If aging scares you...

If aging scares you, rest easy, Richie is here to save the day. Check this cat out. He even makes balding look bad ass. (having knuckles glazed in turquoise and a beard that would make a caliph blush is neat as well.)

Fez

Casablanca

Which one is tooth paste and which is shaving cream? I found that out the hard way.

Hassan II Mosque-3rd largest in world.

Marrakech

Yves St. Laurent had a house in Marrakech...I didn't really know who he was, but I liked his pots.

I got suckered out of 50 dirhams by snake charmers.

I am seeing the storks for the first time myself just now.

The Viking and I

I have been in Tigmat for over 3 weeks now. I help Peter the Swede with his adobe house project. The majority is structurally completed and the work is most coating the walls with more mud layers, but also building planters for trees and flowers, laying concrete and such. This weekend I had a perfect day. The labor that'd usually make you sweat and your backside sore was quite refreshing due to the cool 20°C cloudy day, that was interrupted with rain. I was able to spend that afternoon drinking coffee and reading to the rain; a perfect combination.

Boone's Rainy day playlist is as follows:
Garbage-I'm only happy when it rains
Bob Dylan-A hard rains gonna fall
CCR-Who'll stop the rain?
Little Dragon-After the rain
and a bit of a stretch...
The Who-Love, reign o'er me

But what else do we do on the oasis? I suppose we chat a little. About IKEA? Pickled Herring? ABBA? Yes, those come up in conversation, but Swedes are more than just IKEA, Pickled Herring, and ABBA. I like to ask Peter the hippie why he thinks the world is quickly come to an end, and environmental catastrophe is on its way.
Sidenote: Let it be said that this area of the sahara which usually receives 3 days annually of rain has had 3 weeks this year. The farmers are quite thankful. They are having harvests bigger than they have ever seen. Too bad they don't know it is really iceberg juice that their crops are licking up, and that the ocean will be over their heads within our lifetime. :)


We also eat camel steaks bigger than your or my face. (The donors are pictured above)

Boone's end of the blog playlist:
a little diddy by Richie Havens, the famous cover artist, called "Here comes the sun".

Big dipper

I hope only my screen shows it this dark.

Greetings from Tigmat!

The lower Atlas mountains

Bijan and I have found a new home for the next ? days/months/years, Tigmat, an oasis close to the town Guelmim in the SW of Morocco.

But before we arrived in Tigmat we where in a town called Assa in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the Sahara. The plan was to go to a village called Foum El Hassan to look for the owner of a WWOOF farm who we tried to contact but he never responded. We arrived in Assa and expected to camp outside of town, however, a girl on the bus invited us to stay with her family. We were so excited to be taken in by a Moroccan family. They were incredibly generous. We sat on the floor lounge style and drank mint Moroccan tea, ate traditional Moroccan dishes, and were showered with perfume at their relatives houses. The same night we arrived we slept on the living room floor.

Sharifa and her family

Wild camels

Day two, we went to the clinic where the mother of the house works. Shortly afterward Bijan kindly drank a glass of Moroccan water he was too polite to turn down. After a nap we both awoke and he asked if I was feeling good which I was (I didn't drink any non-bottled water). Before long he was flushed, sweating, and hugging a turkish toilet (however, those who have used them know there isn't much to hug). That evening we took him to the hospital after he was feeling abdominal pains and suspected a kidney stone (which wouldn't be his first). The nurse brought in a shot and told him to drop his shorts because it wasn't headed for his arm. It turns out he did have a kidney stone, which he is still passing. So we had out first (and hopefully last hospital visit for our stay here, inshallah)

Putting up the clothe to keep the flies out but unfortunately the heat inside

We spent two more days in Assa and frantically debated what to do and where to go next. Fortunately, on the bus to Assa we met another foreigner, Peter, a middle aged Swede. We told him we were on the road looking for a bit of adventure and a place to work in exchange for food and shelter. In just so happening that Peter was building a mud/straw brick house in a beautiful oasis a bus stop before Assa. He offered a free place to stay and the possibility for work exchange. So we went to Guelmim and tried to telephone him but the number was incorrect. With few alternatives we hopped into a Taxi and headed for the oasis Tigmat. The driver dropped as off by a country road and told us to head down. So with our bags and all we walked into the desert refuge. We were directed to a gate by some locals but there was no answer at the door. We sat in the shade and ate the last of our sausage and oranges, hoping that Peter was going to return very soon. It wasn't too long before we heard a sneeze from behind the gate and we called out to the owner, Peter. He greeted us and invited us in...

Peter's cool mud/straw house

We have now been here a few days and we think we will stay for a while. The house is mostly constructed on the outsides. It is livable, but it is more like camping with a roof over your head. We are helping in small ways by watering the palm saplings, stacking the mud bricks neatly, and finishing the palm awning (which we had previous experience from the cabaña we built at our home in Spain).

I hope that in our time here we can learn the methods of mud/straw brick house construction (making the bricks, building, spackling with mud and lye, etc). If construction goes fast and I stay long enough, I might be able to help with the compost toilet construction and methods of other permaculture techiniques which I set out to learn. At the moment, we will see. In the meantime, I am reading Peter's book on Desert Gardening during the hot afternoon break and practicing French occasionally with Bijan, who fortunately is practically fluent. I wouldn't have made it far in Morocco without him since I only know a few greeting words in Arabic and French.