Random moment #7 – infinito particular

Random moment is our playlist series started during the 2020 pandemic.

#7 – infinito particular

from brazil mostly, new and old, enjoy + like.

#spotify #playlist #nowplaying #marissamonte #madonna #maluma #bebelgilberto #céu

Roaming around the desert – part 2

Continuing with the drive around the desert area near our camp, accompanied by some lively traditional Gnawa music.

… along the way, we stopped to see a herd of donkeys that gathered around a well in the middle of a featureless flat desert.

The well was built by funds from the charity – Coeur de Gazelle as identified by a plaque above the well.  It is such a valuable resource that this organization is providing to the inhabitants of the desert.

These donkeys are probably owned by Berber nomads living in the area.  According to Wikipedia, Berbers, or Amazighs, (ⵉⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵏ, ⵎⵣⵗⵏ)) are an ethnicity of several nation groups mostly indigenous to North Africa and some northern parts of West Africa.

The area has been the home of nomadic Berbers for thousands of years. In Morocco, after the constitutional reforms of 2011, Berber has become an official language, and is now taught as a compulsory language in all schools regardless of the area or the ethnicity. In 2016, Algeria followed suit. Berber languages (generically Tamazight) are spoken by around thirty to forty million people in Africa. We observed that road signs and roadside advertisements were all written in Arabic, Berber, mostly also in French, and very occasionally English.

We saw a tent that served as a tea house for tourists to drink mint tea and socialize with the locals … not sure what these boxy homes were made of as they were all wrapped in some form of textile – certainly looked portable. A lady was standing outside her tent (see above photo) but unfortunately our guide did not make any arrangement ahead of time.

Do you know Zinedine Zidane was born in France to Kabyle Berber parents from Algeria ?

Though often thought of in the West as nomads, most Berbers are in fact traditional farmers living in mountains relatively close to the Mediterranean coast, or oasis dwellers, such as the Siwa of Egypt; but the Tuareg and Zenaga groups of the southern Sahara were almost wholly nomadic.

Prominent Berber groups include the Kabyles from Kabylia, in northern Algeria, who number about 6 million and have kept their original language and society; and the Chleuh in High and Anti-Atlas of Morocco, numbering about 8 million. Other groups include the Riffians of northern Morocco, the Chaoui people of eastern Algeria, and the Tuaregs of the Sahara scattered through southern Algeria and Libya, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. The staff who ran our camps were probably Tuaregs as they all wore the characteristic indigo-blue colored djellabas (robes).

Despite the hostile desert environment, people had apparently lived in this area for a long time. We drove through a ghost village.

The abandoned dwellings were built with adobe, or mud bricks made with sand, clay and organic matters. The guide did not say much about the history of this settlement, but it was pointed out that the mountain range in the horizon marks the border with Algeria (see below).

On the way back to our camp, we passed by this mysterious complex.

The buildings looked unoccupied – it could be a tourist hotel which was closed during the off-season.  The architecture is Malian, i.e., from Mali, a country south of here. Unlike a traditional building made with mud bricks, this one seemed to be made of concrete.

I think this building style was used in one of the Star Wars movies. We soon got back onto the paved R702 and then the N13 highway near Hassilabied and turned south, effectively circling Erg Chabbi in an anti-clockwise direction, arriving back at the camp in about an hour.

The desert was hostile and unforgiving, and it was a lonely and mysterious place.

 

 

Random moment #6 – working man

Random moment is our playlist series started during the 2020 pandemic.

#6 – working man

time for some heavy metal headbanging air-guitar, enjoy + like.

 

#spotify #playlist #nowplaying #rush #blacksabbeth #acdc #vanhalen

Maison Acacias, Tissardmine

During our day trip in the desert near our camp, we had lunch at Maison Acacias, a hostel and restaurant situated in a small oasis.

African blues by Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté suit the mood here – try “Ruby” and “Kala Djula” first – they are all good.

We got to Tissardmine after a 2-3 hour drive off-road northbound from our camp on mostly solid rocky terrain.  There were several stops along the way but the straight-line distance is less than 100 km.

We formed a 2-car caravan (see earlier post here about what we did earlier in the day), there were no paved roads, just tracks in the sand. Our SUV did get stuck in the sand and required the more experienced driver from the other SUV to get us out.

The oasis is the site of a small traditional Berber village with 15 or so houses. If you know where to look, Tissardmine is visible on Google map.

Lodgings (top photo) and entrance to the cafe (below).

This big dining room could be a place where tourists scattered in different campsites gather for a drink or dinner in the evening, if they know this maison and can find it. Notice the pillar that is made by stacking earthen urns.

Although two couples arrived after us to have lunch, the place was very quiet and peaceful. I don’t remember if they have internet access.

There were rooms on the other side of the parking area, but unoccupied. It was the low season afterall. There was a roof terrace which afforded a view of the desert.

Lunch was relatively simple. Everything was fresh and cool.

Grilled meat smelled great.

An idyllic, truly remote, desert hideaway. I(Chris) felt relaxed just by looking at it.

For all of us, it is safe to say that Maison Acacias must be the remotest place where we ate lunch.

A second part of the story on roaming the desert is coming up next.

 

 

Random moment #5 – enjoy the silence

Random moment is our playlist series started during the 2020 pandemic.

#5 – enjoy the silence

one for the weekend, enjoy + like.

 

 

#spotify #playlist #nowplaying #cher #petshopboys #depechemode #royskopp

Roaming around the desert – part 1

First, let’s put on some Morocco traditional music made by the Oud – a type of lute to get us in the mood. In Fes, IT went to a class to learn how to play the oud.

What did we do in the desert ? We set off in two 4-wheel drive SUVs in relative comfort to tour around the areas around Merzouga, and nearby settlements, Tissardmine, and Hassilabied.

The drivers took us north from our camp in the dunes (see our earlier post here). We were soon traveling on tracks over mostly solid rock, skirting around the eastern edge of the Erg Chebbi sand dune.

While the semi-arid desert looks inhospitable, there are human activities scattered all over the area – some are modern like this communication installation, and some are old, e.g., a ghost town (see our later post).

Our first stop was a fossil field, where one can just pick up fossils from the ground.  It was in the middle of nowhere, no sign and not even tracks.

Morocco has vast deposits of Devonian limestone which dates back three hundred fifty million years. The Sahara desert was a warm shallow sea and the seafloor was abundantly populated by various extinct life forms – ammonites, trilobites and belemnites.

We found only ammonites (see photos) which have a coiled tubular shell. Apparently, they are excellent index fossils, and it is often possible to link the rock layer in which they are found to specific geological time periods.

While we were all bending down looking for the perfect specimen, a man spotted us and came over on a motorcycle to sell us an assortment of stuff from oil to rocks, laid out neatly on the ground. We did not see where he came from – a kind of traveling salesman. Shopping was not on our minds as there were so many things to discover around our feet.

Our next stop was a brief look at an open-cast antimony mine in the same area, worked by two men – one inside a big crack in the ground to load the ores into a bucket, and another above ground operating a diesel-powered crane of lift the ores out.

We could not see the bottom as it was really dark with the shadow cast by the vertical walls. It wasn’t very deep but we could not see how the ores were extracted from the rocks.  Antimony is an ancient metal and its compounds were recognized and used in ceramics.

Our guide told us that the men were mining stibnite (antimony sulphide, Sb2S3) that had been used traditionally to make a blue-black mascara, known as khol, widely worn by men and women in North Africa.  Antimony is commonly used as an alloy to harden other metals, such as lead in batteries, and lead and tin in type metal for printing.

Under a cloudless sky, there was no one in sight and the only sound was made by the sputtering diesel motor. There was no shade to get away from the sun, except to go underground. It must be several degrees cooler down in the pit.

While traveling across the relatively flat desert, we noticed rows of small rock piles which presumably act as markers of certain boundaries, probably relating to land ownership.

From time to time, we saw camels roaming in the open desert, without riders or handlers. They were surely not wild, probably just taking a break from providing tourist rides or walking long distance in a caravan.

Our next post will be about lunch in the desert.

Random moment #4 – libertango (four exceptional versions)

Random moment is our playlist series started during the 2020 pandemic.

Libertango (four exceptional versions)

Four different genres, instrumentals & lyrics, enjoy + like.

 

 

#spotify #playlist #nowplaying #tango #astorpiazzola #gracejones #yo-yoma

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Two weeks of vacation was a good chunk of time for me (Chris) to start and perhaps finish a book. For this trip to Morocco, my selection was this classic – The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, published in 1949.

I knew about this book first from the soundtrack for the 1990 movie made by Bernardo Bertolucci starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich, which I never saw. The movie won awards for best cinematography (Vittorio Storaro). It is now on my to-watch list.

The film’s soundtrack was composed mostly by Ryuichi Sakamoto, which won the Golden Globe for best original score. The piano version of the main theme is popular and has appeared in several compilations. I prefer the richer orchestral version, however.

I enjoyed the book and it added another dimension to the trip.

The Sheltering Sky is the cautionary tale of a New York couple trying to find happiness and themselves intellectually, through adventure in a post-World War II North Africa that was politically unstable and disease-ridden. Their fate of losing everything is a warning about the naive, romantic notions of exotic travels and modern nomadism.

Wikipedia summed up the book as a work about alienation and existential despair.

The writing is dark and relentless about the characters’ moods, as was its description of the emptiness and ruthlessness of the desert. Some of the observations on the idea of death are quite apt. For example,

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.

The title of the book probably came from this idea. We also observed that for most days, the sky was cloudless with an even shade of blue.

the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind . . . [from] nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.

The attitude of the book’s characters towards everyday tourists surfaces in various degrees in many travel blogs (not ours too ?):

… the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home. … [A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, …

The author, Paul Bowles, a 20th century literary cult figure was born in 1910 Queens. He was also well known as a composer, as well as a translator of French literature.

He studied in 1930’s with Aaron Copeland, I liked his Ravel-like piano pieces. His music is bright and dreamy which is totally different from his writing. Try the piece “6 Preludes: No. 6, quater note =54” on this album (track 27).

In a 2009 NY Times article, citing his biography,

… he sat in his room one day as a freshman in Charlottesville and flipped a coin. Heads, he would leave for Europe as soon as possible. Tails, he would take an overdose of pills and leave no note. The coin came up heads.

He started writing The Shelterig Sky in Fes, Morocco and traveled in the Sahara regions of Morocco and Algeria.

Over the years since its publication, he met many cultural elites at the time in the US and Europe, and traveled continuously around the world. He settled in Tangier, Morocco in the 50’s, continuing writing and composing, and lived there until he died in 1999.

I did manage to finish the book in Marrakech on our last day in Morocco.