MOROCCO I 

Chefchaouen & Fes

I arrived in Morocco as the sun set through a cloudless sky. From a cold, rainy morning in Berlin, I touched down in Africa, in the Maghreb. The predominant religion here is Islam and classical Arabic is spoken throughout the country, but there's a lot more going on linguistically than that. The Spanish colonized the North, the French colonized Central and Southern regions, and English is taught in schools as the global lingua franca. Traces of all three inform the Moroccan Arabic as does Amazigh, the native language of the Berber people of central Morocco and the Atlas Mountains. What results is a dialect called Darija, in which Salam is a friendly greeting no matter what part of the country you're in. Then things get interesting, and it's fun to see whether it's followed with buenos dias or bonjour or marhaban, depending on where you are and/or where people guess you are from. 

We spend almost no time in Casablanca; just one night to gather the group and have our first tagine dinner of chicken baked with preserved lemon, onion, and green Picholine olives. Our table is filled with small plates of carrot, red beet root, potato, beans, zucchini, lentils, and baskets of 1-inch thick rounds of Arabic bread coated in coarse wheat meal. The khubz literally "bread" in Arabic, is a staple. We drink sweet mint tea, which is strongly steeped green tea, sometimes with saffron, poured over fresh mint leaves, drained from a silver pot held high over the glass; the higher the better. There's is a limit--as the stream of tea starts to splash at a height of 2 feet or so, but anything less than 18 inches is amature work and no one serving tea would insult their guests with such a short pour. Dessert is always fawakih--fruits. At our first dinner it was a giant bowl of small oranges, apples, and bananas. Everyone loves the oranges the best. They still have stems and a few leaves from the tree, and the peel comes off in one piece if you do it carefully.

In the morning we leave Casablanca for Chefchaouen, but by night, from the balcony of the hotel, all I know of this place is the sound of the Atlantic and the fog settling in off the water. The final scenes of the 1942 anti-Fascist romance (what a genre) Casablanca, where Rick convinces Ilsa to get on the plane to Lisbon, shoots Strasser, and befriends Louis, took place in that same fog--but there's no sign of Rick's Cafe Americain nearby. Modern-day Casablanca is Morocco's largest harbor, and finish and canning are some of the major industries here. It's bustling and full of traffic so we get an early start. On the way out of town we visit the Hassan II Mosque, the largest operational mosque in Africa, which holds 25,000 people inside the walls and just over 100,000 when the plaza outside is also full. Usually mosques are closed to non-Muslims, but the Hassan II is open to visitors as a World Heritage site. The minaret towers 600 feet above the plaza. 

By 3pm we're in Chefchaouen at the foot of the Rif Mountains, in NW Morocco. Also known as the Blue City, shop and hotel owners in Chefchaouen have painted their walls all imaginable shades of indigo and sky to attract tourists. In the honeyed light of the afternoon sun the maze of alleyways through the medina is an endless parade of postcard-perfect scenes. No street is more than a block long, and nothing lines up at right angles, and each new spoke radiates out on either an incline or a decline, so getting lost is virtually guaranteed. Our guide leads us through and we trail behind single-file, the line of us expanding and condensing as one person stops to take a photo or runs to catch up with the rest. The souvenir are beautiful and artistic: Filigree brass lanterns and wooden boxes, tea glasses in every color of the rainbow, jallabas (with a hood), kaftans (no hood), paint, sopa, spices, rugs, sarongs and woven cloths, watercolors paintings. There are sweet little cats everywhere, many of them kittens--easy to fit in a carry-on bag if one were so inclined. We sit in the town square and listen to the evening call to prayer from the adjacent mosque. It's broadcast over tinny loudspeakers, the same way the Buddhist chants were broadcast in Sri Lanka. The effect here is just as odd an haunting, but maybe even more poignant as the plaintive, soulful melodies drift into the minor key and it's possible to hear the breaks and unique inflections in each caller's voice as it reverberates through the town. 

In the morning I go out for a hike. There's a trail that starts out from the edge of town but after 15 minutes it fades into rock fields so any way up is a fine route. Chefchaouen gets smaller and smaller the higher I climb, and as I near the top of the valley I'm in I cross over a river and lose sight of it altogether. The sky is brilliant blue, more so than the painted walls of the town, and the cirrus clouds map strong winds above the peaks. I find a road which my phone says will take me back to town in time to get my bag packed and on the bus in time to depart, and I jog down. I stop along the way to talk (in Spanish) with some men along the road who are shoveling white powder into bags and piling them onto a pickup truck. They tell me it's paint, and that it's made by burning a type of local rock so that it turns into a white powder. It can then be mixed with any color of powdered pigment, which we saw for sale in town the afternoon before. These men take a pile of paint from by the road and turn it in to a beautiful blue city. 

Fes (also Fez) was the first imperial capital of Morocco in the 9th century, and subsequently alternated the role among Meknes, Marrakech, and Rabat at various times between the 9th and 20th centuries. The capital most recently changed from Fes to Rabat in 1912 when Morocco became a French protectorate, and remained the capital even as Morocco gained independence from France in 1956. Fes is known for its huge medina Fes el-Bali, so full of craftspeople that each specialty occupied a distinct section of the market where it was practiced by dozens of artisans. Today it has one of the largest urban pedestrian-only zones in the world. We walk through markets for the copper and metal smiths, the dyers, the silk weavers and garment makers, the leather tannery, markets for red meat, for fish, for nuts, dates, fruit, spices, sweets, and, of course, olives. The Chouara Leather Tannery is by far my favorite place, with rows of vats filling the plaza within the tannery walls like pots of paint. The farthest rows of vats are white with quicklime or calcium oxide, which is alkaline to the point of being caustic, and strips blood and tissue from the hides. Workers in this area wear tall rubber boots, waders, and rubber gloves to prevent chemical burns. Salt, cow urine, and pigeon dung are also used to clean and soften the skins. After a few days in the chalky vats, the skins are moved into the dye pools where they soak in preparations of poppy and pomegranate skins (red), henna (orange), indigo (blue) and tannis mixed with iron compounds for blue, green, and black. The process takes about a week, and when complete the skins are ready to be fashioned into good such as bags, jackets, shoes, slippers, and cushions. We overlook the tannery from a balcony at a leather goods shop and the air is full of the smell of water, wet leather, and pigeon dung. We were given handfuls of fresh mint leaves on the way in to cover up the smells, but they're more earthy than offensive and I put mine in my pocket as I take in the steady tempo of the scene below: Men call to one another over the churn of sloshing water and the slap of wet leather on stone. Now one fills an empty vat with a hose, now one carries a pile of hides to dry. Preparing skins is very physical labor, and the man who owns the leather shop we're in tells us how his back is sore from working there as a young man. He was paid well, but he's also made a point of sending his three boys to college so they won't have the same life of manual work that he did. As we leave I thank the owner and wish his boys well in their studies, but it's sad to think that the tannery might go silent one day. I love the immediacy of it, and in a world of mass-produced goods that are sourced and assembled literally anywhere and everywhere, it feels like this place where people make things by hand in the open air is special, let alone one so full of history and water and life. 

We also visit the Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque and the Al-Attarine Madrasa (madrasa = school), which is the oldest Islamic university in the world. Originally founded as a mosque in 850's by a woman named Fatima al-Fihriya, it became one of the most influential Islamic spiritual and educational centers from the 800s through the 14th century. The Al-Attarine Madrasa is still active today but primarily teaches Islamic theological studies, with other contemporary subjects having been transferred to Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University in Fez. The interior courtyard is open to the sky and follows a pattern familiar in many mosques of stone floors, tile walls, carved plaster lower walls, and unpainted wooden carvings on the upper wals set under a recess to protect them from rain. There are 5 times of prayer or Salah throughout the day, which change daily with the rise and set of the sun. The times for the next few weeks are posted on the main door of the mosque in the same way tidal charts are posted at a sailing school; they mark the ebb and flow of the medium traversed along the journey. Upstairs of the courtyard are two floors of tiny dormitories, which define that word as literally as I've ever seen--each room is a 4"x6" or so space with a door and a small window, maybe 2. They're just large enough to lie down in, or sit in and study on the floor. Despite the austerity I can imagine a community of students living here happily, studying and sleeping and praying together with the heart of their school open to the sun and the sky.

The architecture of many dwellings in Fes, and in the greater country of Morocco, reflect the Islamic values of keeping the family (women and children) inside the safety and protection of the square, three-story home (riad) with a roof garden built around a central courtyard. Many riads have no windows, and in traditional Islamic homes only the men go out for work and other business pertaining to politics, government, and ensuring that the needs of the family are met. Contrast this with Berber culture, wherein the roles of women and men are far less defined by gender, and where both women and men are responsible for meeting the needs of the family and participating in society, government, and politics. I'm accustomed to single buildings, like a church or a mosque, being a literal reflection of the values and history of the organisation within (e.g. Christian churches being built in the shape of a cross), but it's a different thing altogether to wander the streets of an entire city center and be surrounded by a manifestation of Islam.

MOROCCO II

The Sahara and Amazigh Villages 

To travel in the Sahara in November is to love the sun. Desperately. In the same way you loved that very first person who broke your heart: Watching it disappear means piercing cold is only an hour away and will continue through the interminable small hours of the night, the color drains from the landscape, and the world collapses into a shifting pool no bigger than the throw of your cell phone flashlight.  Seeing it rise again, lifting a hand or the face toward the barely perceptible but assuredly growing warmth is relief, is sweetness, and daring to believe that love could be possible again.  There may have been tears at dawn...

Before all of that, though, we had to get into the desert, and that meant camels--14 of them--tethered together in groups of 7 with the lead camel having walked the route so many times he barely needs to be led at all. They sit on their two-kneed legs like cats when they fold their paws under their bodies, but despite the extra joint they're sure-footed and steady and after adjusting to the gait, we're all on our way to our camp of canvas tents. The camels we ride are Dromedary, which is the Arabian variety, known for their height and single hump. There are also Bactrian camels that have wooly coats and two humps are the Mongolian variety and hang out in the highlands of Central Asia. Regardless of one hump or two, the hump is an energy reserve made of fat which allows the camel to go for long periods without food. Arabian camels can also drink salt water. We visited a camel nursery after our trip to the desert where we got to taste camel milk. I sometimes get flack from people for adding a few grains of salt to coffee when I drink it, but a splash of camel milk would be perfect as it's naturally salty. At $32 USD/liter and given the number of camels running around the US, I'm not sure it will catch on the way oat milk has, though. 

We spend the afternoon hiking around the dunes and "sandboarding," which is what happens when you take the bindings off of an old snowboard and find a dune steep enough to slide down. Nobody's good at this, which is why it's fun, but most of us can manage 30 yards or so, and we all cheer for one another and give style points for most creative sandboard dismount. Mine was a side-fall-forward-roll-popup-fall-again dismount. Not entirely unique, but executed with conviction. For the next two days we all found sand in places and pockets we didn't know sand could go. 

After a traditional tagine dinner we gathered around a short-lived fire (because there's nothing to burn in the desert!) that a band of wandering musicians use to warm their drums before playing. The musicians are Ganawan, a people of Ghanaian lineage who have spread from sub-Saharan West Africa to North Africa. They play a collection of Ghanaian instruments including the Djembe (drum), Lune (drum), Gambrille (lute), and some Algerian castanets called Akarkash which sound just like their name suggests-like little crash symbols that keep the treble rhythm and sound like galloping hooves. Goat skins are used to make the drum heads, and it's important to warm them before playing in the cold desert night so they don't tear. Before our trek into the desert we stopped for a music lesson with a Ghanaian music teacher who's been living at the edge of the desert for decades. He teaches us the three ways to strike the djembe--with the fingertips at the edge of the drum, with the full length of the fingers, palm just cupping the edge of the drum, and with a flat, open palm in the center of the drum. The later sound is big and full and is the most bass of the drum notes. We play call-and-response for a while until we get the hang of it and the 14 of us keep a rhythm together, and then our teacher switches to the lute and we jam for a while. At the end of it, our teacher hands a standard 6-string guitar to one of our group who knows how to play and asks for a song in return. Totally put on the spot but absolutely graceful under the pressure, Jay plays Jo Stafford's 1952 "You Belong to Me."

See the marketplace in old Algiers

Send me photographs and souvenirs

Just remember when a dream appears

You belong to me

It was kind of perfect. 

I get up an hour before dawn and climb the sand dune near our camp in the dark. There's barely a breath of wind, the moon is gone, Orion is setting in the western sky while some bright orb (maybe Venus?) holds vigil in the East. There's no hint of light to tell which way the sun will rise, but I climb the same dune where I watched it set and just face 180 degrees the opposite way. Slowly the landscape takes shape below me; the dunes reclaim their curves as the eastern shield begins to glow. When the sun pierces the horizon it's all bright yellow-gold cotton ball clouds over the terracotta sand, and the sky shifts from soapstone to dusty sage to blue again. Once day has fully arrived the clouds change from cotton balls to feathers. I run down the dunes back to camp, in giant soft steps like running down a mountain in snowshoes, we pack our bags, re-mount our camels, and journey back across the desert toward the Berber villages of the High Altas Mountains.

The Berber people, called Amazigh in Morocco, are indigenous to North Africa (the Maghreb) and pre-date the arrival of the Arabs. Their written looks highly symbolic in contrast to the understated calligraphy of Arabic, and Amazigh pictograms are widely used to decorate woven textiles like rugs, tapestries, and pillow cases,  can be found on village walls, and make beautiful tattoos. The Arab and Amazigh cultures differ significantly in their understanding of gender roles and the place of men and women in society. In Arab culture, where the Riad is the highly protected interior-facing home where women are protected (confined?) and care for the family, Berber culture sees men and women as equally capable of managing the work of life, so it's more often shared based on who's available and what needs to be done. Amazigh people also have a considerable history of peaceful co-dwelling with people of Jewish ancestry, and it's common for there to be a mosque and a synagogue in the same village, with cemeteries for each group as well. There's a set of short stories called Women as Brave as Men, a contemporary analogue of sorts to Scheherazade One Thousand and One Nights. It's hard to come by, so if you find a copy please let me know. 

The Amazigh villages are often built of clay laid over wood frames and allowed to dry in the desert sun. The clay wall are often 2 more feet thick to give stability to the structure despite the soft medium, and to create a thermal barrier. The clay holds heat for upto 8 hours, which means a building can stay well above freezing despite a harsh winter night, and, if built in the shade, can create a temperature difference of 20+ degrees farenheit on a hot summer day. Many villages have a network of interconnected passageways that create a contiguous first "floor" of everyone's dwelling. Second-story walls separate individual homes, which are accessible by staircases or ladders. There's a code of ethics that governs Amazigh life, wherein crimes of stealing, deliberately causing harm/killing others, and making romantic advances toward married women are considered by a jury of sorts and punishment can range from paying fines to shaming to --in the worst of cases--exile. Given the harsh conditions of the Sahara and the distance a person would have to travel to find a new village willing to take them in, exile is tantamount to being allowed to live but being utterly disconnected from everything but one's own individual life and means. 

Travelers, traders, merchants, and nomads are welcome in Berber villages but not usually allowed inside the village walls. They stay in the mosque, which is open to all people at all hours, instead. "Guest of god" are allowed to stay in the mosque for 3 days, and are given food by the village where the mosque is located before they are considered rested and cared for and ready to move on. 

After a night in the valley below the Todgha Gorge, we climb up the dry river valley and get to meet a  nomadic Amazigh family living in a series of caves and tents at the top. We encounter the first family member halfway up the gorge. She's wearing dark blue layered robes and an orange baseball cap and she's singing. He beautiful voice echoes down the canyon as she hops as effortlessly as any canyon-dwelling creature from rock to rock, gathering firewood and calling to us "Bonjour!" We cross paths with several small groups of people and donkeys coming down the mountain, also nomads, walking their donkeys to the spring at the bottom of the gorge to give them water and to fill their 5-gallon plastic jugs for drinking and cooking. At the top of the gorge we meet the grandfather of the family and the granddaughter. He's maybe 70-something and she's almost 4. He sits, taking the sun, a mild tremor in his hands and cataracts clouding his sky-blue eyes as she runs, in socks, after one of the 20 or so baby goats wandering the hillside nearby. She chases one down and brings it to us. It's about the size of a house cat, and docile, and we take turns holding it. It's so light! Maybe 3 or 4 pounds? It doesn't seem to mind being held a bit, and I whisper secrets to it about how sweet is its and ask it how it likes this mountainside home. We take some photos with the family and wonder at what it's like to live this nomadic, cave-and-tent shelter life. After a night in the desert I have I lot of respect for anyone who braves the elements of this landscape on a permanent basis. I hold the grandfather's one hand in both of mine as we say goodbye, wondering at all the work this hand has done, wondering just how clearly he can see me though his cloudy blue eyes. I know he can hear my voice, though. I say thank you in the most sincere tone I know how. I wave to the little girl and the goats, and we gather our things and scramble back down the gorge to our hotel. 

MOROCCO III

Marrakech

Marrakech is a tale of two cities, but unlike London and Paris in the namesake novel,  Marrakech is two cities one within the other. Inside the walls of the Medina, Marrakech is what you see in the photo above at Jemaa el-Fnaa, the immense plaza adjacent to the marketplace. It's one part mall and one part flea-market that spokes out from the plaza and weaves itself through the maze of radial corridors that run between all the secrets held within the contiguous riad walls. Shops the size of a closet unfold soccer jerseys and terracotta tagines and tangias. Room-size shops sell filigree brass lamps, kaftans, djellabas, shoes. Occasionally the full courtyard of a riad appears behind a half-open heavy wooden door. Le Jardin Secret is, as the name suggests, a secret oasis 10 minutes walk into the maze of the medina that appears so suddenly green and lush within the baked orange mazes of shops. I stopped there to rest and then to climb the tower, which is one of the few places from which it's possible to view the city. From the top, the tower of Madrassa Ben Youssef is visible to the NE, and the tower of Mosque Koutoubia is visible to the west, across Jemaa el-Fnaa. Beyond Koutoubia and to the north is the New City. I walk Ave Mohammed V every couple of days to go from the south wall of the medina where I'm staying to visit Guilez, the new neighborhood of concept shops, pret-a-porte fashion, flower boutiques, dog spas, grocery stores, and nice restaurants. I hang out at Kartell Kollektiv co-working space where there's good music and good coffee and good people, SOME Slow Food for a grilled eggplant and green juice lunch, and Azalai Urban Souk, where I get adopted by a family from Marrakech and invited to dinner at their home. 

The buzz of scooters is relentless, even in the medina, as they're allowed to drive through it here. I name the things I pass, walking along: Orange soda, cookies, silver tea pot, djellaba, kaftan, monkey on a chain, magnets, a pile of pomegranates to be pressed for juice, keychain, rattan lampshade, tin lamp, tagine, coffee, soap, excursions to the desert with camel rides, carved wood boxes, silver platter, tea glasses, cigarettes; give coins to the blind man with pale, opaque eyes, give coins to the old woman, give water to the boys walking by the road. A cabinet of instruments, pashminas, henna, a radio playing, three cobras and a boa constrictor, a pile of baskets, the whining clarinets of the snake charmers and the tempo of the drums with which I walk in step. Jemaa el-Fnaa. The open heart of it all. Call to prayer: Sometimes plaintive and pleading, beggin for worship. Sometimes a reminder, and invitation,  sometimes a scolding. Each man has a different voice. Only the men pray outdoors. They line up in rows on small carpets and the cantor leads them. Prayer. Bow. Prayer. Prostration. On bent knees then forehead to the floor. Prayer. Silence. Rise. This goes on for a few minutes and then breaks up and the men flood out into the square and the wave of them washes over the market and runs in rivulets down the winding corridors of the alleyways. 

Marrakech smells like sweet sheesha smoke and shaving soap, car exhaust, lemon cleaning solution, orange blossom oil, charcoal, kerosene, cooking spices, frying oil, baking bread in the morning, incense in the evening, and, for just a moment, in a quiet corner of Le Jardin Secret on a balmy afternoon, the chlorophyll-green of garden plants. Not pictured but also seen in the medina: a dead cat, 30 chicken heads scattered on the ground for the living cats to eat, an anatomy lesson in goat: trachea, lungs, stomach (grey and villous), omentum, hooves. Sides of beef on hooks behind butchered sections laid out on the counter. Men wear the same rustic djellabas they sell. Most women cover their hair with scarves and the glittery, ornate silk kaftans are for the tourists. 

I visit Jardin Majorelle, the gardens of Yve Saint Laurent, born in Algeria, raised in Paris, and inspired by Marrakech beginning in the 1960s. He traveled there frequently to sketch designs for his upcoming collection. YSL is famous for the revolutionary androgyny of women's smoking jackets, Rive Gauche fashion that anyone could wear, and international collections that borrowed a visual vocabulary from traditional Russian, Chinese, and Moroccan garments, and sewn homages to artists such as Piet Mondrian. Contrast this radical shift in Western, particularly European ideas about gender representation via fashion with Eastern countries where men typically wear sarongs, and in Sub Saharan Africa where, from the perspective of European colonists, the minimal distinctions between male and female dress (among other gender-based features) caused great alarm regarding the development and capabilities of indigenous people. There's such intense meaning and interpretation associated with what we put on our bodies. Which is a wild though to have an an Islamic country where many women ride bicycles in full burkas, but where they also go to the hammam where there's no clothing worn for the scrub or massage at all. There's a lot going on in Marrakech. 

Here's a thing I discovered that struck me as odd: Moroccan tea is Chinese gunpowder green tea, which was initially imported to Morocco in the 18th century during diplomatic exchanges between Chinese leaders and Sultan Moulay Ismail. It's steeped breifly, pourd into a glass, then steeped further. A second cup is poured and discarded as the "washing" of the leaves, and then the pot is left to brew for another few minutes, just until it boils. Remove from heat. Add back in the first cup, a lot of white sugar, and fresh mint. Let the mint wilt, and then pour. When I went to dinner at my adopted family's home the mother cut three kinds of fresh mint from her plants in the garden for the tea, and it was the best cup I've had since I first tasted it 3 weeks ago. 

I go to the hammam. I've never been. During one of our many drives between places on the Flash Pack tour last week our guide said that going to the hammam is strange for some people because it's been many years since you've been washed like a baby. And I smiled, thinking this was a bit of flavor added by way of translating this custom into English, but really, they scrub you and wash you like a baby. The woman wo took care of me held my hand and led me around. She dried me with a towel. She gestured to me to lean forward and she wrapped my hair into a towel turban and tucked the corner in by my forehead, then touched my cheek. I've never had a stranger give me a bath with such uncomplicated, maternal kindness. It was so sweet. We need this everywhere. If you have the chance to visit a hammam in Morocco, by all means, go! 

Maybe as a contrast to the chaos of sensory information on constant firehose here, the white plaster walls carved with geometric designs at the hammam are some of the most beautiful artworks (or holy works, as there's no deus iconography in Islam?) I've seen in the city. Carvings cover the walls of the madrassas mosques, but the walls are also colorful and the material changes from floor to celing, often with some scrolling passages from the Quoran layered in. These are absolutely white and unchanging from ceiling to floor. Imagine snowflakes were giant and perfect and stacked in rows of repeating patterns. Put a point at the center of the circle. Divide with 4 diameters; top to bottom left to right and then across the diagonals. Draw the points of a star outside. The tips will be at 45 degrees. Add pentagons and indented squares, rectangles, pentagons, more circles. The center of one pattern becomes the tangent of another, all a play of relief in shadow and light. 

I drive outside the city. Which is also to say I drive! I rented a car and dove into the ever-moving flow of traffic that runs through Marrakech, a macrocosm of the ever-flowing traffic through the medina. You don't stop. There's an occasional traffic light, but for the most part the roads intersect at roundabouts and everything just keeps moving. There are cars and buses and scooters whizzing by, people on bikes, people on foot, carriages drawn by horses, donkey carts, vans loaded with bottles of water in a pile strapped to the roof that 's bigger than the van, carts of grass, pickup trucks full of wood and machine parts and people, a few tuktuks. You just don't stop. It all moves a little faster here, a little slower there, and sometimes a bike or a scooter is blatantly going the wrong way into oncoming traffic, but nothing's happening too fast and people shift and spaces open and close again and somehow it works out ok. I have to pay the security guy who stays up all night in the square near the riad $2 to watch the car. That seems to be working out ok too. Just don't drive with the phone in your hand. That gets you pulled over and given terse instructions on how to pay attention when driving. I explain I was using the map. He points to a phone holder on the dash. I offer an apology. Then the traffic officer tells a 5-minute story about how he and his wife finally got travel visas to the US after 25 entries in the lottery. An invitation to Seattle. Handshake. Shukran. Smiles. Driving on... 

MOROCCO IV

Jebel Toubkal, 4167meters

The trek to Toubkal begins in Imlil, a mountain village about 65k (90 min drive) from Marrakech. There's a small hospital and an elementary school, a hammam, a mosque, and several dozen shops selling meat and snacks, and all the other tourist items you can find in the markets of Marrakech. Though there's a lot of variety, the wholesalers of all the tourist goods must have some kind of monopoly because the distribution is pretty homogenous. On the drive in I pass a handful of other small villages, one of which was particularly hard-hit by the earthquake on Sept 8, 2023. Other places I'd seen had a few tents here or there, maybe 20 altogether scattered in clusters in any given village. Here, though, were rows and rows of 8x12 blue and white tents about 6' high pitched edge to edge across a dirt lot like a refugee camp. There could have been a hundred or more. People had been killed and injured. There were places where a tumbled walls and fallen doorways broke the regularity of otherwise rectulinear architecture. There was only one place where the road looked as though it had recently been cleared of fallen rock. Otherwise shops were open and people were out in the streets. The initial two weeks following a disaster are often the hardest, both in terms of restoring essential resources like shelter, water, and food, and in coming to terms with the sudden loss of homes and lives. Which is not to diminish the struggle and the hardship of the earthquake, but just to give this snapshot of life  about 3 months later. Resilience is evident. These people are not devastated. 

Though it's not a technical hike--no glaciers, no cravasses, no ice axe or mountain rescue expertize required--Toubkal is a hard hike through a stark and rugged landscape and a guide is required. I'd made arrangements with the Bureau de Guide Imlil after finding their information on a travel blog and, somewhat miraculously after a series of brief emails and odd text messages to arrange and day and time to start, met my guide in front of the Bureau. Jemael is about my height and has 20 pounds on me, max. Maybe he's 45? There's a lot of weather on his face. He's missing all but one of his top teeth. He wears jeans and worn hiking boots, carries a small backpack, and wears a tattered black sweater. I think I know about 100 words in French. He probably speaks 3-4x that in English. We both know some unquantifable amount of Spanish. We're going to spend the next 2 days together. We can communicate, but it's not easy. 

The weather forecast is for clouds in the afternoon, clearing overnight, with a sunny day on Friday and temperatures 15C by day/10C at night at 3,000 meters. It's perfectly pleasant in Imlil but could get cold starting out early for sunrise at the summit, so I rent some gloves and a pair of wind pants from an outfitter in town (read: specialized tourist shop with a collection of faded outdoor clothing, shoes, and other gear from the 1990's), buy a Snickers bar for 8 dirham (80 cents) to supplement my trail snacks, and off we go. 

I had very little idea of what to expect, except for knowing the basic dimensions of the hike, so I had to laugh when after an hour on the trail we come to a village of 20 houses with 2 restaurants, 4 tourist shops, and cans of Pringles in every flavor imaginable. One shop owner has even taken a hose from the mountain stream and hooked it up to a water bottle he's punctured like a lawn sprinkler to spray waer over the expertly chilled dinks he has for sale. Among the endless parade of donkeys carying supples for the shops and overnight bags for the tourists and the endless parade of tourists themselves, I realized this was not the Cascade wilderness experience I'd been having in Seattle. It's still a hike through a stunning, steep mountain landscape, but a catered one. When I was a kid and the trail got hard we just to joke about the "trail improvements" we wished we had along the way. The trek to Toubkal has this covered. It is the realization of all trail improvements, replete with toilets, delicious cooked lunches, t-shirt shops, Orangina, multicolor woven beanies, and no end of canister snacks. Pringles anyone? 

We reach the Toubkal Refuge, a 3-story stone-and-morter building with terraces for the donkeys and a large stone patio by about 4pm. The sun is cooling, and I'm a littel tired from the trek so far but in good shape overall. Inside the wood fireplaces are roaring though it's still comfortable on the patio with an extra jacket. More and more people arrive. The sun fades to dusk, then dark blue and a few stars come out. The guys who run the Refuge make us popcorn, which a Spanish woman who just climbed Kilimanjaro tells us they serve at the bunkhouse there too. Peopel speak French, Spanish, Amazig. Most everyone knows some amount of English but I'm the only American I can identify in a house of 50 or so people. We chat for a couple of hours until dinner in whatever combination of languages suits the people talking and I fade in an out of the conversation depending on what I can understand and what I have to say. We eat soup and spaghetti with tomato sauce, chicken cooked with saffron and onions, bread, tomato/onion/pepper salad and oranges. More conversations, some reading, a heavy blanket and the top bunk by a little window where I can look down the valley and see some stars, and I'm off to sleep. There's the quinitessential guy snoring all night in the bunk across the room, and for whatever reason the donkey outside has a lot of anxious-sounding things to say at 3 am, but it's enough sleep to feel like I can get up at 5, head down to breakfast, and find Jemael for the ascent. 

It's breathlessly quiet. There's no wind, the air is mild, and the waning crescent moon underscores the punchbowl of stars that domes the canyon. Orion is setting in the west; the same Orion I saw set in the west over the Sahara a week ago. It's nice to feel oriented. I hesitate to ruin it all with a headlamp but there's not enough light to navigate otherwise and this is where things get rocky. In the next 3 hours we have 3,000 vertical feet to climb. I think of Asgard Pass in the Enchantments back home, which is so steep there isn't a single, distinct pathway or even switchbacks. You just find a way, and as long as you're going up, you're headed in the right direction. 

I'm glad for Jemael. The world is a planetarium of stars above and a steep field of boulders indeciperable beyone the throw of our headlamps below. My legs burn from the early start and yesterday's hike, but Jemael is sure-footed and knows the way. Sometimes he turns around and asks "You good?" and I say "yeah I'm good" and we keep climbing. After a while it's just an andless ascent in the darkness. We pick our way around thorny scrub, scramble over boulders, follow a path for a minute that fades as soon as it was found. The headlamps of hikers above and hikers below form little threads of light, like constellations moving over the mountain, and give a sense of distance. They're also the  first glimmer of anything like Christmas lights I've seen since arriving to this Islamic country in November. It's hard to breathe in the thin 10,000+ foot air, but we keep a moderate pace. Thoughts boil down to simple repetitions: Breathe, 2, 3, step, breathe 2, 3, step, breathe. The air is cooling. Finally, the sky lightens to the east and we near the saddle before the final ridge to the peak, but as the sun rises, so does the wind. 

I put on my puffy vest and a long sleeve jacket but had to take my gloves off to unzip my pack and now my hands are burning with cold. The wind isn't so strong that it blows us off course, but it's piercing and painful and the rising sun is no comfort. The last hour of the hike is just sheer will. The mountains are staggeringly beautiful. The early sunlight and a dusting of snow play in the cravases of their ancient skins and I trade even colder hands for an attempt to capture it in a photograph but my fingers and dumb and fumbling and it's too cold to feel anything else. Jemael points the way and we stumble on toward the iconic metal peak that marks the top of Toubkal. 

Someone has been camping at the peak. I can't imagine how anyone could sleep in this wind, let along stop moving for more than a few minutes. As exhausting as it is to keep moving, to lay down for even a minute would be like letting a fire go out and watching the ashes blow away in a matter of minutes. I climb the last step up to the metal structure that marks the peak of Toubkal. Jemael takes my hand and claps my shoulder and we laugh together. I don't know how many times he's made this climb; somewhere between 50 and 5 million, but this one's mine and he takes my picture with my arms extended toward the sky. We find a little shelter out of the wind (sort of) and in the ever-warming sun and share some cookies. Black birds play in the updrafts and hover in front of us, with 13,000 feet of nothing behind them. Marrakech is north, more mountains to the east and the Sahara to the south. There's a lake down there somewhere to go to on a multi-day trek, but from here it's out of the frame. We don't stay long. We have every step we took to get here to take again and it's a long way down. 

Everything moves faster on the descent, and there's no denying the strenght of the sun as we pick our way back down the pass, but the last 5 hours have been an exercise in survival and I have to take some car not to stumble. We stop at the Refuge for some tea and after a second cup I pile my coat in my arms and spend 10 oblivious minutes face-down on the table. 

Jemael and I gather our things and pay for our night at the Refuge and bid farewell to the staff and the litter of puppies living there that look to be about 4 months old. Jemael and I don't talk much on the way down. We weren't particularly loquatious on the way up, but we managed to talk about our lives a little; what we do for work, our families, how people make a living in Imlil and the impact of the earthquke on people in the area. He's married and has a 9-year old son. His famiy lives in Imlil and grows apples and has walnut trees near their house. His son goes to school in town. We stop for lunch at a little shanty by the river and share a tomato & egg tagine and a salad. The owner sits with us and he and Jemael talk in Amazigh. I admire the river. 

We pass goats and the few juniper trees growing in the valley. I can count them on one hand. The day is warm and the sky is absolute blue. Idylic as it is I'm growing weary by the minute, and by 3pm, even though we're down from the mountain, we still have at least a mile to walk along the road to get to Imlil. My mistake, as I chose to do this hike in what is essentailly a pair of Doc Martins that I bought in Berlin, but I have blisters and I can feel them getting worse. We stop for one last look down over the valley before finishing the hike. The pair of us are quiet on a rock together. Jemael smokes half a cigarette. I patch my blisters with band-aids. I can see Imlil a mile or so in the distance, but this time we don't take the road. Jemael is kind and invites me to have some food with his family at their house. I can't say no. We cross the valley and then go down what feels like a thousand uneven stone steps to the river at the bottom of the valley. The river feeds the irrigation channels we follow through the walnut orchards. It really couldn't get any more picturesque, to follow a creek over a waterfall and through groves of walnut trees in the golden afternoon light, but every step is pain and I start to worry that if we don't arrive to Jemael's place soon I'll be making the drive through the winding mountain roads back to Marrakech in the dark. 

A few more turns and over a fence and we're there. Jamael's house is actually his brother's place. He's been living there with his family since the earthquake. We sit on the roof terrace and his son, Royan, brings bread and Jamael carries the tagine of chicken, carrots, potatoes, peas, tomatoes, and onion cooked in a saffron broth. Royan and I share the food and Jamael's wife brings tea. It's all familiar after nearly three weeks of being in Morocco. It's nice to feel that way, and to sit cross-legged on a cushion at a low table, to take my boots off for a while, to put my sweater on, to tease Royan about how much of the tagine he can eat vs how much I can. Jamael and his wife talk for a bit and pour me more tea. The branches of a walnut tree hang over the terrace and the yellow leaves remind me of fall, even though it's Dec 7. Mark Twain once wrote that if the world is going to end you could buy yourself a decade by going to Cincinnati; everything happens 10 years later there. In case that's not convenient consider a rooftop tagine at Jamael's place with his family on a summery day in early December. Time might not stop there, but you can definitely slow it down for a while. 

It's a merciful 5-minute walk back to the car from Jamael's place, though it could have been miles away for the solitude. One turn off the alley way and we're on the main road full of shops and people. I return the gloves and the pants I rented and Jamael and I are standing at the car. For the first time since we met we're face-to-face just taking each other in. His eyes are dark brown and steady. "You're a good guide, thank you. And a friend. I appreciate your company." I think he gets all of that. He holds out his hand and takes mine for a moment. "You're a good man." I know what he means. He helps me maneuver the car out of the lot and I pull onto the road with an hour yet before sunset to get home.