Second Trip

Home again, home again, jiggity jig... Yes we are home, having just finished up a second great fall trip. It was a scuba diving trip in Bonaire. It was a whirlwind. Our plan to get home from the Morocco trip and have four days to unpack, wash, repack, reaquaint the pets with who we are AND check on the windchime orders was scrunched a little by the plane fiasco. Air France is not my favorite airline (long story) and our one unplaned night spent in Paris was not romantic (long story). So... we lost a day in between trips. But all was good here at home and packing to go on a dive trip to the Carribean is somewhat simple - dive gear, bathing suits and a few short and shirts.
The trip flying over on United was good and this year, they did not lose my dive gear like last year so all was good. At least it started out that way.
We always stay at Captain Don's Habitat and this time we were staying in a Villa with two other couples who are friends we met, in fact in the past in Bonaire. This was the view from our room. We arrived early in the morning, had a great breakfast, had our dive briefing, went snorkeling and waited for the first of our friends to arrive. Had a great dinner and turned in early.

This was the view INSIDE our room the next morning after a night of a small rainstorm.

That shiny reflection on the floor represents the inch of water we woke up to the next morning. The drain system (two holes in the patio wall) did not work and water silently backed up into our room out our front door, into the hall and into the other two upstairs rooms (not occupied). What is unbelievably lucky is that our laptops, my kindle, our cameras and even our suitcases did not get wet. The dive gear laid out against one of the wall did, but that was ok. My paperback was swollen to twice its size, but still readable! AND we did not get shocked when we stepped into this surprise.

After some insistence on our part , we were moved to another villa which turned out to be just fine.

This is the front entrance

The back of the villa.

PD  relaxing amid all of our dive gear .

This is a view looking toward town. You can see sailboats in the distance. This was the week of the annual regatta so there was a lot of sailboat action.

This picture really does not do justice to the color of the water. The contrast was even greater than this photo shows.

This is a picture of the salt pans. This is a big industry (Cargill) on the island and has been a part of the history of the island.The back pond was actually very pink. I think the drier/older the salt is, the darker or pinker the water is.

This is the salt once it is harversted. There were about 10 of these pyramids of salt waiting to be loaded onto a conveyor belt and then loaded into a ship.

The island is home to many, many flamingos. Apparently, some fly back and forth daily between Bonaire and Curaco and others just stay put. The island is considered a sanctuary for them.

The island also has a good sized population of donkeys (part of the island's history) and there is a sanctuary for them.

And did I mention the iguanas and parrots?

We set out a plate of veggies and fruit every morning and the small to medium iguanas came to eat. The yard area was full of them. The big lizards hung out down by the restaurant nearby.

We ate, slept, read, snorkled and dove.

We did all of our dives from shore this trip. We were just one of many people in little white rental trucks driving out to dive sites, gearing up and walking (or stumbling) into the water and going under.
Dive sites are marked by these little yellow stones.

This was the rough side of the island where we did NOT dive. Waves too big, wind too strong and the shore was piled high with broken coral.

We did not take pictures under water, but one of the other couples did. In fact, Bill and Donna Goodwin are great photographers. Bill is going to send me a few pictures to post. Bill is an award wining photographer. He has a website called Feral Divers Media and a blog at http://www.thefirstanimal.blogspot.com.

I will post again as soon as I get some photos from Bill.

A Final Moroccan Post

I feel as I now (belatedly) have recounted a brief overview of a wonderful  trip.  My pictures do not give justice to the beauty of the country of Morocco. Seeing our family was the most important aspect of the trip for us. Our young grandsons are growing up well. Our daughter and son-in-law are living their dream of living in interesting places in the world. So for those customers who have been with us a long time and started reading those postcards about the family, this is just another chapter for you.

I will include some final pictures below to hopefully just give you a final feel for Morocco. Remember, I have about a thousand more, if you ever need a picture of a gate, an archway, desert, a camel, scary mountain roads or adobe buildings. Just contact me. I can fix you up. And finally, remember my advice on traveling to Morocco – take a baby with you.

People of Morocco

I have a few pictures of some of the people of Morocco that I took as we traveled. I wanted pictures of the women in their flowing garments. Their headscarves and the long robes they wore were sometimes very beautiful. Even those there were a  solid color, even sometimes all black, still gave them a sense of grace. Now, sometimes we saw quite elderly women walking alongside one of those crazy, curvy roads out in the rural areas in flowing garments, but they were carrying sacks of sticks/wood or rugs or some sort of fabric that simply bundled this wood together. It was pretty hard then to admire their garments when you saw these women (and might I say – Never a man) carrying these burdens. What we were told later is that because other forms of fuel for cooking/heating is expensive, carrying wood from somewhere else to home is still the norm and it is still the job of the woman.

So, hee are pictures of some folks I took as we drove. Some from out in the desert. Some from at the farming co-op and at the fossil musuem.

Vehicles I Have Met!

You know that TV show called "Most Dangerous Road" (or something like that) on Current TV? Well..... been there, done that. The Atlas mountain roads are curvy, full of switchbacks, and narrow roads with nothing to keep you from careening over the sides and into the valleys except your good sense and the good will of the oncoming traffic. Plus, in many places, the oncoming vehicles or even the vehicles you had to pass were not what we normally see in the good old US.

Not so unusual, but the tractors often were overloaded with people and had a variety of cloth covers for shade.

There were a million versions of this litle truck. Some had real roofs, some had shade like covers and some went topless like this one. They were driven in the city as well as most villages. Again - at times, several people could be riding on these.

These were only in the cities and functioned as sight seeing taxis I believe. All were elaborate in their decorations.

                      Yes, that is a truck in front of Michael LOADED with big bags stuffed with ??

                                                   Passing was pretty easy on this road.....

other times, a little hairy. And actually I couldn't take pictures of the really scary ones where someone had to backup for a little ways to a wider spot in the road or where one vehicle had to really, really hug the side of the mountain to allow room for the others. I couldn't take pictures because I was busy watching the edges of the car, moving the mirror in or just holding my breath.

And no report would be complete without mentioning the double decker transports that hauled cattle or sheep in these two story arrangements! I kid you not. Cows and sheep apparently willingly stand in the top level of these trucks and ride over narrow, winding, high mountain roads without a problem? Sometimes there were also people up in those top levels too. I could not tell if the animals were tied down somehow?? There were horse hauling trucks as well, but not on double decker trucks. Now that I think of it, I don't remember seeing goats in these kind of trucks. So... either goats and horses are too valuable to risk having them jump out or there are too difficult/smart to get up there. Who knows? Often both levels were indeed packed tightly with animals.

This is only a quick show of these trucks we saw. I might add though that most trucks sport very colorful paint jobs with lots of wooden designs attached and lots of flags, banners beads, etc hanging inside the cab as well.

Catching Up

OK, so here's the deal. My intention was to every night of this trip write snappy information for you and download great pictures. But, as I mentioned earlier, internet was not always accessible and often, if it was accessible, it was slow. So..... I got way behind (ugh) but now, I want to catch up. But instead of doing these next entries by dates of the rest of our trip, I am going to write and enter by topic. So my first topic will be Taxis. Yes, you read that correctly. I did a thorough study of the little taxi business of all of towns we drove through. All medium to large towns have different color Petite Taxis.

                                                                       Rabat's little blue taxi.

                                      Fes had little red cars (or for the native - le petitie rouge taxi).

                        This light green VW Rabbit was in one of the small towns we went through.

Petite beige in Marakesh.

Petite blanc on the way to Cassablanca.

And in Cassablanca itself - we were back to red!

Petite taxis could take only three people, sometimes four. Then there were large taxis that could take multiple fares which made things much cheaper for the passengers but then I guess you had to perhaps venture out of your way to get the other passengers to your destination.

When we rode in the blue taxis in Rabat, we had great drivers. One guy wanted to get us to enlist Michael's help to get him a VISA (our mistake for telling him where our son-in-law worked.) The second one who brought us home from one of our adventure days on our own wanted to teach us Arabic words for common things that we might need to know.

Journey into the Desert

I look back on this event - this adventure into the desert and still find it amazing that we did it. Riding a camel across dunes that have been the subject of many books, epic tales and movies (Lawerence of Arabia, Secrets of the Sahara, etc) was truly not ever on my life list of things to do. But, I am so glad that we had this opportunity.
These trips are set up to leave the starting point (several different desert hotels along the edge of the dunes) late in the afternoon. For us, the distance to our encampent for the night was about 90 minutes at a camel's pace. The winds had finally died down to be replaced by intermittent light rain. Our family and four visitors from Spain all left from Hotel Yasmina but in two groups. We gathered our few things to take with us - a change of clothes and our cameras and walked from the patio to the waiting camels.

Notice my head gear. Jenny and I decided if you are going to ride a camel, we must dress appropriately. There is an art to this head gear AND one must wrap according to need - if you need to cover your face, you wrap one way, if you don't, you wrap a different way.

Some of us rode double.

While others manned their camel all alone.

                                             Will chose to ride alone as did Pops.

And .... we were off. Our guide was Ahdid (that is probably not spelled correctly), and I apologize. He was wonderful. He spoke at least four languages, most of which he said he learned from the guests he took out into the desert. He was very attentive, helping us with everything:

1. Getting onto the camel (which you try to do like one would mount a horse. The camel is lying down and you try to throw you leg over and get on. However, the camel is still pretty tall, so you throw you leg over, lay forward on your stomach and then pull yourself up into a sitting position. Sorry, no pictures of this, thank goodness.)

2. Rescuing fallen objects that you lose as you bounce along - water bottles, pacifiers and shoes (Donovan and Pops).

3. Rescuing fallen people - ok, so Philip didn't fall off, but almost. As we climbed the first dune (and it was a small one), Philip began to slide backwards off of his camel's back. We were all laughing so hard, no one got a picture, but you can see that he rode far back on this poor camel, which contributed to this situation. Our guide ran back and offered Philip a push back up therefore preventing an actuall "fall from camel" event.

4. Photographer - he took many of our pictures for us.

5. Actual guide duties - giving us information and getting us to camp!

It rained on us on the way to camp and the sky was gray, but it was still great. We saw other caravans of desert visitors close by and off in the distance, but we were the best looking group!

About 90 minutes later, we crested a dune and saw our home for the night.

We had a dining tent, a cooking tent, our individual sleeping tents and a bathroom tent.

Layers and layers of rugs and blankets everywhere! We ate and slept very well. The food, tea and company were great.The night was very dark and very quiet. The weather cleared during the night and we were awakened early in the morning to go outside and watch the sun rise.