Jared – Page 2 – The Escape Hatch

Into the Negev: Windows to the Past

So a funny thing happened while I was writing these articles about Israel. Maybe you heard – a global pandemic broke out and brought all travel to a halt.

As such, it’s been hard to come back to this blog and celebrate exploring the world when it suddenly feels like traveling overseas is something we used to do. Right now, for example, I was supposed to be on a beach in Mexico. That ain’t going to happen anytime soon. This Christmas Lea and I are planning a trip to the south of England. Will we still be able to go? Who knows.

The hospitality industry is one of those that’s been struck hardest in the current crisis. I’m left to wonder how much the places we’ve traveled to in the past are being impacted, and how the many people we’ve met along the way are coping with the current situation.

History tells us that this too will pass, and that months or years from now the world will settle into a new “normal.” It would be foolish, though, to assume that everything will be as it was before. Just as how we travel and take precautions changed after 9/11, so too will the world be a different place once the COVID-19 fires die down.

Anyway, back to the story in progress:

After leaving Jerusalem, we picked up another rental car for our final Israeli expedition: a trip down Highway 40 into the Negev Desert. The Negev is the large, sparsely populated region that takes up the lower half of the country. Why go? To see Israel’s own Grand Canyon – the Makhtesh Ramon (Ramon Crater) – and all the awesome geology that goes with it.

The road to the Ramon Crater goes through Avdat National Park, site of the McDonald’s that is the only place to stop for lunch on the drive. (In 2017, that was $21 US for two scrawny burgers and stringy fries.) Looming over the fast food joint, however, is an ancient, mountain-top Nabatean city that was once the next stop on the spice road after Petra. And wonder of wonders, unlike almost all the other mountain-top ruins we’ve visited, you can actually drive up to this one. (I’m looking at you, Masada.)

Somebody’s living room once had an awesome view.

The city was founded in the 3^rd century BC, lasted until 700 AD, and is still well preserved for a place that no one’s lived in for over a thousand years. Sections of the city show the influence of the original Nabateans as well as the later Roman and Byzantine occupants. Overlooking the desert and the old spice route are the pillars of an ancient Nabatean temple and remains of a slightly less ancient Christian church.

Pillars and arches really hold up over time.

Not long after leaving Avdat we came to Mitzpe Ramon, the town on the edge of Ramon Crater, where Lea witnessed this rocket scientist trying to sit his daughter on the back of a wild Nubian ibex.

Despite the name, Ramon Crater isn’t a crater. Instead, it’s the world’s largest box canyon, formed by erosion over the last five million years. We planned to spend the night in Mitzpe Ramon, but we still had plenty of daylight to burn, so off we went over the edge of the cliff!

Highway 40, which continues all the way south to Eilat, takes a switchback down the north face of the crater and crosses the valley floor, with many convenient pull-offs to see the geologic wonders of the area.

The first we came to was the Carpentry, a mound of unusual black rocks that resembles a giant pile of wood. The rocks are made of sandstone that was superheated by hydrothermal activity and cooled into crystalline shapes.

This is what happens when you play Jenga with a pyramid.

The next stop on the geology trail was the Painted Rock Park. At various points in the past, magma baked the sandstone of the region into quartzite of a variety of colors, depending on the different minerals in the magma and the temperatures at which the rocks were formed (or so the sign says). This particular area has multi-colored boulders arranged for travelers to view up close, but the differing colors of sandstone can be seen in many places throughout the park. From this pull-off you can see a particularly stunning cross-section of strata that looks like a rainbow in rock.

Saving the best for last, we came to the crater’s Ammonite Wall. This site is a medium-short hike from the road, but it’s definitely worth the trek. Ammonites (and Lea will surely double-check me on this) were marine mollusks that went extinct along with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Here in the park is a place where an undersea mudslide buried an entire colony, and they can now be seen preserved forever in the rock. Ammonites weren’t your run-of-the-mill garden snails either – these suckers were huge.

There’s plenty of natural beauty to stare at in Ramon Crater. If you’re up for biking and backpacking, there are trails galore. However, the temperature had dropped substantially during our two weeks in Israel, so even if we were up for exerting ourselves, the weather wouldn’t have been kind.

We ate Thanksgiving dinner that night in Mitzpe Ramon, then took the last tour of our two week vacation – a star tour of the Negev night sky from Astronomy Israel. Desert skies are ideal for stargazing, especially in places so far from city lights. When we were there in the day, the clouds were still hanging on from the rain system that had recently moved through the country. After dinner, we received the all-clear – the clouds had moved on and the sky was ready. It was also really, really cold, but the tour guide had blankets to spare.

Gratuitous photo gallery of Ramon Crater follows:

On our final day, we took a last look at the crater from the rim, then drove back to Tel Aviv. For as big of a city as it is, there’s not much for a traveler to see there, or at least so it seemed to us. Tel Aviv is a busy metropolis where people actually live and work, and feels like the most modern city in Israel. After all our time spent soaking in the history of Petra, Galilee, Jerusalem, and the Negev, we used our day in Tel Aviv just to walk along the Mediterranean.

And yet, there was still one thing for me to geek out about: Andromeda’s Rock.

Hear me out. Modern Tel Aviv was built on the site of the ancient city of Jaffa (a.k.a. Joppa) – in myth, the home of such figures as Queen Cassiopeia and Princess Andromeda, and the start and end point for the quest of the hero Perseus. The oldest district of the city is still called Jaffa Port. At the end of all the piers and wharves is a series of rocky outcrops that constantly get bashed by the waves. The last of those rocks, according to tradition, is where Andromeda was meant to be sacrificed to the Kraken. According to Hollywood, here’s how it would have looked three thousand years ago, give or take a few embellishments.

We had to be at the airport shortly after 1:00 a.m., but we booked a room at a beachside hotel anyway just to have a place to relax until midnight. Our flight out of Israel landed in Istanbul in the wee hours of the morning, where we wandered around the airport in a daze before climbing on our direct 13-hour return trip to the States. I’m not sure we were aware what day/time/year it was when we finally got home.

And that was it for 2017. Who knows what travel will be like in 2020 going forward? I often sign off by saying that The Escape Hatch will ever be open, but for now I’ll raise a glass of Cuban rum to all of us hunkering down at home.

Stay mindful, stay healthy, stay hopeful! The Escape Hatch will return.

Three Days In Jerusalem

Blogger’s note: This is the third of four chapters on our time spent in Israel in November, 2017. The first two can be found here and here.

We dropped off our rental car in Haifa, walked across the street, and caught the train to Jerusalem. Aside from having to find the entrance to the station in a shopping mall whose parking lot and bus terminal were under renovation, it really was that simple.

As I mentioned in my last article, Israel’s train network makes travel exceedingly easy, almost as if a metro rail extends across half the country. The day we left Haifa, though, was the end of the weekend, so the train was packed with students heading back to university and soldiers returning from leave. I have to admit – sharing space with college-age kids carrying assault rifles is a little unnerving.

We switched lines south of Tel Aviv to pick up the train to Jerusalem. That one was nearly empty, and the ride through the valleys of Israel was quiet, peaceful, and just a little bit eerie. When we disembarked, Lea and I were the only ones waiting for the bus to take us into the city.

Believe it or not, Lea and I weren’t sure there’d be enough in Jerusalem to interest us. We’d already checked off quite a few ancient history boxes and we’re not the “religious pilgrimage” type. We did want to see the Dead Sea and I was up for a visit to Masada (after watching the TV miniseries with Peter O’Toole as a kid in 1981), but beyond that we didn’t have any commitments.

And by commitments, I mean hotel reservations or plans of any kind after our first two nights. Aside from an excursion to see the two sites mentioned above, we had no firm idea how we were going to spend the rest of our time in Israel.

Our hotel was not too far from the Jaffa Gate, the western entrance into the Old City. By “not too far” I mean, of course, straight-line distance on the map. The walk wasn’t quite so easy, with at least one dead end and an extremely busy highway to cross (Yitshak Kariv). Plus, there were an awful lot of stairs to climb to reach the city walls.

Inside, the Old City is a maze of single-lane streets and stairways that blend into each other. Some are open to the sky while others are covered, giving whole sections of the ancient metropolis the feel of a two-thousand year old shopping mall. Stores and market stalls were everywhere, but the streets were so crowded that two travelers on our own didn’t draw the attention of aggressive touts as we had in other parts of the world.

We could have become lost quite easily had we not already had practice at navigating Old World mazes in Zanzibar and Marrakesh. However, while those places were flat, Jerusalem is multi-level, making it almost seem at times as if it was designed by M.C. Escher.

Our first stop after navigating the labyrinth was the Western Wall, the last standing remnant of the Second Temple and one of the holiest sites of the Jewish faith. The Wall is open to the public, as long as you obey the gender segregation rules: the larger section of the Wall is for men to pray, and the smaller for women. We were simply there to watch, but we accidentally crossed an invisible demarcation line and Lea got yelled at for not having a Y-chromosome. After that, we decided to take in the view from afar.

From afar is the only way to view the Dome of the Rock, the holy site of the Muslim faith, unless you’re willing to convert. We circled back into the maze of the Old City, got a little lost, and eventually found ourselves at a site that, I’m ashamed to admit, wasn’t even on my radar: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Christianity’s holiest site is pretty unassuming from the outside.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, first built in 326 by Emperor Constantine, enshrines what is believed to be the site of the Crucifixion and the tomb in which Jesus was buried. Within the church are several chapels and altars, a large rotunda, and the Stone of Anointing upon which Jesus’s body is believed to have been prepared for burial. The Church was packed with people following the Stations of the Cross as well as several guided tours, but it was still possible to view most of it on our own.

With sore legs, an evening to kill, and an excursion out of town scheduled for the next day, Lea and I retreated to our room, dined on microwave noodles from a gas station, and flipped through Fodor’s Israel and TripAdvisor to figure out how to spend the rest of our vacation. We were drawn toward the Negev Crater in the south of the country, both for its geology and the opportunity for stargazing tours. It became clear, though, that there was more in Jerusalem to interest us, so we made the executive decision to extend our visit. Luckily, our hotel was happy to let us stay on one extra night, and didn’t even need us to change rooms.

Well before dawn, we walked to a hotel just down the road, where a tour van would collect us and a passel of other travelers for a trip to Masada, the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve, and the Dead Sea. Our tour left so early in the morning because part of the package was the chance to climb Masada in the dark and view the sunrise from the top.

It sounded like a good idea at the time. I’m telling you now – it wasn’t.

The remnants of Masada dangle over a cliff.

Masada is an ancient mountain-top fortress built by Herod the Great during the third decade BCE. It was the location of a siege in 74 CE during which the Romans built a giant ramp in order to attack the large group of Jewish rebels hiding there. The rebels famously committed suicide rather than let themselves be taken.

Masada can be approached from either the west (the Roman ramp side) or the east (the Dead Sea side), but the two routes don’t intersect. Our tour brought us to the eastern side of the mountain, where there’s a cable car to take you to the top. The catch? The cable car doesn’t run until after sunup. And so we climbed.

The ascent takes at least an hour. It starts as a gentle slope, during which you keep asking “Where’s the mountain?” As it becomes steeper, you ask the same question while pausing for breath. Once you finally reach the mountainside you’ll wish you hadn’t, as you zig and zag up a steep rock face without the benefit of handrails. The hike began in total darkness, but twilight crept up our backs the closer we got to the summit. Important advice: don’t turn around. Don’t look down.

After my 500^th “Are we there yet?” I reached the top, only to find it was all for naught. I’d climbed as fast as I could to take a photo of the sunrise, and the sky was a solid bank of cloud. I spent a little time exploring the ruins, but Masada hasn’t weathered the ages as well as other sites, and in most places there’s little left but the outlines of buildings and a few stone walls. The Dead Sea is easily visible, and from on high it’s also clear how much that great salt lake has shrunk in modern times.

If you thought the climb up was fun, let me tell you that the climb down is also a hoot. (On this tour, it was still too early for the cable car to be running.) The nice thing about the ascent, despite how hard it was on legs and lungs, is that I was facing the mountain the whole time, so if I’d tripped, I’d have fallen up and toward the mountain. On the way down, just as my legs were so tired they shook with every step, I was facing down and away, staring the whole time at the field of razor-sharp scree just waiting to break my plunge when my knees gave out. And they wanted to, they so wanted to.

We probably would have better enjoyed our next stop, the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve, if we hadn’t been so damn tired from hiking Masada. Ein Gedi is an oasis and wadi valley with hiking trails, waterfalls, botanical gardens, and ibex. We made it as far back as one of the waterfalls before giving out.

The second rock I climbed that day was much smaller than the first.

Next was a stop at the Dead Sea itself. We rode to the far northern tip, stopping at overlooks to take in the view. Because of its insanely high salt content, there’s something distinctly odd about it – the waves are more sluggish, the coastline is encrusted in white, and the receding waterline has left deposits like tree rings in the sandy basin.

And of course, because of the salt, it’s impossible to sink in it. We didn’t have a whole lot of time to take a dip, but we did get to wade out and experience the surreal buoyancy of lying on our backs in what felt like something between lake water and honey.

The other thing to do is to cover yourself in Dead Sea mud which, of course, is supposed to be great for your skin. I’m not sure how much I buy into that, but there are gift shops to sell all sorts of beauty products derived from Dead Sea salt. What I am sure of is that Dead Sea mud is nearly impossible to rinse off. Even when it’s gone, you’ll still feel an oily, sticky residue everywhere.

In retrospect, it might have been better to have driven ourselves. Because we’d taken an excursion, I felt rushed through each site we visited that day. Then again, taking our own car would have also involved driving in and out of Jerusalem (where the traffic was nightmarish) and crossing back and forth into Palestine (which might have been time-consuming in a whole different way). There is a lot to experience around the Dead Sea, though, and I would recommend giving yourself time to enjoy it.

On our extra, unplanned-for day in Jerusalem, it rained. That wasn’t the end of the world, but it did spoil any chance of walking along the Old City wall. We did hit the markets one last time and visit two museums.

The first was Yad Vashem: the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. This museum has got to be the most exhaustive, richly-detailed, and breath-taking memorial to the victims of the Holocaust to be found anywhere. However, if you really want to experience it in depth, I have to recommend breaking in after hours. During the day, the museum is so crowded with tour groups that you can barely see the exhibits. It would also take an entire day to go through properly.

Jerusalem’s buses and light rail go everywhere, except to the ancient parts of town.

That night we visited the Israel Museum, a massive art museum that also houses the “Shrine of the Book” – a permanent standing exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls exhibit by itself should be amazing for any history nerd, but the museum as a whole, with its wide variety of artistic styles and exhibits, is world-class. It’s also a very large complex, so be ready for a lot of walking.

The thing about Jerusalem is that there’s a lot to take in. You could spend a week or two there and still have places to explore. Despite all the turmoil and strife in the region, it’s a city that lots of people visit and sometimes stay for good. We met more Americans in Jerusalem than anywhere else we’ve been outside of walled-off Caribbean resorts, but these Americans weren’t tourists – they lived there. Ancient and modern at the same time, it’s easy to see why scholars for centuries considered Jerusalem to be the center of the world.

Next time: We drive a rental car into a giant hole in the desert.

On the Road In Galilee

When I left you hanging, dear readers, Lea and I had just been grilled to within an inch of “well done” by the airport security in Eilat. From there we took a plane back to Tel Aviv, took a train to the city itself, and slept for a few hours in a hotel connected to a giant shopping mall (after the mall had closed, which made finding the front desk a rat-in-a-maze challenge). The next morning we hopped right back on the train and headed north to the city of Haifa.

I have to give a shout-out to Israel’s wonderful (and cheap for how far it’ll take you) train system. Imagine a metro rail such as you’d expect in a major city, and extend it across most of a country. Granted, Israel is only the size of New Jersey, but their rapid transit makes getting from city to city a breeze. The rail system doesn’t cover the whole country, but it connects all the major stops up and down the Mediterranean coast and Jerusalem as well (which we’ll get to next time).

Haifa was not our final destination. As soon as we got there, we took a cab from the train to a car rental agency where we’d reserved the tiniest vehicle we could get our hands on. Since we’d also rented a car for the day in Eilat, this was our second overseas driving experience. In general, though, Israel was the first time we’d dared to dip our toes into the joys of operating a vehicle in another country.

A few words on driving in Israel:

1) The cars have pin numbers. In addition to using the key to enter and start the car, you have to punch in a code on a pad next to the steering wheel. Every time I did so, it felt like I was activating a self-destruct mechanism. Which is, in fact, what Lea and I started calling it.

2) You’re not going to be able to pump your own gas, so don’t even try. If you were Israeli you could, but the self-serve gas pumps require you to key in all sorts of extra codes which, I think, included the license number of the car and some kind of personal ID . It doesn’t help that all the digital pump displays are in Hebrew with no option to switch languages. Save your time, grab an attendant, and use hand-gestures to imply that you’d like to fill your tank.

3) Israelis love roundabouts. The country is full of them. I understand from a statistical standpoint that they’re much safer than four-way head-on interchanges, but I swear there were some roundabouts with no intersections at all – they was there for the fun of it.

4) Signs are in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, unlike the monolingual gas stations. Before going to Israel, we were told that Waze was a more accurate navigation system there than Google Maps. The problem we discovered (at least in 2017, it might have changed by now) is that Waze only shows directions in the native language of whatever country you’re in. Unless you can read Hebrew, you’re pretty much out of luck.

The first place we navigated to was Beit She’Arim National Park, site of an ancient Jewish necropolis that is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The huge complex of graves, tombs, and burial caves was an especially important site during the first centuries of the Jewish Diaspora, when many Jews both in Israel and abroad sought to be buried there. Today it’s a fascinating site to wander and see layers upon layers of history.

One of many catacombs carved into the hillside.

From there, we traveled east (after making a few wrong turns) toward the Sea of Galilee. First, I’ll admit there’s a weird feeling I got seeing freeway exits for places like “Nazareth.” Second, it should be pointed out that the Sea of Galilee isn’t a sea at all – it’s just a good-sized lake. It isn’t even the size it used to be: it and the Dead Sea have both been shrinking for decades due to more and more demands being placed on the Jordan River as a water supply. In 2018 (the year after we went) the Sea of Galilee dropped to its lowest point since official measurements began, passing the “black line” below which irreversible damage occurs.

The Sea of Galilee is already the lowest freshwater lake in the world, but to reach it you first drive up, up, up over a range of hills, and then down, down, down into the valley. We’d hoped to catch a view of the sunset across the sea, so I’d booked us lodgings on the eastern shore. Doing so, I’d inadvertently rented a cabin within the Golan Heights. According the Google Maps, when we were standing on the beach we were in Israel, but when we walked back to our cabin we were in territory disputed with Syria.

I’d made the reservation through Booking.com, which is what we also ended up using for 95% of our hostel stays in South America. One of the great things about Booking, and why I’m giving them free advertising here, is the feature that lets you print your reservation in both your own language and the language of wherever you happen to be staying. This came in handy when the proprietor of the lakeside camp where we were staying didn’t speak or read a word of English.

I’d thought it a stroke of luck that I’d found us a room on the east side of the lake when there weren’t many options to choose from. I’d imagined everything was in danger of being booked, when in fact we were there in the “dead” season for tourists. Our cabin was one of about a dozen or so that were attached to a closed water park, and we were the only guests. An ideal setting for a horror movie, but we did get to see our sunset.

The next day, we took a longer route back to Haifa, stopping at two sites of interest along the way. The first was Bet She’An, an extremely well-preserved Roman (and later Byzantine) city on the site of an even older Canaanite settlement. The city that you can see today lasted from 63 BCE until it was destroyed by an earthquake in 749.

When I say that you can see the city, I mean that you can actually see it and get a feel for what it was like 1500 years ago. Many other ancient ruins, such as the city of Volubilis in Morocco, are nothing today but the outline of ancient foundations. While much of Bet She’An is rubble, a lot of it is still there, with buildings, houses, baths, and an amphitheater mostly intact.

I guess the builder’s warranty expired 2000 years ago.

Our next stop for the day was Gan Hashlosha, a park containing spring-fed pools that maintain a constant temperature of 28°C. It’s a great place to take the family for a mid-day swim, so long as you don’t mind being constantly nibbled by the many tiny fish that populate the pools. Color me ticklish, but despite how pleasant the water was, being pecked by cute little wanna-be piranhas was a bit too much. The park is indeed lovely, so I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from going. I’d simply suggest that you bring along someone the fish might find tastier than yourself.

These little monsters have a taste for human flesh.

We made our way back to Haifa and checked into our hotel on top of Mount Carmel just in time for Shabbat. Israel takes Shabbat seriously – the country shuts down from sunset on Friday night to the same time on Saturday. This can prove a particular challenge to travelers, especially those who need laundry done. Realizing our predicament, we went out in search of any laundromat that might still be open. Doing this, we found another problem particular to the city of Haifa itself: Mount Carmel blocks nearly all cell and GPS signal on its northern face, where the bulk of the city is.

Find a laundry we finally did – one attached to a hostel full of foreign students. Unfortunately, we had to wait our turn at the machines, but to our good luck there was a pizza place just down the block that remained open on Shabbat as well.

Other interesting notes about Shabbat in Israel: Hotels have “Shabbat elevators” that run up and down, stopping on each floor, so that Orthodox observants don’t have to operate the control panel. Also, local ISPs may decide that Shabbat is a good day to shut down their network for maintenance.

The Baha’i Gardens – look but don’t touch.

While everything else shuts down, tourism still goes on. Not far from our hotel were the Baha’i Gardens. The Shrine of the Báb is one the holiest sites in the Baha’i faith, and the gardens above it are magnificent – if only you could see them up close. Above the garden is a viewing platform, crowded with tourists from buses, and at the bottom is a smaller garden around the shrine itself that you can actually walk through. The large portion of the gardens can only be visited via a pre-arranged guided tour, which we didn’t learn until later. Otherwise, the garden can only be viewed from afar, which is why all the pictures in postcards are taken from helicopter.

Part of the garden you can actually get to.

Leaving Haifa for the day, we drove down the coast to the ancient Roman city of Caesarea. The national park built around this old coastal port has turned it into – there’s no other way to put it – the most gentrified set of ruins we’ve ever seen. To be honest, we never even got as far as the main ruin complex itself, because between the parking and the old city is a maze of expensive restaurants and souvenir shops the size of a small amusement park. The parking lot was packed with plenty of people who weren’t observing Shabbat, and the whole park was crawling with families out to kill a Saturday.

After Bet She’An, Caesarea was a dud. I hate to put any national park on my “don’t bother” list, but I have to do so with Caesarea.

On the way back north, however, we made a little detour. On our original train ride to Haifa, I’d noticed what looked like a ruined castle along the coast, and I’d spotted it again while on the drive down. I managed to find it on the map, so before we returned to Haifa, Lea and I pulled off at the exit in Atlit and drove to the Château Pèlerin, a Crusader fortress built by the Templars in 1218. This isn’t really a tourist site – there’s no infrastructure save for a fishing pier and a fence around the ancient Crusader cemetery. However, it’s not a bad spot to watch the Mediterranean away from the tourist crowd.

And so concluded our first week in Israel. For the second half of our trip, we had plans for a train ride to Jerusalem, a hotel reservation for two nights near the heart of the city, and then… we had no idea. Here was the test: could we plan a vacation on the fly? Tune in next time to find out!

Red Sea Crossing: Eilat to Petra

We were supposed to go to Greece. For the autumn of 2017, Lea and I had been planning a two-week Aegean odyssey: Athens, Delphi, Santorini, Crete. We were going to snorkel, visit a volcano, and see enough ancient ruins to make my wife want to club me in the head.

Then life happened and we couldn’t go during our optimum vacation window. We could travel later in the year – maybe – but by then the Aegean would be too cold to enjoy. I don’t remember the exact sequence of decisions that led us to Israel instead, but I’m sure it ran along the lines of Lea reading a travel article (like this one!) and both of us hoping that since the Red Sea is farther south, it might be warm enough to swim at that time of year.

Thus and therefore, we went to Israel in November 2017. By this point we’d already decided to quit our jobs in 2018 and trek around South America, so in addition to this being a much-needed escape, it also served (as would our later trip to Guatemala) as a test-run for our career break. We would carry everything in our backpacks, use public transport when possible, walk across borders twice, and not plan everything ahead. When we left the Atlanta airport, we didn’t even have hotel reservations for the last few days of our trip. Let me tell you, this freaked the 2017 version of me out.

In the Indiana Jones-style travel map in your mind, picture the big red arrow representing our flight crossing the Atlantic and Mediterranean to Istanbul, then turning south to Tel Aviv, where after a very short night’s stay we flew a quick morning hop to Eilat.

You’ve never heard of Eilat. Here it is:

Eilat is a Red Sea resort town at Israel’s southernmost tip that’s very, very close to the borders with Jordan and Egypt (though not the part where Moses went for a swim). When we got there, the air was still warm but the water was definitely cold. We wouldn’t learn how cold until we were in it and committed to snorkeling, but the crystal-clear views and beautiful fish made it worth the chill.

We were there at the end of the season, so nothing was exactly crowded. We stayed at the Orchid Eilat Hotel, in which you have to be taxied up to your cabin in a golf cart unless you’re from the Andes and love that kind of climb. The Orchid had the advantage of being right across the street from the Underwater Observatory and just a little way down the road from the Coral Beach Nature Reserve. It was there that we did our snorkeling, and it was also there that we bought our Israel Parks Pass. This ended up being a money-saving move, and if you go to Israel you should do it too.

The Israel Parks Pass allows you entry into national parks and reserves all over the country. We each bought the 6-park “Classic Pass,” which today sells for ₪110 ILS (about $31 USD at the current exchange). For that, we gained admission to six of the many parks and historic sites on the face of the card. I believe we ended up visiting seven or eight, but we used the pass to get into those with the highest admission fees.

(Traveler’s note: the unit of currency in Israel is the “shekel,” symbol: ₪ )

Anyway, if you’re into snorkeling, the Coral Beach Nature Reserve is a great place to do it. Don’t get me wrong, the water in November will wake you up, but it’s clear and the views are gorgeous. The current is also pretty fierce. It flows along the coast from north to south, so you’ll get into the water on the northern pier and fight it the whole way until it takes you to the southern pier where I advise you to get out. Otherwise: next stop, Egypt.

The Underwater Observatory is also well worth your time. It’s very much a family attraction, and was pretty busy on the day we went. There are small and large aquariums, including the obligatory shark tank, but the main draw is the observatory itself which you access via a pier before taking the spiral steps down for a Captain Nemo-style view of the sea bottom and the surrounding coral.

There’s always one guy stirring things up.

Everything we did in Eilat in those first days, we did by foot or by taxi. The airport is in the middle of town, so you can get a cab or a rental car right there to go where you will. When it was time to cross the border into Jordan, we took a cab north to the Wadi Araba Border Crossing (a wadi being a dried-up river bed) and, backpacks loaded for bear, we walked from Israel to its Arab neighbor and flagged the first taxi driver we saw to take us into Aqaba.

Aqaba’s not quite the tourist spot that Eilat is. We took the night bus around the town (with two or three other passengers, I believe) but there wasn’t really much to see. It has a few beach hotels, but Aqaba’s main reason for existence is as Jordan’s only sea port. It’s a working town, not a tourist trap. It is, however, the launching point for excursions to the ancient city of Petra.

(Cue Indiana Jones music again; make note to re-watch The Last Crusade.)

Petra is exactly as amazing as the pictures you see on Instagram or National Geographic. In truth, it’s even more so, because the photos are dominated almost entirely by the giant façade known as the Treasury. While that’s certainly the grandest and best preserved of the city’s cliff-carved buildings, it’s not by any means the only one. The structures go on and on through a long, sand-strewn valley (packed with as many tourists as any place I’ve been except for Machu Picchu). It’s astounding to think that this fantastic site was lost to all knowledge for over 1400 years.

While you can get to Petra from the park entrance in a horse-drawn buggy, that’s mean to the horses. The best way is to walk… and walk and walk… through a narrow canyon as it descends toward the city. Along the way are small outbuildings and carvings to clue you in as to what’s to come. At one point, there are the remains of a sculpture of an entire caravan carved into the canyon wall. This was, after all, the same route that desert traders would have taken. If only one could go back and glimpse ancient cities such as Petra in their full splendor.

At one point along the descent, your guide will tell you exactly which side of the canyon wall to stand against for the “oh wow” moment of seeing the Treasury for the first time. And I don’t care if you have watched Indiana Jones 3, you will not be prepared for seeing the real thing in person, lit by the blazing sun through a crack in the giant sandstone walls.

The Treasury, Petra’s most famous facade.

What follows will be at least half an hour standing in the wide plaza in front of the Treasury with your mouth stuck in a permanent “O” and realizing that the widest angle on your camera lens still isn’t wide enough.

Beyond the Treasury, there is still a lot of Petra to explore; more than is really possible and still make it back to your bus in time. There are options for staying in the area if you’d really like to explore the complex and hike to some of its higher, harder-to-reach features, but we had a flight out of Eilat the next evening. It was back on the bus for us.

The next morning, we taxied to the border and trudged under our heavy packs back into Israel. Going that direction wasn’t as hassle-free as it was when entering Jordan, and while there had been taxis waiting on the Jordanian side, there were none on the Israeli side of the border. Since most people make the crossing in tour buses, we had to wait until a taxi happened by with other passengers in tow.

We had one day left to spend in Eilat, and while it would’ve been great to hang out on the beach we didn’t have anywhere to store our belongings. Thankfully, there is more that the area has to offer. From downtown Eilat we rented a car for the day and drove north to Timna Park.

The Timna Valley is home to many geological features carved by wind and sand: pillars, arches, and mushroom-shaped formations. It was also the site of ancient Egyptian copper mines, and relics from mining operations have been found that date back to the 5^th millennium BCE. (That’s millennium, not century.) The park is accessible for hikers and bikers, but be smart: come in a car and bring lots of water.

Our last evening in Eilat was itself something of an adventure. We dropped off the car in the center of town and then – silly us – decided we’d look around for a restaurant where we could hang out and, I dunno, use the bathroom. A few outdoor restaurants could be found, but toilet facilities? Nada.

We hiked in the direction of a McDonald’s sign and, after what Google Maps tells me was less than a kilometer, but which felt an awful lot longer under the weight of our packs, we made it to the Mall Hayam Eilat. The mall was a decent place to wait for our late night flight, but we made another discovery – you can’t get into a shopping mall in Israel without showing your passport and passing all your luggage through an x-ray scanner. Which, given where we were and the relationship Israel has with its next-door neighbors, is completely understandable.

Pro Tip: The layered sand art you can make for yourself at Timna doesn’t survive transit.

Once it was time to check in for our flight, we taxied to the airport (no more hiking!) and were met with another new experience – the thorough airport security grilling. Now, at this point I’d traveled overseas enough to get used to the full-backpack, take off your belt and shoes and stand still for the pat-down search. (I seem to be a magnet for the “random search” lucky dice.) However, as soon as the airport staff spotted the Jordanian stamps in our passports, Lea and I had the pleasure of a protracted interview about everything we’d done in the neighboring country.

Don’t get me wrong. The Israeli security personnel were nothing but professional and very polite. So were we – after all, our travel plans were in their hands. We were asked repeatedly about where we’d gone in Jordan, who we’d spoken to, how we’d gotten about. Did we arrange our taxi before-hand? What was our taxi driver’s name? Did we have friends or family in Jordan? Had we brought anything back? Where had we stayed? Where had we gone?

Guard: What did you do in Jordan? Us: Um….

In the end, it was a relief to be handed our passports back and allowed into the boarding area. Also, I’m sure anyone but middle-to-upper class American whiteys who may be reading this are probably rolling their eyes by now. “Oh, you were questioned by the police? Poor you.” Still, it’s a thing that happens, and if you travel in and out of Israel, just be aware.

Next time: We drive to Galilee and are eaten by fish.

You Should Be In Oaxaca

Friends, I am here today to sell you something. Namely, I am here to sell you the idea of taking a vacation to Oaxaca. They’re not paying me a dime for this. I’m proselytizing just because I love the place so much.

Readers will remember from my last article that Lea and I visited Oaxaca in 2016 to celebrate Día de los Muertos. Oaxaca is definitely the hot spot to be on the Day of the Dead, but there are plenty of reasons to visit this lovely part of the world at any time of the year.

Because we went there specifically for Day of the Dead, we had a lot of fun in transit – and by “fun” I sarcastically mean the other thing. We booked an evening flight to Mexico City, a brief stay at a hotel near the airport, and a quick morning hop south to Oaxaca . The travel gods were not pleased by this, so our hotel in Mexico City cancelled our reservation and every other place within a reasonable cab ride was booked as well. We could have got a room at the hotel inside the airport for the paltry sum of $400 USD. Instead we chose to sleep in the terminal.

Which was freezing.

Early and bleary, we landed in Oaxaca and were immediately welcomed by the warmth and easy laid-back atmosphere of this small, secluded city. We were also met, right at the departure gate, by people selling tours. Normally we would have set our shields on maximum and our phasers to stun, but we were tired, had a lot of travel to arrange, and when we saw that the agents were selling trips that went nearly everywhere we wanted to go for dirt-cheap prices (around $30 USD per person) we said “Sure! Why not!” and signed up.

But first things first: We needed food! After checking into our hotel, we grabbed a cab and went forth in search of sustenance. Oaxaca has a lot of good restaurants, many of which can be found around the Zócalo (the big square at the center of town) and along the Calle Porfirio Díaz, which parallels the pedestrian Calle Macedonio Alcalá. However, thanks to our handy Fodor’s guidebook, our first port of call was the Mercado 20 de Noviembre, a market and collection of eateries that is ground zero for traditional, authentic Oaxacan cuisine.

Basically, this is where the locals go to eat. The center of the market is an enormous maze of kitchens and food stalls where you order your food directly from the cook and sit at a bar (or at tiny tables for two). On the way into the building, if you’re coming from the street named Miguel Cabrera, you pass through a meat market where you can pick out a cut of meat from one stand, your vegetables from another, and wait while all of it is grilled for you and served on tortillas.

The Mercado 20 de Noviembre isn’t designed with tourists in mind, so they’ll spot you coming from a mile away. This won’t do anything to change the friendliness of the people, or how fantastic the food is. Sure, try some of the upscale restaurants in town, but go to 20 de Noviembre first.

So about that tour:

We signed up for a longer excursion that hit many of the top spots to visit outside of town. We scheduled it for the day before Día de los Muertos began in earnest, so as not to miss any of those goings-on while tooling around the countryside. The tour was conducted in a convoy of vans which, during the peak of festival season, were packed as full as they could go. Some had Spanish speaking guides and some English. However, because of an internal snafu at the tour company, we weren’t picked up at our hotel when we were supposed to be. The company sent an employee to fetch us in their personal car, and we caught up with everyone else at the first stop – after which we got to ride in the front seat with the driver of one of the Spanish-language vans, squished in between the passenger door and the gear shift. And yet, it was all good fun.

The first stop was east of town, in the village of Santa María del Tule, to see the Árbol del Tule, a Montezuma cypress that has the largest trunk of any tree in the world. The trunk has a circumference of nearly 140 feet, and is 46 feet in diameter. The second place contender is either a baobab in South Africa or a giant sequoia in California, depending where you look online.

From there, the tour took us to visit (and shop at) an artists’ collective in Teotitlán del Valle where you can watch local artisans produce rugs and other textiles using hand-operated looms and natural dyes. The people of Teotitlán are of Zapotec descent and wear their heritage proudly. Lea and I found a rug there that we liked very much, and I failed utterly to negotiate the price down before buying it.

And that was before they gave us alcohol. The third stop on the tour was El Rey de Matatlán, a watering hole for travel groups where you can see how mezcal is produced and taste multiple varieties before battling your urge to buy multiple bottles. (I’d already blown our spending money on that rug, so we were safe.) Mezcal, distilled from fermented agave, is the beverage of choice in Oaxaca. Tequila is a sub-category of mezcal made from blue agave, but in fact there are many more varieties than I’d imagined.

I’m shocked that I avoided buying a bottle.

The landscape around Oaxaca abounds with Zapotec ruins, which are very well preserved because of the region’s dry climate. Our tour took us to the second most important archaeological site in the area, Mitla (derived from the ancient name Mictlán). Mitla was the religious center for the Zapotec people, and the site is an amazing complex of well-preserved temples, tombs, and palaces.

Our last stop for the day was at Hierve el Agua, a natural infinity pool in the sky. The rocky pools are at the top of sweeping cliffs over a deep valley, above what appear to be enormous waterfalls – until you notice that the “water” isn’t moving. These white formations are caused by calcium carbonate from the springs that form the pools, carried by water trickling down and depositing minerals in the same way that stalactites are formed within caves.

For those adventurous enough, or who thought ahead and packed bathing suits, you can dip in the pools and enjoy the view of the valley. Lea and I did not, though we did enjoy taking pictures and sampling the snacks for sale at the village on top of the cliff.

Back in Oaxaca itself, there are plenty of ways to spend your time. There are so many art museums and galleries that now, three years later, it’s hard to remember which ones we went to, though I’m pretty sure we visited the Museum of Prehispanic Art, the Manuel Álvarez Bravo Photographic Center, as well as La Casa de las Artesanías. Of the churches in town, the Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán is not to be missed. During the Day of the Dead festivities, the entire façade of the cathedral was lit up at night with an impressionistic video history of the region.

Directly connected to the Templo de Santo Domingo are the city’s botanical gardens, the Museum of the Cultures of Oaxaca, and the Francisco de Burgoa Library. The museum has extensive displays on the history of the area, and needs several hours to fully enjoy. The library is no less jaw-dropping – the thirty thousand volumes inside, cultivated from monasteries and convents across southern Mexico, are positively ancient. I giggled to see a locked shelf of titles that had been banned by the Inquisition as heretical.

In Oaxaca, we also discovered the funniest street-crossing signs in the world.

There are plenty of places to shop in Oaxaca, but if pottery is your thing you should take a cab or bus out to the village of Santa María Atzompa. It is here that much of the traditional “black clay” pottery of the region is crafted and sold, as well as the green-glazed pottery that is unique to this village. We don’t often go in for souvenirs, but we did buy a beautiful green bowl, and I kept a black clay skull from Atzompa in my office at work until I “retired.”

Last, but certainly not least, if you visit Oaxaca you absolutely cannot miss the ruins at Monte Albán. Give yourself a day or two to get used to the altitude first, because Monte Albán was the capital of the Zapotec civilization, and like all Mesoamerican and South American cultures, they loved to build their cities on top of the highest mountain they could find.

There are several great things about the site. First, it’s amazingly well preserved, given that it’s one of the oldest cities in Mesoamerica (dating back to 500 BCE). Second, all the tourists are over in Cancun visiting Chichén Itzá and Tulum, so you can actually see the monuments at Monte Albán without a thousand people taking selfies and blocking your view. Guides for hire are available, as always, but Lea and I wandered the city on our own, at our own pace. Just make sure that when you arrange transport up the mountain, you also have a ticket and a time to get back down.

In our travels, Lea and I are sometimes doing more than enjoying the local scenery and cuisine. We’re also on the lookout for a place to retire. Oaxaca is on that list of possible destinations. In fact, it’s pretty close to the top.

Here’s one last story to give you the flavor of the community: While scouring the Internet for Día de los Muertos activities, we came across a well-buried poster for a daytime comparsa in Tule, city of the giant tree. We took a cab there well ahead of the appointed time in hopes of finding a spot from which to view the procession. We consulted our map, found the intersection where the comparsa would begin, and staked out a doorstep where we could sit in the shade.

And we waited.

As we sat there, an event of some sort began to take shape. Young people of high school age walked by with band instruments. Old men set up chairs, tables, and a canopy in the middle of the crossroad. We waited for some activity to erupt, for the people of the town to pour out in droves, but nothing happened. That is, until the guys under the tent noticed us and invited us over. They pulled out chairs for us, right in front of everyone, so we could watch the band that had set up around the corner. Somehow, just by being there, we became guests of honor at the comparsa of Santa María del Tule, even though our Spanish was nearly as nonexistent as everyone else’s English.

The band played, old men danced with a Catrina, and bottles of home-brew mezcal were passed around. (Drinking was not optional.) While we were enjoying the event (and asking ourselves what we’d got into), a Chinese woman who’d been exploring on her own was roped in to be the center of attention with Lea and I. It was an odd, unexpected situation to say the least, but we felt very, very welcomed by these people with whom we shared nothing but a common humanity and a love of life.

Yeah. I could definitely go back there to stay.

P.S. Here’s a thing even long-time readers have surely forgotten. Waaaay back in Chile, this very time last year, I decided that when we returned from our South American odyssey, I was going to publish a collection of all my short fiction that had seen print so far. Ladies and gents, that collection is now available just in time for your holiday shopping pleasure! Check it out.

The Escape Hatch will return in early 2020. Where will the trapdoor open? Israel and Jordan! Stay tuned.

Oaxaca: Día de los Muertos

So we have this quaint little holiday called “Halloween.” Adults binge-watch slasher flicks and Tim Burton movies while kids dress up and go door to door begging for candy. Grown-ups being grown-ups, we buy our own candy and gorge ourselves silly. All of this somehow goes back to the Catholic observance of All Saints and All Hallows Eve, transmogrified into the autumn equivalent of Carnival as hosted by Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Aside from the holiday being awesome, I’ve also heard it pointed out recently that Halloween is the line in the sand that keeps Christmas from advancing any further up the calendar year.

In Mexico and other Latin countries, the Festival of the Dead is taken much more seriously and is, ironically, even more fun. Down there, they haven’t forgotten the “reason for the season.” They’ve kept the muerte in Día de los Muertos.

Readers of this blog will recall that Lea and I have a thing for touring cemeteries around the world. In October 2016, she and I went for a mainline fix of this habit by taking a trip to see Day of the Dead celebrated properly. We didn’t aim for any crummy coastal tourist town, either. We went hardcore: We went to Oaxaca.

(Pronunciation: Wah-Hah-Kah. Now you know.)

Oaxaca is the southernmost state capital in los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. It sits on a mountain plateau in that southernmost bend where the country swerves north into the Yucatan before crashing into Guatemala and Belize. It was home to both the Zapotec and Mixtec cultures, and relics of that era still pepper the whole region. The Oaxacan people and their culture still wear their ancient heritage proudly, of which the Day of the Dead celebration is only the most visible and well-known example.

Now, we did a lot in our week in Oaxaca, and not all of that had anything to do with Día de los Muertos. I’ll save the other stuff for my next post; today I want to focus solely on the Day of the Dead. During our time there we watched comparsas, took photos of catrinas, and visited celebrations at big city and small town cemeteries during the height of the festival. Each place had its own special character, and every one was worth the trip.

Definition time: A comparsa is a group of singers, musicians, and dancers, of which we got to see many during the festival. A comparsa isn’t a parade, but at night they do parade down the boulevards of Oaxaca City, usually dragging a festive mob along with them. During Día de los Muertos, the comparsas are more often than not accompanied by people in costume, on stilts, and/or carrying giant effigies of the dead.

Catrinas, along with the ubiquitous sugar skulls, are perhaps the most recognizable Day of the Dead iconography. La Catrina is an elegantly dressed female skeleton, and she can be found literally everywhere. Though she’s dressed in the finest European fashions, La Catrina can be traced back to the death-goddess Mictecacihuatl, who oversaw the remembrances of the dead in Mesoamerica long before the Spanish conquest.

Ofrendas are altars to the departed. They usually contain pictures of the deceased as well as enough food for a banquet and items representing what the honored person loved most in life. There are many different regional styles of ofrendas, all of which we saw displayed at an exhibit at the San Pablo Cultural Center. Pay attention to the schedule of activities, and you’ll probably be able to find a traditional ofrenda in the act of being assembled.

Everything a couple could possibly want for the afterlife, including their dog.

The celebration in Oaxaca begins as early as October 28. The north-south pedestrian street through the city’s central district, the Calle Macedonio Alcalá, becomes a thriving market full of stalls selling all manner of holiday paraphernalia: sugar skulls, skeletal dolls, bouquets of flowers, religious icons, and knickknacks that you can either take home or leave on the graves of your loved ones, who’ll be coming to visit and trade gossip from the Great Beyond.

If you’re worried about Oaxaca being infested with American tourists during this season, don’t be. We were told – by locals even – that the city is overrun with tourists at this time of year, but one look at the busy (but not overly crowded) thoroughfare and we said, “Pfft! Have you seen Mardi Gras?” In the year we went, Oaxaca was crowded enough to be festive, but not so much that it was in any way suffocating.

October 31: All Hallows Eve

On Halloween night, we took a cab to the cemetery in the Oaxacan suburb of Xoxocotlán, referred to locally as “Xoxo,” where one of the most traditional Day of the Dead observances is held. Outside of the cemetery, there was a full-on carnival atmosphere. Vendors sold food, flowers, and glow-sticks for the kids. A full band played at the city gates, and the smells were that of any State Fair I’d attended in my life.

Inside the cemetery, the noise went down by half. The mood was still festive, but mixed with courtesy and respect. On October 31 and November 1, families in Xoxo sit vigil with their loved ones, bringing picnics to their family graves and sharing news with the spirits of the dead, who are believed to be present on these nights. The graves are decorated with flowers and lit with colored candles. In Xoxo you can also find many examples of graves decorated with tapetes de arena – meticulous sand paintings of the departed or religious figures. For a traveler, this first night of Día de los Muertos brought mixed feelings of reverence and the excitement of discovery.

November 1: All Saints Day

On All Saints, we stayed in town to walk through the Panteon General, the large municipal cemetery in Oaxaca City itself. The cemetery has clearly grown over time, the older sections separated from the new by the complex’s original walls. Class divides are evident as well, based on the grandeur and upkeep of various mausoleums. The cemetery walls themselves are full of crypts, stacked five high and running along the entire circumference of the necropolis. During Día de los Muertos, those crypts are lit by candles, bathing the stone in tones of sepia.

The living are more ephemeral than the dead.

The Panteon General is less colorful than the cemetery in Xoxo, but the monuments are beautifully sculpted. I know that despite all the time we spent, we didn’t come close to exploring all the grounds. We saw them first during daylight hours. When we returned at night, we bought flowers from a vendor outside and laid them on several graves that had gone unattended.

November 2: All Souls Day

On our last full day in Oaxaca, we visited cemeteries in the small town of Santa María del Tule and in the neighborhood of Xochimilco not far from our hotel. Both were very vibrant, with the tombs painted like the houses of Valpariaso and many of which were used as garden beds for a variety of flowers and succulents native to the arid Oaxaca region. The burials in Xochimilco were nestled so close to one another that it was impossible to walk through the cemetery without stepping on grave after grave. The plots in Tule were spaced farther apart, with many shaded paths leading in between and – unless my memory fails – a hot dog stand and balloon vendor near the entrance.

The guy with the giant sombrero tombstone wins.

What makes Día de los Muertos special is that it’s not about mourning the dead, but instead is about celebrating their lives. Despite the trappings of skeletons, devils, and other grisly images, the holiday has as little to do with “horror” as riding a roller coaster is about plunging off a cliff. Día de los Muertos is a celebration of remembrance, with a little sadness, but also joy – joy in the reminder that death is a sign that life nevertheless goes on.

Next Time: What else we did in Oaxaca!

Three Nights In Iceland

In August 2014, Lea and I bought plane tickets to visit Iceland the following January in order to see the Northern Lights. Just a few days after booking our flights, the Bárðarbunga volcano erupted. Thankfully, this wasn’t a monster ash-spewing eruption like the Eyjafjallajökull event that shut down air travel over Europe in 2010, but seriously. Come on.

(Prior to this, Lea and I had a track record of causing heat waves, freezes, torrential storms, and major floods by the simple act of reserving a camp site. We’d grown to expect natural disasters, but this felt like a case of the universe trying to one-up itself on us. However, the eruption would add an extra layer of awesome to our experience. More on that to come.)

The view just down the block from our Airbnb.

This trip was prompted by a deal we saw on Groupon, but we didn’t use the Groupon. Vacations advertised on Groupon are not necessarily cheaper than those you arrange yourself, but they can give ideas for itineraries and destinations. Plus, booking everything on our own gave us flexibility that we wouldn’t have had on a packaged tour.

Another reason to go to Iceland at that time was the peak of the eleven-year solar activity cycle, which made it a prime year for viewing the Aurora Borealis. In 2015 we would be catching the downslope from the peak, but it would still be (we hoped) a relatively strong time for viewing the Northern Lights. Armed with a spanking-new Canon EOS Rebel T3 DSLR camera, and having recently crammed the book Canon EOS Rebel T3/1100D for Dummies into my brain, we flew into the Great Frozen North in the dead of winter, lava flows notwithstanding, to take magnificent photos of amazing, fantabulous, and spectacular aurorae!

So of course I forgot to pack the tripod.

Reykjavik

Early in the morning of January 15, 2015 we landed at Keflavik International. I say “morning,” but in Iceland concepts like morning are theoretical generalities not strictly tied to things like, say, daylight. A former U.S. military base, Keflavik is a long ride from Reykjavik itself, and after our all-night flight the first thing we had to do was find our Airbnb and crash. We woke in time for sunrise (around noon?) and used our few hours of daylight to walk around Iceland’s capital. But first, breakfast!

Directly across from the Hallgrimskirkja, the giant church that looms over the city, we found a little brunch place called Café Loki. We also discovered that we wouldn’t be able to eat out much during our stay. Breakfast for two – Lea bought a bagel with salmon and I went with the “Icelandic Sampler” – cost about $50 USD. As you’ll see in the picture below, the Sampler came with ham on toast, salmon on toast, and mashed potatoes on toast. The white thing behind the Icelandic flag that looks like some kind of pastry is actually fish jerky. That bowl of cubes the flag is sticking out of – that’s the fermented shark.

Y’all. I highly recommend going to Iceland and trying the fermented shark. It is the single most foul thing you will ever put in your mouth, short of drinking bleach. In fact, that’s kind of what it tasted like, with an added whiff of ammonia. Fermented shark ranks way above such paltry culinary delights as durian fruit, frost-blackened potatoes, and stir-fried intestines, all of which I’ve also tasted. Seriously, go and try it. Afterward, your mouth will be grateful for any other meal you eat that isn’t fermented shark.

After that adventure, we tooled around downtown Reykjavik and enjoyed two really interesting museums. The first was Reykjavik 871±2, also known as the Settlement Exhibition.

In 2000, when clearing the ground for a new hotel, excavators discovered the well-preserved remains of a Viking longhouse from the tenth century and other relics from even earlier. The settlement is one of the oldest man-made structures ever found on the island, and can be dated so precisely because of a layer of ash that was deposited in 871 from a volcanic eruption. Once the site was unearthed, they simply built the hotel above it, leaving the excavated longhouse in place in a basement museum.

By mid-afternoon, what we would consider the “hot part of the day” in the southern U.S., the sun had already set. We still had time to visit what is possibly the most fun museum anywhere in the world: the Icelandic Phallological Museum. This small exhibit space is dedicated to the science and art of all things phallological, and it’s impossible to walk through it without a goofy smile on your face. For example, here’s a photo of Lea standing next to a… specimen… from a male whale.

First Night

Tours to see the northern lights leave every evening from the main Reykjavik bus terminal. Since they can’t guarantee the ability to see the lights, or if the lights will even appear, you get a free ticket for the following evening if your initial trip is a bust. Before arriving in Iceland, Lea had contacted a guide who led smaller, private tours, but after arriving we weren’t able to get in touch with him. For our first evening, we elected to follow the tourist cattle call. After all, it would at least be good practice to try out our new equipment.

Back home we’d practiced using the Canon Rebel T3 by going out at night and taking pictures of the stars in near total darkness. While walking around Reykjavik, we shelled out $130 USD at a camera shop for a tripod to replace the one I’d forgotten. This turned out to be a good investment. The one I bought in Iceland was strong, sturdy, and heavy enough to hold still in the fierce northern winds. The aluminum tripod that came with the camera would have blown right over had we tried to use it.

As for what to wear on an Iceland winter’s night, we weren’t taking any chances. We each wore two layers of underwear – one of which was military grade thermal long johns, and heavy-duty thermal socks. We brought jeans that were a size too large to make room for all the extra padding we were wearing underneath. We wore sweaters, high-visibility winter coats, gloves, glove liners, toboggans, masks, and long, wind-resistant raincoats. My gloves were specifically designed so that I could pop my fingers out for short intervals to operate the buttons on my camera and then stick them back under cover so as not to freeze them off.

All of this gear proved necessary on that first night of sky watching, as our bus took us straight into a blinding snowstorm. Three buses, carrying about fifty tourists each, pulled off at an old country church where the whole teeming mass of us waited in the lee of the building for the snow to break and the skies to clear. They didn’t, so back to Reykjavik we went. It did prove a useful trial run of setting up and stabilizing our camera in adverse conditions. It also reinforced my commitment to never live anywhere north of the Alabama-Tennessee state line, at least until global warming really kicks in and the South becomes an unlivable desert.

Bárðarbunga

So, I mentioned that a volcano erupted after we bought our tickets. The eruption was still going strong in January. Bárðarbunga is a “subglacial stratovolcano,” meaning it was erupting under and through Iceland’s largest ice sheet. Unlike the Eyjafjallajökull eruption that sent enough ash into the air to shut down airports all across Europe, Bárðarbunga was spewing out Mount Doom levels of hot red lava.

(Let me pause for a moment to mention that I strongly suspect the Icelandic people of pranking the rest of the world with their language. I think there’s a real, secret Icelandic language in which geologic features have names like “Mount Bob.” I refuse to believe that “Eyjafjallajökull” is an actual word.)

I should also mention for those new to the blog that Lea is a professional geologist. She considered volcanology as a field of study until, as she puts it, she realized that every major eruption takes a volcanologist or two with it.

When we learned that instead of spoiling our vacation plans, we could buy tickets on a charter flight to view the volcano from the air – well, we had to go. It was expensive – really, really expensive – but when was the next time we were going to have the chance to fly over an eruption of this magnitude? Possibly not in our lifetimes. We were sold.

So, on Day Two of our visit, we spent our few meager hours of daylight making our way to Reykjavik’s small, regional airport and boarding a turbo-prop airplane that could maybe hold twenty passengers. The plane took us out over a landscape reminiscent of the planet Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back. The snow and ice went on forever until BOOM – eruptions of molten lava spewed into the sky amidst an enormous field of fresh, black igneous rock.

The red was so red it didn’t look real; it looked like a special effect. As high as we were, the eruptions were clearly enormous. Since we were constantly in motion, I set my Canon on rapid-fire mode and took several hundred photographs as our plane circled the volcano multiple times, giving us a variety of angles and views. It’s hard to get across the sheer sense of scale in pictures, but here you go:

In terms of thrills per dollar, that was some of the best travel money we’ve ever spent, and it completely made up for the whole fermented shark thing.

Second Night

We still hadn’t heard from the guide we’d been hoping would take us on a private tour, but since our first evening on the Mass Tourist Excursion had been for naught we were entitled to a second ride for free. This night was crisp and clear with nary a snowstorm in sight. This was a blessing and a curse. Whereas we had three buses of hopeful stargazers with us on the previous evening, there were nine tour buses this time, packed to the gills with people hoping to see the Aurora Borealis. Any time there are that many people in one place, a sizable fraction of them are bound to be idiots.

Our first stop was a restaurant on the edge of nowhere. It was far enough from Reykjavik to easily see the stars, but near enough that the city lights were still visible. This proved a benefit, because it gave me a clear horizon line on which to focus my camera. There was no aurora to be seen, but we had crystal clear views of the sky. We also got to watch the aforementioned idiots, of which there were plenty, try to take pictures of the stars with their phones.

Using the flash.

Thinking the night was another bust, we piled into our tour buses and headed back toward the city, only for our eagle-eyed guide to tell the driver to stop minutes later. She’d been watching for signs of aurorae out the front window and had spotted something. Soon all the buses had pulled off next to an empty roadside field as we watched the ghostly northern lights take shape overhead.

The lights weren’t as dramatic to the naked eye as photos had led me to believe, but they were still marvelous to watch and the color came out well with long exposures on the camera. What surprised me was that I was able to see the aurora move and change shape in real time. I had expected it to be more static, only changing form and position slowly, like clouds on a windless day. Instead it rolled and waved like a giant streamer in the sky.

I set up my tripod, focused on the horizon, then angled my camera up with the F-stop cranked as low as it would go, the ISO dialed up fairly high, and the exposure time set to ten seconds. Voila:

In many shots the landscape was overexposed, in part because of light from the street and in part because of people trying to take pictures with their flashes. But… We’d bagged our first aurora!

The Golden Circle

In the dead of winter, there’s not much of Iceland you can see, what with the country being buried under meters of snow and ice. However, it’s still possible to do the traditional “Golden Circle” tour of the three big natural wonders in the southwestern part of the island. We signed up for one of these tours on our last full day in the country. The bus picked us up from a nearby hotel early enough in the morning that we would hit the first location around sunrise and still be able to see the last of them before sunset a few hours later.

The first stop was Thingvellir National Park. (Or rather, Þingvellir National Park. I swear, now they’re making up new letters.) At this park you’re standing right on top of the North Atlantic Ridge and can see where the North American and European continental plates are pulling apart from one another.

Next was a geothermal field in the Haukadalur valley containing many active geysers. The one conveniently named “Geysir” is currently dormant, but “Strokkur” erupts every five or ten minutes. The cutest was an energetic, bubbly little hot spot called “Litli Geysir.” I’m serious. The fun thing about visiting these geysers in the winter, and by “fun” I mean “constant fear of slipping and breaking a bone,” is that all the water vapor finds its way back to the ground and freezes into a perfectly smooth, slippery layer of ice everywhere you might want to walk.

Last on the list was a sunset view of the Gullfoss, or “Golden Falls.” The walk to the falls included much hiking up and down through tightly packed snow and then, for the stupid people like me who wanted a closer view, ducking under a chain marked “no admittance past this point” and a nerve-wracking stroll along a narrow, snow-covered ledge to get right up to the falls themselves. In my defense, no one was paying attention to that sign.

Gullfoss: Icelandic for “Watch your step.”

Third Night

Lea finally managed to get in touch with our private guide only to find out that he’d been sick but had hoped to get well by the time for our tour. No such luck. Not willing to give up, Lea searched and contacted several tour agencies and at last procured us seats on a nighttime excursion into the wilderness, away from the crowded tour spots and big city lights.

We were picked up in a 4×4 and joined a convoy of four vehicles carrying maybe fifteen sightseers plus drivers and guides. Once we left Reykjavik, our drivers took us off-road back into Þingvellir National Park, following trails into the hills with snowbanks two or three meters high on either side. At first the night wasn’t as clear as the previous evening. We stopped at several hilltops and ridges, pausing for half an hour at each location and watching as the aurora struggled to take shape. The sky grew clearer, but the northern lights were still hazy and indistinct.

In the end we pulled up to a lake ringed by snow-covered hills, with the lights of a road and a handful of houses on the far shore. And the sky above us exploded.

The lights we saw from that lake were phenomenal: brighter, more active, and more complex in form than those on the previous night. Because we were on the shore, the lights were also reflected in the water. I could gush forever, or I could just show you:

Because we were with a smaller, more serious group, we were able to watch the splendor of the lights in relative silence. Those of us taking pictures used tripods, long exposures, and in general knew a little more about what we were doing. There was still some flash photography and “light painting” going on in order to take pictures of people in front of the lights, but it was minimal. As the night drew on and got even colder, our guides served hot chocolate – with vodka. As frigid, starry nights go, it couldn’t have been more perfect.

The Blue Lagoon

No, not the Brooke Shields movie. On the road from Reykjavik back to the airport, there’s a geothermal spa called the Blue Lagoon which is probably the single most visited tourist spot in Iceland. The lagoon began life as a reservoir near a geothermal power plant. The water is rich in minerals from the surrounding lava field, and is blue because of the silica that also forms a grey mud on the bottom of the pool. You’re supposed to spread this mud all over your face and skin for whatever magic “fountain of youth” properties the spa fairies imbue it with.

Though the air was a solid zero Fahrenheit, the water was a balmy 100 degrees. Lea and I paddled around happily in nothing but swimsuits while spa staff walked around the pool bundled up to their noses. The tricky part was the dash from the shower room to the pool itself. For that brief stretch, you have to make it barefoot across slippery, ice-crusted decking without busting your butt before you get into the water.

Zero to 100 (degrees) in thirty seconds.

And that was it for Iceland. After drying off, buying gifts in the gift shop, and digging out pain meds for Lea (who stubbed and probably broke her toe on a silica stalagmite in the pool) we took off on an evening flight to YYZ and a grueling slog through customs before returning to the States.

There are so many places we want to see in the world that there are very few on our “Go a Second Time” list. For me, Iceland is the place I’d most like to return to. However, next time we go we’d like to see it in summer, rent a car, and drive the ring road all around the island. The country is incredibly expensive, but its natural beauty makes it worth the cost, whether you have twenty hours of daylight to enjoy, or only four.

Safe travels, everyone! In a few weeks, for Día de los Muertos, The Escape Hatch will feature a quiet city in southern Mexico where the dead come out to play.

Escape From Marrakesh: Morocco, Part 4

After inching our way through the Hollywood of the Sahara and zipping down the Tichka Pass over the Atlas Mountains, we landed in Marrakesh, the last big stop on our tour before flying home. This was late in 2015, so “home” meant a month of frantic, last-minute remodeling projects before putting our house on the market and moving to Atlanta. We weren’t looking forward to that, but were also worn out on our “package tour” itinerary and being rushed from one place to another in order to see as much of the country as possible in two weeks.

In Marrakesh we would abandon our tour and take the city at our own pace. At least that was the plan. Marrakesh is a city that demands you take it at its pace, which is lost, bewildered, hassled, and confused. It’s a bustling city, a hustling city, and a market city to rival any other medina on the continent. As such, it seemed the most African city of any in Morocco, with its cacophony of sights, sounds, and smells, and its aggressive vendors who will literally chase you down and grab you to make you visit their shop (this happened).

On our first day in town, we stuck with the tour for as long as we could stand it. The first stop was the 16^th century cemetery of the Saadian royal family, now home to a lush garden, crowds of tourists, and the cutest cats in the country – which is saying something.

THE most adorable kitten in all of Morocco.

After, as we wandered through the maze of the old city trying desperately not to lose track of our guide, I practiced a little more of my “guerrilla photography,” taking secret snapshots of Moroccan daily life. Next was a stop at the Bahia Palace, filled with room after room of the lush, amazing Arab architecture and design that had been permanently burned into our retinas by that point.

It was here that we ran away. While Hamdan, our guide, was yelling “Yallah, yallah!” to get our group to follow him, we jumped ship and headed in the other direction (after telling him, of course).

After two weeks, still beautiful, if a little too much.

The next stop on the tour would have been a march through the heart of Marrakesh’s central marketplace, and we weren’t interested in being forced into any more recreational shopping – certainly not the way it was practiced here. Instead we did our own thing, finding our way to the huge El Badii Palace, which was under renovation but still open to the public, and then the nearby Jewish cemetery (because, as long-time readers of this blog should know, we always check out the dead people).

Storks and their nests are everywhere on top of the palace walls.

Our next stop was to locate, in the maze of the city, the Henna Art Café, a restaurant Lea found where you can have henna done using the artist’s home-made henna recipe. Today, with current GPS tech, better worldwide access to data networks, and directions on the café’s own website, it’s probably easier to locate, but four years ago, working only from vague notes jotted down in our hotel room and a rough (nearly fictional) tourist map of Marrakesh… well, it’s a miracle we found the place. But we’re so glad we did.

Because we had to escape from the crowd. The streets pointed every direction but straight, and while trying to find the right alley we got into a shouting match with a shop owner who followed us several blocks trying to get us to come to his store. At last we asked for directions at the post office, since the postal workers were the only people in town we could trust not to direct us to a spice shop instead of where we wanted to go.

The Henna Art Café is a refuge of quiet above all the foot traffic. You can still hear it all through the windows, two and a half stories below, but you get to lie back on comfortable cushions, enjoy the food, and ignore it all. Then the henna artist comes out and creates some of the most amazing skin art you’re ever going to see. Just look:

That evening we splurged at a wonderful French restaurant a block from our hotel. We went to bed early, because the next day had an early start of our own devising.

Day Two was scheduled as a “free day” in Marrakesh to spend however we wanted. Gate One offered an optional trip to the resort town of Essaouira, but a little research showed us that Essaouira offered nothing but more and more shopping. Instead, we booked a tour that picked us up before dawn and took us to ride in a balloon over the Atlas Mountains at sunrise.

Getting a balloon into the air in the desert is a tricky thing. The wind was the main problem. Our guides drove us around until we found a depression they felt was sheltered enough that the balloon wouldn’t get dragged away or fly off while being inflated. There were eight tourists and one pilot who were to ride in the balloon itself, and all of us got to take part in getting the thing off the ground. The women in the group got to sit in the basket to anchor it, while the men got to hold the guide ropes on the other end, keeping the balloon from dragging while it filled with air.

Apollo to mission control, we are ready for liftoff.

And then we were away! The sun hadn’t long been over the mountains before we were sailing over farms, sheep pastures, highways, and the foothills of the Atlas themselves. Our guide kept trying to crack us up, shouting to imaginary Taliban fighters on the ground far below that we were friendlies. The flight itself was eerie and serene at the same time, and the vistas of the desert and mountains in the early morning sun were everything I’d hoped they’d be. Such a flight would have been the perfect end-cap to our experience of Morocco.

A flock of sheep being let out to pasture.

Our ride taking off with its next load of tourists.

Alas, we still had Marrakesh to deal with.

We followed our balloon flight with a gratuitous camel ride through a palm grove. Recommendation re: camel rides – one is enough. Back in the city, with most of the day left, we took a taxi to the Majorelle Gardens, a private two-acre botanical preserve at a private residence that was started in 1923, and then purchased and renovated by Yves Saint-Laurent in the 1980s.

After that, for some ungodly reason (cheapness being my first guess) we walked to the old city, entered through the north gate, and hunted for a photography museum we wanted to visit. This was made excessively frustrating by the impossibility of distinguishing streets from shopping alleys in that part of the city, the inaccuracy of our tourist map, and the fact that even the children we asked for directions would lie to our faces, insist the museum was closed, and that we should visit their family’s shops instead. We found the museum, enjoyed it (though we don’t have any photographic evidence) and haggled with a taxi to take us back to our hotel.

That night we set out on foot looking for a tapas restaurant we’d glimpsed while on our tour bus, desperate for anything to eat that wasn’t kefta kebabs or tagine. We didn’t find it, though a nice man who saw us walking insisted he knew where it was and offered to drive us. Fools that we were, we got in his car. He drove around in circles before bringing us to his souvenir shop. We pried ourselves away as quickly and politely as we could, then wandered back toward our hotel and ended up having dinner at KFC.

That’s Marrakesh for you.

Our tour at last brought us full circle back to Casablanca. We’d already been there, done that because we’d arrived a day ahead of everyone else, so we skipped the Hassan II Mosque tour that we’d already taken. Our tour did visit a Christian church with beautiful, modern stained glass windows that strongly reminded me of those at the Methodist church where I grew up in Baton Rouge.

Here’s where we also witnessed a bit of “Muslim exceptionalism” similar to the “Christian exceptionalism” prevalent in the United States. In Muslim countries, no one but Muslims are allowed to so much as set foot inside a mosque (with the exception being the Hassan II). However, at this church, our guide encouraged us to go inside and take photos even though Sunday services were still in progress. This attitude made us really uncomfortable, so we waited until church let out to go in and appreciate the architecture.

Years later, in our trek around South America, we became much less shy about visiting churches that were actively in use, even going so far as to crash a wedding in Chiclayo, Peru. However, the attitude that “mosques are sacred, but this church isn’t” rubbed us the wrong way, just as do assumptions of Christian privilege here at home.

That night we had one last group dinner on the waterfront. The next morning, early early early, we boarded the plane for home.

All that my eyes could focus on by the end of the trip.

Verdict?

Morocco: Go there. It’s a beautiful country, with many amazing sites and cities. Our favorites were Rabat and Fez, and I also enjoyed the historic sites in and around Ouarzazate. However, unless you’re a crowd person who loves to shop and haggle, skip Marrakesh.

Our Packaged Tour: It had its ups and downs. Because of taking a group tour, we got to see a lot of places that we otherwise wouldn’t have considered or had access to. However, there was also the perpetual feeling of being rushed, and of having too many activities crammed into every single day.

My recommendation: If you choose a tour, don’t be shy about taking a day off from its itinerary or planning a side trip on your own if it’ll make your experience better. Just be sure not to miss the bus.

Oh look – that’s Greenland out the airplane window.

The Escape Hatch will be going on a brief hiatus. In a month or so, get ready to experience the aurora borealis in Iceland.

Yallah, yallah!

“Are You Not Entertained?”: Morocco, Part 3

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Fresh and early in the morning, after washing off the Saharan sand, we hopped back on the bus for another long day of travel. The itinerary: a ride through more of Morocco’s geographic wonders toward the city of Ouarzazate (pronounced War-Zah-Zaht), the center of Morocco’s film industry. “Hollywood in the Sahara,” here we come!

But first – while we were staying two nights in Erfoud, we’d asked to have our laundry done. (Even wearing outfits two days in a row, we hadn’t brought enough for two weeks.) The laundry was returned, folded and clean, and at a reasonable price. No complaints at all, but on our way out of town we saw from the bus how our laundry was probably washed:

Laundry: all-natural and completely organic!

Our route went along more of Morocco’s river canyons, which showed the powerful effect of water in an environment such as this. Down in the river valleys, the land was as lush as a jungle, while merely a hundred yards away (or less) the land was as dry as bone. We paused for photos on the top of the stunning 800-foot cliffs over the Todgha Canyon, which was lush and cultivated at the bottom. Since this was only the second trip I’d taken with my Canon Rebel T3, I was still really excited about the telephoto lens. I confess I spent most of our brief stop stalking people on the valley floor from my crow’s nest high above.

Me and my telephoto, him and his donkey.

From there we drove up the valley of the Dades River, which had carved a deep, narrow gorge in the Atlas. The bus let us off at the bottom of the narrowest, highest stretch and let us hike up the rest of the way. There was a stone aqueduct running just above the stream itself, and the water was clear and cold. At the end of the gorge was a restaurant where the tour had stopped for lunch in earlier years, until the back of the building had been caved in by a landslide.

The head of the pass, with a slightly buried restaurant in the distance.

We arrived in Ouarzazate in the evening with just enough time to wander around and discover that the city was depressingly bland, though we did get to meet some friendly local cats. The next day was going to be extremely busy, so we got up in time to catch a gorgeous sunrise.

After sunup, the day’s long list of excursions began with a walk through the 12^th century village of Taourirt and its Kasbah, a grand castle that once watched over the desert caravans. The village itself is still a living, breathing town. One of the things I appreciate most about Morocco is that its history isn’t set aside to crumble under the hiking shoes of tourists. Many of its ancient trading posts, structures, and citadels are still very much in use.

While driving through Ouarzazate, of course our guide couldn’t help but point out the many movie studio facilities on the outskirts of town. Because Morocco is the most politically stable country in North Africa, and since it offers a wide variety of canyons, mountains, ancient cities, and desert landscapes to choose from, it’s the filming location of choice for movies dry and sandy. The film they were proudest of, understandably, was Russell Crowe’s Oscar-winning Gladiator.

I’ve skipped past the bloody bits in this clip, for the faint of heart:

Our last stop in the region of Ouarzazate was the ksar of Ait-Ben-Haddou, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of the most famous fortified villages in southern Morocco and a textbook example of the architecture found in the region dating back to the 17^th century. And while it’s a historic city open to tourists, and surrounded by a ring of vendors selling souvenirs, it’s in use as a living village and home to many families. The structures are maintained in the ancient style, but the insides of the homes are often quite modern.

And of course, Ait-Ben-Haddou is used as a shooting location for films and television. The city gates and many of the buildings can be seen quite prominently in this clip from Game of Thrones, albeit with a heavily CGI’ed backdrop.

The final bit of excitement for the day – and exciting it surely would be – was a drive on the Tichka Pass, the highest road over the Atlas Mountains. Now, the travel company (Gate One) assigned everyone bus seats and rotated them every day, so no one was stuck with a good or lousy view for the entire two week tour. On this day, as luck would have it, Lea and I were awarded the seats in the very front of the bus, giving us fantastic views of the horrifying drops over the maze of hair-raising switchbacks as we made our way over and down.

Exactly how fun is the ride over the Tichka pass? When I re-watched Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation on DVD, I almost shouted in my seat – “Hey, I’ve been there!” Check it out:

Now, if you wind that clip back to the beginning of the scene, you’ll notice that the chase begins in front of the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, and then minutes later (through the magic of cinema!) Tom Cruise is flying up the Tichka Pass, 350 km away. Good grief, that’s a fast bike.

Our day’s ride would eventually bring us to Marrakesh, but that is another story. For now I’ll sign off with a cute-as-hell Moroccan cat.

Tea In the Sahara: Morocco, Part 2

Yallah, yallah! Back on the bus!

After leaving Fez, our route took us south across the “Middle” Atlas Mountains and along the river Ziz for a long, long day of sightseeing through bus windows. After that, we would spend two nights in the city of Erfoud, very close to the Sahara and the border with Algeria. Got that? Let’s go.

Our first pit stop as we climbed up into the hills was the little ski village of Ifrane. Yes, ski village. The town looked as if someone had airlifted part of Germany or Switzerland and gently set it down on the slopes of the Atlas. From the description given by our guide, that’s pretty much what happened. The Middle Atlas are very temperate and one of the few areas of Morocco where you can see greenery all around and not be surprised. It’s green enough for wild macaques to be running around in the trees – macaques that have learned that gullible tourists are an excellent source of potato chips.

The further south we went, the more sparse the vegetation grew. I did my best to take photos while the landscape zipped by, but most of the shots didn’t come out very well. However, scattered among the hillsides were occasional Amazigh encampments. Many Amazighs still live the the nomad life. Their houses are big tents that can be packed up and moved when it’s time to relocate their livestock.

(As in my last article, I’m using the name “Amazigh” instead of the more common – although ethnically incorrect – term “Berber.” After all, how’d you like it if I called you a barbarian? Actually, scratch that. I have too many friends who might consider it a compliment.)

Lunch was at the Hotel Taddart just outside the town of Midelt, and it was here that Lea and I lost all patience with Moroccan cuisine. We’d been eating kefta and kebabs for nearly a week and were eager for anything else, so when we saw that this restaurant had “Salad Niçoise” on the menu we went for it. When it arrived – well, imagine a regular side salad with lettuce, tomato, onion… and a can of tuna upended over the top of it. They didn’t even bother to spread it around or mix it in: the tuna was still shaped just like the can it came out of.

Midelt wasn’t a total bust, because right next door to the restaurant was a fossil and mineral museum/store. Morocco is a fossil-rich country and we would come across them in many places on the trip. This store in particular had an impressive collection of giant ammonites and really bizarre trilobites.

Christmas stocking stuffers (if you have a geologist in the family).

Following lunch was a winding, scenic drive down the Ziz River valley, a narrow strip of lush vegetation in the middle of rocky wilderness and rock formations to make geologists swoon. And Lea did, continually pointing out cuts, folds, and striations in the rocks while both of us took turns trying to photograph the landscape while zipping by at umpteen miles per hour without having the pictures marred by bus window reflections.

While Lea was getting excited about Moroccan geology, I was basking in the glow of all the ancient, crumbling structures that were strewn along our route. It turns out that the joke was on me – even today, people in eastern Morocco still use adobe as their primary building material. Adobe dries and crumbles quickly in the Saharan environment, so every building looks like a crumbling monument from the distant past. Most of the “ancient buildings” I drooled over were, I learned later, no more than ten or twenty years old.

Still, the Ziz River Valley is beautiful, and it shows the stark contrasts of desert life, especially when viewed from any high overlook. Where there is water, life explodes in abundance. Where there isn’t, you fry.

We spent two nights at a secluded resort on the edge of Erfoud with blue swimming pools and light switches that looked like water faucets. Using that as a home base, we would travel south for a tour of the city of Rissani and an excursion into the desert. This is what I’d come for and I was ready – except for those light switches. They really threw me off.

After passing through the gates of Rissani, we were met by our guide for the day: a Tuareg in full Tuareg regalia. The Tuareg are one of the three major Amazigh groups to be found in Morocco, and we were now in their territory. (“Tuareg” is also the name of a very tasty brand of coconut cookie found across southern Chile and in one single convenience store in Guatemala.)

I’ll see your “Welcome to [Your Town]” sign and raise you this.

Our tour began at a local mosque. We weren’t allowed to enter the worship area, but we did get to tour the lush courtyard garden and enjoy the ever-jawdropping Moorish architecture. After that, we walked across the street to a ksar (fortified village) built in the 18^th century and still very much in use today. This is where I learned my error in assuming any crumbling structure must belong to antiquity. To keep the ksar in shape, the residents continually have to “paint” the walls with fresh mud to replace any that has cracked and crumbled away.

Leaving the ksar, we went on a tour of the local market, starting with a “parking lot” full of donkeys. Elsewhere there were animals for sale, but these were those that local vendors used to bring their goods into town.

While wandering the market I wanted to take pictures, but in general taking pictures of people without their permission is uncool – and most people here wouldn’t have wanted their pictures taken anyway. I tried a sneaky, unethical strategy to get what I wanted. (Bad Jared!) Instead of being obvious about pointing my camera at market scenes, I simply wore it around my neck with the lens cap off. Hidden in my hand was the control for the shutter release. It was far from good photography, but it let me walk the market while taking surreptitious stealth photos. I had no idea what I was getting; all I could do was point my body in the general direction of whatever pictures I wanted to take and snap a random shot. Most of them came out crap, but I did get a handful of gems.

The last stop in town was a workshop where slabs of fossil-rich rock were cut and shaped into tiles, tabletops, souvenirs, and anything else you’d like to spend a few thousand dollars on. Once again, Lea and I were struck with “when we win the lottery” thoughts. After escaping the fossil furniture outlet with our credit cards intact, we rode off into the desert for the “optional” Sahara tour.

So which would you like for your kitchen counter?

But was it really optional? I mean, come on. If you’re this close, there’s no way you’re not going.

The tour began by heading way off-road in several 4x4s for lunch at an oasis, followed by a photo op with a nomadic Amazigh family living in a traditional dwelling. Watching the family’s daughter hand-weave a rug using traditional techniques was genuinely fascinating, though this part of the tour felt exploitative enough to make me uncomfortable.

The most uncomfortable I’ve ever felt as a tourist.

But enough of that. Bring on the camels!

The camel ride was a sunset ride, so first we rode to yet another desert resort and waited around for an hour or two, drinking tea in the air conditioning until the sun started heading down. Then we were back in our 4x4s on the way to pick up our real transport:

Camels are dirty, gross, and smelly, and I love ‘em. Not as much as llamas, but you can’t ride a llama. You really can’t ride a camel either unless you have trained handlers nearby and the camels in question are tolerant. I rode a horse before – once – and this felt much, much more unstable. Then again, there was sand all around, so I imagine if my smelly chauffeur decided to throw me the impact wouldn’t be quite as painful as hitting hard dirt, unless the camel trampled me for good measure.

None of that happened, of course. These camels were customer-service professionals, and as we climbed on board they took us in caravans, camel-nose to camel-butt, up into the Sahara. And I do mean up. This was not a gentle climb into deep and deeper sand as I’d imagined it would be. The line between Sahara and not-Sahara was a sharp demarcation. The ground was flat until suddenly it wasn’t, and a giant mountain of sand stood in front of me.

(I say mountain. Really more of a hill. I’m from one of the flattest states in America. What did I know about elevation gain? This was three years before I got up close and personal with the Andes.)

The sunset itself wasn’t that big a deal. The horizon was too overcast to see it and the sun was setting to the west, over the Atlas Mountains and not the dunes. However, the sheer romance of the setting (a word I use in the Lawrence of Arabia sense) overwhelmed me. Though this was only the edge, it was still the Sahara: an endless expanse of sand the likes of which I’d only read about in novels by Frank Herbert. And here I was on the back of a camel, dipping my metaphorical toes in the driest of oceans with half of a continent before me, empty and unknowable.

Our camels let us down with barely a grumble and we followed our guides to the crest of the highest dune. Morocco lay on one side and an endless expanse of terra incognita on the other. We watched the light dim and the shadows grow longer. The breeze from the west ruffled our hair. The miles behind us and the miles yet to come vanished for those quiet moments.

Sometimes you build up an experience in your mind and feel empty when it’s come and gone. But sometimes you sit on the edge of the desert, leaning against the person you love most in the world, and listen to the silence as the stars slowly appear.

Next Time: Morocco’s Hollywood! On the set of Gladiator and Game of Thrones. Also, a landslide demolished our regularly scheduled restaurant.