Spain - Morocco - South Africa

When I was in the third grade I sat in Mrs. Neighbors' geography class and received my first research assignment in public school. My teacher explained we would write a report on an assigned country. I remember being mad that I got a country that I thought was a complete waste of time: Morocco. "What's Morocco?" I wondered vaguely to myself. I thought it had something to do with the maracas my aunt, Domitilla, had shown me. I raised my hand. "You mean Mexico?" I remember asking my teacher, sure she had just said the name of the country wrong. "No, I mean Morocco," she said. So through the next few weeks, I became interested in a country half-way around the world from where I sat in Casa View Elementary School, dutifully recording facts about it and drawing pictures of Berber goat-herders, still mad that I had not been assigned a cool country to write about like England or Mexico. (In my young mind, England and Mexico were the two other places one might consider going besides the United States.) But as I grew older, that mental journey begun so long ago is one which is finally (it took long enough) about to become a physical one.

Between third grade and now, Morocco has always enchanted me. You know it's a romantic place in the imagination, made more wild and exotic in popular novels from beat writers and poets, popular in the Hollywood movies about it which I adored unquestioningly (Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia, for example, just to name a few), all of the fantastic paintings by Matisse, who was fond of the light in Tangier. And now, I shall finally see these things and these places. I just paid out significant dollars for a long guided tour, something I never do and which I categorize as "protection money" to be able to go to this country unmolested. I will, however, be able finally to see places like the Atlas Mountains with a drive over them, along with a jeep tour of the Sahara. I will go take the boat from Spain to Tangiers, and I will travel along the Northwestern coast of Africa. I'm going to see Casablanca and Fez and Marrakesh and a hundred other places I've always wanted to see. You know, Spain and South Africa--well, they're just gravy! (And forget about Alaska--I can't do everything, a hard lesson to learn, and well, I just went there a year ago. That will have to do for the time being.)