Morocco

Now that I am back home in the States, I can finally do the b log for Morocco and my wrap-up blog. Morocco was one of the better places, in my opinion, that I visited on my travels. Maybe it was the fact that it was my last stop and I wanted to "live it up", but whatever the case was, I really enjoyed my time there. After leaving Cairo, I flew into the economic capital of Morocco, Casablanca. Casablanca is notorious for being very boring and mostly a transit stop for tourists, so I hopped on a train to Marrakech, a six hour train ride south. The train ride was a last minute entry into my awards for the "Worst Travel Moment". The train was oversold by about two hundred tickets, so every single seat was taken, as well as every single standing spot, and because I was one of the last people on the train, I was forced to stand in the stairwell leading to the door. To make matters worse, there was no door, so I had to hold on for dear life the entire six hour trip. And, if that was not enough, I happened to be standing next to the disgustingly foul smelling toilet and half way through the ride, the toilet overflowed and set filthy liquids running through the floor onto my bag and feet. I was less than pleased upon arrival, but I did not let this horrible ride get me too bummed. I arrived in Marrakech at night, and one thing I learned from my travels is that arriving anywhere at night leads to problems. This was no different. I only new the location of my hostel in English, and virtually everyone in Morocco speaks only French and Arabic. This made communication with people very difficult. I luckily found a cab driver who could speak a little bit of English, and he agreed to take me for a ridiculous price, but I was in a bind and had to do it. Marrakech is a crazy city, full of small streets and alleys that you must take to get around, making it very easy to get lost, so I thought that this cab driver was trying to take me to somewhere where I was going to get mugged and robbed of all my things. After driving for some time, he let me out of the cab and told me that my hostel was up the street about fifty meters, but he could drive any further because of roadwork. I got out and immediately was lost and had no idea where I was. Finally, a group of kids approached me and told me they knew where I was staying and walked me to my hostel, only twenty meters from where I was dropped off IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION. They then demanded money from me, almost 6 USD, to which I gave them half. They swore at me and I went inside. I found out later that that was a common scam used by cab drivers and young kids in Marrakech. Marrakech is a very crazy city. The main square was only about a fifteen minute walk from my hostel, but it can sometimes take up to an hour because of how packed the streets get with pedestrians, motorbikes, and small cars. The square is filled with people all hours of the day, but is totally different during the day from at night. During the day, the square is a lot less crowded (but still a madhouse) with beggars with monkeys, snake charmers with live cobras, people playing drums, women drawing henna, and various other people trying to make a buck. The square is lined with various restaurants and cafes, including the Arcana Cafe, recently destroyed by a terrorist attack which killed twenty tourists. I was there only days after the attack, so I was able to see the cafe and the absolute destruction that had occurred. At night the square is a totally different animal. The square is packed with food stalls, cooking various Moroccan delicacies with benches set up right in front of the stall to eat. It was really fun sitting at the stalls eating various things, rubbing elbows with the locals and seeing what the real Moroccan people ate. One night I decided that I would try every type of odd (non-Western) food I could find in the market. The specialty of many of the stalls is entire sheep heads. They cook the heads and then extract the various goodies for consumption, including: the brains, tongue, eyes, and various other parts that I could not decipher. I plopped my self down at the most busy stall I could find and made the gesture of brains and tongue to the man with the large butcher's knife sitting in front of me smoking a cigarrette. I got a plate first with brains covered in some sort of spice. It was absolutely delicious. I then got a plate with tongue, lungs, heart, eyes, and some other parts that I could not make out. Once again, they were very good, although some of the more grizzly parts were hard to stomach. Even so, the locals around me seemed impressed that I was eating everything on my plate. Either that or they thought I was an idiot because I was eating what even they would not eat. Whatever. Because of the heavy French influence in Morocco, snails are also a big delicacy. I finished off my night with a bowl of snails and a plate of olives, and was quite content with my gastronomic experience (although the snails were a little odd even though I had had them before). Shopping in Marrakech is also very exciting. Right off the square lead small roads and alleys that lead to an immense amount of shops called "souks". There are souks for every type of thing imaginable. The people are all extremely nice and happy to make a deal. They always offer tea and treat you as a guest in their house when you enter their shops. Definitely the most pleasant shopping experience of my trip. Some people I talked to really did not like Marrakech because they thought of the people as pushy and there were too many beggars and scammers, but because of the longevity of my trip, I had become totally used to these aspects of places. I loved Marrakech because it seemed as though the culture of the city and people were right out front in the open. Where as other cities and countries one sometimes has to go in search of the culture of a place, such as traditional clothing, food, or music, in Marrakech, you are almost overwhelmed by these things. I could sit and watch the people in Marrakech for hours and be completely content. Despite my being enamored with Marrakech, I decided to book a guided trip to the Sahara desert to ride camels and hang out with Berbers, the traditional inhabitants of Morocco. After a terrible entire day of travelling I finally made it to the desert around 5 PM. I was given a camel and we then set out into the sand for around three hours until we arrived at the Berber camp, which was essentially a group of wool tents in the middle of nowhere. Riding camels was one of the worst things I had done on my trip. It sounds fun and looks fun from afar, but actually riding the hideous beasts for an extended amount of time is all kinds of terrible. The way they walk makes the ride very uncomfortable and they are constantly walking up and down the tall dunes, making the rider have to hold on for dear life every time they do so. Despite the fact that the ride was unspectacular, the surroundings made up for it and then some. It is an odd sight to look out on to the horizon and see nothing but sand and dunes for miles and miles. You could see so far in front of you that you could see Algeria. Eerie experience. After finally arriving at the camp and walking around like I was severely constipated for a few minutes (my legs were shot from the ride) we sat down to a traditional Berber meal cooked over a fire. It consisted of couscous and various vegetables, potatoes and chicken cooked in a clay pot called a tagine. It was delicious but I cannot tell you how many times I had this dish or something similar during my time there. I was a little tired of it by the end. That night, I slept in one of the wool tents and got no sleep because sand was continually blown in my face. I even got up for the sunrise but it was too cloudy (that day it rained the desert, who would have thought?). The next morning I was able to take a snowboard that they had in the camp up one of the very large dunes and ride down on my butt which was very fun. It was incredibly exhausting to get up these dunes, so I was only able to get about thirty or forty yards up. Still a blast though. Then, the fun truly happened. Myself and a few others who decided against taking camels back to the awaiting bus were able to hop on the roof of a land cruiser and drive through the desert. In the US they would have made you sign waivers, get your insurance, and most likely would make you ride inside the jeep, but in Morocco none of that matters. The driver floored the jeep at frightening speeds through the desert, over huge dunes almost causing us to plummet off the roof. At points I was truly scared that I was going to fall off and get hurt. Even so, it was so much fun and one of the most fun things I did on my entire trip. Once I got back to Marrakech I had to make a decision on whether I wanted to go on to Fes, another city to the north, or stay in Marrakech for a few more days and enjoy the last days of my trip. I liked Marrakech so much that I stayed. Because I only stayed in Marrakech and the desert for my time in Morocco, I did not get the best feel for the country as a whole, but I definitely think that Marrakech is one of the coolest cities in the world to visit. I was definitely impressed.

Sorry about the wait...

My Morocco blog as well as my final blog to wrap up my trip will have to wait until I get back stateside. It is impossible to type much using the French keyboards in Morocco. My 48 hour adventure of planes, trains and waiting around starts now. Check back on Monday for the updates.

Egypt

My ten days in Egypt is about to come to an end and now I find myself about to embark on the final stop in my journey, Morocco. I know it sounds cliche, but my time traveling has literally flown by, and although I feel I am ready to come home, I still wish I had another few months to enjoy myself "off the grid". As I have done with all my countries I have visited, this blog will be about my feelings about my time spent in Egypt over the last ten days. My first blog may have seemed somewhat negative, and while my feelings about Egypt really have not changed since that first blog, I do believe that Egypt has a few redeeming qualities that make up for some of the more negative aspects. Egypt is a country that relies on tourism. With some of the most amazing monuments, relics, and temples all in one place with thousands of travelers arriving each week, Egyptians know that without tourists, they would be in trouble. That is why this country was hit so hard with the recent deadly protests that plagued the nation. Tourism plummeted. Over the last few months the tourism industry has slowly picked back up, but from I have been told, the number of tourists coming to Egypt is a small percentage of what it was this time last year. As a result, instead of experiencing hostility from Egyptians as a result of recent events of violence, I was met by jubilation that I, an American tourist (one of the few Americans here) was finally returning to stimulate the fledgling Egyptian economy. I was treated to overtly nice people everywhere I went and not to mention bargains in shops where business was slow. While at first I complained of the hassle of scammers and people on the street, after a while I began to accept it because it was simply Egyptians attempting to make a living in this hard time. As long as you treated people attempting to sell you trinkets or solicit their services as a "guide" with respect when you decline their advances, everyone was happy. Although, there are some areas of the country that are still affected by the revolutions with a lack of police force and general order, the people of Egypt have made sure that tourists avoid said areas of unrest, because everyone knows that if tourists feel unsafe or harassed, that will mean no more money coming into their country. Egypt was also a very different place than anywhere I have been. I spent the majority of my time on tours or site seeing, something that I tried to avoid in other countries on a daily basis. I felt more like a tourist in Egypt than I had in other countries (if that makes sense). Don't get me wrong, I loved seeing things like the Pyramids and Abu Simbel, but spending all day in the sun and 100 degree weather in the desert looking at temples can get a little "old". And not to mention the lack of nightlife present in all of Egypt, but from what I gather, that is true in almost all predominately Muslim countries where drinking is forbidden as part of the religion. I am glad that I came to Egypt during this turbulent time in their history and am happy to be a part of getting their economy back on track. It may have not been my favorite stop on my travels (probably my least favorite to be honest), but it was definitely a good experience for me. I am now on to Morocco, the final stop on my journey, and another Muslim country that has recently been plagued with political and social unrest (a terrorist bomb killed 20 tourists in Marrakesh last week), so we will see how this goes. Crazy that I will be home in such a short amount of time. Better make this last stop count.

Cairo to Aswan

After spending another day in Cairo, I decided that it was time to get away from the big city and do some exploring of the sites that are south along the Nile River. I hopped on an overnight train to the town of Aswan, twelve hours south of Cairo. Amazingly, this was the first train I had been on in my entire trip and was amazed at how comfortable and easy train travel was compared to bus, although much more expensive. After arriving in Aswan I did some site seeing a few minutes outside of the city. The best thing about Egypt is that almost everywhere you travel to there are ruins or a temple or some other amazing area that alone would warrant a day trip, but because there are so many, you can pack many sites into one day. That night I was woken up at 3 AM and put on a bus to Abu Simbel, a four hour bus ride south into the desert. Abu Simbel is very impressive. It is a massive temple built by Ramses II that had to be moved after the creation of the third largest dam in the world (creating Lake Nassar) and now sits on the side of a mountain. It is hard to describe all the various temples that I have visited because they are all so magnificent, with giant sculptures that are 100 feet tall and beautiful paintings on every wall, so I will leave that to the pictures that I have taken, but believe me, Abu Simbel was breathtaking. By this time I had traveled so far south in Egypt that I was less than twenty minutes from the border with Sudan. I then traveled back to Aswan and got on a Falluca, an Egyptian sailboat, and cruised on the Nile for a day and slept on the river. It was very peaceful and relaxing. I shared the boat with a French family and another Canadian girl and had a great time cooking and sleeping on the boat and swimming in the Nile. When I got off the boat I was picked up by a guy I met at my hotel who told me that "Bin Laden has been shot", to which I thought he was just joking. But, to my surprise I turned on CNN when I got back and he was right. I am interested to see what people are going to say to me here when they start to hear the news. If they care at all or what their feelings are on the subject. So far, since I left Cairo I have been harassed a lot less, and people are genuinely happy to have tourists here because it seems as though business is really slow in these outlining areas. You still have people aggressively trying to sell you crap at very high prices, but it is nowhere near as bad as Cairo. Later today I leave for Luxor which is known as the scamming capital of Egypt, so this should be interesting. One thing that is a little scary is I originally was supposed to take a bus north from Aswan to Luxor, but because there are no police and order in some villages along the route, I now have to take a train and bypass all the trouble. Apparently, buses with tourists are stopped and people are robbed and hassled by the "sheriffs" or these villages. Not a situation I want to be put in to, so train sounds fine to me. I will report back in a few days on my Luxor experience as well as my last few days in Cairo.