Hello loved ones. So sorry for such a long delay. The internet is a tool not so widely available to us. We roundly agree that not bringing a laptop was the biggest mistake of the trip. We are now in Morocco and while there is more infrastructure here than in Bhutan or Uganda, uploading fancy photos and catching up on our extensive backlog of those two countries will have to wait. For now, we will make do with some brief notes and photos when we can….

So where are we now? At the moment we sit in an internet cafe in the High Atlas mountains in central Morocco, in a little village called Imlil. It is pretty touristy here, but quite beautiful. The Djebel Toubkal, the highest mountain in North Africa, sits snow-capped just above the village. Tomorrow we will go on a day-long guided hike. We’ve been in Maroc about a week now and have eaten some delicious tagines (which we like to pronounce tagina), seen lots of severed goats heads, been ridiculously overcharged, and been invited into strangers homes and given gifts of walnuts, bread, fruit, watermelon…it’s kind of schizophrenic here, the split between people wanting to rip you off and people wanting to make you so welcome you genuinely feel a part of their family.

We started in Casablanca, which is cosmopolitan and friendly. There is a giant mosque there, one of a handful in the country that is visitable by non-muslims. We missed the guided tour but both got sneaked in by the cleaning staff. In the first two days we had tea with two strangers, the first set of whom were local men being friendly. They called us off the street and into their sidewalk cafe, bought us mint tea and welcomed us to Morocco. The second was a (homeless?) man who told us he had been a math professor and invited us to coffee. In flawless English he talked to us about the places he’d studied and how he’d love for us to come to his house and have dinner. He just lived 30 minutes outside of Casa and we’d be welcome there any time. He spent an hour and a half with us before he moved in for the kill. He needed 50 dirham for gas money to get out to his house; I will say that Ramon was on to him long before I was. Buoyed by the previously mentioned mint tea experience, I overlooked the man’s missing teeth and weird dirty jokes up to the bitter end. Ah well. Live and learn.

We moved on to Marakkesh, which, for a white person, is like being on the tackiest, most aggresive ocean boardwalk you can imagine. People constantly and I mean CONSTANTLY ask you to buy this buy that and then charge you quadruple what they charge a Moroccan. I think, were you Moroccan, Marakkesh would be a great place for a trip. As it is, I am dreading going back even to pass through.

We left Marrakesh and took off for the mountains, where most people are Berber, not Arab. (Actually, this is tru of most Moroccans – apparently only 10% are ‘pure’ Arab). So up here, mountain Berber is the first language, Arabic the second, French a distant third. But most everywhere we have been able to get along quite easily language wise. Warmth-wise, it would be hard to beat the people up here. Despite the hustlers, and there are many, Morocco has really won me over.

Our next plan is to go to the desert to see the ‘great oasis route’ – also quite a tourist trap i’m sure, Ben Hur was filmed at one of the kasbahs there – and then on to Fes.

Hopefully with less ambitious posts, we will be able to post more often. The keyboard here is totally different than in the states, however, so even typing is a little bit of a brain-melter. Furthermore, after an hour of typing this, the connection has gone down, so I will have to start over again…sometime.