It is still the dark continent in many ways. Dark not in absence of light, but dark in a positive, mysterious and thrilling way. I’ve wanted to touch African soil my entire life, and some strange sequence of events lead me there this holiday season. Just the upper left corner of it, Saharan Morocco. This is a very image heavy post, and there are stories behind each image. But I can’t tell them here, I’ll let you fill in the rest.

This experience I keep comparing to what I understand about skydiving. Exciting and terrifying at the same time. Some days were shady and sketch, others made me feel like young Indiana Jones with heart pounding and mind spinning.

As my insides lead me to more areas of the world that are considered corners or empty spaces, I am continually perplexed by this planet. I wanted to put my hand in the sun, eat Saharan honey, and listen to the ringing in my ears between whistling dunes.

There’s quite a few, all from the interior of Morocco from the day after Christmas 2011 to the second week of January 2012.

What I’m excited about now is to finish compiling the video footage and relive the experience with a bit of drama on the internet. And if you’ve never heard of the Jemaa El-fnaa (two translations, “Assembly of the Dead” and “Mosque at the end of the World”) find out what it is, because it is the most exciting place on planet Earth. Seriously.

It is difficult to speak in brief about any one experience, but I’ll try one scene for you.
In the Jemaa El-fnaa there are snake charmers. Men with drums and flutes play music to calm Cobras and Asps. There is also a man who performs with them, in a trance, on all fours sweating in the sun, rocking back and forth to the African rhythms and brushing the noses of the Cobras with his wild hair as he moves around like an animal. Between the Cobras (four of them, all hooded and ready to strike) are trained chipmunks that dart in and around the bodies of the snakes, taunting them. Beside the Cobras is a writhing pile of Adders and Asps that occasionally get unruly and slither off the pile.

The man in the trance simply grabs their tail and pulls them back in the pile, always just missing the strike. He continues his trance and charming until after the sun sets on the third holiest place in all Islam, and retires for the evening, all his snakes in boxes with no lids. The chipmunks follow uncaged as he drops bits of lettuce for their dinner, just as the evening call to prayer echoes off the pink city.