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These doors are from the ruined Al Baadi temple in Marakech. They are incredibly large - probably 20 to 30 feet tall. Al Baadi was a huge temple built in the 16th Century and must have been amazing at the time. In the ensuing centuries it has been plundered leaving the shell of the original temple, but not much else. This temple, like so many other things in Marakech, was hidden away in the labyrinthine bowels of the city. After our cabbie drove us there all that was visible to mark the temple was an unadorned door in a plain wall. This led through a kinda spooky narrow twisting hallway which eventually opened out onto the temple. No big neon signs and souvenir stands, no guards, no rails to protect you - just you and the temple. Notable in this temple are the storks which are supposed to have a strict schedule for migrating to and from the temple. Walking around the temple you can hear their beaks clap together as they chatter at each other. The holes in the walls were originally used to hold scaffolding for the construction of the wall.

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This is one of many decorative arches over a door in the Bahia Temple of Marakech. The Bahia Temple, while smaller than Al Baadi, is much better preserved with most of the original art surviving intact. These arches illustrate a point I found generally in Marakech - the beautiful Islamic art seems reserved primarily for the ceilings and upper parts of the wall. Most of Bahia has bare walls with beautiful and ornate ceilings. I'm not sure whether this has some sort of religious significance or not (looking towards Allah?). I've read that the Muslim faith disallows recreating nature in a scene so that much of the artwork is abstract and geometric - thus was created some of the most beautiful art to survive that era.

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Another beautiful piece from a ceiling in Bahia, this one painted on wood rather than carved into stone.

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This is a picture of our guide for our first trip through the souks of Marakech. He is dressed pretty normally for a citizen of Marakech and is standing in one of the miscellaneous lanes which line the souks. I was really happy with this picture - it captures very nicely the look and feel of marrakech and turned out beautifully if I do say so myself (though I guess I should crop out that bucket at the lower left).

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Every set of vacation pictures has to have at least one mandatory dorky picture of the participants so here's the one in this set. From left to right that's Ali, myself and Rusty with our camel guide at the bottom of the picture. Ali and Rusty are two friends of mine who came along on the trip. The main lesson of this excursion was that camels are not shy about expressing their displeasure. Also, it turns out that camels are very LOUD - very, very LOUD - much louder than I had really anticipated. Although Rusty's and Ali's camel seemed to accept their riders with grace and warmth, my camel didn't seem nearly so welcoming. In fact, he seemed downright against the idea of carrying me at all. Some cynics would point out the difference in the weights of the various riders, but I prefer to believe that I just happened to pick a camel from the "extra rude" pile. We saw several camels in Marakech but I never saw any of them doing what I would call useful work - I suspect they were mostly there for geeky tourists like us to ride. The animal of choice for actually useful work seemed to be the donkey which was seen pretty commonly pulling carts around the city. Given the traffic conditions in Marakech I was surprised that nimble footed pedestrians had any kind of life expectancy - I don't really know how donkeys saddled up to carts made it through the streets at all.

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On our tour through Marakech (largely an obvious excuse to direct our American money into Moroccan shops) we were taken through the "souks" which are sort of like open air markets in the states, except without the open air - tight little shops cram next to each other in small twisty alleyways which were obviously not meant to support anything more than a few people but in fact have been pressed into service handling motorcycles, donkey carts and large crowds simultaneously. It's pretty chaotic trying to walk down one of these lanes without having at least a couple toes stepped on or smashed in some other manner. The souks are divided into various districts. The fellow shown here is the man I bought a carpet from in the rug souk. To backtrack a little, I have a friend in Seattle (our art director at Suckerpunch) who always takes his Gene Simmons doll (lead singer for KISS) on trips, snapping pictures of him in front of famous landmarks. I forgot to ask Dev about his doll for my Morocco trip so I bought one in New York on the way out. I convinced our carpet man that in order to sell me his carpet he would have to pose with Gene for a picture. You see the result here. I'm not sure he really understood the significance (for that matter, I'm not sure I understand - it's Dev's idea after all). When I gave him Gene he asked why "she" was painted up like that. You begin to understand the true meaning of "cultural gap" when trying to explain something like this from an American perspective to a Moroccan rug dealer in Marakech.

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Marakech has many gardens. This one at Menara is one of the largest and the main feature is the huge manmade pool you see here. It really is quite lovely with the High Atlas Mountains in the background, the reflecting pool and the islamic building at the back of the pool. Lovely, that is, until you examine the pool up close. I'm kind of glad I never really took any pictures of this pool up close, but for historical accuracy I have to tell you - I've seen cesspools I'd rather swim in. Hate to burst the romantic bubble the picture conjures up, but man that thing was foul!

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This was definitely one of my favorite parts of the trip - a tour out to the Ouriko valley. We had a great cabbie (definitely the way to see things in Marrakech - $60 for an entire day of driving wherever you want to go) who took us away from the main tourist road up high into the remoter parts of the mountains. This was definitely a culture far removed from our own and therefore the most interesting thing I saw on the trip. These tiny villages are built into the sides of the mountains from stone gathered in the same mountains. People were washing clothes by beating them on stones in creeks of meltwater from the snow high up on the mountains. I couldn't bring myself to take closeup pictures since the people weren't necessarily happy about the idea and I didn't want to turn these people into some sort of "tourist attraction". They deserve more respect than that. Their clothing consisted of brightly colored robes, turbans and hats. These villages are built by the traditional berber people of Morocco and are usually across a deep valley from the nearest road. Supplies would be driven to the nearest spot on the road and then trekked across by donkey cart. We stopped many times on the road to the top and regardless of how remote and uninhabited the land looked around us, every stop drew lots of children who seemingly sprang up from nowhere to ask for money/sweets/whatever. One of the perfect moments on the trip for me was seeing a woman in a bright blue robe across the valley in this village yelling in a song or chant of some kind. I'm not really sure what she was doing, but that was what made the moment - being in a foreign country among a foreign culture and aware of something significant occurring but not really sure what the significance was or how to interpret it.

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This was some intricate carving from a tomb in Marrakech. The tomb was built in the 16th century and had largely been forgotten until it was seen from the air. It has since been renovated. This is a fascinating story to me. To imagine that a large area of a crowded city like Marrakech could remain "undiscovered" for years until discovered on a serendipitous flight is something that could never occur in America. People must have passed by this door thousands of times without ever realizing what lay behind it. Even today, it's appearance is hardly spectacular. Another door among many in another wall in yet another alley with nothing to distinguish it. This was one of the most startling things for us in Marrakech. Coming from a world where every tourist attraction has vast parking lots, souvenir stands and barkers trying to sell "programs - get your programs!" out front, it's hard to get used to going to a tourist attraction in Morrocco and wondering which door the "attraction" lies behind and which door leads to some ancient pharmacy or shop.

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One of the main staples of Moroccan life is the goats. Shepherds would herd these goats high into the Atlas Mountains and stay for several months. They built shelters at the peaks of these mountains which sheltered them over these months. This is one of those shelters. I'm not really the one to make a judgment on such a subject but to my blundering western eyes they seemed like some of the most self sufficient people I've ever observed. My guess is that nuclear war would go largely unnoticed in this region unless it made a nearby hit. These people build their houses from the stones in the mountains, they make their clothes from the sheep and goats they raise, they get food from their gardens and livestock and generally seem much better adapted to survive without the safety net of civilization than most of the rest of us. I was impressed and came away with a deep admiration for them.

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This is the famous square at Marrakech which marks the entrance to the souks. The tower in the background is an ancient and beautiful mosque. Unfortunately, not being Muslim, we couldn't go inside. The interesting thing about the square to me was the real tradition there. Yes, there were the usual tourist items and people in gaudy costumes hoping that you'll be willing to pay money for the privilege of having your picture taken with them. But there were also the open air dentists which no sane tourist would ever visit but apparently were still thriving out in the square. Most interesting to me were the story tellers who would squat in the square with "flip books" which held what appeared to be post cards to illustrate their stories. These stories were traditional myths told solely in berber or arabic so no tourist money was flowing in here, yet they were also thriving. Each of them had a crowd of locals gathered round to hear whatever story was being told. It made me feel connected somehow with the ancient storytellers of Greece who passed along the Iliad and the Oddysey through the telling of stories. To see traditions like this still being acted out today, not for the benefit of tourists but solely for the benefits of the tradition itself, gives me encouragement that everything in the world isn't being taken over by computers, television and HBO. As much as I appreciate those things and am a product of them, I'm glad that there are corners in the world where their influence isn't yet as dominating as it is here in the U.S..

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This was the resort we stayed at - Club Valtur. I heartily recommend the club although the air trip on our return was about as close as I'd like to ever come to pure torture (see the story elsewhere). It was definitely a beautiful resort although the rooms were a little sparse (little more than a bed, chair and desk outside the bathroom). In addition, it seemed unnecessarily difficult to call back to the states. Regardless, the food (which was part of the package) was delicious, the staff exceedingly friendly and the grounds beautiful. This is a picture of the ceiling (once again, the art is on the ceiling) in one of the main halls.

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These are the grounds immediately in front of Valtur. As you can see, the landscaping is beautiful with flowers blooming everywhere. We took our trip over Thanksgiving which represented the off season in Marrakech. I can't imagine that the flowers, etc. would be much more beautiful in the tourist season and although this was the "rainy" season, that apparently means they get rain once a week rather than never. We only observed blue skies and warm weather during our entire stay (okay, it got pretty chilly at night and in the morning). The resort is composed primarily of italians which meant that their nightly cabaret was pretty much over our heads. Imagine a game show in a language you don't understand with no subtitles. Occasionally the host would make what was obviously the punchline to a joke and everybody in the crowd would laugh uproariously inciting a nervous laugh from us even though we didn't really understand what was going on. In addition, the sense of humor, while I'm sure no less developed than our own, was nonetheless...well, different than our own so that even on the rare occasions when we did understand the jokes they just didn't seem quite as funny as the rest of the audience's reaction would have lead us to believe. Still, the experience as a whole seemed kind of funny on a meta level. The idea that we felt compelled to laugh at things we didn't even understand is funny in and of itself when you take a step back to reflect on it. Another rather entertaining item from a western perspective was the labelling of some of the public areas. Apparently taking the cue from the notion that clinics have nurses, the medical area at Valtur was pointed to with a sign labelled "nursery" and the laundry room, in deference I suppose to the ironing that went on there, was named the "irony room". Hmmm...maybe they've been listening to too much Alanis Morisette.