Time goes by. It seems hard to believe, but one week from now my nephew Doug and I will be settling in, following dinner, at the Es Saadi Hotel in Marrakech. A long distance, physically and culturally, from my allegedly "haunted" house here in Seattle.
I'm reviewing the clothing and equipment list sent to me by the "adventure company." The fact that the list is much less extensive -- and thankfully includes fewer items requiring purchase -- suggests the difference between my Morocco trip and other trips I've enjoyed with this same provider. No ice axe or sub-zero rated sleeping bag this time. The oddest suggestion is for bicycle pants, to provide additional padding between a camel's back and my own backside.
Somewhere I have that item, left over from a bicycle tour a number of years ago, but I can't figure out where the pants are stored away. It's getting down to crunch time -- either find them soon or buy new ones.
The mental preparation is more difficult than the physical gathering of clothes and equipment. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've always been fascinated by desert lands in general, and Morocco in particular. Certainly ever since I saw that ersatz Moroccan movie, Casablanca.
I doubt that I ever saw Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in Road to Morocco, and let's just say that I'm not viewing that particular film in preparation for the trip. I am reading, however, Paul Bowles's novel The Spider's House. I'm only about one fourth of the way through the 1954 novel, but it gives the reader a highly atmospheric feel for Fez -- where we end our trip -- during the period when popular resistance and violence were intensifying, agitation that would lead to the eventual end of the French Protectorate in 1956.
Over a half century has passed since Bowles wrote about his favorite city, and Bowles was already lamenting Fez's physical and cultural changes in 1954, but I suspect that the book remains a good introduction to certain physical and psychological aspects of that part of the world. I probabaly will be finishing it during the flight over.
Doug will leave San Francisco next Wednesday, about the same time as I fly out of Seattle. We meet at JFK, where we'll have a layover of several hours before departing for Madrid. And thence to Marrakech.
Rev up the four-wheel drives. Cue the camels. I'm on my way!
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