We’ve had problems with hotel rooms that were too hot or too cold. The most memorable one was in Death Valley, where the room A/C was unable to keep up with the 112F outside temp. The guy who came to “fix” it showed how to adjust the thermostat, which had no effect. When he came back three hours later and told us the same thing, evidencing no memory of our first encounter, Sally christened him cousin Daryl, and his other cousin Daryl (1). Well, they have yet another cousin Daryl.

Our room was getting cool as the day ebbed and the outside temp dropped to 62F. We tried increasing the setting on the thermostat to 80, to no avail. I finally complained to the front desk and they sent a maintenance guy. This other Daryl set it to 86. Obviously, this didn’t help.

So I went back to the guy at the desk, who came back with a space heater which is powerful enough to warm a small room. Which our room is not.

I guess there are Daryls everywhere.

I’ll follow this with a full post about today later.

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(1) This, of course, is a riff on the “Newhart” show.

The last two days were marathons. Our door-to-door travel time from Casablanca to our home was 20 hours; if you add the 8 hours we spent on Monday getting to Casablanca, that’s 28 hours to travel home. Of course, in the good old days, a trip of that magnitude might take weeks (1). So I can’t really complain.

We took five planes, drove for many hours between cities, stayed in five hotels, went on approximately 15 outings. I took about 1,300 images, which is slightly fewer per day than our last trip to Southeast Asia. You’ve seen most of the best on the pages of this blog. Including this post, I’ll have published 19 times about this trip (20 if you count “What’s in my bag for Morocco”).

So how was this trip?

This was a good trip. Like most, it had some things that were better than expected and some that were worse. But I’d say it turned out right about as expected, overall.

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

• The Moroccan people we encountered, mostly those who deal with tourists, were uniformly friendly and soft spoken. The few encounters we had with civilians on the street were generally pleasant.
• The food was a challenge. I’m well known as having a limited and unadventuresome palate, and the food was – to me – not something I looked forward to every day. On the other hand, I made an effort to eat what was on offer, even if some of the choices were not what I would have accepted back home. And while Sally’s restrictions are always a challenge, it was handled reasonably well on this trip.
• While we’ve made increased use of end-to-end service and guides in several of our last trips (Africa, Southeast Asia), this one was the most comprehensive, and I might say, intrusive. Our guide and driver traveled with us from city to city, and Kamal even flew with us on one leg of the journey. It felt to me like we had a full time chaperone (we did!), which is not the way I like to live. Nonetheless, having them around made things much simpler, as we didn’t have to think about the mechanics of any thing on the trip. This was reinforced on our long trip home, where we navigated through Heathrow airport on our own for about an hour while changing planes: two buses, innumerable escalators, and a lot of walking.
• Morocco, while 99% Muslim, doesn’t really try to control the behavior of visitors, and many Moroccans don’t appear particularly religious. Many woman wear head scarfs, but an equal number don’t. Some hotels and restaurants don’t serve alcohol, but many do (2). There are mosques everywhere, but it feels no different than the number of churches in the US.
• They take security very seriously. Any car trip of more than a few miles ran into multiple check points manned by the police and/or other security forces. The Amanjena hotel checked our van for explosives every time we entered during our four day stay. Passport/ticket checks and baggage screening happened multiple times for each flight, both during departures and arrivals.
• The hotels varied in quality, which is to be expected. The Amanjena, like each of the Aman hotels we’ve stayed at before, was really exceptional. The Dar Ahlam was unique and very special – they went as far as they could to make if feel like you were staying in a friend’s home. The Olinto was a beautiful facility, but not well served by the inexperienced staff. The Riad Fes had a room that I found disappointing, although the rest of the hotel was quite nice and the location, in the Medina, was unique.
• The sightseeing was, well, sightseeing. There’s very little in the world that is on my “must see” list, so it’s hard to get excited about another Roman ruin, or another mosque/church/synagogue/temple. Our walks through the Medinas and around Skoura were the most enjoyable to me, as it gave us an opportunity to see people living their lives, even if that life was selling t-shirts to tourists.

It was good to be traveling again, after the COVID break (3). We’re already planning a couple of US-based trips in 2024, as well as a beach resort this winter. So there’s lots of planning to get done.

And, finally, here are some pictures. I know you’ve been waiting 😉.

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(1) In 1492 Columbus and his crew departed the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory off the coast of Morocco southeast of Casablanca and arrived at the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean five weeks later.

(2) We consumed less alcohol on this trip than any other in memory.

(3) Our trip to Montana with our children and grandchildren was not a “tour” and was very enjoyable, but a different sort of thing than these travels.

As we had a 10:15am flight back to Casablanca, we were picked up at the at our hotel, the Dar Ahlam, at 7:45 by a local driver. Our guide, Kalam, and our driver had gone back to their homes in Marrakech after dropping us off at Dar Ahlam, so the hotel arranged for a local driver. The airport in Ouarzazate was about 45 minutes away and tiny. Our flight was about 40 minutes late, but we made up most of the time en-flight and during our stop at Zamora and landed in Casablanca pretty much on time. Unfortunately, our luggage seemed to be on a later plane, as we (and the other 20 people with checked bags on our flight) waited about 40 minutes for the bags to come through on the belt.

Outside, Kamal was waiting as usual and we were soon on our way to the city for a brief look around before going to our hotel. The plan was to take a tour of the Hassan II Mosque, which is the largest active mosque in Africa, completed in 1993. Unfortunately the last tour entry was at 3:00, and our delayed luggage killed any chance of getting there in time. But Kamal did some magic and got us attached to a small tour group that was just getting started.

The approach plaza reminds me of St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. The mosque and surrounding plaza are designed to accommodate upwards of 120,000 worshipers, although attendance at daily prayers is really only a handful.

Anyway, the guide was entertaining and appeared knowledgeable. He concluded the tour with an impassioned yet friendly speech about how Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all about the same god, and all about peace, and why can’t we all just get along?

After the mosque, we took a spin around the city just to see what it looked like. Here’s what it looked like: a city.

More European than either African or Arabic, with 6,000,000 residents, high rises, global company logos, etc. Everyone told us there’s really nothing to see (as a tourist) in Casablanca other than the Hassan II Mosque, and it appears they are correct. On the other hand, it seems like a lively city to live in.

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So Kamal dropped us off at the Four Seasons Casablanca, which turned out to not have a reservation for us. Big miss for the travel agent! After a few texts and phone calls, and unneeded aggravation, we had a room. Bummer to have our last night in Morocco go like this. But the room was fine, and then we went down to dinner (1). We didn’t do much unpacking, but we did rearrange our checked and cabin luggage for tomorrow’s flights home.

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Tuesday, November 7: Homeward Bound

This morning our driver showed up right on schedule at 10:00 am to take us back to Casablanca airport for our trip home via London. The total door-to-door travel time from the Dar Ahlam until we walk into our house will be about 28 hours.

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(1) An alcohol-free dinner. The Four Seasons does not serve alcohol, which is the first of our hotels to do so. I felt like we were back in NJ.

For our second and final day at Dar Ahlam, we scheduled … nothing. In many ways, it was a repeat of the first day. We found our way down (and up) narrow stairs and through hallways to the living room area, where a member of the staff appeared to escort us to our breakfast table. As we had experienced yesterday, the tables are scattered all around the grounds, so we never sat the same place twice.

Once we finished breakfast, the manager came over and was talking about our plans for the day (none), when he suggested we have a guide drive us around Skoura, the town here. Sally had not left the hotel since we arrived, so we decided it would be a nice thing to do. After checking the manager came back and said the guide would be here by noon and would take us our for an hour or whatever we liked. As it turns out, the same guide who escorted me on my walk yesterday drove from his home about an hour away with a driver and arrived right on time.

We had a nice drive around and made a few stops. Skoura, a community of about 60,000, is slowly dying. The good news is that Morocco is very aggressive about children’s education, and as the children graduate they move to the cities to pursue careers other than the farming and craftwork that was traditionally done here. Also, there’s been a drought across sub-Saharan Africa for five years now, and the Sahara desert is slowly moving northward, making agriculture more difficult. So there are a fair number of homes that are abandoned, including one very large multifamily structure that only has a few families left. –

When we got back to the hotel, lunch was waiting at yet another different location, this time in the middle of the farming area the hotel maintains for fruits and vegetables.

The hotel has a tiny gift shop, which unsurprisingly is unstaffed. You simply walk in and choose what you like, and they trust you to let them know so you can pay for it when you check out. We did this, and Sally picked out something she liked.

The rest of the afternoon was spent lounging near the pool area. The pool is nice enough, but they only have a few lounges, and the remaining guests (it’s Sunday afternoon and most people had checked out) were scattered about, making finding a suitable location to sit in the shade a bit difficult. But we eventually managed and enjoyed sitting there.

Back in the room we spent some time packing. We have a 10:15 flight tomorrow morning to get back to Casablanca for our onward flights to New York via London on Tuesday, so we need to leave the hotel by 7:45. Which means getting up by 6:00. Ugh.

Kalam picked us up at 9:30 for a full day drive to our next destination, the Dar Ahlam in Skoura. Our itinerary said that the drive was four hours, but that was written before we had to change hotels to the Olinto because of damage to the Kasbah Tamadon. The Olinto was in the wrong direction, so the trip over the High Atlas Mountains would now take five hours, plus any stops.

I was worried about the roads, as the trip into the mountains a couple of days ago was on pretty bad, very windy pavement for much of the trip. And we were going to spend more time in the mountains this time. But as it turned out, today we were on the main road across the range, and large portions of it had been recently replaced and straightened. It was still a mountain road, and it was mostly two lanes (except for a passing lanes on uphill grades). But overall, it was smoother sailing than the previous trip.

Portions of the road were still under construction. At those points we were diverted onto a section – usually a few hundred yards long – of the old road, which tended to be closer to the edge and have very poor pavement, or no pavement at all. But this was a small portion of the trip.

Along the way we passed through a number of villages, all of which had the same appearance from the main road: several blocks of small shops, selling groceries, building supplies clothing and souvenirs, snacks. We passed more examples of earthquake damage.

Where the north side of the mountains were forested and green up to the tree line, the south side was much drier and had much less, and smaller, vegetation. Another few hours south of here the Sahara Desert starts, so the climate is drying out as you come off the mountain peaks.

As we pulled into Skoura, the town where the Dar Ahlam hotel is, I was following the driver’s path using Google Maps. We kept turning down smaller and dustier dirt tracks until we came to a stop in front of a door in an unremarkable wall. Homes, even relatively simple ones, are often built around courtyards with no exterior windows to the street and simple doors. But this looked weird for a hotel, even though there was a small sign which did not give the name of our hotel. Even the driver and guide looked perplexed. Our guide pulled his phone out and a moment later, the door opened and someone came out to greet us.

At this point the hotel staff took charge of us and our luggage. Our guide and driver said goodbye, as they were heading home for the weekend and would meet us Monday afternoon in Casablanca.

The Dar Ahlam may be one of the most interesting hotels we’ve ever stayed at. It’s built into an old kasbah (1) that has been renovated and expanded into a four star hotel with 18 rooms and suites (2). There’s no check in process, they simply led us through a warren of tiny hallways to our room. We soon found out that there are also

• No room keys or locks
• No menus
• No reservations for dinner
• No meal times, or limit on the number of meals you can have
• An open bar throughout the day
• All activities – cooking class, massage (3), guides, etc. – are included.

It was about 3:00 by this time, and we hadn’t had lunch, so we were escorted to a table and asked what we wanted to eat. It turns out that this isn’t as open ended as you might think; they apparently have a relatively limited repertoire (although they don’t expose the list), and they also make guesses in advance about what you might like and start preparing it for you. For instance, we had fish for dinner the first night, which we definitely wouldn’t have asked for.

Getting to and from our room was a challenge: we continually got lost, going into dead ends or corridors that seemed to lead to other corridors. After maybe 20 tries, we were able to do it with no mistakes.

As I mentioned, the building is a warren of tiny hallways with small rooms, dead ends and corners filled with artwork and craft pieces. Many of these sets are quite picturesque, though dark and hard to photograph.

Our room is a bit of a disappointment. It is very cute and simply furnished. It is also very dark, and has only a small and not-very-comfortable loveseat to sit on. If you’re trying to read a book and need some light, forget about it. There is enough closet space, which is fortunate, because there is literally no room to open the suitcases and get anything. There’s also an enclosed patio with two lounges, which we used for a few minutes. The only part of the room with adequate light is the bathroom, so you can put on makeup or shave without slicing your face.

The hotel, on the other hand, has lots of nice sitting areas. Some are the little nooks off the halls, which are furnished in more traditional styles. There’s a very contemporary large living room-like area, where the staff is always ready to get you anything you want – drinks, snacks, etc. And outdoors has dining tables scattered all around the grounds, so that each of our meals has been in complete privacy, whether indoors or outdoors.

We scheduled three activities for Saturday: I went for a walk around the neighborhood with Fuad, a guide, early in the morning, then Sally and I had a private cooking class at 11:00 and prepared our own lunch, and finally we each got massages at 4:00. Kind of filled the day, along with eating breakfast, our self-prepared lunch, and then dinner. Lunch and dinner were both tejine: chicken for lunch, and lamb for dinner. As mentioned in an earlier post, tejine is the standard meal throughout the country. It always has a variety of vegetables, and often adds a meat such as chicken, beef or lamb.

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(1) A kasbah in Morocco derives from the Arabic term for a fortress or citadel, but has grown to mean a block-shaped building with towers at the four corners. It is a common style used for expensive homes and hotels.

(2) Actually 9 rooms are in the kasbah itself, the other 9 are in another building on the grounds.

(3) We found out the massages were not included when checking out, but $60 for a 45 minute massage at a resort is very reasonable.

After leaving the lunch with our new Berber friends, we drove about 90 minutes to our hotel for the next two nights, the Olinto. This is a new-ish hotel in the middle of nowhere, renovated and re-opened under this name by a new owner just one year ago. This was not our first choice (1) – the original plan was for us to spend two nights at the Kasbah Tamador, which is owned by Richard Branson of Virgin Everything fame. Unfortunately, the Tamador was damaged in the earthquake and won’t reopen until the spring. The Olinto, like the Tamador, was designed to offer us two nights – one full day – of nothing but relaxation.

When we got to the hotel, we were greeted by yet another lovely hotel staff. Thus far, each of the hotels’ staff have been extremely nice. At the Olinto, they added very quiet. To a person, we had to strain to hear what they were saying.

The excitement started when we were escorted to our room, one of nine villas at the hotel. Rather than use numbers, each had a name. Ours was named Lavender. Sally has some floral allergies, and lavender is one of them. We had made this clear to our travel agent, who made it clear to the master tour planner she was using, who made it clear to the booking agency for Morocco, who made it clear to the hotel. So we asked the reception person if it was simply a name, or if there was some reason for the name, and if there was any actual lavender in the room.

It turns out the situation was both better and worse and better than we feared. No, there was no lavender in the room, either flowers or in the toiletries. Yes, there was lavender all around the villa – dozens of lavender plants, surrounding the patio and the pool. In fact, the entire hotel was planted with hundreds and hundreds of lavender plants. Fortunately, being November, none of the plants were in bloom – which made us hopeful that there would be no affect on Sally, as there didn’t seem to be any good way to fix the problem.

We did decide to find out why, since everyone in our booking chain seems to have notified the next level about the allergy, why nobody raised the issue with us. To make a long story short, the hotel’s assistant manager claimed to have texted the booking agent that made our reservation to alert them, but never heard back. Apparently, he notified the wrong booking agent, who proceeded to ignore the text. This took us almost 24 hours (out of our 40 hour stay) to find out, meaning that we were upset for much of that time.

So let’s put that all aside for the moment and talk about the Olinto and our stay there.

The grounds, public areas and our villa were all quite nice. We had a suite with a spacious bedroom, a living room with big TV, and a patio, a roof terrace and a heated pool. We never managed to use the pool, as the weather was just a bit too cool to warrant it.

The staff and food service were nice. Although as I said earlier, we had to work to hear them talk. We had two breakfasts and only one dinner; we were too full from the Berber family lunch when we arrived to have dinner that first night.

The second annoyance came with the telephone in the room. Our phone didn’t work – if I made a call, they couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t hear them. Same if they called me. So I walked over to reception (2) to both report the problem, and take care of whatever it was I had been calling about. They promised to get it fixed.

Around 11:00pm, while preparing for bed, I jostled the phone and it made a call. I immediately hung up. A minute later, it rang; I answered but heard nothing. This happened twice; I assume the desk saw the call, and called back to see what we wanted. Then I got into bed. A few minutes later, there’s a knock on the door; the desk guy assumed something was very wrong and ran down to see what was going on. I was not pleased; if they had fixed the damn phone, none of this would have happened. They didn’t get someone over to fix it until the middle of the next day, after we complained again.

In the afternoon, having nothing to do at the hotel (3), we asked at reception if it was possible to go for a walk outside the hotel. After all, we know nothing of the area and had no idea if there were any safety concerns. The desk clerk seemed shocked: “You want to go out alone? Without a guide?” This is the same response I got from the front desk back in Fes to the same question. It seems like it’s somehow inappropriate for rich tourists to do anything without a guide. Anyway, she agreed that it was safe and suggested we turn right outside the front gate, and escorted us to the front gate (about 50 feet from the desk) to ensure we didn’t get lost and turn left, or something.

We walked along the road for about an hour. It was a quiet, dusty country road, with houses and orchards, a mosque, and a very small block with a couple of stores. I’m happy to report were weren’t kidnapped or robbed.

We spent both evenings doing what we never do while on vacation: we watched TV, using our Amazon Prime account to catch up on one of our favorite shows.

Friday morning we ordered room service for breakfast, as we planned to meet our guide and driver at 9:30am for the long trip to our next stop.

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(1) “Choice” is a strange word to use here, as our travel agent chose all of the hotels for us. And chose this replacement hotel. Our contribution was to say OK.

(2) We seem to always get the rooms as far away from reception as is possible. This was the case at the Amanjena as well as here.

(3) Of course, the plan for this stop was alway more or less doing nothing but relaxing at the hotel.

You’ve all heard about the High Atlas Mountains – that’s where the most damage from the earthquake that hit Morocco early in September took place. If you followed the news in America, it looked like all of Morocco, including Marrakech, was destroyed. As you’ve seen earlier in this blog, there was damage to Marrakech – but it was very limited.

Today we (sadly) left the Amanjena for a trip to the High Atlas Mountains (1). On the agenda was lunch with a Berber family in their home. If you recall, we had a dinner in a private tent with dancers and musicians, which was enjoyable but really a stage show. The promise for this adventure was that it was authentic. But we were skeptical.

The drive was supposed to be about 90 minutes but wound up taking two hours when we were stopped by road construction to clear debris from the earthquake.

Along the way, we passed many scenes of the damage. Buildings knocked over, road damage, but most importantly tents made from tarps that are now the homes for many of the people whose houses were destroyed. For right now, the tents aren’t that bad – they have running water and sanitation, which many families didn’t have before. But winter is coming …

When we finally reached the village where we were having lunch, we were met by a guide, Mohamed (2), and his driver, Mohamed. Mohamed (the driver) had a 4×4 vehicle which we actually needed to get up the steep, narrow and rutted road leading to the top of the village where our host family lived. Along the way we had to stop and negotiate a series of maneuvers to get around a large delivery truck doing his thing on the mountain.

We finally walked the last piece up to the family home. The view from their place is beautiful – you’re looking out over a valley surrounded by mountains. The man’s name was Said, and we couldn’t really understand or remember the woman’s name. Their children and grandchildren lived in the compound with them; a three year old named Adam was running around and was very cute. A son-in-law and a daughter also came in later on, but didn’t interact with us.

After an exchange of pleasantries with Mohamed (the guide) translating, we were asked to help prepare lunch. Lunch was a pair of tajines (3), one chicken and one vegetable. Our assistance was pretty minimal – we cut a few vegetables, and dropped some chicken in the pots.

While dinner was cooking – it takes quite a while – we were each taken inside and dressed in a djellaba (4). Which seemed a bit over the top to me. Especially Sally’s, which didn’t look like any djellabas we ever saw on the street – it looked like a bridesmaid’s djellaba, and never supposed to be worn again.

Lunch was surprisingly tasty. I ate the chicken tajine and all the cooked vegetables that were in it, along with the flat breads that the woman baked herself.

All in, it was very enjoyable. The people were genuine and friendly, although they didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Berber – which limited our conversation. Mohamed (the guide) spoke excellent English, and was a resident of the villlage. Despite having only gone to school through age 12, he was knowledgeable about the world and very well spoken. We enjoyed talking with him.

After lunch, we reversed the process: walking down a long rutted road to where Mohamed (the driver) picked us up, then down the switchbacks and past a water delivery truck to the main part of the village where Kamal was waiting with our driver in the van. Then another hour and a half to our hotel for the night, the Olinto. We were stopped again at the same road construction site, but for only about 15 minutes this time.

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(1) It’s annoying but correct to keep repeating “High Atlas”, as the Atlas Mountains is composed of many sub-ranges: High, Middle, Saharan, Anti-, and Tell Atlas Mountains. But from here on I’m going to drop the “High”.

(2) Yes, another subcontracted guide.

(3) Tajine is a traditional Moroccan dish of chicken or beef typically braised with spices, garlic, onion, olives, and preserved lemons. Pretty much every restaurant and hotel we ate in serves this dish.

(4) A djellaba a loose-fitted, hooded caftan that is worn everyday in the Maghreb region of North Africa. Graham Nash wrote of “striped djellabas we can wear at home” in Marrakesh Express.