It’s done. We’ve booked our vacation for the two first weeks of June.

The itinerary is the following:
- five days in London, including a side trip to Hampshire to see Jane Austen’s house (side trip to Stonehenge too maybe?);
- fly to Edinburgh, Scotland;
- visit Edinburgh for two days, then make a side trip to St-Andrews;
- hop a train to Glasgow;
- visit Glasgow for two days;
- train to the Highlands, most likely Mallaig;
- return to Edinburgh then fly back to London, then Montreal.

Psyched!

(BTW: does anyone have a voltage adapter I can borrow?)

Where should we go on vacation in June?

This year T and I decided to ditch the idea of going for one big expensive trip to Australia, and instead go on two cheaper ones. It’s already settled that we’re going to Costa Rica in November, T’s choice. It’s now up to me to decide where we go in June.

My choice was Scotland, though there isn’t much to attract T there (hot hobbits don’t do it for him). However, we sort of took a step back when we looked at the cost of travelling in the UK. 29$ CAD for a cheap breakfast? 50$ for a bed in a dorm?

Is our information wrong or is it really that expensive? Perhaps we could go to Ireland and just pop on over to Glasgow for a few days?

I feel bad that I haven’t been blogging much lately, but there really isn’t anything to blog about, unless you’re interested in the details of how greasy the food is (deep-fried quesadillas!). For want of anything else to say, here’s a summary of my trip:

So, in the past four days…

Mexican meals: 6
Pizza meals: 2
Trips to Walmart: 1
Kilometers run: 5
Times I’ve been offered Pepsi before 9 am: 4
Times I’ve accepted: 0
Bags of beef jerky consumed: 2
Death row prison guards (no, really!) spotted at lunch yesterday: 5
Episodes of Law and Order watched: 7
Cowboy hats spotted: countless
LARGE suvs: countless
Camouflage outfits: countless
Cosmopolitans: 1

Ugh. Detox starts tomorrow. Get me to a fruitery!

I’m here in Nowheresville, Texas, teaching for about two weeks.

I thought I’d seen Nowheresville before, you know, in the Sahara. But this is worse. I remember the first time I came down here, it was my first business trip with my current employer, and I was quite excited. Then reality hit. This “town” (which shall remain nameless), population 5433, is so small there aren’t any restaurants, not even at the hotel. I had to eat at Walmart’s. No bus, no taxi, everyone drives, but of course, no cars. Huge trucks. A guncheck at the door of where I work. The road doesn’t have a shoulder to run on, and of course the hotel doesn’t have a gym. To top it all off, it’s a dry county. No alcohol.

And this time I’m here for twice as long. Alone. Sunday night I rented seven DVDs for the duration, and grimly prepared to face my sentence. God bless cable.

Update: Reduced sentence due to good behavior! I’m coming home Saturday! Woot!

It’s good to see you again. And I hope to see all of you soon too.

And off we went to the Sahara the next morning. We’d hired a guide and a 4×4 for 4 days, along with two Aussies and an Italian couple. Those were the best days of the trip so far.

The first day’s drive seemed like it would never end, 8 hours of dusty road in hot, unbelievably dry weather, where all we could see all around were endless rocky plains. Basically, the moonscape by daylight. Very hard on the system, I have to say.

In the desert it’s not the heat so much as the lack of humidity that gets you. You are constantly aware of the water you are losing, as your mouth dries each time you breathe. You’re hot but never sweaty, as everything evaporates instantly. You rub your fingers together and they feel strange, for the oil that is normally on your skin is gone. After four days without a shower, my hair was not greasy, but felt like dry hay.

We finally got to our destination, the tiny nowhere village of Zagora, and three Berber nomads were waiting to take us into the desert on camelback to sleep in their camp. We said goodbye to our guide and after an hour and a half of camel riding, it was pitch dark and we finally got to their big, sturdy tent. They threw cushions around a low makeshift table, and the six Westerners feel asleep immediately. When they woke us with dinner (one big bowl of stew, six forks, and mint tea), the moon had risen and they had lit a lantern. The desert was the most perfect silence I had ever heard; it was a perfect feeling of peace, happiness and good will.

The nomads told us that their families sent one son each, six months out of the year to work wih tourists, but that they much preferred their true nomadic life. They’d never been to a city and didn’t wish to. Cars scared them; one recounted that when he went to the tiny town of Ouarzazate, he didn’t know how to cross the street. He had no wish to see Marrakesh.

The next night we stayed with a Berber woman and her seven dirty and beautiful children. That desert was one made of endless sandy orange dunes, the kind of desert immortalized in so many pictures and movies. But that’s another story for another time.

Hello from Marrakech… so much has happened since last I blogged. Here’s a much-abridged version of recent events.

Took the 7 1/2 hour train ride to Marrakech, which was comfortable and relaxing. We had read that when you eat on public transportation, it was customary to offer to share it with the people around. This was quite well received and led to many a conversation with the friendly locals who in turn always offered a share in their lunch as well. One woman showed us the pictures from her brother’s recent wedding, explaining all the details of the Moroccan wedding ritual.

Got to Marrakech and ate in the Djemma El Fna, an extremely crowded town square (think Jazz fest main event crowded) with food stalls surrounded with long benches where locals (and the occasional tourist) squeeze in and eat dinner for around one dollar. T ate at a lamb stall, where the man coarsely ripped the meat of the rack with his hands and a dirty knife, throwing it onto a little plate for T to eat, also with his hands of course. He said it was delicious, but it seemed extremely greasy to me.

Decided to book a four day Land Rover trip to the desert proper, and took off the next day.

Welcome to the “From the Road” edition of the Chronicles, which shouldn’t be as long a post as I’d like, because the keyboard is hard to use.

Landed in Casablanca and headed immediately for the capital Rabat. Beautiful city, no sollicitation, but we’re clearly not in Canasas anymore. Extremely surprised by the quality of the room we got for 12 dollars (no dollar sign on this keyboard of course). There had been a discount because no hot showers were available.

Expected to be dead by that point, but we were full of energy. Went and discovered the medina, a walled-off part of the old city. Inside, a maze of tiny streets and whitewashed walls, looks like the way I imagine Greece would. Then into the souq, another maze but this time bustling with chaotic activity. Lots of people selling spices out of large open sacks, each pile a different color; smells amazing.

The people are friendly and patient with we tourists who stick out like a sore thumb, but so far no sollicitation, very little begging (unlike my neighborhood at home), not even so much as a stare.

Well, better end this one here, I’ve run up a 70 cent bill. Might not blog again, but I’m thinking of home. Enjoy Yulblog tonight.

Only six days left before the trip to Morocco. I’m very anxious for it. So anxious in fact, that I keep reading everything I possibly can on the various destinations, planning in my head what we’re going to do and when. This weekend I bought 54$ worth of Imodium, water purification tablets, alcohol swabs, bug repellent, etc. We also rented The Sheltering Sky (Un Thé au Sahara), and spent yesterday evening poring over maps and train timetables. This morning I booked hotels in Rabat, Meknès and Fez.

I do this because I’m so looking forward to it. The nagging problem in the back of my mind is, the more of the trip I prepare, the less of an unplanned adventure the journey will end up being. On the other hand, I’m bouncing off the walls and I can’t help but find out exactly at what time our train from Fez to Marrakech is leaving, and how much I can expect to pay for an overnight camel rental in Ouarzazate.

I keep reminding myself that I survived months in Indonesia alone without a single reservation, before there really was an Internet to speak of, before I could really read ahead. That was the greatest adventure of my life. And when I lost my traveller’s cheques in the backcountry of Bali, and had to survive penniless for a week, well, that was living!

That’s it. No more booking ahead. It’s going to be such a looooong week…

(image from matchtours)

“I, for one, know of no sweeter sight for a man’s eyes than his own country”

- Homer

Or city, for that matter. I’m back.