Ibn Ibn Battuta

Of Kasbahs Rocked, Peaks Surmounted, and Jobs Forgotten

Morocco map

Over a recent long weekend, while Jacqueline was back in the US visiting family, my jet-setting friend Ryan dropped in en route from Dubai to New York.

Busy with jobs and life in distant cities, we haven’t seen each other nearly enough since our Georgetown days, so it was a good opportunity to catch up. Since the trip was, for Ryan, also a rare chance to escape his desk in Manhattan, I did my best to haul him as far from civilization as I could in three short days.

Thursday evening, after home-cooked Moroccan couscous with spiced chicken,

Moroccan Skiing, and Apes on Ice

Some reports online (which definitely don't merit a link) tout Mischliffen - a ski resort south of Ifrane - as "the Moroccan Aspen". To be fair, on our visit last Saturday we did find Mischliffen nestled in a natural alpine wonderland, but one of considerably less dramatic heights than its Rocky Mountain counterpart.

Mischliffen's two ski trails - one modest and the other more so - empty into a large bowl at the hill's base, where hundreds of Moroccan kids and teens spent the day sledding on wooden fruit crates nailed to sawed-off ski halves. Often several of them would join together in a train at the bowl's lip and slide