It's late, very tired, but happy not to be sick anymore. We finally started feeling better just in time for our 6 hour bus trip from Essaouira to Casablanca. By the time we got to Casablanca, we were ready to go out and do what we do best. Eat. Which of course meant Rick's Cafe. We went for lunch on wednesday and enountered a rather significant amount of security for a restaurant in the middle of a rainy afternoon. It turns out there was a US congressional delegation there for some function, we looked, but didn't see any familiar faces. Anyhow, lunch was so good we went back for dinner. We also walked around Casablanca a bit, but didn't really do much else... except upload pictures.

We have two completely new galleries ready for your perusal, and there are also new pictures in two of the older galleries. Here are the links:

New Pictures from The Museum
New Pictures from our week in Bath
Hogmanay
Our last 10 days in London

...and here's a link to a post you may have missed unless you were paying really close attention as it was never at the top of the blog:

Hazy Recollections...

Enjoy the pictures, and let us know what you think!

Back on January 12, we left a cold and wet London for a more pleasing climate, or so we hoped. Turns out Morocco is having one of it's colder winters. We arrived at our Riad in Marrakech too chilly to change into Tevas and t-shirts. We did manage to have dinner at the Djemma el Fna, however, which was an experience. If you have occasion to go, Stand 114 had the best food (fried eggplant and potato pancakes) and mint tea. We didn't gather the courage to try sheep brains or snails, though. The next morning, we discovered that chickens must have their own 5:00 call to prayer, because that damn rooster muezzin wouldn't shut up.

Marrakech is pretty overrated. You only need about 2 days there. The Djemma el Fna is definitely worth seeing. It has snake charmers and monkeys and acrobats. It really picks up on Friday night when all the weekending Europeans arrive. Most of the "gardens" mentioned in the tourist literature are actually just olive groves. However, there is one that was quite lovely, the Jardin Majorelle. Finally, dinner at Yacout was a fabulous night of beautiful, but not over-the-top, food and music (i.e., no bellydancers). Matt will post more on Yacout later.

It was clear that we needed to get out of Marrakech and the reach of its hassling shopkeepers and psychotic mopeds. So, we booked a trip to the south with Mohammed and his trusty Fiat. What an adventure this would be! Traveling across the desert on camels like Lawrence of Arabia.

Not quite.

We left Marrakech around 7:30 a.m. and headed for the Atlas Mountains. We crossed over the Tizi n'Tichka pass, seeing many Berber villages on our way. It seems to be quite the engineering feat that places built with rocks and mud stay in place, but they seem to do just fine. On the other side of the mountains, we visited Ait Benhaddou, a excellent example of a Kasbah, and now a UN World Heritage Site. Not to mention that Lawrence of Arabia and Gladiator shot scenes here. That accomplished, we arrived in Ouarzazate for lunch. It's the Hollywood of Morocco. We didn't see any movie stars, though. A few more hours of driving and we arrive at our destination for the night, the Todra Gorges. The hotel provided a space heater, but that didn't seem to warm anything up too well. And since the entire hotel lost power in the middle of the night, it didn't really matter.

In the dark and cold of the next morning, with just eight or so hours before I had to ride a camel, I got Berber Belly (sorry for the graphic details, but I have to tell the story the way it happened). This made me very unhappy as we drove for hours to our next stop, Merzuga and the Erg Chebbi sand dunes. Sure, I took some Immodium, but it just wasn't kicking in yet. Fortunately, the hostage compound that releases you once you buy a rug had a real toilet, so I was able to evacuate. The Touareg that evenutally sold us our three rugs, noticed my discomfort and force-fed me about two heaping tablespoons of dry cumin. That seemed to do the trick, for a while anyway.

Yes, we bought rugs. Three rugs. We haggled. We think we did well on the price. Certainly better than we could have done at home, but you're just never sure how much better you could have done. And Matt got himself a djellaba (Jedi robe). They also served us lunch, gave me a lovely necklace as a gift, and showed us pictures of Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn from their visit while shooting Sahara. They even showed me Matthew's home address. We actually did enjoy ourselves and learned a lot about the tribes. It was probably the only positive experience we had those three days.

Transactions complete, we headed for the camel meeting point. I was feeling energized now that the diarrhea seemed to have disappeared. It was cloudy and cool, but we hoped for the best. Eventually, we got on our camels, and headed for the camp. About 15 minutes into the two-hour ride, it started to rain a little. Then a lot. Then the wind decided to join the party. By the time we reached the tents, we were pretty wet. However, our extensive research into technical clothing proved well worth it, because we weren't as wet as the other people that showed up. So, we spent a while sitting in a cold tent with five Dutch kids, one Canadian, one Peruvian, one Brit, and one Smokestack (that's what we call the French now).

Dinner arrived, but I had no real desire to eat it, as, you guessed it, my diarrhea had returned. I downed about three more Immodium tablets. Matt was concerned what this would do to me, but I didn't care. I had no intention of shitting in the rain and wind and spraying the contents of my bowels all over the Sahara, or worse, myself. Unfortunately, this also means that I couldn't go pee. More on peeing later. Again, sorry for the gross stuff.

We suffered through dinner (along with an adorable cat that kept sneezing on us), and everyone headed straight to their tents for bed, as this night could not end soon enough. The tents turned out not to be rainproof. But they seemed to get the rain down to a fine mist before it hit us in the face. The Berbers provided us with eight camel blankets to sleep under. These are the same blankets that were between our butts and the camels' wet backs earlier in the day. Surprisingly, they could have smelled worse. As wet animals go, camels really don't smell that bad. Somehow we managed to get some sleep (I think the two Benadryl helped me a bit). But I never did go pee that night, so I slept with a bursting bladder.

Our guide came to get us around 6:40. It's time to go! But first, I had to pee. Fortunately, the Immodium overdose seemed to have done the trick, so there would be no Shitstorm in the Sahara today. My mother, while shopping for travel goods for our trip, purchased what I fondly refer to as "pee cones." They are paper cones that allow a woman to pee standing up. I have used them many times with great success before. But that morning I learned a valuable lesson. Don't go too fast. The pee can only come out the hole at the end of the cone so fast. If you fill the cone up, it will backsplash down your leg. Not caring that I just peed on myself, I climbed right back on that camel and headed off into the sunrise. Of course, there was no actual sun to speak of, it was still raining, and the wind was blowing harder than the night before, and some of the rain was actually sleet, but we made it back to Mohammed and his trusty Fiat.

Now, somewhere during this trip, the Great and Powerful Jinx, Matt, uttered the following sentence: "As long as a car has a running engine, the heater has to work." Dumbass. Wet, freezing, with just a little bit of pee on my leg, we rode in the car for about eight more hours. We had to take the long way, as the roads in the desert were flooded. THE SAHARA WAS FLOODED! Along the way, we passed places that were getting their first snow in 20 years, and lots of kids were out playing, but I didn't really care that much, because I was very, very cold. Eventually we got to a hotel in Ouarzazate that gave us a deal on a room with lots of hot water and a working heater. We were supposed to return to Marrakech, but the storm dumped a lot of snow on the mountains. We returned to Marrakech the next day in a Land Rover, went straight to the Sofitel, where we turned our room into a laundromat, I had a trip to the spa, Matt shaved his head, and we ate at the nice French restaurant. We like to recover in style.

The next day, we left for Essaouira, a sunny beach town, which we managed to enjoy for about a day before we came down with the flu, and, unfortunately, more diarrhea. Our fevers and chills seem to be over now, and we found this lovely little Internet cafe around the corner (close enough to run back to the room in a bathroom emergency). So, we thought we would use this downtime to update the website. We are working on pictures as well, but that takes a lot more time, so please bear with us.

I hope you enjoyed this story. My Dad keeps telling me I'll think it's very funny soon, but I'm just not sure.

We are in Essaouira Morocco and we think we have the flu. This will be short because I am typing this on a french keyboard and the letters are all in the wrong place.

After Hogmanay, we returned to London for another ten days, more on those later. On the 12th of January we left for Marrakech. It was not as warm as we had hoped. We had a fantastic meal at Yacout - more on that later - and then we headed south to spend the night in the Erg Chebbi dunes on the edge of the Sahara, where we endured the worst rainstorm the region has seen since pretty much anybody down there could remember - more later. The same storm closed the Atlas mountains, so we could not return to Marrakech. Oh, and our car didn't have heat. We were cold and wet for basically 3 days straight. We made it to Essaouira two days ago, and we suspect its a town we would really enjoy if only we felt well enough to leave our room.

On the bright side... no wait, There is no bright side.