Many starts to this blog post. First I started writing about the amazing German couple we met. Turns out Billy and I aren’t nearly as cool or adventurous as we had hoped because these guys have been traveling the WORLD with their two kids in a converted FIRE ENGINE for THREE YEARS!!!
Okay, I guess fire engines are smaller in Germany, but still. Bad ass. We met them on the beach the day after we arrived in Mirleft, and so starved were Billy and I for grownup interaction that we surely came off like a couple of swingers when we begged them to stay an extra night and come to our place for dinner. The guys cooked while the ladies drank (well, this lady did anyway,) and the kids, though they couldn’t understand a lick of what the other pair was saying, still found a way to love and hate one another, multiple times, back and forth, like kids do.
Then I was going to write about how we hightailed it out of the desert for the coast like we had scorpions in our pants, but I was reaching with that metaphor, the truth being that we just wanted to get warm and the beach is a much more responsible babysitter than the desert when I just want to close my eyes for five minutes. Because there’s no scorpions at the beach. See, it takes a lot of work for that metaphor to come into focus and it still sucks.
And, finally, I was going to talk about Patrick, my dear friend who I spent a fair portion of my twenties drunk and bartending with in NYC, who stayed with us for a week and just left, leaving a stack of New Yorkers, two books, and a boatload of sweet memories in his wake.
But none of those beginnings found a middle. I suppose I’m feeling a bit of traveler’s fatigue. Or maybe it’s just parenting fatigue. It feels unnatural to spend this much time with your children. But soon enough they’re going to be the ones trying to hide from me, so I try to practice gratitude, even in the face of their unconscionable meltdowns.
Mirleft. A dusty town on Morocco’s southern coast. It’s quaint in an African sort of way. When I asked my friend, a world traveler who had spent some time in Morocco what the country was like she made me laugh when said, “you know, it’s Africa lite, but it’s still Africa.” This can mean a lot of things, I guess, both good and bad. In the not so great column (which of course isn’t inherent to all or only Africa), there’s a lot of cinderblock and unfinished structures and a crippled infrastructure unable to properly handle garbage collection. In the pretty fucking rad column is a raw beauty relatively untouched by mass development and an unhurried mentality relatively unplagued by neurosis.
We didn’t think we’d come this far south, but when you want to get warm in the Northern Hemisphere, south is where you go. Found a place on Airbnb, private messaged the host asking for a discount if we’d stay two weeks and voilá. (That’s French. You can actually say that here without being a douche. Douche. That’s also French. You can say that here and they actually give you douche.)
We’re a three minute walk to the beach down some curse-inducing steps and a two minute drive to town where there are - count ‘em - two places that sell booze. Hotel Aberith and Beverly’s. If you’re nice and order a meal they might even sell you a bottle or two to take home, provided you have a bag to hide it in on your way out the door.
First up, Hotel Aberith. We came with Patsy for dinner. We walked in and the kids immediately fell asleep – that alone deserves a Yelp award. Actually, I would love for Yelp to introduce that as a filter. Good for groups/good for naps. Erykah Badu played on the radio and the house cat kept trying to cuddle. I felt like I was in Williamsburg circa 2001.
And at Beverly’s, a bangin shrimp tagine and a turtle. No cuddling. And no nap.
We’ve spent the past week exploring the cliff rimmed beaches that are home to cafes churning out freshly caught fish tagine (yes, we eat a lot of tagine) and paragliders that fly overhead like giant birds. It’s pretty surreal to be lying on the beach and suddenly be cast in a giant shadow as though a silent plane were coming in for a crash landing.
I’m glad we booked two weeks. The nicest, coolest people we’ve met in Morocco live in this town. Case in point: we asked the shopkeeper where to go for Friday couscous and he recommended a place, and then another place, and then said, “But the best is my mother’s.” He told us to come on Friday at two and when we did he gave us a giant platter of piping hot deliciousness, refused to take our money, and then refused when we tried again.
Out of all the places we’ve been so far, this is where I could spend a month. A year. The first quarter of my retirement. Would learn how to surf and make couscous and paraglide my arthritic ass down to the beach.
We have two more weeks in Morocco before we head to Spain, land of taboo-free wine drinking and car-free plazas where the kids can roam and Billy and I can ignore them and pretend we’re on a date. Coming at’cha Spain. Hola back.
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