Jared – Page 3 – The Escape Hatch

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

Note for Email subscribers: This post has movie clips! Click here to see them on the site.

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.

Please don’t accidentally blow up Morocco.

It Comes With the Package: Morocco, Part 1

So we really wanted to go to Cuba. Once upon a time, in an administration that was a little less orange than the one we have at present, it appeared that restrictions on travel between the States and our neighbor to the south were relaxing. In fact, an acquaintance of ours had gone on a photography trip to Cuba and brought back many beautiful images.

So we did the research. If we were to go, we still had to do it as part of a “cultural exchange” program approved by the State Department. We looked at all the options, what they cost, what they would let us do, and devised a complicated spreadsheet to “score” each tour package and pick the one we wanted.

The result: they were all too expensive, and none would give us the freedom to see what we wanted to see. So, with only a few months left to make a decision about where we would travel that year, we got on Groupon.com to see what was available. It came down to two options: a trip through Italy in which a travel agency would arrange our hotels, rental car, and then set us loose; or a packaged tour through Morocco where everything was planned in advance and all we had to do was show up.

We’ve always been leery of packaged tours – the lack of freedom, being herded like sheep – having experienced them in a way on the cruises we’d taken. However, after the decision fatigue of planning and discarding our vacation to Cuba, coupled with the uncertainty of driving on our own in a foreign country, we opted for the Morocco package. To set the timeline straight, we purchased our tour of Morocco less than two hours after abandoning our plans to see Cuba.

Never annoy any guard dog who has a cannon.

The Package

The trip we booked was the two-week Kaleidoscope of Morocco from Gate One Travel. The itinerary doesn’t appear to have changed in the years since we went (September 2015), and includes a bus, an English-speaking guide, many of your meals, and all of your hotel reservations for six cities in Morocco: Rabat, Fez, Erfoud, Ouarzazate, Marrakesh, and Casablanca. Along the way there are many side-trips and optional tours, as well as a free day here or there to wander around at will.

Despite my initial reluctance to go back to Africa, it was the chance to ride a camel into the Sahara that sold me.

When you buy a trip from Groupon, there is usually a list of designated departure cities from which they will fly you so the tour group can converge at the same place and time. We were living in Birmingham, Alabama, which is never on the list of departure cities. To our irritation, nearby Atlanta wasn’t one either, but the folks at Gate One were accommodating. They could book us a flight from Atlanta to Casablanca, but we would have to leave the States and land in Morocco a day before everyone else. We would be on our own to arrange lodging for that first night and meet up with the tour at the Casablanca airport on the following day.

That was no problem for us. We booked a stay at the Ibis Hotel (which by sheer coincidence would be where Gate One would put us on our last night in-country). After our arrival, we had an evening and a morning in Casablanca to ourselves.

Casablanca

Despite lending its name to one of the greatest Hollywood classics of all time, Casablanca didn’t feature prominently on the tour’s itinerary. There’s a reason for that: there’s not much to see. Casablanca is the economic capitol of Morocco, and as such it’s a working city. From a tourist standpoint, there’s nothing there – with one glaring exception. And I’m not talking about the cheesy “Rick’s Café” that someone established to cash in on Humphrey Bogart.

No, the reason you have to visit Casablanca is to see the Hassan II Mosque. Completed in 1993 after only seven years of intense construction, the Hassan II is the largest mosque in Africa and the fifth largest in the world. Compare that to the Sagrada Família in Barcelona that’s been under construction since 1882 and won’t be finished until (supposedly) 2026. The more striking comparison in my mind is to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which we’d visited three years earlier. Both spaces are more vast than your brain wants to comprehend, but the Hassan II Mosque just seems so much classier. And it’s far, far less crowded.

Breathtaking, intricate stonework and lighting.

Also important to note: the Hassan II Mosque is the only mosque in Morocco which non-Muslims are allowed to enter and tour. All others must be viewed solely from the outside.

After enjoying a morning at the mosque, Lea and I went back to the airport to hook up with our tour group. This was actually nerve-wracking since the guy Gate One sent to pick people up was only watching for airplane arrivals. Even though I walked by him no less than five times, not once did he have his “Gate One” sign where I could see it. We called the Gate One office, but English is not a good “second language” in Morocco. If you don’t speak Arabic or Amazigh, then you’d better brush up on your French.

After hours of desperate searching we finally located our dude (who thankfully wouldn’t be our guide for the rest of the trip). He piled us in a van with some fellow travelers that took us to our first official hotel in the neighboring city of Rabat.

Rabat

Now this was our kind of town. I’d never heard of Rabat before, but here there was plenty to do. Our stay included free time to wander and a tour to see the sights with our group, led by our guide Hamdan. Hamdan was the best – always a smile on his face, always free for a question or two, and a master at corralling a mob of English-speakers with shouts of “Yallah, yallah!” (Come on, hurry up!)

Ruins within ruins within ruins at Chellah.

Rabat is the political capitol of Morocco, so our city tour began with a drive-by of the Royal Palace, where we got to watch guards lounge around the gate. After that, on the edge of town, we visited the impressive ruins of the city of Chellah. Chellah has several distinct sections, having been inhabited at various times by the Phoenecians, Romans, Amazigh Christians, and Muslim Arabs. As anyone who read my articles on Peru may remember, I’m a sucker for ruins. Ancient sites like Chellah make me drool.

Back in the city, we visited the Oudaya Kasbah, an ancient fortified keep that is still inhabited, the home of many families and businesses (including one fantastic candy shop). In the Kasbah, it was possible to get the feel of Moroccan daily life. The café overlooks a sheer cliff down to the where the Bou Regreg river empties into the Atlantic. Down there on the muddy beach were many people enjoying the afternoon and playing in the waves.

We wrapped up the morning with a visit to the Hassan Tower and the mausoleum of Mohammed V, both impressive feats of Arab architecture and design. After that, we found our own way to a currency museum and a pair of modern art museums that were some of the most impressive we’ve come across anywhere.

On the Road to Fez

After Rabat came our first long day on the bus. Unlike on our later trek through South America, we didn’t have to worry about transporting our luggage or booking tickets. In fact, we didn’t have to think at all. That even came down to choosing our seats.

This we didn’t expect: on the tour we had assigned seats on the bus, and those assigned seats changed every day. I can see the logic behind it. With variable assigned seating, no one got to hog the best view or throw a fit about what their preference was. Everyone got to sit up front, and everyone got to sit in back. It did, however, play into the feeling that tourists on a package tour are essentially herded like sheep and treated somewhat like infants. Having spent most of my adult life in customer service I know damn well that adults can act like infants and that you need to be prepared to manage that.

Anyway, on the road to Fez we got to see the “holy city” of Moulay Idriss from afar and get up close to the ruins of the Roman city of Volubilis. Once again, I was in Ancient Ruin Heaven. Volubilis was a Roman city that is now a UNESCO world heritage site. Most of the buildings were destroyed by the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, but much of the site has now been uncovered, including much fine Roman tile work.

Fez

Once we reached Fez, we got a special treat. After our group had settled into our hotel, we were all taken out to dinner – not at a restaurant but with a local family who’d prepared us a grand Moroccan feast. This is the kind of experience that we’d never have been able to arrange on our own unless we’d had contacts or friends-of-friends in town. We sampled many dishes and the family members mingled with the tourists, providing a generous and wonderful welcome to the city.

Moroccan appetizers and a table set for eight.

On our next day in Fez, Lea and I broke from the itinerary. We’d taken a look at the plan for the day and it looked like a lot of running around and shopping. We’re not recreational shoppers and there were other sights that we wanted to enjoy. Hamdan was alright with this and arranged a private tour (which we paid for ourselves) to take us where we wanted to go.

It sort of worked out like that. Our personal tour guide still aimed us at places where we were expected to at least consider making purchases, and at two of them we actually did. However, instead of running around with the tour group from one shop to the next, we were able to enjoy a different sample of the city.

We started with a visit to the Jewish quarter, visiting a synagogue and the local Jewish cemetery. A word here on religion: Morocco is a Muslim country, but it’s an inclusive, more liberal form of Islam – about as far as you can imagine from what Saudi Arabia must be like (though we would see more restrictive forms of Islam once we got into the countryside).

No, seriously, look at the insane amount of detail!

After seeing the Jewish district and the gates of the city, we visited a pottery and ceramics collective on the outskirts of town. We got to watch artisans hand-make the pottery, chip out tile patterns, and hand-paint the results. The entire process was spectacular, as were the items they crafted. We were able to escape while only buying a serving tray, though if we won the lottery I can imagine decorating a house with this stuff.

From there we went down into the maze of narrow alleys that is the heart of Fez. This city has been a crossroads of commerce going back to the days of caravans across the Sahara. Along with trade goods, that commerce also brought ideas. It is home to the oldest known university in the world, the University of Al-Karaouine. According to our guide, though the story may be apocryphal, it was here that Pope Sylvester II first encountered the Hindu-Arabic numeral system and brought it back for use in Europe. (It’s more likely that books from the university in Fez made it to Barcelona, and it was there that the future pope learned Arabic numerals. Either way, it changed the course of history.)

In the courtyard of the world’s oldest university.

A closer look at the beautiful hand-carved designs.

Navigating the maze of Fez, our guide took us through streets of artisans and craftsmen. In the courtyard of the coppersmiths we crossed paths with our official tour group and were glad not to be part of that herd for the day. In one enormous house we got to see traditional rug makers at work, after which we were presented a series of hand-woven rugs in a variety styles. And yes, they were happy to take credit cards and handle shipping. Oh, we were tempted.

Moroccan kefta. So good at first; we’d be so sick of it later.

An unmissable stop is Fez’s famous leatherworks. From on high, you can watch workmen dying leather in a vast morass of chemical vats. The smell is overwhelming, and that’s from far above. I can only imagine that the poor guys who work there have had their sinuses completely burned out by now.

The last stop we requested was on a hill above the city and off the tourist trail: the Musee des Armes. This large, practically deserted museum had room after room full of weapons and armor dating from modern times and going back thousands of years. Admission is cheap and there’s a pre-recorded English language audio tour, hilariously narrated by someone who didn’t speak English and was obviously trying to pronounce the words of the script phonetically.

Just what you need for a night on the town.

Our private tour didn’t hit every point on our list and still pushed us toward more shopping than we’d have liked, but the lesson to take away is that even on a packaged tour you can break out on your own and see the sights you’d like to see. Rabat and Fez in particular are cities that I’d highly recommend as travel destinations. I’d feel perfectly happy to go there again, if there wasn’t so much of the world left to see!

Next, in Part 2: Crossing the Atlas Mountains into the Sahara!

Homecoming: How To Move Back To the U.S. Part 3

It’s been a month and a half since Lea and I began settling back into life as estadounidenses. It hasn’t been without bumps or mental comparisons between life here and life in South America. In fact, the settling-in hasn’t settled all the way. It’s a slow process with flurries of activity and stretches of “What now?”

In my last two articles I covered two of the most challenging aspects of returning from a period of long term travel: finding a place to live and getting that all-important health insurance. Today I’m going to talk about all the other little things that we learned and/or made up along the way as we reintegrated into American society.

Since we’re no longer documenting our lives photographically, I don’t have pictures to share about our daily life in Atlanta – so instead I’ll entertain you with photos of South American birds. After all – they too travel far and build nests.

Where To Stay and For How Long?

By this I mean establishing short-term housing and not your eventual residence. Even if you can pick up the keys to a new apartment the day after you return (as we did) it’s still not going to be livable. If you’re not able to land an apartment from afar and are still engaged in your search, then figuring out where you’re going to reside in the meantime is priority one.

For us, we bridged the gap by booking a hotel for four nights in downtown Atlanta. We were able to do this cheaply because we’d built up a ton of Holiday Inn reward points and only wimped out twice to use them on our actual trip. A hotel isn’t a long-term solution, unless you get a room in an extended-stay. Even so, the costs build up and you may have to do that which we so often find difficult: ask for help. We have friends who extended an offer for us to couch-surf at their place while we got ourselves settled, and we have others whom we might have begged so as not to impose too long on any one relationship.

As I did in Part 1 of this series, let me reiterate that it is of vital importance to understand the turn-around time of the housing market where you plan to live, so you can know in advance how long you should expect to need other arrangements before moving into your permanent abode.

Movers

If, as I suggest you try your hardest, you’re able to line up an apartment while you’re still overseas, you’re going to need to move your belongings out of storage. While you’re still overseas, and if you don’t mind an international phone call or three, I encourage you to peruse the discounts many moving companies offer on Groupon.com. When researching movers, make sure to verify that both 1) where you have things stored, and 2) where you’re moving to, are in the moving companies’ operating territory. Prices go up steeply the farther you ask a company to drive.

If you’re relocating a longer distance than a moving company can handle for a reasonable price (such as from one city to another) you may want to use another tactic of ours: rent and drive your own moving truck, but hire the professionals to pack your belongings on one end and another group of movers to unpack on the other. Believe me, you’ll be glad for the investment.

Transport

Here’s another tricky issue. When you first move back to the States you’re going to have a lot of running around and buying stuff to do. If one of the first things you try to buy is a car you’re going to be in a world of hurt. Buying a car takes an awful lot of time and energy that, honestly, would be better put to use getting through other aspects of your move. We sold both of our ancient Honda Civics before we left the country, so we had no immediate transportation at hand except for Atlanta’s public transportation.

Enter our friend Melissa! I can’t say “thank you” enough – Melissa stayed for four days and drove us around as we made trips to our new apartment, our storage unit, and the Heart of American Darkness (Wal-Mart) for supplies. After she went home we still had a lot of moving to do, including a trip to Louisiana to pick up our cat, so we rented a car for ten days. This ended up being a hefty but necessary expense. It was made even more expensive by the fact that since we no longer owned cars, we didn’t have our own car insurance. Unless we wanted to take our chances and assume nothing bad would happen, we had to go with a company that would let us buy liability coverage along with the normal damage waiver on the car. This narrowed the field to Enterprise and Sixt. Sixt would have been the cheaper of the two, but their policies would only allow us to drive to neighboring states. Louisiana was outside the allowed territory, so our money went to Enterprise.

If you’re wondering if we’ve broken down and bought our own car by now, the answer is still No. We’re hoping not to – Atlanta’s MARTA system can take you nearly anywhere so long as you learn how to navigate the bus lines in addition to the subway. This is a lesson South America taught us well, and if we can keep it up it will save us a ton of money in the long run, as well as reducing our carbon footprint. (Because yes, we care about that. But mainly about saving money.)

Owning Real Furniture vs. Camping Out

Of course you want furniture. Our problem was that to fit our belongings in a smaller storage space, we got rid of a lot before leaving on our trip. This included the couch that our cat destroyed, the mattress that was ready to be replaced anyway, and both of our computer desks. (One was $15 from a yard sale and the other was rescued from a dumpster, so no big loss.) Once we moved into our new digs, though, we had to pull out our camping gear in order to sit or sleep. We made do on a cot, air mattress, and a camping chair until we could rectify the situation.

While we still had our rental car, we went to various furniture stores looking for items in our price range. We were disappointed to learn that what had once been a good discount store had in our absence doubled their prices. In the end we made a trip to Ikea for a couch, desk, and pantry cabinet (because whoever designed our kitchen didn’t think that food storage was important). While we kept our purchases frugal, the item we skimped on the least was our mattress – after ten months of concrete hostel beds we were pretty damn ready for comfort.

Grocery Staples & Cleaning Products

On the topic of having a kitchen (at last!) we now needed to stock it. Perishables like meat and veggies we’ll buy as we need, but while we still had a car we stockpiled non-perishable staples that we weren’t able to put into storage – flour, sugar, spices, noodles, rice, chili oil, soy sauce – all the things you keep in a pantry and use a little bit each time you cook. Likewise, we couldn’t store cleaning products –detergent, bleach, cleaners, hand soap. In addition, there were items that we knew we’d use in abundance – paper towels, cat litter, T.P., and the like.

Since we suspected it might be a long time before we had access to a car again, we bought enough pantry staples and cleaning supplies to last two months or more. This cost well over $1000 in Wal-Mart and grocery trips. In one instance we filled up a shopping cart, paid for it, took it out to our car, then went right back inside to fill cart #2.

Jobs

Unfortunately we have to pay for all this. I mentioned in an earlier post that while saving for long term travel you should also save for your return. We’re using those savings now, as slowly as we can help it, but the specter of gainful employment looms nigh.

The good thing is that like apartment hunting, your job search is something you can start while still overseas. Update your profile on LinkedIn, for example, while making your long-term break from employment into a positive. Lea did a wonderful job at this by setting specific goals for herself and keeping track of how well she met them. Read about that here and follow in her footsteps.

You can also apply for jobs and do interviews while abroad, as long as you have a decent internet connection or phone signal. Reach out to people in your professional network and let them know your return plans, so they can keep you apprised of employment opportunities. Again, this has worked well for Lea who had a few companies actively waiting for her return.

As for me? I’m taking the scary road of pursuing a total career change. I was a librarian for twenty years, always with stable government employment. Now I’m a self-employed writer, having to discipline myself to work every day as if I had a boss looming over my shoulder. So far that’s working out, though whether I can actually make a living remains to be seen.

Get By With a Little Help From Your Friends

Reconnect! This is the fun part and one of the most important. It may also take initiative, but the psychological dividends are enormous. When you travel long-term, you lose that sense of belonging to a community. Sure, you can “like” posts on Facebook, write articles for your travel blog, and send emails to friends and family, but as long as you’re gone that distance between you and those you care about grows and grows and grows.

When you return, be proactive. Call people. Tell them you’re back. Arrange to have lunch. Invite people over once your place is presentable – or even if it’s not; you can sometimes conscript them into helping your move. (I’ve been suckered in this way myself more than once.) But most of all, don’t get so wrapped up in the logistics of reassembling your home and career that you forget to reach out to your network of friends.

Here in Atlanta, Lea and I belong to Sunday Assembly, a secular community. Its big monthly meetup was the day after we returned. It would have been easy and understandable if we said “It’s too early, we’ve got too much stuff to do, we’ll wait and see folks next month.”

But we didn’t. We dropped everything we “needed” to do, which at that point was a pile the size of Denali, to spend time with a bunch of friends all at once whom we hadn’t seen in forever. Could we have been moving items out of storage or buying necessities at the grocery store? Sure. But it was better to nourish our hearts instead. As we’ve persevered through all the other tasks of jumpstarting our new/old lives, we’ve kept spending time with our friends as an essential part of that process.

Besides, while we’ve been away on our own adventures, so has everyone else. It’s as meaningful to hear their stories as it is to tell our own. And without the warmth of a community of friends, you can never truly feel “home.”

P.S.

This will be the last weekly installment of The Escape Hatch, at least until Lea and I flee the country again. But fear not! I’ve still got much to say on the subject of travel, and there are many other places we’ve been in the world. Expect a new article every two or three weeks, or sooner if inspiration should pounce. The Escape Hatch will always be open.

See you on the road!

Getting Health Insurance: How To Move Back To the U.S. Part 2

This topic pisses me off. I was reluctant to write this article and have been putting it off because I know it will leave a foul, foul taste in my mouth. To mitigate the negative headspace that thinking about applying for health insurance in the United States will put me in, I’m going to populate this article with cat photos.

Like so:

Okay. That’s better. First, a little backstory. If you’re not interested, feel free to (tl;dr) skip ahead to the next cat photo for the moving-back process. When we left on the trip, we didn’t want to be insurance-free for ten months in which anything could happen, so Lea researched insurance plans for expats. The one we settled on was the GeoBlue Xplorer Essential plan, but I highly encourage anyone taking a long-term trip to investigate the options for yourself. For the GeoBlue plan, there were two options – one that would provide health coverage in pretty much every country in the world except the United States, and one that included the U.S. in the package.

There were two problems with the latter option: first, the plan wasn’t ACA compliant, so if we opted for U.S. coverage through GeoBlue we’d still get hit with a tax penalty at the end of the year. Second, adding the U.S. to our coverage would double the cost of our premium. That’s right: health coverage in the United States would have cost us just as much as health coverage in every other country in the world combined. We chose not to take the U.S. coverage and stick to hospitals overseas if anything bad should happen.

So then our options then were to either 1) sign up for an ACA-compliant health plan good in the U.S. that we would pay for but not use, 2) eat the tax penalty, or 3) somehow get an exemption from the tax penalty on the grounds of being unemployed and in another hemisphere. We were able to work out option #3 and get the exemption, but it involved applying for ACA coverage just to confirm that it was unaffordable, filling out a lengthy form buried on the ACA website, mailing a physical copy of the form to a hidden HealthCare.gov bunker, then making several phone calls from Peru months later to get our form out of the junk file and have someone actually process it.

GRRRRRRRR.

Luckily (or not, depending on which way your political views lean) the “Individual Mandate” was stripped from the ACA for tax year 2019 going forward, so there’s no need for anyone else to worry about this until the pendulum swings the other way and the Individual Mandate gets reinstated. If you’re moving back to the U.S., though, you still need to get insurance or run the risk of letting an unexpected illness or accident bankrupt you in the emergency room.

Cat photo:

Our return to the United States was scheduled for May 17. Our GeoBlue coverage was good through the end of May, but since it only covered care in other countries we would have to get ourselves medevacked to Mexico City if anything bad were to happen. We had to get American insurance, and once we had a signed lease with a physical address to show residency, I tried to do so in advance of our return.

I did not succeed. Perhaps my problem was trying to get health insurance from the HealthCare.gov marketplace and not directly from an insurance company, but being scared of what the premiums would be on the open market I went for HealthCare.gov and ACA coverage instead.

Here’s the problem. In order to apply for insurance through the ACA marketplace outside of the open enrollment period (Nov. 1 – Dec. 15) you have to fill out a questionnaire to determine if you’ve had a qualifying life-changing event to justify your need for insurance and to grant you a “special enrollment period.” You would think that moving back to the country from somewhere else in the world would be such a qualification – and it is, but with a catch.

The key question on the questionnaire for expats coming home is one that asks “Have you moved within the last 60 days?” Nowhere does it ask “Will you move in the next 60 days?” When I filled out this application while in Colombia, I had to answer “No.” When I competed the form, the website informed me that my wife and I did not qualify to apply for insurance.

Cats:

I picked up the phone and called HealthCare.gov’s helpline. (Another goddamn international call.) I explained the situation and the person on the other end let me know that as soon as we got back to the U.S. we should apply for the special enrollment period again, this time answering the question “Yes.” (We would, of course, have to upload proof of our new address and start date.) I said OK, shrugged my shoulders, and made it a priority to sign up for healthcare the day we got back.

(Which I actually did the morning of our flight, before we left Colombia. After all, assuming our plane didn’t crash, that would be the day of our return.)

What the person on the phone didn’t tell me:

Health insurance plans bought through the ACA marketplace always begin on the 1^st of a calendar month. The deadline for submitting an application and the necessary paperwork to begin your plan (on June 1^st, for example) is the 15^th of the preceding month.

I applied on the date of our return, the 17^th. See the problem?

I answered Yes to the “Have you moved?” question and we were approved for a special enrollment period. We selected a health plan from the ones offered – not the cheapest, but not the most expensive – and waited for information on our new coverage to arrive.

When we learned that our coverage would not begin until JULY 1 we were livid. How were we to go six weeks without health coverage in the country with the highest health care costs in the world? First we called our new insurance provider to see if there was anything they could do to bump up the start date on our plan. We were informed that since the plan was purchased through the ACA marketplace there was nothing they could do on their end, but they could transfer me over to the HealthCare.gov people so we could speak to them.

The HealthCare.gov helpline informed me that there was nothing they could do either; that was the policy and there was nothing they could do about it. When we asked what we were supposed to do if we needed healthcare in the interim, the HealthCare.gov person told us she could “send us a list of clinics in our area that might be able to help out” – as if we were destitute or homeless. When we pushed further, expressing that that answer was unacceptable to us, the HealthCare.gov helpline hung up on us.

Llama throwing shade:

We called our actual insurance provider back. This time, they were able to help us out by providing information that the HealthCare.gov helpline either 1) didn’t have, or 2) didn’t care enough to mention: There are companies out there that provide 30-day short term medical policies to fill in gaps in your health coverage. They don’t cover much, and don’t cover any pre-existing conditions, but at least they’ll help you not go bankrupt should you get run over by an S.U.V. or have a sudden heart attack from spending too much time on the phone talking to health insurance providers.

Our provider transferred me directly to a sales rep for one of these companies, and within thirty minutes we had a policy to cover us for the month of June until our regular policy took over in July. We still didn’t have any coverage for the remainder of May except what was provided by our rental car company. The joke I told people was that if either Lea or I had a health issue during that period, we would have to get in our rental car and crash it before going to the emergency room.

Cat, or specter of death:

So, to summarize, if you’re a long-term traveler returning to the U.S. and don’t have a job lined up with employer-provided insurance, here are your options:

1. Buy a plan on the open market, and damn the premiums.

We didn’t research this option, so I can’t list any pros or cons. I can say that I fear what those premiums might cost, given how high the “Affordable Care” premiums are.

2. Apply for a plan on HealthCare.gov before the 15^th of the calendar month before the month you plan to return.

In order to do this, you may have to bend the truth about your return date in order to answer “Yes” to “Have you moved in the past 60 days?” knowing that you’re going to have to provide documentation that someone may or may not actually look at. Whether you’re comfortable doing that, I leave to you. If lying to the government isn’t your style, then you’ll also want to get on board with the next step:

3. Purchase a 30-day short term medical policy to close any gaps in coverage you may experience.

In the U.S. health system, any coverage is better than no coverage at all. Unless you can meet the criteria for option #4:

4. Be so filthy rich that you don’t have to worry about paying for health care out of pocket.

While overseas, Lea and I did on occasion use our health coverage and the healthcare systems in other countries. What we learned from the experience is that healthcare in South America, as far as we could tell, is just as good as it is in the U.S. while being an entire order of magnitude less expensive.

Now we’re back. We’ve got “cheapie” plans that don’t cover much and have high deductibles, so we’re still reluctant to see a doctor for anything less than an emergency. But at least we’re covered until we get something better.

It ain’t the best situation, but for long-term travelers it’s something to definitely keep in mind as you plan for the end of your journey.

Next week: Fun With Furniture! And now, one last kitty for the road:

Apartment Hunting from Abroad: How To Move Back To the U.S. Part 1

So, as reported last week, Lea and I returned to the United States and have settled back into our old lives. Easy-peasy, right? Heh. No.

In truth, the “settling” is still going on, though our activity has slowed down from its initial frenetic pace to something more manageable. There’s still much that’s up in the air and uncertain, but we’ve got the basic necessities covered and a few of the comforts as well. There are still some anxieties remaining re: health insurance and jobs, but that will shake out in time.

I mentioned last week that we arranged for some elements of our return while still overseas and I promised to go into a little more detail for the benefit of those who might try a similar long-term travel stunt. This article assumes that even if you’d like to own a home upon your return, your first place of residence is going to be an apartment because no way can anyone house-hunt while backpacking on another continent. Some of the issues I mention may only apply in the state of Georgia, but could also crop up elsewhere. So here goes:

In a room up the street from this church in Salvador, we applied for a lease in Atlanta.

Save enough money not just for your trip, but to live for an extended period without a job upon your return.

This should go without saying, but in addition to being a common sense survival strategy, it will also affect your housing search. In order to rent an apartment, you nearly always have to prove that you have income before they’ll let you sign a lease. Some backpackers earn money while traveling to pay for their next hostel, we had no income and no guarantee that we would at the time of our return. Some apartment complexes will allow you to rent if you can show liquid assets in lieu of a steady paycheck. Some will not – this ended up crossing one of our choices off the list. Thankfully, at least two of the places we liked would allow us to apply as long as we had a certain amount of money available in the bank or other liquid financial products. We did and could prove it; this was the basis upon which we were able to rent from afar.

Do research on housing options before leaving the country.

If you’re planning to leave everything behind to travel long term, but still intend to come back, take time to look at apartment complexes before setting off for another hemisphere.

We did so, but to be fair we were looking for places to move because we hated what our current complex was turning into. (We hadn’t yet committed to the overseas trip and were considering staying longer in Atlanta.) However, this early scouting served us well – once the date of our return approached, we already had a list of apartment complexes where we would be willing to live.

In Bogotá we were still waiting for a “Welcome” letter with the correct rent and deposits.

Know when to start looking, and apply for apartments as early as possible.

Working from our list, we watched for available units well in advance of our expected return date. Since apartments in Atlanta require tenants to give 60 days’ notice before moving out, 60 days was the target period in which available units would appear on the market. Our goal was to snatch a good one, sight unseen, before anyone else snapped it up. This required a leap of faith – we’ve never been comfortable renting without seeing what we were getting. In this case, all we had to go on were online floor plans and our memories of the “model units” that we toured over a year earlier.

The next step was to communicate with the leasing staff from 4,415 miles away (the distance from Atlanta to Salvador, where we officially started the process). You can fill out many apartment applications online, given a decent internet connection (which you can’t take for granted). We ran into an extra roadblock when we discovered that our #1 choice of apartment homes was changing management companies right when we were trying to apply. All of their application software was down, so we called the complex’s leasing office and, over a scratchy international phone connection, explained our situation, had the paper forms sent to us electronically, filled them out by hand, then scanned and emailed them back to Atlanta. This back-and-forth with the leasing staff worked, eventually, though the difficulties drew the process out for several weeks (another good reason to start early).

In the house at the bottom of this dirt road, we slowly examined our rental agreement.

Read every word of the lease. Leave your Escape Hatch open.

When we finally received the lease it was Easter weekend and in Salento, Colombia our Internet was painfully slow to nonexistent. During one of the windows when we could access the lease, we pored over it clause-by-clause. While doing this, we discovered that there was no provision for early termination by the tenant. In fact, with two specific exceptions that wouldn’t apply to us, early termination of the lease was expressly forbidden.

This was a deal-breaker. We’ve had to exercise an early termination clause in the past (when we’d moved into an apartment that turned out to be a Roach Motel) but we also needed the option because of many other scenarios we could imagine. Sad, angry, and frustrated, we sent notice to the apartment complex that we couldn’t sign, were backing out of the deal, thanks for their assistance, have a nice day, then started the whole process over with the next apartment complex down our list.

Guess what? After applying at Apartment Complex #2 and receiving their electronic lease, it had the exact same No Early Termination clause – in fact, in this case it was worded even more strongly. Apparently this is now a thing in Atlanta, as set forth by the Georgia Apartment Association. Research that I’d done the one time we did have to terminate a lease revealed that the State of Georgia has the weakest renter protection laws in the country. I’ve no doubt that groups like the GA Apartment Association have a hand in keeping it that way.

Anyway, rant aside, both complexes came back to us with amended policies that set terms that would allow us to break our lease early. We said “thanks” and asked them both if they would insert these polices into the legal documents that we would sign. Apartment Complex #2 said No – the early termination option was only a “courtesy.” Apartment Complex #1 said Yes – they were happy to add the early termination addendum to the packet of documents that we and the leasing agent would sign.

Guess who we went with? Once we had a signed lease we were finally able to set up utilities and other necessities. This was a tiny bit of a hassle but not overly so.

In Medellín we signed the lease and set up utilities.

Renters Insurance and Utilities

Getting Renters Insurance was no problem at all. While in Medellín, over the space of a few hours. I was able to get online quotes from five or six companies, pick one, and pay for it.

Electricity was a little trickier because Georgia Power will not let you create or log into an account from an IP address outside the U.S. (We learned this way back in Ecuador when we tried to pay the last power bill for our old apartment.) To set up new service I had to bite the bullet and make an international call to the power company.

Thankfully for this apartment we didn’t have to set up water, sewer, or gas, though it would have been a similar process – try to do it online first, then use the phone as a last resort. The only hiccup, and one we didn’t solve until we actually moved in, was setting up Internet access. We wanted to go with Google Fiber instead of Cursed Comcast, but the brain surgeon who rented our apartment before us never turned off their account and we had to prove to Google that yes, we lived there now.

Enter freely and of your own will.

So at last, on our first day back in the States, with a check for the first month’s rent and butterflies in our stomach (because what if the apartment was horrible?) we arrived at our new home and picked up the keys.

And the place is fantastic. It’s much more spacious than we imagined from looking at floor plans. There’s plenty of room for our belongings and space left over to walk around without feeling cramped. After many years of sharing a single sink, we now have two in our bathroom. We have lots of windows and natural light galore, so much that Lea’s sewing blackout curtains for our bedroom.

The place isn’t perfect. When we took possession, for example, one of the closet doors was missing (oops) and we’re still having trouble getting maintenance to fix a dripping shower head and leaky bit of caulk. During Prime Time every night, some interesting characters make a lot of noise outside the convenience store several floors below. But for the most part, the place is wonderful and with a few added touches it will truly be a home.

P.S.

In the next post, the cloud to our silver lining: Trying to get Health Insurance upon our return. How dare we?

To be continued.

Home Is Where the Cat Is

We’ve been back in the States for two weeks and three days. We landed at the Fort Lauderdale airport on the afternoon of Friday, May 17 for a five hour layover, two of which were consumed by an interminable death march through customs and immigration. A couple years ago we signed up for TSA Precheck. We should have signed up for Global Entry instead. Believe me, we’ll be doing that now.

The good thing about layovers in Fort Lauderdale is that they have what I consider to be the best airport pizza in the world: DeSano. Lea thought it was too salty this time, but to me it was just right. I like their “Diavolo” – a pizza with pepperoni and whole red peppers. And so began two weeks of weight-gaining indulgence at as many of our favorite restaurants as possible to see if they measured up to our memories.

This and rum cake are why I love flying through Ft. Lauderdale.

Our flight from Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta landed sometime between midnight and 1:00 a.m. Saturday morning. The time since then has been a nonstop whirlwind of activity: rushing around, shopping our eyeballs out, visiting old friends, driving to Louisiana and back to retrieve our long-lost kitty, and reassembling our lives like pieces of IKEA furniture. I’ll cover as much as I can and regale you with many tales of our reentry in the coming weeks.

Our first order of business was to run by our storage unit and make sure we had access to personal checks; otherwise we’d have had to take cash out of bank machines to make the move-in payment on our new apartment, which we were scheduled to do that afternoon. Fortunately, we’d left our checkbook in easy reach and were free to move on to Action Item #2: breakfast at OK Café.

Real. American. Breakfast. Y’all. Pancakes with syrup. Eggs done right. Bacon. Orange juice. Milkshakes. A cheeseburger with fries. (Okay, that last was my order.) Did OK Café live up to our recollections as a classic, immutable Atlanta landmark? Hells, yeah.

It would be ungracious not to mention that our friend Melissa who joined us in Cartagena opted to stay and drive us around for our first four days in Atlanta. We would have had a much harder time and less fun without her. Thanks, Melissa!!!!

Action Item #3 for our first full day was to pick up the keys to our new flat. We’d arranged for this apartment from afar, starting all the way back in Salvador, Brazil, and not hammering out the final terms and conditions until our stay in Medellín. I’ll go through the nitty-gritty about arranging a return from long-term travel in next week’s installment (stay tuned) but suffice it to say that with a little pre-trip prepping and a willingness to make international phone calls you can have a lot of things set up and waiting upon your arrival.

Our apartment, for example, is in a complex that we’d looked at and liked a year before we left for South America. The unit we rented is a corner two-bedroom that’s larger than our last apartment, and right next door to a train station on Atlanta’s MARTA system – which is essential since we’re planning to go as long as possible without buying a car. Here’s the downtown skyline as seen from our window:

So that we’ll always remember South America, a power line blocks part of the view.

Once we had the apartment, the next goal was to fill it with stuff. Bright and early Monday morning, some movers we’d hired (while in Colombia, but not from Colombia) unpacked our storage unit and disgorged it into our new digs in just under three hours (which was incredible, even considering how much stuff we’d got rid of before we left). After that, for fear of what insects may have laid eggs in our boxes during the last ten months, we unpacked everything to get as much cardboard as possible out of the new apartment. The only way to cope with this much heavy labor was, of course, with more dining out at our favorite restaurants.

Fred’s Meat & Bread at Krog Street Market: Still as good as ever.

As you’d expect, there have been a few shocks to the system upon returning to the States – cultural aspects norteamericanos take for granted that we’d become deacclimatized to in the southern hemisphere. Portion sizes – YUGE! Selection of products in grocery stores – heavenly. Prices – ye gods. Americans – LOUD. But there was one cultural shift that occurred in Atlanta that took us completely by surprise, and I think it hit me full in the face as we drove to Fred’s for the best sandwiches in the city: namely, the explosion of people zipping around on rent-by-the-minute scooters.

Before we’d left, rental bikes had started popping up around town, but the scooter craze hadn’t even begun yet. We noticed a few people riding them around our hotel downtown, and while moving into our apartment we noticed piles of abandoned scooters from four different companies clustered on every floor of our parking deck.

As we approached Krog, a fleet of at least a dozen people shot across our path on these things. I can’t explain it, but my knee-jerk reaction upon seeing them in use was the same revulsion I feel every time I see someone whip out a selfie stick. I’m over that now – they’re a cheap, quick way to get around and while I haven’t tried one myself, I have had occasion to use a rental bike. Maybe I’m just old and scornful of new technology (gods, I don’t want to be that person), maybe I’m nervous about getting run over on the sidewalk, or maybe it’s just that I’ve spent a year walking everywhere and I appreciate how much you miss by zipping through life at high speed.

At least until I try one. Then I’ll probably fall off, break my arm again, and have a whole new reason to hate them.

After a few days, alas, Melissa had to go home. We organized closets and arranged what furniture we had. I alphabetized books, BluRays, and DVDs (because I’m me). Our apartment was simultaneously a wreck and empty – we had stuff everywhere, but no mattresses, no desks, no couch to relax on, and no cat to tell us what to do. We dealt with the latter by renting a car, gorging ourselves silly at Nori Nori Sushi Buffet, and driving to Louisiana to retrieve our long-lost Miss Piggy.

Nori Nori: So/so. The rolls aren’t quite as good as we remembered, but the grilled squid and nigiri are still to die for. Especially the eel. (Lea may disagree on that point.)

As long time readers may recall, before our trip we had to find a home for our cat. Parting with Miss Piggy was the saddest thing we did before leaving for South America. We could stay in touch with our friends, but we had no idea how Miss Piggy would handle us leaving her behind or whether she’d even remember us when we came back. We entrusted her to our friends Bob and Laura, and their teenage son Evan who would be Piggy’s primary caretaker while we were away.

It turns out that Piggy did wonderfully. She bonded with Evan, who we’re sure was sad for us to take her back (though he put on a brave face). Yet once we were at their house and she sat in our laps it was clear that she didn’t see us as strangers.

The only downside to the affair was that during our absence, our friends had to move away from Atlanta for work reasons. The upside to the downside was that our friends moved to Thibodaux, Louisiana, giving me a chance to actually go home home. I may have lived for thirteen years in Alabama and nearly three years in Atlanta (which I love, by the way) but I will never be from those places. I will always be from the land of Mardi Gras, fried catfish, Tabasco sauce, andouille gumbo, and Zapp’s potato chips.

We may have gone a little nuts at the grocery store.

And so, after ten months of constant travel, we set off once again – heading down to the Gulf Coast, visiting friends and loved ones along the way, and forging westward past the old, familiar landmarks on Interstates 10 and 12, until finally turning south on I-55 towards LaPlace and pulling over in the tiny, swampy hamlet of Manchac: nestled between Lakes Ponchartrain and Maurepas, home to the finest catfish restaurant in the history of human existence on Planet Earth – Middendorf’s.

I could write a whole article on Middendorf’s. Instead I’ll stick to two words: GO. EAT.

Middendorf’s famous thin-fried catfish. Mine. You can’t have any.

We had Sunday lunch at Bob & Laura’s with their extended family, but before running off with our cat we made a trip north to Baton Rouge to visit Lea’s graduate adviser, Dr. Ferrell, who is the closest thing to a grandparent that we have now. Baton Rouge is a city whose geography is imprinted on my brain like a circuit board; I had to resist the urge to spend all day driving around to all my old haunts. It’s good that I did. Dr. Ferrell fed us crawfish and gumbo, making our Louisiana experience complete in every way possible.

The night before, though, after driving up from Thibodaux, we made a point of going to The Chimes. Apparently, The Chimes is now a chain with locations elsewhere in Baton Rouge and other cities. The original is an LSU landmark just outside the north gates of campus, where they serve literally hundreds of beers as well as fine Cajun cuisine. (Their crab cake sandwich is unmatched, and my favorite appetizer is the alligator.) The Chimes is a special place for Lea and me – it was where she spent many, many hours with her fellows in LSU’s geology department while working on her degree, and it’s only a block down the street from the amphitheater where we were married. In fact, The Chimes was the first place we stopped between leaving our wedding reception and heading off on our honeymoon.

Lots of memories, most having to do with alcohol and seafood.

We got up way early Tuesday morning, drove back to Thibodaux and squeezed an unhappy cat into her slightly-too-small travel carrier. She cried as long as the roads were bumpy. She was happier when sitting in Lea’s lap, or when we draped a pad over her carrier (she likes to hide under things). We stopped only as often as we had to for gas, food, and the uncramping of legs. Eventually, exhausted, we pulled into our parking garage, marched down the unusually long hallway to our apartment, and let Miss Piggy loose in her new home.

She immediately hid in the closet. We weren’t surprised.

We were surprised by how soon she came out, how quickly she adjusted to her new surroundings, and how soon she forgave us for leaving her with strangers for a year. The apartment was still a wreck, our new furniture hadn’t arrived, and we were still sleeping on an air mattress and a cot, but none of that mattered. Miss Piggy was back. Our family was reunited. We were home.

P.S. The Restaurant Tally – Do they still hold up?

Fort Lauderdale Airport

DeSano Pizza Bakery: I think so. Lea, not so much.

Atlanta Metro Area

OK Café: Oh yes.

Mary Mac’s Tea Room: Surprisingly, no.

The Bone Garden: Sí, Sí, Sí. Another margarita, por favor.

Fred’s Meat & Bread: Absolutely perfect, and dangerously close to our new residence.

Hooter’s: Iffy. Something seems different about the hot sauce. Another test is needed.

Nori Nori Sushi Buffet: Also iffy. We’d go back for lunch if we were in the area, but not for dinner or on weekends when the price goes up.

Hankook Taqueria: Fan-f**king-tastic, but we should order fewer tacos.

Louisiana

The Chimes: Is still the Chimes. Branching out has not lessened them in any way.

Middendorf’s: If possible, even better than we remembered.

P.P.S.

There are still a bunch of Atlanta restaurants we haven’t taste tested yet, if anyone wants to drive us. Pretty please???