdity of the situation made him and then me start laughing, so that he gave up.  That’s it.  That was the most genuine interaction we had outside of our hostel. 

I have never felt such animosity, veiled in such false friendliness as I did in Marrakech.

Also in Marrakech, tourists are flooded with opportunities to take tours into the mountains or desert.  Most are overnight.  We couldn’t decide between them, so we took the bus to the desert ourselves.  I think this was the right thing to do because we learned that a lot of the tours take you from one sponsored shopping opportunity to another and we probably could not have dealt with that.

So, we took a 9 hour bus ride over the snow capped Atlas mountains to a town called Mhamid, where the road ends and the Sahara begins.  This is definitely enough material for a post of its own.

After the desert, we took a 12 hour bus trip back through Marrakech, to a nice seaside (Atlantic) town of Essaouira, which is where we are now.  It is beautiful and much more relaxed.  Whew.

culture II (or: don’t go to Marrakesh)

When someone says that people from a particular place are friendly, it is invariably a conclusion drawn from a tiny number of anecdotes or encounters- and everyone understands this and nobody minds.  When we hear someone say “people from Pittsburgh are really nice, we don’t worry whether the assertion has been proven to scientific significance, we just accept the statement and move on. 

If I wanted to avoid that kind of overgeneralization, I would say this:  “Most people in Marrakesh are probably nice, but you probably won’t be meeting those as a tourist.”  However, I think I prefer to just stick with standard conversational procedure, and leave it at: “Everyone in Marrakesh is a real asshole.”



We didn’t like the hustling in Tunisia, but Moroccans have a reputation to uphold, and Marrakesh is the epicenter of tourism in the country.  We were pitched a Sahara excursion on the train ride down.  As we were walking across town to our hostel, someone draped a live snake around Cari’s unwilling neck.  As we walked through the narrow alleys with our big bags on, one young lad followed us for minutes, determined to give us blatantly false directions on how to get where we were going.  When I finally stepped between him and Cari and told him we didn’t care what he said, and we just wanted to keep walking the direction we were going, he swore at me.  A surprising number of our interactions in Marrakesh ended in physical contact and obscenities.  It didn’t matter:  he enlisted two helpers to continue hounding us to turn around and go the wrong way.  And why the hell did he care so much about which way we walked to begin with?  If you change direction (and are then led around the long way) maybe you give a tip.  If you’re already going the right direction (and we were) you don’t need a guide.

A henna-applicator toting woman wrenched Cari’s hand out of her pocket and had a death grip on two fingers (I tried to dislodge it and couldn’t) as we shouted at her that we weren’t paying for it.  She still demanded payment as she roughly scraped the henna back in to her plunger- and cussed us out- when we refused.  Another woman tried to force a bangle around Cari’s wrist.  I was quicker that time and tossed the bangle on the ground.  She cussed us out in Arabic.  So many of the jerks went for Cari that I found myself feeling like I needed to do a better job stopping them, and each encounter made me resolved to be more of a jerk myself the next time. 

Now, we are both pretty cheap, and certainly on a budget now, so maybe someone who doesn’t mind handing out Dirhams left and right could have a good time here- but I prefer to think that what the jerks in Marrakesh need is more people like us.  Not all cultural differences are beautiful or cute or need to be treasured.  I realize that it is only like this because there are so many tourists, and because it works, but the culture that has grown up around the tourist industry here is “bad.”  The world would be a better place without it.

It also backfired- we resolved to punish the area by spending as little money as possible.  We had four nights on the calendar for Marrakech but left after two.