stumbling over eden

​Twelve years ago I found myself on top of Mount Toubkal, the highest point in North Africa. It isn’t a difficult climb, just needing decent shoes and decent lungs. But it is ‘a highest spot’, and though I like to ramble and explore, getting to the top of things is usually beyond what I do. So perhaps that is why, as I sat there looking out over the High Atlas through air as clear as the day it was made (?), there arose the notion that I might travel over these ancient time-shattered peaks all the way to the desert. And it was immediately obvious that it was one of those ideas that must be nurtured and adapted to, like an unplanned child. To walk from this ‘highest spot’ into the great, sprawling wilderness of the Sahara Desert was an offer from the gods which I could not turn down. Twelve years passed, until this year I decided the time was right to accept it.
 
I am an obsessive note- taker and the following are excerpts from the Moleskine notebook I carry with me on every journey. (This post is a version of a recent article: see http://www.kasbahdutoubkal.com/news/

---

​April 29th 2017
Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s Berber culture but establishing a specific itinerary and timetable is always elusive and I have found it more my style to embrace the ambiguity and happenstance that seems to go so easily with my time in Morocco. So it was after a good breakfast, some decent coffee and well-wishes of Abdul and his friends at the Kasbah du Toubkal I set off back down the hillside into Imlil to drive to Telouet, where we would visit the remains of the Kasbah of the ‘Lords of the Atlas’, the fearsome but compelling Glaoui family.  Moha and I would also rendezvous with two mules and possibly one or more muleteers before and setting off on the 500 km trek.

---

Read More