In Morocco, Itinerary and 1st blog, from the plane

(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.