From Sand to Snails to Snow

I last checked in from our Sahara Desert adventure. We finished off that trip with a few hours at the Ouallywood of North Africa, Atlas Studios, touring the sets of all your favorite movies set in desert locations (and many unknown Biblical movies that never made it beyond the bin at Walmart). We walked like Egyptians on the Cleopatra set, visualized ourselves in The Mummy, and admired from afar sets from Game of Thrones and Prison Break. For those of you who know me well, you know that movie, television, and pop culture knowledge are completely lost on me. My evolution in that realm stopped around the time M*A*S*H called it quits. However, the kids were impressed with the trivia despite the fact that it was not exactly the Warner Bros.Tour.

Our bus back to Marrakech wound its way through the mountains without incident, and we busied ourselves with packing in a few more Morocco adventures before Foster had to head back to Vermont. We spent more time in the medina shopping for souvenirs, slurped down our first round of Moroccan snails, and made it to Oukaimeden to try some skiing in the High Atlas Mountains.

The long and winding road

After driving the winding mountain road and peering over the edge into bottomless gorges, I was already wobbly from the adrenalin rush when we reached the “resort” (and I use that term loosely). Once we arrived and paid a parking attendant to let us pass along the road, we drove past a few hotels which were probably once quite spiffy. Donkeys meandered along the road to the first parking lot. All around us, skis and boots from bygone eras were displayed for rent. Vendors rushed the car in hopes of drumming up some business. Fortunately, we had some inside intel that there was a semi-legitimate rental shop further along the road. We spotted a small building and pulled into the dirt lot, only to have a few more roadside vendors try to convince us that we’d be better off with their cheaper options. In the name of a shred of safety, I opted to spend the big bucks (which is a rare choice for me) and rent skis that at least looked as though they had been manufactured in the past decade.  Once inside the building, we were free of hassle, and the friendly guy we found there did a good job of sizing us up and fitting us with skis, boots, and poles. He never inquired about our skiing ability or weight, so I just put faith in his divining powers and trusted that the bindings would be miraculously adjusted to suit our needs.

Once we were all set with equipment, we took a minute to check out the surroundings. We were in a dirt lot across from a small shack that was supposedly the lower ticket window for the two T-bars that we could see on the novice hill directly across the parking lot. Up the road about a half of a mile, we could see the real lift dangling above the rocky slope. The whole scene was little surreal. Stone houses hugged the rocky slopes, blending in with the landscape except for their colorful doors. The sunny side of the road was snow-free, and a small stream flowed next to patches of grass. The shady side of the road was covered in snow which extended to the top of peaks that towered over 10,000 feet. The most recent snow had fallen at least a month earlier. With no grooming or snow-making, this was to be natural snow skiing at its most interesting. Every day since the last snow has been nothing but blue skies and sunshine. The sun glinted off snow that resembled frozen Styrofoam. It wasn’t icy – just solid and squeaky. There was not a tree to be seen – just jutting rocky peaks and snow waiting to be skied in any which way.

We lugged our skies across the road and fended off multiple requests from guides who were anxious to show us the ropes. We waited outside the ticket window, which was to open at 10:00. We are on Moroccan time, so there is no race for the “first chair” at the crack of dawn. There were a few other skiers milling around, but no one seemed too concerned when the ticket window still hadn’t opened by 10:20. A few skiers started walking up the bunny hill and skiing down. We could see that the chair lift in the distance had started running. The guides suggested that, if we hiked up to the top of the T-bar, we could ski the cross-over trail to the lift. However, there were mixed messages (and it could have been my Arabic skills) about whether or not we could actually buy a lift ticket at the upper lift. We waited some more, then decided to head for the upper lift line in the car rather than on foot. After piling all of our skis and bodies into our minuscule rental car, we headed up the road to explore Plan B. Contrary to what I expected, the “base area” at the lift was even more deserted than the bunny hill. There were four or five shacks selling Coke and snacks. There were two snail vendors in the middle of the parking lot, and donkeys ambled up and down the road, carrying people between the two parking lots. And, alas, the there was a ticket window, but it was closed. The lift ran smoothly up the mountain without skiers. A few people stood around waiting. The clock struck 10:40, and, at last, a man with a key opened the ticket window. Relieved to think that we might actually get to ski, I happily plopped down the $10/ticket for our full day passes (yes!), and we clicked into our bindings for our first run.  

The first thing we noticed was that you need to alternate lines in loading the lift. Although there were only about 8 skiers on the entire mountain, there were lots of people who were here to just ride the chairlift to the top and play in the snow. We alternated between skiers and walkers. Completely clueless about what we might find, we hopped onto the lift and decided we would all get off at the mid-station to assess the situation on our first run. There is something wonderful about sunshine and 50’s as you sit on a lift. Oddly, the snow was not soft, but the sky was brilliant and the temperatures were warm. We managed to negotiate the mid-station exit ramp without any catastrophes, and Foster took off down the trail. It took about 10 seconds and two turns for his ski to pop off and travel a long way down the steep slope. Fortunately, he took it in stride and one-foot-skied to the runaway ski – settling in for a less aggressive approach to the rest of the run. Nolan, Brianna, and I stared down the steep slope dotted with moguls and wondered what we were doing. We all eventually took a few deep breaths and forced ourselves to take the plunge and just keep on turning. We all arrived unscathed at the base, but Brianna was the first to feel the altitude. With green spots swimming in the snow before her eyes, she opted for a water and snack break while the boys went up again. After run #2, Foster was feeling it and took a break. Nolan, Brianna, and I headed up for a run. Finally, all four of us regrouped for a trip to the top. The scenery was spectacular all the way up. As the lift cleared the final rocky outcropping, we had a 360- degree view of both snow-capped peaks and red, rocky mountains in the distance. It was breathtaking on many levels. The atmosphere at the top was festive. “Walkers” rented skis and played in a large snow field.

When I saw the trail we would need to negotiate to ski down the mountain, my legs turned to jelly and panic set in. Brianna and I contemplated getting back on the next chair down, but with Nolan flying down the mountain in pursuit of Foster, my mothering instinct kicked in and suggested I should follow a half a mile behind them to keep them safe (altitude and fear do funny things to the brain). Five minutes later, Brianna and I had our skis off and were picking our way across the rocks to just get to the death- defying drop that someone had deemed to be a trail.  Foster and Nolan were dots in the distance. We stepped back into our bindings and mustered the courage to start down. After about ten minutes, we were feeling more confident about our ability to survive this ordeal. That’s when Brianna took a minor fall that turned into an epic slide. I watched helplessly from above as she slid, and slid, and slid. She gathered speed, she seemed to slow, she flew over the lip of the mid-station trail in a puff of snow, and she kept on sliding. The boys, who had finally stopped to wait for us, were sitting in the snow near the mid-station as she flew past. Eventually she came to a stop. When I saw her pick up her head and start talking to Foster and Nolan who had skied over and started picking up the pieces, I finally breathed again. Then I laughed, and I couldn’t stop. I stood there doubled over alone in the middle of the mountain – laughing uncontrollably.  When I finally made it down to where Foster, Nolan, and Brianna were stopped, Brianna was laughing. She had survived and was only disappointed that there was no video proof of her feat. That serious slide marked that end of the day for Brianna. Nolan and Foster insisted on one more run to finish the day. When we finally headed down the mountain and met the ambulance on the way up, I thanked my lucky stars that we had survived the adventure unscathed.

Taking the horse out for a walk at the ski resort

After a week of adventures, we popped Foster back on to a plane to Canada and set about returning to a “normal” life. It’s the end the university semester for me, so exams and grading are keeping me busy. I endured my first learning experience with Moroccan university exams. Although my classes have numbered about 100 students/class, apparently, there are at least 200 students registered for each one. Although they don’t come to class, they will still take the exam. That will make for twice the grading fun!

The first fun trick of the exam process, however, was getting my exams photocopied. I should have predicted this would be a small ordeal from the outset, when I learned that photocopying would require a “meeting.” When the first meeting was cancelled three week ago, I wasn’t too surprised. At the rescheduled meeting, I was sent away to shorten my exam so it could be completed within an hour. This week, I turned up with my shortened exam and hope that I would come away with the 400 copies that I needed. After a trip to the “paper man” to sign the necessary forms to release the paper, I took the paper to the “copier man” to wait my turn in line. Once it was my turn, I waited patiently while he used an antiquated copy machine to first copy one side, then flip the paper and feed it all through the machine again to copy the second side. He repeated the process for all five pages. About an hour after I entered the magic photocopying room, I walked out with all the pages I need for my exam with an enormous stapling and sorting job for Nolan. I will never again take a sorting and stapling copy machine for granted. Exam season promises to hold lots of new lessons and cultural experiences for me. I will try hard to find the humor in each one, and to take each challenge as an opportunity to practice the art of patience. In retrospect, yesterday’s copying adventure gave me a chance to chat with three professors I had never met before and to practice some new Darija phrases with the copier man. One of the benefits of not being able to communicate is that it cuts off my sarcasm reflex. Rather than saying what I really want to say, I am forced to say boring things like, “It’s really cold in here,” and “thank you very much.” Ah…the struggles of a foreign language…making me a better person 400 copies at a time.

Amazigh New Year Treat

The Boyz Touch Down in Morocco

Happiness

MerHba Foster and Nolan! The New Year brought the best belated Christmas present ever with the arrival of Foster and Nolan in Morocco. The week that has passed since their arrival has been filled with both fresh reminders to appreciate all that is different and special about our everyday life in Marrakech and some new family adventures.

We wasted no time in immersing the boys in the chaos of Djemma el-Fna - giving them just a couple of hours to rest up before introducing them to the monkey-trainers, snake-charmers, vendors, and general madness of an evening on the square. They got to experience their first call to prayer from a rooftop terrace while testing out their first round of olives, harissa, and tajine. It was a classic Marrakech night to jumpstart the transition to Morocco time. Then, it took nearly four days for them to recover.

A local funduq

Brianna, thrilled to have her brothers here, got straight to work catching up on movies and binge-watching t.v. shows with them. She also took advantage of having company to venture out shopping in the medina without the usual hassle that comes with being a single female. We celebrated a late Christmas together and, then, finally ditched the dead palm fronds and stale gingerbread house in favor of moving full speed ahead into 2017. We visited some of our favorite restaurants, went to see the local storytellers, and visited the Bahia Palace. We visited the knock-off stores for super cheap imitation sneaker shopping, and I was introduced to the world of YZY's - some kind of Kanye West sneaker craze that this oh-so-hip mom managed to miss along the way. The quest for the perfect fake YZY's involved some super secret system of sole, seam, and font evaluation. They all kind of looked the same to me, and I just tagged along for the ride. Fortunately some impostors made the cut, and Foster and Nolan came away sporting new shoes. Nolan then got busy trying to scheme up ways to start his own business shipping fake YZY's home to his friends. This semester promises to be a real world education for him. First up: "Honing Your Entrepreneurial Skills Through Illegal Export."

Celebrating Marrakech Christmas

Winoo - our favorite juice stop

Nolan enjoys a camel burger

Bahia Palace Moments

Foster and Nolan also got to meet some of the characters in our Marrakech life, pat the neighborhood cats, and experience some of the daily challenges that continue to boggle our minds from time to time. This week's "Morocco moment" was the discovery that stores are no longer selling trash bags because they are not environmentally friendly. The staff at Carrefour assures me that someone out there is working on an eco-friendly solution, but, in the meantime, there will be no more plastic trash bags. I do, honestly, applaud the effort, however, it would have been quite helpful to have a plan in place before phasing out trash bags entirely. I am not quite sure what we will do tomorrow, when our last trash bag goes into the dumpster. We live in a concrete building surrounded by concrete. I don't have a worm bin, a compost pile, or a fire pit. To my knowledge our neighbors do not either.  It's a good thing I have three children here with me this week to run handfuls of garbage down five floors to the dumpster. Oy.

En route to M'hamid - entering the Draa Valley

After a few days of "real life," we headed south for a desert adventure. No visit to Morocco would be complete without camels, so we headed to Ouarzazate. We survived the four-hour bus trip through the mountains without any barfing (unfortunately that was not the case for everyone on the bus), and we silently gave thanks each time the bus passed another sheer drop and remained on the road. When we arrived in Ouarzazate we were thrilled to set our feet on solid ground and breathe in fresh air. The city was remarkably quiet, and we searched for our hotel without once having to risk our lives in traffic. Once we settled in, we set off to explore the kasbah. We wound our way through the labyrinth of empty rooms and tried to imagine what life would have been like in a different era.  We strolled through the old village and eventually made our way out to enjoy the shops on the main road, where we found ourselves in a magical maze of a store, over-stuffed with ancient treasures. It felt as though a genie would magically pop out of a lamp at any moment.

Kasbah in Ouarzazate

A cave of magical treasures in Ouarzazte

The next morning, we headed further south, this time in a 4X4 with our guide Abdou. We were headed for M'hamid, the last town on the frontier of the Sahara, en route to our desert adventure. The landscape grew progressively more rocky, dry and desolate for the first hour. Then, we emerged into a sea of palm trees, marking the beginning if the Draa Valley, a 100 km "river" valley that stretches from Agdz to the Sahara. The change was stunning, and the next 100 km was an amazing contrast of the palm oasis with its ancient kasbahs and the towering red rock walls that formed its backdrop. From time to time we detoured from the main road into the oasis to catch glimpses of alfalfa farmers tending their crops under the forest of date palms and children driving donkeys along dirt roads.  We noticed as the more conservative long robes of the women of the city were replaced with more festive and sparkly skirts in the valley. And, finally, after a long dusty day in the car, we came to the literal end of the road in M'hamid. Forty kilometers from the border with Algeria, the road ends, and the Sahara desert begins. We passed through a few different police checkpoints, and our driver reassured us over and over that they were just protecting us. They wanted to know that we were sleeping in the desert he said. He also went on to tell us all about the cameras on the border, the helicopters waiting to be deployed whenever something moved, and the fact that he would just call 117 if we got lost in the dunes, and immediately helicopters would be looking for us. I wasn't sure whether we should be reassured or nervous.

Turban shopping en route to the Sahara

What did become quickly apparent was the fact that we would be the only things moving in the desert this night. Apparently frigid desert camping is not high on most tourists' lists in January. When we finally rolled out of our dusty vehicle in M'hamid, we were greeted by our dromedary team. Four sweet looking camels waited to bring us to our desert campsite. As Foster and Nolan wrapped themselves in their desert turbans, our camel leader, Youssef, readied the camels. He led them across a tricky ditch before having us hop aboard for our 6 km trek across the sand. As the camels rose from kneeling to standing, we clung to our handlebars and wondered what we were in for.  For a while we giggled at the sheer oddity of riding aloft these weird animals. It seemed a little surreal - being led through golden sands by a young boy dressed in a turquoise robe. He communicated with the camels with clicking sounds, and they seemed to comply. After no more than 15 minutes, I found myself wondering how much longer the torture would last. After 30 minutes, the lower portion of my body had gone numb, and I stopped searching for creative saddle positions to minimize my pain. When Youssef finally brought the camels to a kneeling position again and told us to dismount, I was ecstatic.

Making friends with our dromedary team

My view from the front

While the camels waited, we walked over a path in the dunes and found our desert camp and two friendly staff (who had likely been forced from their warm, cushy homes to accommodate us in the desert).  We were pleasantly surprised to find that we had signed on for some kind of glamping experience. Our giant tent was lined with Moroccan carpets and furnished with four beds, stacks of blankets, our own sink, and a light bulb. There was a dining tent, a tea tent, and a giant fire ring. We were the only souls to be found in this deserted desert paradise.

Glamping in the Sahara

After enjoying tea and chocolates, Razzi presented us with two snowboards and sent us to the top of the nearest dune. "Exhausted" does not begin to describe how we felt after hiking to the top of a dune, carrying snowboards in deep sand. The idea of sand boarding had sounded so appealing before we set out up the dune. Now it seemed like a ludicrous undertaking. We flopped in the sand at the top of the dune and admired the surroundings. Brianna was the first to take the plunge - opting to sit on the board rather than strap in with sneakers. She enjoyed a sweet ride. Foster followed. Then, the two of them set about lugging the boards back to the top of the dune. Gasping and wheezing, Brianna brought me her board. Foster slumped over a nearby dune and rested.  I took my first run, inspired by Foster and Brianna's effort. I flew down the packed sand before digging an edge into the soft sand below and dumping off sideways. It was a blast. Then I had to climb. That was not a blast. Panting and sweating, I finally reached the peak of the dune and planted the board. We spent over an hour just playing in the sand and watching Nolan flip, roll, and slide.When the sun finally set, and we had succeeded in embedding grains of sand in every crevice of our bodies, we took one last ride down the dune back into the camp.

Do real Vermonters Sand Board?

This is not Smuggs

A looong hike up the dune

Standing up looks too scary!

Nolan and desert parkour

When we slid back into camp, we were greeted by a piping hot tajine for dinner, a campfire, and a private drumming session. We shivered in the cold, crept as close to the fire as possible, appreciated the desert stars, and headed to bed very early in an effort to get warm. As the temperatures dropped, we piled on the blankets and wondered what kind of craziness had inspired us to visit the desert in winter.

When the alarms went off at 6:40 to wake us for sunrise, Brianna immediately exclaimed, "Thank God! I thought that night was never going to end." All three kids were wide awake - not exactly frozen, but uncomfortably suffocated under towering blankets. The problem was not waking up, but actually mustering the enthusiasm to get out of bed into the freezing cold. Brianna and I managed to drag ourselves to the top of a dune for sunrise, while the boys opted to stay entrapped in their blankets. Once again, the desert was silent, and we had the sunrise to ourselves. We spotted Razzi down below in his turban moving between tents, and we knew that meant that a hot cup of tea would be waiting for us when we returned. We jogged down the dune, told the boys breakfast was ready, and went into the dining tent to hug a teapot and cradle hot hard boiled eggs in an effort to get warm. The boys eventually stumbled in and found their spots at the table. In contrast to the super sweet mint tea we have grown accustomed to, our tea pot was filled with extra strong, bitter green tea. I looked on in amusement as all three kids challenged each other to gulp it down without making faces. I stuck to the coffee.

 After breakfast, we packed up, bid our desert hosts goodbye, and piled back into the truck with Abdou for a ride through the dunes back to the paved road. We made a quick stop in Tamegroute to visit a pottery cooperative famous for the region's signature green pottery (colored by magnesium baked into the clay). Three hours later, we rolled into our hotel full of sand and fresh desert memories - grateful for the heater in our room, the hot water in our shower, and the power outlet next to the beds. When we forced ourselves out for dinner a few hours later, the desert already seemed like a distant memory except for the sore camel riding muscles which would stick around for days as a sweet reminder of our adventure.