(From 06/15/09, written on the plane) Working up to today, I’ve had the gamut of emotions: anticipation, anxiety, fear, anger, excitement, relief, wonder, curiosity. I’m going to Morocco!
They say that the flight will be 9h29min in the air. We left at about 3:30pm PDT (as to when we really left – lift-off).
I did finally get my last email sent, about 10min or so before we started taxiing. I’m on a KLM Boeing 747-700. That’s a big plane! Being the geek that I am, I had been trying to estimate how much it could hold/ how much it weighed. I guessed that the plane weighed ~1000 tons and w/ people and gear, it could hold about a total of 2000 tons. I was rather awed by the thought of some 4 million pounds flying (if that were a true figure). Looking up the in-flight movie (it was supposed to be ‘He’s Just Not That Into You,’ but it wasn’t - I don’t remember now what it was), I found info about KLM’s fleet. 747’s can hold 35,000 kg (us and gear) for a max lift-off weight of 390,100 kg. So, I was off some.
Other cool stuff I didn’t know about my cool plane: 920 km/h cruising speed, 64.44 m across (wingspan), 70.64 m long, max 428 people, 12,900 km max range. The last one was the coolest to me – 8062 miles w/o refueling. For comparison, the 777-300 ER can hold 425 passengers, is 73.86 m long, can be 351,543 kg at lift-off and can fly 14,200 km w/o refueling.
Itinerary from 6/15 – 7/3: (written in several parts in mid-July)
We (my mom, dad, sister and I) started in Casablanca and immediately took the train to Rabat (2 trains, actually). They are both on the Atlantic coast. We stayed there for 2 nights and then quickly went to my sister's village by way of her souktown (overnight there). (My blogpost talks about this part.) We stayed in her village for 5 days, in the High Atlas Mountains, then went north to Azrou (2 nights) and Ifrane – day trip. Azrou is a nice, mid-sized Moroccan city, but Ifrane is a lavish, mid-sized European city, built by the French during their occupation (colonialization). Today, Ifrane is a fancy retreat for very rich Moroccans and for Europeans who want a cheaper vacation. There are some lakes in the Ifrane National Park just north and east of Ifrane where we spent a day looking at birds. (An upcoming post is about that day.) This was a really fabulous birding day. Birding is one of my dad’s favorite things. We also did a short part-day trip to Ain Leuh. (There are 2 dots over the i, and Leuh can be spelled Louh. The city is pronounced aye-n luh-hhhh – where the end is the sound you make when fogging up glasses to clean them.) This was the start of alternating between busy days and easy days. Driving around the lakes (Dayet Aoua, Dayet Ifrah and a few others), eating a heavy meal in Ifrane, then going to a Nature Preserve was a busy day. Taking just a 1-hr each way trip to Ain Leuh for tea (and a snacky lunch) for a few hours was a very easy day.
After Azrou, we went to Fes, where we stayed for 2 nights. We walked and walked and walked around the medina – literally ‘old town’ – in Fes it’s the huge maze of streets where lots of various stuff is sold. We went to a tannery in this area, too, and made some zween (nice, pretty, new, etc) purchases. If you’ve ever been to a bazaar or souk in a Middle-Eastern and/or North African country, you know about the hard sell, but there’s NOTHING like it that I’ve ever come across outside of that region. We were hard sold several times and we truly caved in the tannery’s sales area, because the quality of leather was like nothing any of us had ever seen.
The second day in Fes, we went up to Volubilis (a large Roman ruins, which is ~1/2 excavated and protected by a fence and has workers who look out for it and guides to show you around) and Moulay Idriss, then took a taxi back to Fes, then took a bus (which, ironically took us up past Volubilis again) on up to the Atlantic coast, north of Rabat in Larache. We had originally planned on hiring a taxi/driver and car for the day, but the pension’s owner’s brother found us some yahoo who wanted an obscene amount, so we took the bus up to Lixus (only 3km). We had figured that we’d spend just an hour there and then continue south for the rest of the day to Merdja Zerga National Park, looking for more birds. In the end, it worked out much better that we took the bus to Lixus, since we spent 3 hours there, wandering around the mostly unexcavated Roman ruins. (There is no fence here and, while there were 3 men who wanted to be our ‘guides,’ none spoke English and my guess is that they didn’t know more than we could have ascertained on our own.) We had a fabulous time discovering stuff and tooling around.
We decided to go to Moulay Bousselham the next day on our way down to Rabat. (Moulay Bousselham is right next to the Merdja Zerga National Park). I was super sick, so we did less than I think that we would have otherwise. We decided to go w/ some guys on their little rowboat motorboat to look for birds. They ‘guaranteed’ that we’d see flamingos and said that they’d give us our money back if we didn’t find them. We thought that that was amusing, but they really wanted to show us flamingos. We knew that they were no longer in Morocco, but in Turkey. We just wanted to see what we could see in the marshy areas, by boat, which we wouldn’t be able to see just from the shore. At one point, we were in an area where the draft wasn’t enough to use the motor, so we were mostly floating, or being pushed by our guide. He insisted that off to one side, there were flamingos. We dutifully looked w/ our binoculars and Dad took some pictures, but we were sure that they were lying, mostly because they were all white birds and flamingos are at least partly pink. Also, the beaks were wrong, but we couldn’t get a really good look at them just then. After that, we headed back and took other taxis on our way down to Rabat. Later, at lunch, my dad was able to zoom in on his pictures of the ‘flamingos’. We had insisted that they were not flamingos, but were egrets, which we’d been seeing all day. It turns out that we were all wrong. They were not flamingos or egrets, but white spoonbills, which were a lifebird for most of us. (A lifebird is one that you’ve never seen in the wild before. While everyone’s seen flamingos at the zoo and/or in some expensive US hotel, few of us have seen wild ones. That’s why we would have been interested in seeing them in the wild.)
Back in Rabat, we went to the National Library and the Zoo. I strongly recommend the Library if you have any research that you want to do. Do not go to the zoo, unless you can bear to see tortured animals (you think I’m kidding). The only redeeming aspect was the majestic Barbary Lions, which are part of a breeding program where they are working to revive an extinct species by working from a ½ Barbary Lion crossed w/ a similar breed and have now gotten to an 80% Barbary Lion. They were truly magnificent animals, but they spend most of their time in small cages. They have access to a run part of the day, but all of them share the same run, so they only let out one cage’s worth at a time.
Then, we got my parents onto a train to Casa, while we got on a train to Meknes on our way back to Souktown and Berberville.
GRAND TAXI explanation: (typed on 7/12/09)
To get to a nearby city, Fatima and I hired 2 spots in a grand taxi. While grand means large in French, they aren't necessarily really all that large. They are full-sized Mercedes sedans, mostly, although I've seen some that are station wagons. The Mercedes can hold 7, unless there are children, in which case more. Also, sometimes you can take one passenger in the trunk - or a sheep, although I
(Thank God) have never traveled with a sheep. (My sister has and has a post to that effect at innocentablogged.blogspot.com. If you think that I reference her site a lot, I do.)
The grand taxi needs to fill to at least 5 or 6 passengers before it will leave. When my whole family was here, we would hire out the taxi, paying for 6 spots w/ *ONLY* 4 people. (These numbers don't include the driver. In the US, 4 people plus the driver would be a very full car. NOT so here.) We may not have to wait for the taxi to fill up, but we may well have to wait a while. Sometimes folks have waited for 3 hours.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Returning to the US
I've been in Morocco for a month and will be returning in a few days. I have hand-written pages of notes about my trip, but I haven't been able to get onto blogspot in weeks and it's tough getting time on the internet, because I have to use my sister's computer. When we're home, we're generally sleeping, eating, watching a movie (also on the computer) or my sister's using her computer.
There will be more stuff coming up online here and/or on astrotheophilus.blogspot.com as soon as I get home and can type it in. I promise. (And I take promises seriously.)
Yesterday, I was starting to pack for home, remembering to take out stuff that I'd promised to leave in-country. (In-country means Morocco for me for now. It's one of those PCV (PeaceCorps Volunteer) things. If I forget to explain one, let me know. There are lots of PCV things. There are also lots of Arabic and/or Tam phrases that I like a lot which I may well take home to the States. I'm going to try to remember to explain those eventually, too.)
I realized that I didn't know if my flight was on Monday morning at 10am or at 12 noon, since the time had changed once (or twice) and I couldn't remember which was the more recent change. We went online to Royal Air Maroc's (RAM's) website and looked up the schedule of flights from Casablanca (Casa for short) to JFK, the John F. Kennedy airport in NYC. There were one or two per day each day during this week except for Sunday and Monday, when there were none. We looked at this several times and then decided to call RAM. Because it costs 5dh (5 dirhams, where 8 dh = $1) a minute to make a phone call, we decided to use skypeout instead. My sister's internet connection is slow, though, so our connection wasn't great. Nonetheless, we were able to ascertain that, indeed, there was no flight on Monday and I was now booked on the Tuesday flight. We were quite amazed and disgruntled, flabbergasted, etc. Why hadn't I been told about this? When was I going to figure this out? RAM said that they didn't have any of my contact info, just my name and the reservation, so they didn't have a way to contact me.
The original flight had been made through expedia.com by my mom. I had never used expedia before (and won't be again), so my mom had made a new username and pwd for me, but hadn't bothered to tell me the pwd. She had emailed once saying that I could call her for it, but back before I came in-country, it didn't matter. Now, when it really mattered, my parents were awol on a driving trip all over the US. We have their itinerary, but, again, it costs $$ to call the US and we didn't know if they were traveling in-between spots, etc. We sent an email and went to the next option: calling expedia. Being booked on another flight a day later wasn't a problem for me by itself - in fact, it meant that I'd be able to go to my sister's host-mom's baby's naming party, which was a big deal. But, the problem for me was that I had had two other flights booked to get me back to SFO. I needed to get new ones.
Here are some of the notes that my sister took during the 45 minute completely useless waste of time phone call to expedia:
'After explaining the problem, I sat on hold for 15 minutes while she ??talked to RAM??. She could not solve the problem. I asked for her supervisor, and sat on hold for another 16 minutes. At 37 minutes in, she said she'd transfer me to her supervisor. At 42 minutes, she said the supervisor would take over. At 49 minutes, the supervisor "Randy" said he could not understand me, due to a poor connection, and hung up on me.'
We're going to send this to expedia. The people that we were talking to were obviously from India, so the fact that this guy gave his name as 'Randy' was nearly laughable and close to offensive. The fact that he then said that we had a bad connection and hung up on us was really offensive. Yes, we had a bad connection, but he just didn't want to deal w/ us, because expedia didn't know about RAM's cancellation of the flight and subsequent reassignment of my reservation, so they didn't want to give me different flights for the rest of the trip. I guess that they figured I was just jerking them around, but, no, in fact it was RAM and expedia had dropped the ball by not following up. I'd put money on the fact that RAM canceled the flight a month ago or more, but expedia figured that I had finished the first set of legs of my flight getting me to Morocco, so the rest didn't really matter. Or something.
In the end, we resorted to texting folks we knew who were on skype. My dad's account and my aunt Glorious' account were open and we texted them. Also, my dad's sister's account was open on gmail and we texted her. My dad's sister got back to us first, so we talked her into calling Delta directly. After 3-4 tries (and hang ups) she was able to get me on a flight direct from JFK to SFO. Safi. (Enough. I'm done. etc.)
Or so we thought. She told them to send an email confirmation (pretending that she was me). She gave them my email address ~4 times. No email. No email. This morning, we finally went online to Delta and I am confirmed on two flights on Tuesday. Safi. Finally. I've NEVER had a saga like this to fly somewhere and I haven't even left Berberville yet. (I call my sister's town Berberville in all public posts, as she does, for PCV safety reasons.)
To get to Casa from Berberville will require an ENTIRE day's travel. I'm going to get on a tranzit at 5-5:30 am (it leaves somewhere in there, or, occasionally, if it's full, at 4:50 - like last time we took it. My mom nearly had a cow, because she was on it, but my sister and I were lagging a bit, but we got on it.) It's 4 hours to Souktown. I may well write an entire post about the Berberville-Souktown tranzit, but not today. It may hold as many as 30 people, though (some on top) and it's smaller than a full-sized van in the US.
Then, we'll get two spots on a bus to one of the big-six cities in Morocco, either Mekne's or Fes. (The apostrophe is for an accent grave - downward facing accent.) That will be 4-5 hours. Then, my sister will say good-bye and I'll get on a train for the last 4-5 hours into Casa Voyageurs. (There are 2 train stations in Casa.) I'm getting a hotel right by the train station, since I don't want to have to worry about it the next morning when I take another train (this time only ~45 min) to the airport. If we can catch buses and trains in a timely manner, it's possible that I'll be able to see the sun set into the Atlantic ocean, which I may have done before from France, but I don't remember it. Anyway, inshallah (God willing).
I'll have my phone on once I get to JFK (inshallah at 2:45pm local time) until I have to turn it off at about 5pm local time on Tuesday. Hopefully I'll be able to say hi to some of you.
There will be more stuff coming up online here and/or on astrotheophilus.blogspot.com as soon as I get home and can type it in. I promise. (And I take promises seriously.)
Yesterday, I was starting to pack for home, remembering to take out stuff that I'd promised to leave in-country. (In-country means Morocco for me for now. It's one of those PCV (PeaceCorps Volunteer) things. If I forget to explain one, let me know. There are lots of PCV things. There are also lots of Arabic and/or Tam phrases that I like a lot which I may well take home to the States. I'm going to try to remember to explain those eventually, too.)
I realized that I didn't know if my flight was on Monday morning at 10am or at 12 noon, since the time had changed once (or twice) and I couldn't remember which was the more recent change. We went online to Royal Air Maroc's (RAM's) website and looked up the schedule of flights from Casablanca (Casa for short) to JFK, the John F. Kennedy airport in NYC. There were one or two per day each day during this week except for Sunday and Monday, when there were none. We looked at this several times and then decided to call RAM. Because it costs 5dh (5 dirhams, where 8 dh = $1) a minute to make a phone call, we decided to use skypeout instead. My sister's internet connection is slow, though, so our connection wasn't great. Nonetheless, we were able to ascertain that, indeed, there was no flight on Monday and I was now booked on the Tuesday flight. We were quite amazed and disgruntled, flabbergasted, etc. Why hadn't I been told about this? When was I going to figure this out? RAM said that they didn't have any of my contact info, just my name and the reservation, so they didn't have a way to contact me.
The original flight had been made through expedia.com by my mom. I had never used expedia before (and won't be again), so my mom had made a new username and pwd for me, but hadn't bothered to tell me the pwd. She had emailed once saying that I could call her for it, but back before I came in-country, it didn't matter. Now, when it really mattered, my parents were awol on a driving trip all over the US. We have their itinerary, but, again, it costs $$ to call the US and we didn't know if they were traveling in-between spots, etc. We sent an email and went to the next option: calling expedia. Being booked on another flight a day later wasn't a problem for me by itself - in fact, it meant that I'd be able to go to my sister's host-mom's baby's naming party, which was a big deal. But, the problem for me was that I had had two other flights booked to get me back to SFO. I needed to get new ones.
Here are some of the notes that my sister took during the 45 minute completely useless waste of time phone call to expedia:
'After explaining the problem, I sat on hold for 15 minutes while she ??talked to RAM??. She could not solve the problem. I asked for her supervisor, and sat on hold for another 16 minutes. At 37 minutes in, she said she'd transfer me to her supervisor. At 42 minutes, she said the supervisor would take over. At 49 minutes, the supervisor "Randy" said he could not understand me, due to a poor connection, and hung up on me.'
We're going to send this to expedia. The people that we were talking to were obviously from India, so the fact that this guy gave his name as 'Randy' was nearly laughable and close to offensive. The fact that he then said that we had a bad connection and hung up on us was really offensive. Yes, we had a bad connection, but he just didn't want to deal w/ us, because expedia didn't know about RAM's cancellation of the flight and subsequent reassignment of my reservation, so they didn't want to give me different flights for the rest of the trip. I guess that they figured I was just jerking them around, but, no, in fact it was RAM and expedia had dropped the ball by not following up. I'd put money on the fact that RAM canceled the flight a month ago or more, but expedia figured that I had finished the first set of legs of my flight getting me to Morocco, so the rest didn't really matter. Or something.
In the end, we resorted to texting folks we knew who were on skype. My dad's account and my aunt Glorious' account were open and we texted them. Also, my dad's sister's account was open on gmail and we texted her. My dad's sister got back to us first, so we talked her into calling Delta directly. After 3-4 tries (and hang ups) she was able to get me on a flight direct from JFK to SFO. Safi. (Enough. I'm done. etc.)
Or so we thought. She told them to send an email confirmation (pretending that she was me). She gave them my email address ~4 times. No email. No email. This morning, we finally went online to Delta and I am confirmed on two flights on Tuesday. Safi. Finally. I've NEVER had a saga like this to fly somewhere and I haven't even left Berberville yet. (I call my sister's town Berberville in all public posts, as she does, for PCV safety reasons.)
To get to Casa from Berberville will require an ENTIRE day's travel. I'm going to get on a tranzit at 5-5:30 am (it leaves somewhere in there, or, occasionally, if it's full, at 4:50 - like last time we took it. My mom nearly had a cow, because she was on it, but my sister and I were lagging a bit, but we got on it.) It's 4 hours to Souktown. I may well write an entire post about the Berberville-Souktown tranzit, but not today. It may hold as many as 30 people, though (some on top) and it's smaller than a full-sized van in the US.
Then, we'll get two spots on a bus to one of the big-six cities in Morocco, either Mekne's or Fes. (The apostrophe is for an accent grave - downward facing accent.) That will be 4-5 hours. Then, my sister will say good-bye and I'll get on a train for the last 4-5 hours into Casa Voyageurs. (There are 2 train stations in Casa.) I'm getting a hotel right by the train station, since I don't want to have to worry about it the next morning when I take another train (this time only ~45 min) to the airport. If we can catch buses and trains in a timely manner, it's possible that I'll be able to see the sun set into the Atlantic ocean, which I may have done before from France, but I don't remember it. Anyway, inshallah (God willing).
I'll have my phone on once I get to JFK (inshallah at 2:45pm local time) until I have to turn it off at about 5pm local time on Tuesday. Hopefully I'll be able to say hi to some of you.
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