No Regrets!

On our way to Fès, we drive through some rolling hills before pulling off the road for a quick stop. Perched atop one of these rolling hills were historical Roman ruins in a place called Volubilis. We stepped out of the van into the blazing sun, 102° F and humid. We composed ourselves in the shade of a tree screaming with crickets as our guide explained to us how the ruins are all that remain of a larger town city of 15,000 people that existed sometime around the 1st century. We were shown well-preserved mosaics in the floors of former residences and some columns and arches that are still standing.

Then back in the bus, where the AC is for shit. It’s really hot out here, and sitting in the back seat, we’re dripping with sweat and some of the bumps have a little bit of extra bounce. This is not luxury transportation. It’s also nearly impossible to blog. All we can do is hold on and do our best to stay cool by drinking the luke-warm water that we brought along with us.

We stopped in a tiny village called M’Haya for a community lunch of chicken tijane. This is one of the stops that G Adventures includes in its Planeterra initiative. It’s their way of supporting selected communities with tourist revenue.

We’ve been learning some Arabic along the way. Here are some key phrases:

• salam alekem – hello, how are you?
• alekem salam – hello, how are you? (in response)
• sabachir – good morning
• shukran – thank you
• yalla – let’s go
• souk – market
• medina – old town
• sahara – desert (don’t need to say Sahara desert, because that’s redundant)

After our community lunch, we hopped back on the bus and rolled into Fès a few minutes later. Like Casablanca, I expected Fès to be a small town, but it’s a real city. Feels just like Casablanca but smaller. It was 111° F when we arrived, the high temperature for our trip so far. The very pretty Mounia Hotel welcomed us with ornate mosaics and carvings in the lobby. One of the services the hotel conveniently offers is massage and hammam, and most of us made a booking for those tomorrow.

We headed to a restaurant called Palais la Medina for a group dinner. Another magnificent interior greeted us. The attention to detail on the walls and ceilings of all these buildings is incredible. I had a good lamb tajine for dinner, much better than the gross one I had yesterday. As we ate, there was constant entertainment, with men playing traditional music on the stage, drummers parading around tables, and a belly dancer. That’s when the entertainment really began.

I was selected by the belly dancer to join her on stage. I am not a good dancer, but to a chorus of applause and hoots and howls, I shook my little tush and had some fun with it. A few minutes later, Lindsay was called up to do the same, and she really put on a show. Then a magic show from the Moroccan Richard Petty. I was called up to the stage to help with a card trick, which I admit was pretty good. Then a waiter came by and told us we were needed for something special. We joined a few other selected tourists in a back room, where they prepped us with clothing for a traditional Moroccan wedding ceremony. I got a fez hat on my head, but it was Lindsay got the royal treatment as the bride. At the right moment, they paraded us through the restaurant and onto the stage, where we did some traditional singing and dancing for the crowd. A memorable evening.

This morning, we headed out for an extended tour of the Fès medina. It’s the highlight of this city, more historic and much more impressive than the medina in Casablanca. Winding our way through a maze of very narrow alleys, we learned about the history of Fès and its medina. Fès is the oldest city in Morocco, founded in 789 by a sultan named Idris I, and the medina has grown in successive stages since then. We poked into a doorway to taste some traditional Moroccan pastries and then through another tiny doorway to see a bakery that has been in operation for centuries.

Among things we saw were a severed camel head, plates of bovine feet, and chicks dyed unnatural colors to be more sellable. We stopped at a handmade ceramic factory, where we walked through the process of how ceramics and mosaics are created. We were herded through each step of the process and watched some of the craftsmen in action, but it turned into a sales pitch pretty quickly as we were whisked into the giant shop at the end and “helpers” followed you around to give you the “best deal” on whatever you looked at. This would become a familiar theme, as the same process repeated when we visited a leather tannery and again when we stopped for a weaving and textile demonstration.

As we walked through the medina, I was tempted to take pictures of all of the interesting faces on traditional Muslim men and women, but our guide asked us not to. I was curious about this and asked what the real reason was, and he said that in traditional Islam, it is forbidden to capture the likeness of a person, whether it’s a painting or a photograph. That’s why traditional Muslim art never features people, and photography is forbidden by the most traditional Muslims.

For lunch, we again walked through another random doorway and into a magnificent room. Our chicken pastilla lunch was was sweet and fantastic. It was, of course, served with hot mint tea in little glasses, truly ubiquitous around here.

The temperature today in Fès was 102° F, but weaving through the alleys of the medina all day kept us cool.

Back at the hotel, it was time for our massages. My massage was mediocre, and I don’t like being wiped down with scratchy paper towels at the end. Oh well, it was about worth what I paid for it.

We didn’t have a group dinner scheduled this evening, so I took Mohammad’s advice and went to a smoothie place around the corner from our hotel. Mohammad had been talking up a “zaza” smoothie, which is made with an avocado base. Skeptical but intrigued, I ordered one. It was absolutely fantastic! Piled high with fruit and nuts, and the avocado base must be mixed or whipped with simple syrup, because the whole thing was filling and refreshing. Lindsay and I sat outside and people-watched as I slurped it down. That outdoor cafe was the first place we’ve seen women sitting amongst the men.

Tomorrow morning, we head out of Fès. We’ve been told that it will be a long driving day, 9 hours, but we’re going somewhere very exciting: the Sahara. Growing up, I always looked at the world map and wondered what it would be like to actually be there, how hot it really is, and what the sand would feel like between my toes. And I’ll be there tomorrow.

Our morning taxi to Hassan II Mosque was a great way to beat the heat. The driver was friendly and the unmetered fare was reasonable.

We got tickets for the mosque museum, grounds, and tour. Decorative arches and buttresses covered the doorways and ceilings of the museum. Lindsay marveled at the colorful and intricate wood carvings, brass engravings, and tile mosaics. I was blown away by the photographic opportunities outside as we approached the mosque.

The mosque is an interesting mix of brutalist concrete and hard angles and intricate carvings. It is absolutely massive, made even more impressive by the flat and immaculate grounds surrounding it. It helped that there were relatively few people walking around. Lindsay, dressed elegantly in linen with a bright green headdress and looking like a Moroccan model, helped give a classic, timeless elegance to my photos.

For our tour, we were asked to take our shoes off and place them into little bags. Then we walked inside. Looking up and around, we were surrounded by magnificently carved and intricately decorated walls and ceilings. A breathtaking, magnificent opulence that cannot be captured in words. The architecture features wonderful symmetries and asymmetries that make things really interesting for a photographer. Hassan II Mosque is one of most impressive buildings I’ve ever been in.

Our guide spoke broken English and didn’t seem that into it, but he gave us the basics. The mosque features an enormous retractable roof that opens and closes in five minutes. Construction was completed in 1993, and it’s now the third largest mosque in the world by size (behind only the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia) and the 14th largest by capacity. Given that most impressive religious structures around the world were built so long ago, it’s surprising to me that Casablanca found the passion and budget to build something like this today. Construction of the mosque was entirely financed by public, commercial, and international donations.

The most amazing thing to me is that the entire structure was built in six years. With all of its intricate carvings and painting, I would imagine that designs alone would have taken at least a decade, with approvals and permits taking a decade more. This building is every bit as large and magnificent as Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and that building has been under construction for 142 years and counting. Perhaps the Catalonians have something to learn from the Moroccans.

After a short walk along the steamy waterfront promenade, we hopped into another friendly taxi to Morocco Mall. I’m starting to get a little more confident with my French, using it to talk to merchants and waiters and taxi drivers with mixed success. It’s enough to impress Lindsay, which is good.

Morocco Mall is big, but a little less impressive for us who come from an America filled with enormous Mills shopping malls of our own. The aquarium with sharks and stingrays in the center of the mall is a nice touch, and the Muslim prayers echoing throughout as we walked made the experience unique. French and Arabic signage and spoken language seems to be woven together seamlessly. Everyone here is friendly and seems to get along.

After some mediocre smoothies, we did some quick shopping for some linen shirts and shorts in earth tones that are more appropriate for a Morocco vacation than the sporty stuff I usually wear. A few of the stores were refreshingly cool, but I’m wondering if the rest of the mall had AC or if AC in Morocco really isn’t a thing at all. I am constantly on the edge of sweating.

Then back into a taxi for a ride across town back to the hotel. Aside from the mosque, I’m not all that impressed with Casablanca. I thought it might be a charming outpost in the desert, as depicted in the 1942 movie, but instead it’s a sprawling city of 4 million. A constant haze lingers, and parts of it look like Beirut. We did learn that there is a tourist trap called Rick’s Cafe with props and ambience that honor the film, but any other romantic notions of Casablanca have been squashed.

We headed to our hotel lobby to meet our G Adventures group. This is one of the most exciting moments for me in a trip like this. In the first few minutes, you can get a feel what kind of group you have, what kind of people you’ll be spending the next week with, and what kind of trip this might be.

Nice group, everyone seems friendly enough. Good mix of ages and backgrounds. Our leader, Mohammad, seems like nice guy, if a bit low-key for a tour leader. Mohammad announced that I was a G Adventures VIP, having been on five trips with the company. I feel that may become a running joke.

Tradition is a group dinner on the first night. Mohammad took us to a nearby restaurant called Les Fleurs, where we all got to know each other a bit and I had a lamb tagine that was rather gross.

Headed to bed early to prepare for an early start this morning.

I now sit on our minibus heading east out of Casablanca. Outside, concrete apartment blocks and satellite dishes have given way to rolling hills and farms and what looks like olive plantations. We’re headed for the Roman ruins at Volubilis and will be arriving in Fès later this evening.

I’ve been very fortunate to have done a lot of traveling over the years, and my country bucket list is growing shorter and shorter. Remaining in the top tier are Japan, China, Turkey, and Morocco. With work and life making it hard to take the several week-, month-, or year-long adventures I used to take, I have accepted that I’m going to have to take shorter trips to these places if I am to visit them at all. The only thing that’s been missing is a travel partner. Sure, I could do these trips alone, but after completing my fair share of solo travel over the years, I’ve found that it’s now more fun to take these kinds of trips with someone I enjoy.

So when my friend and fellow travel-lover Lindsay told me that she might be able to rearrange her summer schedule to take a trip with me, I was all for it. Wedged between what was already a busy travel summer for me, we found a two-week opening and settled on Morocco. She had always wanted to go there, and neither of us had ever been to Africa before. I shared my experience and enthusiasm for organized group travel, and we found an 8-day itinerary with G Adventures that suited us perfectly: Morocco Kasbahs and Desert:

• Casablanca
• Fès
• Merzouga
• Todra Gorge
• Aït Ben Haddou
• Marrakech

We’ve added on a land cruiser desert excursion in the Sahara, a sunrise hot air balloon ride in Marrakech, and a day trip to Essaouira. It looks like the perfect itinerary for our time and budget, except that it leaves out the photogenic Chefchaouen. That shiny blue jewel is just too far out of the way, and we can’t get there on this visit.

The adventure all began yesterday morning with an overnight flight from DC to Casablanca. We thought it would be smart to grab a dinner before our 9:30pm departure, but we were dismayed by the lack of restaurant options at Dulles International Airport. We settled on Cava, where I got a slop of a pita that certainly didn’t look like it does in the pictures. Can you believe they were out of tzatziki?

The people waiting at the gate to board our plane were mostly Moroccan, as much as I can discern a Moroccan look. The rest were darker-skinned Africans and a smattering of obvious tourists like ourselves.

Lindsay and I boarded the medium-sized Royal Air Maroc Boeing B787-8 and sat in seats 15A and 15B, next to the biggest engine I have ever seen. Announcements came in Arabic first, then a less enthusiastic English. Next to Lindsay was an old woman who was half-asleep. My impulse was to wake her and ask her to tell us stories from the 1800’s, but Lindsay is much classier than I am. She engaged her in conversation about tea (one of Lindsay’s favorite subjects), the spices and flavors of Russian cuisine, the charm of Old Town Alexandria, and the miserable heat wave in DC over the last few weeks. Lindsay is a talker.

Lindsay and I were surprised to find a very late dinner served to us at 11pm. I found room to eat the meal of chicken and rice, salad, and yogurt. Lindsay wasn’t hungry, so I finished hers as well. Soon, we were over the utter blackness of the Atlantic Ocean at night.

I had planned to get some work done on the laptop, but found that the overnight flight surprisingly did not offer wifi. So the smart thing to do would have been to go to sleep like everyone else. Lindsay and I tried, but the seats were just cramped and vertical enough to make things too uncomfortable. I don’t know how everyone else does it, but we both struggled to get any quality sleep.

After a few hours in a zombie-like state, I opened my eyes to see the sun rising over heavy cloud cover in the Atlantic. The snazzy polarized tint of the windows turned the sun into a glowing orb, red at sunrise and then blue higher in the sky. The blue glow from the window made the clouds over the ocean look a blanket of peat moss on the surface of another planet. Sadly, difficult to capture in a photo. The tint gradually dissipated, revealing a blazing sun that hurt my eyes.

My first glimpse of Africa through the clouds and haze was an overwhelmingly brown and flat landscape of geometrically shaped farms as far as the eye could see and a few roads. These farms looked mostly dry and dead, with occasional flashes of green from lucky, lushly irrigated fields.

Getting off the plane, we gathered on the tarmac and waited for buses to pick us up and deliver us to the airport terminal. The sun was warm but not overbearing, and a gentle breeze kissed our faces. I wouldn’t have expected it, but this was actually a break from the heat in DC.

The airport featured signage in Arabic and French and occasionally English. We collected our bags, hit the ATM, and figured out how to get tickets for the ONCF train to the Casablanca city center.

The train took us past fields of fields of trash and sorry-looking horses, gradually turning into dilapidated city blocks and roads. Apartment buildings and houses had satellite dishes on every roof.

I don’t know much about Casablanca other than that it was the backdrop for the famous 1942 Humphrey Bogart movie. Sadly, the film was shot almost exclusively at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California. I wonder if there is any nostalgic romance from the film in the city today.

After arriving at the Casa Port train station in the center of town, we made our way to Hotel Campanile on foot. The rising sun and humidity made it hot, but the walk gave us a basic lay of the land.

Our room is nice enough, except for the stuck door, bathroom light that doesn’t work, towel hooks that come out of the wall, a faucet about to fall off the top of the sink, and AC that blows but doesn’t cool.

After a much-needed nap, we headed out to start exploring the city. We’ve given ourselves an extra day in Casablanca to give us time to adjust to the time difference and see some of the city on our own before the start of our group tour.

Casablanca is gray and brown and crumbly, like Cleveland. It’s run-down, with brutalist concrete apartment blocks and buildings in varying stages of disrepair. Lots of half-constructed buildings but no construction. Cats are everywhere, and they don’t look too happy. A blanket of haze covers the city, locking in the humidity.

We walked to the medina, or old town, and found it to be similarly run-down and unimpressive. It’s filled with crumbled alleys, makeshift stalls with caged live chickens next to raw chicken for sale, buckets of fish buzzing with flies, and blankets on the ground covered with plastic goods. Men stood at every storefront and filled the seats of outdoor cafes. Meandering the walkways and alleys was an exercise in dodging scooters and making sure we didn’t get lost in the maze.

On a TripAdvisor recommendation, we tucked inside one of the indoor markets to find a restaurant called Dar El Kaid. We were greeted at the unassuming doorway by a Moroccan man in traditional dress and a wonderful toothless grin named Aziz. In surprisingly good English, he enthusiastically welcomed us, invited us inside, and proceeded to give us a charming, in-depth tour of his restaurant.

The place is massive and magnificent. The structure is a former synagogue, but it is incredibly opulent, with intricate carvings, details, designs, and stonework that make the place feel like a palace. He showed us all of the restaurant’s three levels, finishing with a view of Casablanca from the rooftop terrace. Aziz proudly shared the history of the building and further explained that Jews live in peace here with Muslim population. Despite their differences, everyone gets along in Morocco.

Aziz seated us on the second level for the best view of the band and belly dancers, which he promised would be coming later. Menu selection was fantastic. There’s even pigeon on the menu, which I was not courageous enough to order. Instead, we got a couple of traditional clay pot Moroccan dishes called tagines: the Chicken Seffa (angel hair pasta, chicken, cinnamon, raisins, and served with powdered sugar), which Lindsay accurately described as tasting like a cinnamon bun, and the Chicken Rfissa (chicken, flat noodles, lentils, dates, almonds, garlic, and quail eggs). Both were delicious, as was my mint iced tea and Lindsay’s beverage of mint, lemon, and ginger. That’s totally a Lindsay kind of drink.

As we finished our meal, we were treated to some traditional music on violin and an enthusiastic belly dancer hopping around our table. And from Aziz to our waiter who looked like Tik Tok star Khaby Lame and was similarly Senegalese, the service was fantastic. This was an amazing spot, one of the best restaurants I’ve ever been to!

The only blemish was when Aziz caught us on the way out and ushered us into his “family business”, a storefront around the corner where a couple of salesmen were waiting to sell us dresses and natural remedies. We felt a bit uncomfortable and left.

Then back to the hotel for the night. Our warm, humid room is not the most comfortable, but eventually we slept.

This morning, we’re recharged enough to head out and explore more of Casablanca, including what seems to be the city’s most impressive highlight, Hassan II Mosque. Tonight, we meet our G Adventures group.