No Regrets!

Morning found us walking through the narrowest crevice of the expansive Todra Gorge, where we found lots of people living in tents, makeshift tables and stalls with souvenirs, and the spring source of the Todra River. I asked Mohamed if we could drink the water directly from the spring, but he assured me that it would make me sick. Apparently the pathogens in Morocco water come from the source and not from the water treatment plants, as I suspected.

Mohamed is good. Friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable. At each of our stops, he shares facts and history, and on the bus, he’ll do the same over the microphone. But it’s always low-key. Maybe it’s just not in his culture to be high-energy and enthusiastic.

Back on the road for another few hours through mountains and hills and plains, past the occasional buildings colored in browns and oranges and pinks, and past the occasional highway checkpoint where we all have to fasten our seatbelts to avoid a fine. It’s much cooler today, and the AC in the bus is doing the trick.

Looking out the window at the vast expanses of barren land and then thinking about crowded population centers like Tokyo, Mumbai, and New York City, I revisited a question I’ve always wondered… If all of the world’s habitable land was distributed evenly to everyone on the planet so that each person got a piece exactly the same size, how much land would each person get? I turned to ChatGPT for the answer. Taking out oceans and Antarctica and the Sahara and places people obviously cannot reasonably live, it turns out that each person would get a square of land about 180 feet on each side. That’s about the size of a large high school gymnasium, which seems frighteningly small to me. What happens as the Earth’s population keeps growing and the amount of habitable land keeps shrinking due to climate change?

Stopped for a pee and souvenir break, and Lindsay picked up a purple pashmina dress. Lindsay turning heads in our group and among the locals with her fashion and elegance, and these dresses are filling out her stylish wardrobe even further. Every souvenir shop along the way has a selection of trilobite and ocean mollusk fossils. I picked out a really cool trilobite, but they wanted $250 for it, so I got some sweet mosaic-patterned coasters instead.

We stopped for lunch in Ourzazate (“where-za-zat”), where I saw tacos on the menu and ordered them because I’m getting a bit tired of tagines, but I got something between a quesadilla and a panini that wasn’t as good as either. As we ate, misters above our tables sprayed us and kept us cool, but I wondered if the same pathogens in the local water were in the mist and would cause problems landing on our food or filling our lungs.

Arrived at Aït Ben Haddou, most famous for being the location of the Gladiator movies and many others. An impressive fortification on a hill dominates the landscape. As we took a winding hike to the top, damage from an earthquake less than a year ago was apparent in the cracked walls and crumbled rock. The hazy views of the unremarkable town below were mediocre.

Aït Ben Haddou was filled with lots of garbage, and there are lots of stray dogs roaming the streets, so there’s not much else to do other than relax in our hotel, take a tagine cooking class, relax on the terrace, and drink wine. Laughter erupted when, during the call to prayer at sunset, a chorus of stray dogs on the street began to sing along. After our second bottle of wine, I introduced the group to The Kiffness cat music with great success.

Tomorrow, a drive through the Atlas Mountains to what has been described as the jewel of Morocco and the end point of our tour, Marrakesh.