Day 4-6 Road trip the High Atlas (ask Kristy)

• Adventure across the Tizi n’ Tichka Pass
• Stop at the Glaoui family kasbah in Telouet.
• Explore valleys and gorges. Try and do a hike through a date palm oasis in one of the valleys

Day 7-10 Sahara (Desert)

• +/- days as you like but I think at least one overnight is a MUST. We spent 4 nights in the desert and it wasn’t enough in my book. Think PLANETARIUM every night.
• Explore Ait Ben Haddou/Ouzarzate (where they filmed Gladiator). Stay at Riad Ksar Ighnda
• Explore the dunes near Merzouga (skip Zagora, Erg Chebbi and Erg Znigui are more beautiful than Erg Chigaga)
• Buy the stuff the kids make/find. If they try to sell you a dinosaur tooth. Don’t scoff! I bought one and had it verified at the fossil place (see below). Shit was legit! #bestpresentever

“Immediately when you arrive in Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightaway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really goes dark.
You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call ‘le bapteme de solitude.’ It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears…A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintergration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.
…Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can’t help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in time or money, for the absolute has no price.” – Paul Bowles.

Day 11 Sahara –> Fes 

• Travel to Fes (stop to see the Barbary Apes!)
• Stop in Erfoud to pick up a 1,000,000+ year old fossil at Fossils D’Erfoud. Just don’t have anything shipped, I spent 8 months of emails and threats trying to get my ammonite…

Day 12-15 Fes (Time Travel)

• Stay in your room of choice in our favorite riad, Maison Hiya. We fell in love with the owners, Naima and Hamid, check out their other properties as well.
• Eat at the greek salad at Triskala and marvel at the oddness of Elizir.
• Browse the local art, buy something to bring home. You’ll dig it.
• Kite surf with camels! Essaouira is said to be great for wind sports.
• Count the number of calico cats you see, it’s uncanny. Fun Fact: All calico cats are female

Eric & Hamid

Rooftop lounge at Maison Hiya