Land of a thousand lands

Before I arrived in Morocco, I used my computer to scope out the country through Google Maps satellite vision and Google Earth.  It looked like a dry, burnt, barren wasteland.

After being in Morocco, and traveling from Fez to Azrou to the Sahara to Marrakesh to Casablanca, I understood that the reality on the ground is actually very different.

Driving through the Mid-Atlas Mountains around Azrou, for example, color crops up everywhere.  The sky is brilliant blue, the bushes and thistles are dusty green, the cedar and pine trees are a darker, rich green, the rocky outcroppings and cliffs are ruddy reds and golds, the wildflowers are scattered bright and happy yellows and soft sprinklings of purple.

The more I experienced Morocco, the more I thought that Morocco didn’t even look like a single country or even a single continent.

As I looked out the van window during our month of travels in Morocco, the landscape raced by. I saw the rock and ravines of the Grand Canyon, the palm trees of the Caribbean, the desert sands of Egypt and Arabia, the majestic cedars of Lebanon, the pine farms and forests of the Alps, the olive groves of Greece.

On our travels, as I looked out the window at the Grand Canyon, the Caribbean, Egypt, Lebanon, the Alps and Greece, all of a sudden the van would pull through a sharp turn and the scene would fall away.  The view would open up onto a plain ploughed into a patchwork quilt, a couple of trees planted here and there to shade the shepherds and the farmers, the mountains rising up again on either side, forming a bowl.  The sun would loom amazingly large, amazingly bright overhead, birds swirling through the sky above the trees.  Again and again I was hit by the beauty — and was reminded once again that I was in Africa.