The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

On Dream Mountain

touched by angelic light. Her breathing deepening, she recounted how it was the most enchanted spot in the entire world. Despite my asking over and over, she wouldn’t reveal the location of the forest. All she would say was that a traveler ripened by adventure made discoveries to which raw eyes were blind. ~~ My own journey continued. Through days and nights I traveled, the red and black seed never far from my thoughts or my hand. North. East. South. West. No plan or map to steer me. Nothing but my gut as guide to a journey of unending possibility. At the edge of a desert track, I met a lean lopsided shepherd wearing a talisman crafted from a nugget of amber. The size and shape of an apricot, it was etched with the ninety-nine names of God. In a grove of wizened olive trees, a throng of schoolboys mobbed me, begging for chocolate and for pens. At a truck stop on the margin of a lake of uncertain name, a man tried to sell me a wooden box. It was half full of dry sand. He promised that each grain would make a wish come true. Leaving the box for another traveler, I kept going. In Marrakech, I met medicine men and magicians, street- side dentists who doubled as barbers, and on the flat pink plain beyond, a clutch of little boys swinging squirrels around and around on strings. I saw villages fringed in palms, and camels chewing their cud in the shade. And goats in trees, feasting on argan nuts. And skeins of freshly dyed wool, hanging to dry in the blinding

winter light. And mounds of dampened mint destined for thimble-sized glasses of tea. And children skipping along craggy paths on their way back home from class. And ferocious guard dogs with crazed maniacal eyes. And towering cork oaks harvested for their bark. And neat rows of fossils laid out for sale on twisting mountain roads. And chameleons sunning themselves on boulders as old as time. Some nights I slept in ramshackle hostels—or rather tried to sleep—tossing and turning against the riotous din of young men buoyed by drink and lust. On other evenings, I lay on flat roofs, or beside streams, or on desert sands—and watched the heavens as they turned. A canvas of galaxies and stars. Like a handful of salt cast over a black tiled floor. There is nothing so wondrous as lying out undisturbed on the side of a small spinning planet, as it races through space and time. Nothing, that is, except for the kind of surprise that only unplanned travel can bring. The kind of surprise that changes the way you see what you think you know. ~~ Bordered by an ocean and a sea, Morocco is a land of endless deserts and forests, of snowcapped mountains, ancient walled cities and open fields. It’s a realm united by extraordinary beauty, by hope and by possibility. The jewel of jewels in the treasure trove is the High Atlas. They rise up from the baked sand plain like the arched backbone of a prehistoric creature poised for attack. A mass of crags and secret valleys, of high pastures and oblique precipices, there’s nowhere that comes close in sheer magnificence. Little by little I ascended. Shafts of platinum light and freezing shade. One blind bend after the next.

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