Where to Stay/Pay, Tea/Pee

Several people have asked me for references/information about Morocco, so let's just start out by saying I found all of these hotels through www.booking.com, which I have found to be an excellent website for hotels (and when they say "free cancellation", it works like a charm). The upshot of it is, we are paying 50-150€ (and usually 80-100€) per room and living, as far as I'm concerned, in the lap of luxury. We fear our children are in imminent danger of being spoiled.

 

We stay in riads (converted old mansions with courtyards in the middle) whenever possible. In Fez, it's Riad Dar Skalli, and we have the best breaksfasts in the whole country -- four different kinds of homemade bread/pancake/muffin products along with butter/jam/caramel, fresh-squeezed orange juice, tea, and hot milk. It's just a bigger, fancier version of the breakfast we eat every day, at every hotel, till by the end we are all desperate to come back to Paris and make ourselves a bowl of cereal, eggs, fresh fruit, yogurt, or virtually anything other than bread, jam, and tea. In general, Fez has some of the highest quality food we find in the whole country -- really delicious, and my favorite part is the assortment of salads and vegetable side dishes we get at the beginning; at the fancy restaurants, they are more elaborate, of course, and I could be happy just eating this for the whole dinner. Our favorite meal here is at the Pearl of the Medina, which we couldn't find again in a million years. In fact, we couldn't even find it the first time. Luckily, in Fez you can call the restaurant where you want to eat, and they'll send somebody to your riad to fetch you.

 

Some of the most luxurious foods are the ones on display at the markets, especially the gorgeous one in Meknès. We buy enormous bags of dried fruits, olives, and nuts for car snacks and backpack emergency snacks. Perhaps we buy too much, because by the end of the trip, pretty much all of us would choose starvation over one more walnut-stuffed date.

  

 

 

 

In the desert town of Erfoud, we stay at the Kasbah Tizimih (where Kate Winslet once stayed) for one night before our big desert bedouin excursion. This is where we discover we have forgotten to bring bathing suits for the girls; where we learn that pool water is freezing in April, even in the desert; where we realize that canopy princess beds will elicit shrieks of joy from young children; and where finally, I get the photo I title "Kazz rocks the Kasbah".

 

 

 

This is just an afternoon stop for tea in the desert, at the Xaluca hotel at Erg Chebbi, on our way to our 1001 (dollar) Arabian Night. If you want to go higher end, Xaluca is a good call:

 

Auberge Chez Talout, in Skoura is hard to find, but lovely, and the food -- served family style with no menu -- is some of the best we have in the whole country. We are treated like family, even to the extent that when we leave the hotel, we are asked to give a ride to the hotel owner's younger brother, a 15 year old who needs to get to the "big" city of Ourzazate for school. We are happy to give him a ride, especially because his name is "You" which makes every conversation with or about him sound like a grammatically-challenged "Who's on First?" routine. "Where was You going?" "Remember when we drove You to Ourzazate?" "Why does You need a ride?" "So, You, what do you study?"

 

 

 

 

Below is a fancy restaurant we enjoy in Marrakesh, but only because the guy who sells us the perfume bars tells us about it and walks us to it himself. It's hidden behind a few alleyways, a couple layers of unassuming doors, and through a carpet store showroom. I don't know what it's called, but it doesn't matter, because even if I told you, you couldn't find it.

 

In Marrakesh, we stay at Riad L'Harmattan, the hotel we need a guide to find. We arrive late at night, starved, and the girls are rewarded with their first-ever room service, despite the fact that there is not, officially, room service at this hotel. Still, because the girls are cute, and young, and hungry, the staff make them omelettes, served on a beautiful tray in front of the fireplace in the living room of our suite.

 

The best part of the hotel -- even better than the room, the room-service, or the turtles in the lobby -- is the Dutch family with children just the same ages also staying there. Though those children don't speak English, and ours don't speak Dutch, they communicate in the magical way children do and play games, tell secrets, have inside jokes, spy on each other, and all become great friends. Here we are at the night market in the Djamaa el Fna square in the center of the old town. Dinners here are not as elegant as the ones in the private, hidden courtyard above, but they are a lot cheaper, just as tasty, and really quite fun.

 

 

I don't actually consider us fancy hotel people, but when you need a room big enough for four that you can book from overseas, somehow it just ends up happening. We do eat at high-end restaurants, but also at street stalls. Still, the opulence of the settings is just too much to resist sometimes.
 

But just when we fear we are getting too soft, the universe reigns us in with a squatty potty. It's a challenge for the girls, and the first time they try to use one, Gigi ends up peeing all over her skirt. Pippa, in an effort to avoid suffering the same fate, leans over so far to look and make sure her skirt is safe that her hair ends up on the pee-drenched floor.

A Date With a Prick at the Oasis

We wake up in Skoura, a tiny town just east of the more famous Ourzazate -- so famous that I'm sure you've never heard of it. We are still in the desert, but staying in this tiny town because of its huge date-palm oasis. For our morning activity, we wander through the oasis, with me singing "Midnight at the Oasis" over and over to everybody's annoyance. Probably because the only lines I can remember are "Midnight at the oasis. Put your camel to bed."

It's beautiful, and relatively lush after days in the desert. There are ancient kasbahs dotted throughout the oasis and initially, looking from above, they are so easy to spot, we assume they will be easy to find. But once we're in the midst of the oasis, it's so overgrown, we can no longer see the kasbahs. Eventually we find our way to one, and ultimately we find our way back out, but not before get lost numerous times and discover a date tree. It's the end of the season, so what we actually find are fallen dates, in among the lower branches of the tree. Date palms look gentle, but turn out to be incredibly spiky and cactus-like. Anthony finds that out the hard way. We discover that we can use dried spikes fallen from the tree itself to spear the dates without too much injury. At great peril and pain, we spear about a dozen of these semi-sun-dried dates then sit down to have a picnic snack, only to discover that they are starchy, bland, and disgusting. Lesson learned: Next time, just buy the dates.

Next and last stop on our itinerary before heading out of the desert for good: Aït Ben Haddou, another place you've never heard of. But you've seen it, if you've ever watched one of the following movies, for which it was used as a location.

Aït Ben Haddou is classified by UNESCO as one of the world's cultural treasures, and it's easy to see why. The first construction of the ksar -- a fortified collective village of pre-Saharan earthen buildings -- is said to date from around the 11th century. Clearly there must have been a lot of construction and reconstruction since then, seeing as how easily mud structures erode, even in an almost rain-less place.

 Here are views from afar, from inside looking up, from the top looking down, and no matter how you look at it, it's really something special. Even on a hot day. We're thanking our lucky stars that it's 80 and not 110, but we're a bunch of soft San Franciscans coming from gray, cool Paris, and this is about the temperature when we start to melt.

 

 

1001 (dollar) Arabian Night

We are spending one night in the desert, and not just any desert but the Sahara, and not just any part of the Sahara, but the Erg Chebbi, meaning an area of huge shifting sand dunes. This is the stuff of legends, of Lawrence of Arabia, of Ali Babba --the exact image you picture in your mind when you think of the Sahara.

 

In order to get there, we have to leave our rental car in the village of Erfoud, where we are picked up by a 4x4. In theory, we could drive ourselves there if we had rented a 4x4, but once we see what the drive entails, we're quite happy to be passengers. Given how much we've been lost on the regular roads (already about four times, and we only rented the car a day ago), and how there are no signs or indications of where to go out here in the desert, we almost certainly would get lost. It's basically an endless expanse of dry ground, with various car tracks going into unknown direction. The driver does not simply follow one track; he mixes, he matches, and sometimes just makes his own. And then there are the areas of soft sand, in which we get a bit stuck. Better our driver, who is completely unfazed by it, than us.

 

We are driven to the Xaluca hotel at the edge of the desert in mid-afternoon, where we are given mint tea, and taught how to wrap our scarves -- specially bought in Fez for this purpose -- into turbans. Sure, white would be more Lawrence of Arabia. But why buy white, when we can buy blue, purple, and green, with orange and metallic silver stripes? I'm sure this is what Berbers of old would have worn if they'd had the choice. Or, if they'd been little girls from San Francisco.

Once the day cools off a little, we get on our camels for a private two hour sunset ride, led by Ibrahim. He takes us up, up, up into the dunes, where we get off the camels and play for a while in the sand and watch the sunset. They wake us up around 5:30am the next morning for a brief sunrise ride, too. So that's two more camel rides than I've ever done in my life. The camels lumber along slowly, rocking us from side to side. The scenery is unbeatable. The weather, too. We've lucked out; we're told that as of a couple weeks ago (early April), it was still cold without the sun. And then in about two more weeks (so mid May), it will be in the mid-high 30s (that's 90 to 100°F). And in the summer, it regularly reaches 120°F and higher and can get up to 170°F! For us, it's just perfect right now. Warm enough to be comfortable in a T-shirt and to walk barefoot in the sand, but cool enough to wear pants or cover up from the sun.

 

 

Here is our obligatory "Water! Water! I need water!"-I'm-pretending-to-be-dying-of-thirst-in-the-Sahara photo. Seriously, you are not allowed to leave the desert until you have taken a version of this photo. If you don't take the photo, you will be left there to slowly desiccate and/or decompose in the dry sand after -- ironically -- you actually do die of thirst.

 

 

Look! Tiny scareb beetles and their tiny tracks. This is the only living creature we see in the dunes.

Anthony is practically giddy with the joy of how awesome this is. In fact, we all are. It's like living inside every desert movie you've ever seen. We grin the whole time ear to ear, and the girls thoroughly enjoy the most "hunormous" (P's word), perfect sandbox in the world. They tirelessly run up and down, up and down the dunes ("dooms" according to P).

 

 

Thank God we have camels to take us back to our tent. And oh, what a tent it is! We have a full bathroom, beds, and all lined with exotic fabrics and rugs. It cracks me up that I worry about sun coming in our windows in San Francisco and fading our Oriental carpets, and we take our shoes off in our house to make them last longer; here, they've lined the desert floor with Oriental carpets sitting out for who-knows-how-long in the Sahara sun and sand. And they look beautiful.

 

It's not just a tent but rather an entire bivouac. There are two other couples staying at the same hotel bivouacs, but they are each in their own section, so we seem to have it to ourselves. Well, us and the amazing staff who absolutely love kids. They are taken with our girls, who keep adding more and more Berber words to their vocabulary, and in turn they keep taking our girls. Whenever we go to look for P or G, who they call respectively "Fatima Cous-Cous" and "Aisha Tagine", one or both girls are out with a staff member -- playing in the desert sand, getting henna tattoos in the kitchen from Zahora, dancing, singing. We have private concerts, private meals, and a private spot to view the velvet black, perfectly clear nighttime skies chock full of brilliant stars.

 

 

They serve us an exquisite meal, with the most hunormous chicken/vegetable/cous-cous tagine I've ever seen. We eat only a small portion of it, and I would feel bad about the waste, except that we realize afterwards that the staff eats what we leave over -- in this case plenty for the half-dozen staff members, guides, and musicians that seem to be here just for us. Breakfast is also plentiful and delicious, and they go out of their way to make us eggs along with many customary breads, fruits, and yogurts, since the girls have said they missed eggs for breakfast.

 

Which bring me to the title of this posting. This is luxurious decadence, indisputably. And add to that the fact that's in the middle of the desert, so they know they've got us. There are a few other bivouacs, possibly cheaper, but a) we didn't feel like doing all sorts of research, and this one came heavily recommended and b) when we see the other bivouacs in the distance, they're walking out to the desert instead of camel riding, or going in large groups. We're very happy with our complete and utter hedonism for the night, especially because this was the original idea for the splurge/gift from Anthony's inheritence. At the time I arranged this (at Anthony's urging: "When else are we going to be in the Sahara desert riding camels?! Let's go big!"), of course I did not know about the spontaneous carpet purchase Anthony would also attribute as his parents' gift. Yes, we will have those carpets forever, but I have to say that our trip to the desert is also something that will stay with us for life. It is just a breathtakingly perfect 24 hours.

The Bill for a Legendary $1001 Arabian Night:

Round-trip 4x4 chauffeured ride to the desert                                       90€
Supplement for additional 2-hour sunset camel ride                             80€
2 adults and 2 children, one night, staying at the bivouac in the
     desert, meals and sunrise camel-ride included                                540€
Guide tip and supplemental beer/bottled juice fee                                 25€
Long distance phone fees to figure out why our credit card is
     being rejected (flagged because of the carpet purchase...)               5€
Rental car sitting in the parking lot at Erfoud                                        30€

For a grand total of                                                                               745€ or... $1001.