Saturday, October 21, 2006

 

Pants Afire


Words fail me as to how amazing my trip to Morocco was. People have been asking me about it, but referring to my trip as being "really cool" has sounded to my own ears as an inexcusable understatement. Whenever I had a spare moment last week, I found myself pondering how to grapple with the problem of how to put my experiance into words here, on my blog. I will try to resist the temptation to wax poetic about my experiances. I know I lack the felicity with words necessary to make such an expression readable. And yet to give an account of the previous week consisting only of a laundry list of my daily activities would be sorrowfully inadequate. I will attempt to walk that thin line between textbook and emo. Indeed my trip was so full of excitement, adventure, and perception altering experiances that I doubt I can even muster a chronological account of my trip. Therefore I indevor to give accounts off my experiances as they come back to me as I attempt to spin the yarn as to why my trip to Morocco was "really cool".

I apologize for the inaccuracy of the preceding statement, and likewise apologize to any of you that I wasted the time of by telling you how chilly Africa was supposed to be this time of year. But you'll have to understand, that is how it was explained to me. In our preliminary meeting for the Morocco trip, Mannel, who organized the IES trip, and who was in every other way a superlative organizer, warned us that Africa was not going to be the hot place we all invisioned. The assumption he made was that all we Americans who were, in all honesty, ignorant of the ways of the Sahara desert and the land above it, would theorize that the climate would be as hot as it was arrid. I'm sure you have the same image in your minds eye as I did. Mannel warned us that this was not the case, and that we should pack with the idea that Africa would be chilly. So I heeded Mannel's advice and packed primarily warm clothes, along with my sweatshirt and jacket, both of which took up valuable space in my duffle bag.

Mannel is a liar. So much so that his pants are on fire, and I think we can all correctly assume, are hanging from a telephone wire. That image that you have conjured in your mind's eye is no phantasm. Africa is HOT. I don't know what they do to the solar rays over there in Africa, but when they hit you it isn't like the warm aura it is in the states or even Europe. When the African sun shines upon your skin it feels as if you have gotten too close to a bonfire, so much worse the sun over the Sahara.

I am no wuss. I can take a little UV light, no problem. I have even been known to enjoy it. I love the feeling of soaking up the solar rays from a yellow sun. It makes me feel energized. What I don't enjoy is being lied to, and forced to wear long sleaves and jeans. Cotton, by the way, does not breath half as well as they tell you it does. I found myself forced to wear the same three T-shirts day in and day out. T-shirts that are now, I fear, irreversably caked with Saharan sand.

I loved it.

How can one ever expect to get the true raw feeling of the apathy of the Saharan desert towards the human soul if they are protected by a bubble of clean clothes? I fear I would not be able to. But living a dirty lifestyle is all the more appealling when you are surrounded by an area of limitless filth that extends throughout an area the size of the United States. More will be written about desert life in upcoming posts, but it is important to remember when I do write about my time in the desert, I am writing about a filthy, unshaved, feral version of myself, so different from the bathed Mr Tim that exists in the civilized world.

The warm clothes, or rather the sweatshirt did come in handy once under the Saharan sun. That being the day that I woke up early to watch the sun rise over the Sahara desert. While it is an amazing experiance to see such a sight, and while I would not trade the memory for anything, the sunrise itself was pretty dull and I fear reading about it would be just as uninteresting. There were no bright and vibrant colours that painted the sky. All I saw was the great dunes of the Sahara, titanic in grandure, slowly materialize from pitch darkness, and stretch into infinity. But it was very early in the morning so the peaceful emensity of the sight was lost on my until I relived it just now.

I'm not sure what I'll write next, but the amount I left unsaid guarantees more to come.

-Tim M Lunardoni

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