Our Travels have Truly Begun (for the Fourth Time)

This feels like the fourth time we’ve started our trip around the world, and hopefully, this new beginning will be the most rewarding.

Let me explain:

The first “start” of our trip was when we left Palo Alto on June 3, and a couple of long driving days later, arrived in Canada. This was the beginning of our international travel, but with apologies to any Canadians reading this, for all of the magnificent natural scenery, with the exception of poutine, the Loonie, an inordinate fondness for hockey, Canada just isn’t all that different from America. (excepting for the week we spent in Quebec, which really did feel like a foreign country).  We had a great time, but other than the punishing driving distances, we weren’t really “challenged” that much.

The second beginning of our trip was after we finished our trip across the Atlantic and landed in the UK for a month. Here we were clearly in a somewhat different culture, but the language was still the same,  so communication was pretty easy.  Furthermore, so much of American culture is ultimately derived from British culture that the chances of serious cultural displacement just weren’t all that great.

The third beginning of our trip was when we arrived in Switzerland: Here we were in a country with a clearly different culture and with different language(s). But most people spoke at least some English and on a day to day basis, we saw a lot of things that seemed fairly familiar to any American. Plus,  public transit was mercilessly efficient, the water was drinkable, and even the stratospheric prices were not too much of a culture shock after living in the Bay Area (though I never spent $26 on a single meal at McDonald’s in the U.S.) 

Our experiences in France (where, as tourists, we were about as exotic as a baguette) and Spain were similarly both familiar and unfamiliar.  Certainly, as someone who has spent several years traveling through much more challenging locales from Afghanistan to Nepal, Europe wasn’t too much of a stretch, though, for our kids, who had not previously traveled abroad aside from a brief trip to London, it was considerably more of exotic.  

Now, almost a half year into our journey, it feels as if we have truly started again. Two weeks ago, after a long train ride from Madrid to Algeciras at the southern tip of Spain, we took the ferry into the port of Tangier, past the famous Strait of Gibraltar, where we arrived in a country that for the first time was truly “foreign” to American sensibilities (though it should be noted that legendarily seedy/decadent etc. city has really cleaned up in the last decade, as a result of the recent construction of the massive Tangier Med port (now the largest in the Mediterranean) about 25 miles away from Tangier, which has brought a great deal of economic growth to the region.  Now, alongside the old medina, a modern new waterfront development was in full bloom with a host of five-star hotels and modern looking offices.

After a night and a morning in Tangier, we departed by train for Fes, one of the most exotic and fun cities that Anna and I have visited on all of our travels and one that we were really looking forward to seeing again after nineteen years away.

The train from Tangier to Fes was itself a great experience. While European trains were comfortable, on our Moroccan train we had a private cabin all to ourselves. “First Class” tickets for the seven of us for the 135-mile trip (which took more than four hours) totaled about $85.

Upon arrival in Fes, we visited the medina, which is about as chaotic and colorful and experiences you could imagine, with dried camel heads, old fashioned leather dyeing and innumerable merchants and a warren of vehicle-less roads that were easy to get lost in. We stayed on the edge of the medina in the former palace of the Sultan of Morocco’s finance minister, with a huge suite of rooms to ourselves which cost a bit more than half of what we would have paid to stay at the Travelodge in Palo Alto.

From Fes it was on to Marrakech, where we are staying a few weeks in the medina, joined by my parents, who despite pushing 80 years of age, were still up for an adventure. Marrakech has 2/3 of the chaos and color of Fes, but adds to it a fairly modern new city with lots of luxury resorts, cultural events, shopping malls and international-style restaurants (these are slowly developing in Fes, as well, but not nearly to the same degree). We are staying in an attractive and renovated old house (dar) only reachable on foot and a stone’s throw from all of the chaos—but only a 15 minute or so drive from a fairly modern “new city” when we want to get away from it all.

One unique element of our trip has been to this point, our complete eschewing of air travel. This was really Anna’s idea rather than mine, since I think modernity and speed has a lot of wonderful uses. But our travel choices have had some impressive side-effects. We have reached our nightly accommodations by a wide variety of means over the past six months: bus, car, train, ferry, ocean liner, cable car, funicular, and foot.  And we have now even utilized a camel for practical travel to our lodgings before we have utilized an airplane.  A few days ago, we took a trip to the Sahara Desert, meaning that we managed to get from Palo Alto to the Sahara without boarding single airplane.  That seems to me to be a travel accomplishment worth celebrating.

As for the Sahara Desert itself, it is about a nine-hour drive south of Marrakech, during which we stopped at several interesting spots including the legendary 11th-century desert Fortress at Ait Benhaddou. Once we arrived at the edge of the Sahara, we traveled by camel and slept in “glamping” tent accommodations on the dunes. This was actually quite a step up in luxury from Anna and I did this same trip from Marrakech, almost two decades ago, one which involved a long and uncomfortable overnight bus ride, followed by a multi-hour Land Rover ride over a barely marked desert track to Merzouga, which was the village that was our starting point, and which was not reachable by normal road.  From there we trekked by camel to the desert where some nomads living in a tent served us very sandy couscous topped by a small amount of meat, which we were encouraged to eat as the guests. We slept outside in our sleeping bags and awoke to find them covered in two inches of sand that had blown on us during the night.

Fast forward two decades and there’s an excellent highway to Merzouga and there is now a small “village” of tent camps on the dunes, many (including ours) offering fairly luxurious experiences, complete with en-suite toilets and tents with electricity. Progress, of an ambivalent sort, as come to the Moroccan Sahara.  But at least you can still ride camels. 

Sadly, however, all good things must come to an end, and we are leaving Morocco in a week. This also means that we are going to have to take our first airplane on our journey.

Our next destination is Egypt, a locale that is virtually impossible to get to from Morocco without an airplane, as the border with Algeria is closed, and in any case Libya next door is far too dangerous for travel. We’ve run out of European visa time for now,  so we can’t go overland back through Europe (which would be a *long* trek in any case), and the only other way to get to Egypt would be to go through the disputed and highly militarized Western Sahara, cross the dangerous border into Mauretania and then again through Algeria and Libya.

So at last, our family will be reacquainting ourselves with the airplane. We will be utilizing this mode of transport several more times in the coming months as we head from Egypt to Cyprus then on to Dubai and then Tanzania (where we will be volunteering for several weeks), before, if all goes as planned, heading back to Europe where, after a few months interlude, we’ll be heading overland into Asia through Russia by way of Mongolia.

For now, though, we are enjoying staying in a city that, however exotic, like everywhere else one spends time, grows more familiar by the day. . .