We drove to Queen Elizabeth National Park, crossing the equator near the mining town of Kasese surrounded by cotton fields, and drove up to the rim of what looked like a mini Ngorongoro Crater, stopping the jeep frequently to check out new birds. The…
Continuing south towards the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, we stopped off first at the Maramagambo Forest to check out the famous bat cave with its colony of roosting fruit bats. The cave was warm and smelly from piled-up guano but we…
One evocative sound during our time in Marrakech was the haunting call to prayer. Half a dozen mosques’ minarets poked above the rooftops within earshot of our riad, so each day before dawn and at sunset when we were in…
We headed to the garden city of Marrakech, a bustling burgh of pink walls in the shadow of the High Atlas Mountains. Our final four nights would be at another riad in the medina, the Riad Kniza, which had a…
Leaving Skoura the next day, we drove out of the desert and into the snowy High Atlas Mountains. The road twisted impossibly up and over the Tichka Pass at 2,260 meters. Dennis refused to sit in the front seat because he…
We drove on the next day through canyon country into the dry mountain town of Tinerhir and on into the Todra Valley rich with date palms and clustered houses following a shallow river. The Todra Gorge is a long, twisting canyon…
Leaving Fez, we drove south up through the Middle Atlas Mountains and came into quite a bit of snow as we approached the charming Swiss-style town of Ifrane. We reached a plateau blanketed in white that made me yearn for my snowshoes.…
We took a few side trips from Fez during our stay in Morocco. One day we spent a morning touring the surprisingly impressive site of Volubilis, the Roman Empire’s most remote outpost that was built in the third century…
On the drive to to the colorful city of Fez we passed mile after mile of cork-oak trees with their bark half-stripped. Everything here was intensely green due to recent unseasonably heavy rains, the land becoming more smoothly undulating as we drove. This area is the…
We started off our delightful Morocco trip in Casablanca, the country’s financial capital. We arrived to bad weather and couldn’t do much sightseeing on foot, but that was just as well because we were exhausted from our overnight flight from Dakar, Senegal, and…