Well, after being home for a few weeks, I finally managed to set aside some time (three hours in all!), to select, edit and upload these pictures of our trip to Morocco. We were lucky to be travelling at a slow time, so we didn’t have to show up to the helipad at an ungodly hour (Its school vacation time now, and the weather hasn’t permitted any chopper flights for 4 days – the natives are getting restless. Folks are showing up for the first-come-first-served flights at 4am, and still being assigned to the 5th flight).
Both girls travelled well on all of the flights from Timika to Jakarta, Dubai, and Casablanca; although since so much time has passed, it feels like it went a lot more smoothly than it probably did. We spent two uneventful days in Casablanca where the most excitement we had was realizing that we had lost Betsy somewhere along the way. We didn’t even take out the camera until the train ride to Fes, where Diana took a nap after a total melt down. Going through all the pictures of this trip, I realized we have a lot of Diana sleeping. I think it’s just because we were so busy every time she was awake!
We checked into our Riad in Fes, and Diana instantly made friends with the statue by the fireplace and named her Banjolina. Don’t know where she got that from, but Diana was very attentive to her needs, feeding her and giving her drinks of water as necessary…
During our trip we toured a number of derelict mansions, sitting there waiting for foreign investors to come in and turn them into luxury hotels. The places were amazing, with beautiful tile work and huge carved doors. It got us thinking about if WE could ever be those “foreign investors.” The multi-million dollar price tags were a bit daunting, but not as much as the thought of the cost of renovation – both places had at least one collapsed ceiling, and several residents of the animal variety (cats, chickens, etc).
We stayed on the outskirts of the Medina (old part of the city) in Fes, which is notoriously maze-like. Upon asking the maitre d’hotel how to get to the main city gate and being told to just keep turning left until we got there, we decided to hire a guide for our second day. Our guide took us to some of the main attractions in Fes, including the amazing leather tanneries. The smell was overwhelming, but it was a beautiful sight to behold, and we were told many times that we could order anything we wanted custom made and delivered to our door the next day. We also stopped to peek in at the oldest university in the world, where a friendly fez salesmen enabled this photo, and I snapped one of my favorite photos of the trip. Something about the sheep’s hide on the plastic deck chair gets me every time.
The weather in Fes was beautiful, and we spent many afternoons on the rooftop during and after Helen’s 4 o’clock nap. Diana spent most of these at shirtless and running around gleefully in the afternoon breeze.
After our tour on the first day, I feel proud to say that we walked through the medina daily (if not several times a day) and never got so lost that we had to get help (except for when we tried to get back to one specific shop near the tanneries). Having a map was mostly useless, but we would get to a familiar souk, or market square, and then wind our way through the narrow streets until we got to where we wanted to go. All this time we had to be careful to avoid the donkeys and horses carrying goods through the streets, sometimes at quite a fast pace. Diana loves seeing the donkeys and crying our “Donk!!!” whenever we saw one, just to make me laugh.
One of our day trips was to the ruins of Volubilis, which according to Wikipedia “features the best preserved Roman ruins in this part of northern Africa.” Our definition of “well-preserved” must be pretty uptight since we were distressed to see the beautiful mosaics sitting fully exposed to the elements, and without even good signage to tell us what they were, but oh well. The photos on Wikipedia show a lot more color than we saw – but perhaps someone had just splashed some water on the tiles, as we saw a French-speaking tour guide do so he could describe the colors that were once obvious. Both girls withstood the glaring sun quite well, and no one got sun-burned. Diana particularly liked standing on the bases of columns and practicing her ballet.
Leaving Volubilis we stopped at the road-side stand of an artifacts dealer who was selling some rare, ancient artifacts from the area, including resin and rhinestone rings, coins from way back in the 20th century, and these fossils. Ben didn’t ask how much they were, but I think he regrets not getting one.
That was our trip in a nutshell. Now to find pictures of our time in Vermont and Australia…. Hopefully I’ll be able to get those up before Christmas! I was hoping to get the photos inserted in with the text, but now I’m too tired, so you’ll have to figure it out as you go. Sorry!
