Moroccans are all kinds, just like any other people. But they are all fascinating to us.

The most Moroccans we got to meet are merchants, guides, and guardians for vehicles. Merchants are like elsewhere, selling items big and small; but the difference is that their stores are packed into large bunches of thousands in a square mile that it is confusing and fascinating at the same time—confusing because once one gets into the souks it is very easy to get lost and almost impossible to accurately locate oneself; fascinating because with seemingly hundreds of shops next to each other selling basically the same ware,
it is very hard to fathom how one could decide on buying from one rather than from another. Of course most of the stuff is not marked with price, so comparison shopping cannot be done easily.

In cities or in tourist attractions, guides abound wanted show us around for a fee. According to tour books, there are two types of guides: official ones and faux guides. But we couldn’t tell whether which type each is, at least not with any confidence. The several that professed to be official guides showed us picture IDs which are of such low qualities that a laminated picture ID designed by a seven-year old could look a hundred times
more official. And when we showed a lack of interest, one guide was willing to lower the the official price of about 100 MAD (Moroccan dirham, locally shorthanded as DH) per hour. There was also a young man who showed us a tannery (dyer’s market, but I suspect it was not the real one, but a small tourist trap nearby). He spoke good English, pushed us hard to buy things, and refused to accept a small fee. On the way out, I found that he probably was paid 50 or 100 DH by an elderly person near the entrance of the tannery.

Then there are guardians, who are everywhere a car may be parked. According to our tour book, there are official ones as well. They may ask for about 10 DH for a night. But there are certainly more unofficial ones. In Ifrane we stopped our car at a place near the town square where there was a parking ticket machine AND a guardian. If we were to park there, we would end up paying 10 DH for a couple of hours, barely enough time for a lunch, verses 10 DH for the afternoon and overnight if we parked some 50 yards (meters) away on a side street. In Todra Gorge, the self-proclaimed guardian was a boy of
about 12 years old, who spoke a modicum of English (Moroccans generally speak Arabic, and French, their official languages). When we gave him 10 DH, he wasn’t satisfied; only when I pointed out that we barely stopped for 10 minutes that he backed off, saying “have a good day, my friend”.

On Jemaa el Fna, the main square of Marrakech, there are always people selling stuff and food, as well as artisans of all sorts: there are snake charmers, musicians and dancers, people wearing fancy dresses, all waiting for someone to take pictures for 10 DH. Supposedly there is also a dentist who would pull teethes in front of spectators, but we didn’t get to see this feat. In Almoravid Koubba, the overseer told us the same five English sentences (roughly) five times, transmitting no meaning because his English was so very
bad, and would refuse to take a tip less than 10 DH.

Of all these people, most are men (or boys). Women can be seen, although in much smaller proportion to men, but they usually don’t interact with customers (especially in Marrakech). The only exception I found in Marrakech is a woman who operated a small “teleboutique” in a small alley near our hotel, Jnane Mogadore. She apparently run the store alone, speaks good French and enough English for me to buy the phone card and the put extra money into it. In Ifrane a couple of hotels had a lone woman taking charge of the reception desks for the two hotels I visited, and they spoke enough English to
conduct the business, although when I asked whether she spoke English one of them said “not really”. While people running hotel businesses generally spoke English to some degree, those in the restaurants may or may not.

Police is a different matter. Unlike in the US, Moroccan police is usually not found driving around in patrol cars, but usually congregates in small groups at fixed locations. We were flagged down getting outside a small town by a group of about six. Apparently I passed a car where I shouldn’t, right before the place where they were stationed, although I really
couldn’t understand why—I was not driving at a high speed, and the road was apparently
not marked for no passing. The officer in charge was very polite, and attempted to give me a short lecture. After seeing that our French was terribly bad and couldn’t get what he was trying to convey, he shortened his message with a single sentence, of which we caught the last word “Attention”, and waved us by. In other parts of the country we were stopped by police check points a couple of times, each of which they simply waved us by without questions or inspections. During Ramadan we saw a group of three or four police officers
(including a woman) passing the boring afternoon times in a restaurant, either chatting on and off or nodding away in sleepiness. They were not eating anything; and the restaurant was mostly empty.

During our three days’ stay in Ifrane, we met three families of regular people. Each of these had one or more who spoke English, which made communications with us easy. The first family we met were two young sisters, named Inman and Ramniè (sound). They no longer lived in Ifrane, but came back during this time to be with their family. The second family was of three generations, with the grandparents, a daughter, and a granddaughter named Maya. We were surprised to learn that the grandfather is an official working for the
Prime Minister. The third family was visiting for the day from Fes. The surprising fact of this family is that the young man spoke not only Arabic, French, and English, but also some Chinese. It turned out he is an engineer, worked in Qingdao (famous for the only type of Chinese beer seen oversees) for six months cumulatively. Beside him, the family consists of his beautiful sister, his reticent brother, both of who are high-school students, and his apparently well-educated parents. His father spoke some English as well (much
more than our French).

Compared to our first trip to Spain and
beyond about 15 years ago, technology is very different now. Back then we
worry about where to find ATM and get money. Now we worry about cell phone,
Internet connection, and GPS. Of these, Internet is not required, so we’ll just
use it wherever we can find access. Cell phone and GPS, however, we would
rather not leave without.

For most of the world one type of phone is good enough—GSM.
But in the US it’s not the
only game in town, and the GSM frequencies used in Spain
and Morocco is not those
used in the US.
For this trip I bought an Iphone
look-alike on ebay, for about $60 including shipping. And a Garmin GPS.

I9+++ Phone

The new phone turned out to be a geek’s trap, in the sense
that it has a long list of hardware features, and an even longer list of
software glitches, some of them plaintively easy to fix, if only we had the
means to change the code.

Here’s some of the hardware features:

• Dual
  SIM card, dual standby. This is meant to save people money, so one can,
  say, receive signal from an International phone call with the home phone
  number, and yet in most cases choose to use a local SIM card to make local
  calls. A friend tells me that the phone must have two radios to support
  this feature.
• Quad band. Meaning it supports all GSM frequencies, and thus can work in the US as well as abroad.
  
• Two
  cameras, one facing the front and the other facing the back. These are low
  resolution and low quality cameras, not something to replace the real
  thing with.
• WiFi
  and Blue Tooth. The WiFi radio is only capable of extremely low data
  rates, so this is not a fatter data pipe, only a potential money saver.
  The phone’s native WAP browser is very limited, and yet no other browser
  that I’ve tried on it (so far I’ve tried three or four) can see the WiFi
  connection.
• SD
  card slot.
• Replaceable
  battery.
• Compass.
  The software is badly documented, but I eventually figured out how to get
  it to work. Related to the compass function, there is a Mecca Finder, but
  sane-minded Muslins may want to avoid relying on it, as it seems to give
  random directions.
• G-force
  sensor. Only in a half-working calculator can I verify that the phone can
  sense which direction is up. And only on the opening screen can I verify
  that the phone can sense shaking.
• FM
  radio. Of very bad quality.

And here is a short list of the most egregious software
issues:

• The
  phone numbers displayed is in green color, on a slightly different green
  background. And I haven’t found a place to change the color of either.
• The
  internal browser cannot handle most web pages. And its home page is Google
  in Chinese, even if I set the phone’s language to English. And for some
  Google services (like simple weather inquiry), you must start in English.
• For
  most key input, the editable field is on a different page (for example,
  it’s not on the Google page that you enter the search item). Even worse,
  to end the input, you are forced to go to another page to say “Done”!
• Once
  you’re connected to a WiFi network, the phone doesn’t automatically
  remember it, and yet you cannot choose to tell it to remember the setting
  either. You have to program the parameters in at a different place!

In any case, it seems that nowadays phone hardware is
practically worth nothing, and all the money is made on the software. And I’m
working at a place that makes hardware. A glimpse of the brave new world ahead!

Garmin GPS

Previously we have a Magellan GPS. It works reasonably well.
But the problem is that it does not come with European maps, and it is not
extensible. So for this trip we got a Garmin, one with pre-installed maps for
both North America and Europe. But extra map
for Morocco
is another $110, or just about the price of the whole GPS.

Garmin GPS is not without disadvantages compared to
Magellan, but it is a semi-open system, which is a huge advantage. This
openness is appreciable in two ways: one can use it to grab track data, so that
it can be used to make maps in cases where the road was never mapped before;
and one can give it supplemental data, data that is not from the device
manufacturer. It’s this latter feature that gives us the alternate route to a
map of Morocco.

As it turned out, there is a wiki of maps of the world, Open Street Maps. This is where
everyone’s GPS traces can be made available to the world, and this is where you
can make a map of your own. With it, I made a map of Morocco, and loaded it to my Garmin
GPS. It’s not commercial quality by any stretch of imagination, but it does
contain most major roads.

Previously
I mentioned that I had difficulty with Google maps in planning our travels
in Morocco.
I also tried the same plan with the Garmin GPS, equipped with the Morocco map I created
myself. So far I found a couple of issues. One is that there are no street
numbers, and very few points of interest. Another is that locations are transliterated
from Arabic, and the spellings are terribly inconsistent with anything we read
in English. Yet another is that a part of certain road which is classified as
national highway in other maps is unclassified, and consequently Garmin would
not route us through it. For this last shortcoming, I’m tempted to change the Open
Street Maps data to “upgrade” the road in question. I was stopped by my wife,
who argued that without ever travelling on it first, I’d be cheating myself and
others by doing so.

And that is hard to a geek, being forced to not do
something you think is perfectly doable. It’s right next to being forced to
watch someone folding a road map the wrong way.

Oh, talking about maps, we will get a set of paper maps. Just
in case.

We don’t prefer the “been there, done that” type of
whirlwind travelling. To us, a trip is only worth as much as what we can learn
something from it, about the people, the culture, the history, the geology, the
technology, whatever. And for the maximum amount of learning, one needs to
prepare before the trip, and follow up afterwards. It’s a lot of work, but
makes the travel more interesting.

Morocco
will be our first experience with Africa. We
chose it because of its relative safety, and because of its close vicinity to Spain. In our
previous trips to Spain, we heard of people’s fears of Moroccans—it’s very much
like Americans’ fears of Mexicans; and we’ve seen in Cordoba (southern Spain)
the Great
Mosque built by the Moorish people. Not far south from Cordoba,
one meets the Gibraltar Strait, where Morocco is visible with naked eye.

Once we mention Morocco, many people asked: “Are
you going to Casa Blanca?” This is a testament of the power and success of the
movie. But for those who’ve been to Morocco, Casa Blanca is a
“must-not-go-city”. Not that it is dangerous or bad in some other way, but it’s
modern, well-developed, and would not show off the most unique cultural
heritage of Morocco.

Instead, the tourist attractions are mostly in the Imperial Cities,
Fez (or Fès), Meknes,
Marrakesh and Rabat. Of these four, the present-day capital
and the current King’s seat is Rabat,
which makes it less attractive than the others. This is not a commentary on the
taste of the King and Queen, but the mere fact that their adapting Rabat to modern living necessarily makes Rabat less ancient than the rest. Besides,
all that extra people and traffic that commensurate with a modern capital—just imagine
Washington DC—would be a hassle for navigating the
streets. So we’ll take the other three Imperial Cities.

In addition, we’d like to visit the Sahara,
one of the biggest natural wonders in that part of the world. Well, the real Sahara is hard to get to, and for a short visit,
especially in the hot summer sun, we’d settle for a view of a corner of a dune
not far from it. Traditionally there are two places to do this, and following
the advice of many people on the web, we chose the town of Merzouga. There, we’d be able to pick a hotel
room, and see the dune from our window. Going into the desert will still be a
challenge, as in the summer heat not even camels would want to go in. That is,
during the day. There might still be a chance to go into the desert after
sundown, and get back out before daybreak. We’ll see.

By now the trip has come into shape. We’d start off in Marrakesh, go to Merzouga to see the desert, and then to Meknes/Fez
(these two cities are very close). Then we go up to Tanger (or Tangier), where
we can take a ferry to Spain. and

To round off the trip, we’ll stop by Ait Ben Haddou (or Aït
Benhaddou), where supposedly the movie Lawrence of Arabia is shot.
And right next to Meknes,
we will visit Volubilis, a Roman city in ruins. Whether we can finish all of
these, or some of it, it would be a fabulous trip.

Once we were trying to arrange, while in southern Spain, train travel from Barcelona
to the French city of Avignon,
and the gentleman at the ticketing office tried very very hard to tell us that
it was impossible. It’s a hilarious scene, when we thought back, that he, the
one with the important information (for us) and the mastery of the Spanish
language, would be stuck in such an intractable position that sweat beaded down
his balding forehead, while the two of us, unable to understand the predicament
we were in, insisted on the impossible.

Fast forward a few years, and now we seem to run into a few
computers, and the mightiest of them all, hiding behind the clouds, telling us,
in cold patience, that we couldn’t get from point A to point B.

We are talking about Morocco,
a country purportedly with the best road network in Africa.
And about the giants in modern mapping, Google maps and its brethren.

You can see this from this map, the road seems to be totally
chopped up—at least according to Google. This is the map we got when we asked
for routing from Chefchaouene to Tanger. And interestingly, while we are
mapping Morocco,
there is no link or button to report a problem to Google.

Here is another interesting case, where we asked for routing from Marrakesh to Ait Ben
Haddou. According to Google, they are not that far apart, but we just can’t get
from point here to there!


Mapping software is supposed to be an improvement over paper maps. But from what we see here, more improvements are still needed. Does anyone know someone at Google?