Yeah yeah, I know, let's get to the pictures.

Well, first things first - you get my trip in the order I took it, like it or not. And by now you know (or should) that the first 3 weeks of my trip, and all four rolls of film, have vanished. So, pretend it's not a new millennium, hunker down, and do a little reading.

Morocco is incredible, and I could tell a million stories, but I'll try to sum it up with one short one. I'm not sure who makes these distinctions, but I think that Morocco is "officially" a third world country. Later we get to a country that's one of the 5 poorest in the world and definitely 3rd world, so you can compare.

For all its poverty, Morocco is a land of incredible wealth, but not wealth like we measure it. It has a culture and a physical history that has survived through many changes for 1200 years. And to understand it completely, you have to know that until relatively recently, the Arab world was divided into 5 kingdoms whose boundaries were very different than the ones drawn for them by Europe. To speak of Arab history is to speak of Morocco - their history is the history of a race. They have created woven rugs of so exquisite a quality that today cost a king's ransom. They built buildings which you can see even today in much of their splendor, and which are still being used. Their metal smithing, of which some of the finest examples I've seen are in the Islamic Museum in Cairo, are not reproducible by human hands today - there is no longer anyone capable of doing this quality of work on earth - it is a lost art. Morocco has an ocean, a desert, spectacular mountains, and endless fields of oranges, olives and more.

I met two men in Rabat, the capital, who offered to put me up in their apartment in Fez. They just came up and started talking to me because I was obviously a foreigner. We started talking on the train, and they were really nice to me, and genuinely wanted to show me their country. In their late 20's, they lived with 3 other guys in a small apartment in the "New City" of Fez. All of Morocco's cities have an old, still functioning walled city called the Medina, and a new city, built by the French in the late 19th and early 20th century.

It was a typical apartment just like yours, with a parking lot and cable tv, and was as messy as you'd expect 5 college guys to be. They cooked extraordinary meals as exotic as any Moroccan restaurant would serve here, and we sat on the floor around a round table and ate (an incredible amount of food) with our hands. That's just the way we ate.

One day, Aziz took me to the Medina. You can watch the Discovery channel till you're blue, and you cannot imagine what this city is like. It's incredibly small - maybe 3 square miles? Which, for you city folk, is an area about 12 blocks long and 12 wide. In which live five hundred thousand people, doing the same thing they've been doing for 1200 years, pretty much the same way they've always been doing it.

Fez sits in the foothills of the Rif mountains, and even though the structures are at most a few stories tall, it rises and falls and twists and turns so that it's hard to ever tell where you are. The streets follow what must have once been footpaths, and are no more that 12 feet wide (just enough room for 2 passing donkeys), twisting and turning. On your left, through a door, there is a tannery. They bring live cattle here, and in two large pits filled with blood, they strip the hides and dry them. The stench is overpowering. Up ahead, a few streets over, a rug shop. Three stories high, cool and breezy inside. If you stopped, you'd sit on a low bench, drink espresso with the owner. Assistants scurry in and out with rugs, and you say "Imshi!" (take it away) or "XXXXX!" (I forget, but it means keep it). It would take hours to whittle down to the right one, and somehow, it'd seem like no one else ever came in while you were there. This is pretty new building, the owner might tell you, only two or three hundred years old.

But we're going to the haman. The Turkish bath. It was built in the 14th century, Aziz tells us. He comes here Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was, until recently, only for men. Now there are specific days and times when women come, but it is always only men, or only women. As we approach, on our right, you see what is too small to even be an alleyway. It is perhaps 6 feet wide, a cavern, dark, and there are men shoveling coal into what looks like a blast furnace. Smoke belches out. It looks like a early 20th-century steel mill.

"That's how they heat the water," Aziz says. Inside, a small unassuming entry room/ locker room, you pay -- about two dollars for a bath, five with massage. You definitely want the massage. Now you strip to your underwear (swimsuits are also acceptable) and you enter.

You've stepped into a vast square hall, perhaps 80 or 100 feet across and two stories high. It is lit entirely by sunlight through small holes in the ceiling - bathed in a very suffuse glow. The floor is built in descending steps, each 12 feet across and 1 inch down - they slope to the center of the room. The floor is a mosaic of dark and light stone tiles, the room is built entirely of stone. Across the floor, one-quarter inch of warm water is steadily flowing out from the walls, and draining in the center of the room. It is hot and steamy, but not like a sauna. It is... the perfect temperature. There are perhaps 15 men or boys in different parts of the room. This is where you soap up.

A man who looks as small and frail as Gandhi in swaddling clothes comes up to us. Toothless? Certainly no hair to speak of. And he doesn't speak English or French. First, he wraps your soap (you did bring soap and shampoo, didn't you?) in a sort of Brillo pad made from bark or leather or something equally natural. You lie back. He now scours your body with the pad, working the soap into a froth, you had no idea your soap could make this much foam. You are sat up, and a small boy has fetched buckets of warm, very warm but not too warm water. Not little pails, buckets. Big wooden buckets like you imagine you'd need if you were milking a cow. And they dump the water over your head and body, and baby, you are clean.

Ah, but that's not all. You signed up for the massage, remember? Now, whatever word you thinking of, shiatsu or rolfing or chiropraction or whatever, just forget it. Because now the old man sits on your right, and he hugs you. He wraps is right leg in front of you, and his left leg in back of you, and he locks his feet. The his right arm behind your head, and his left arm in front, and you're wrapped in a human pretzel. And this tiny little man rolls onto his side and arches his back, and you are twisted into a shape you didn't know you could make and held in there in the air. At first you're shocked. And suddenly, you realize, wow. Wow. I think I'm stretching every single muscle in my entire body at the same time. This is amazing. Suddenly, he twists some other way, and rolls, and you're all tangled up in a different way, and it just keeps going like that. Have you ever seen anyone use nun-chucks? You are the nun-chuks, and then he's sitting and you're back on the floor again, and you feel really good, and very clean.

There are more rooms, where you can bathe, or take a sauna, but now you've taken all the time you can, and it's time to go. You get cleaned up, and you towel off and get dressed, and get ready, because you're about to fly to Senegal (where you've already lost your luggage).