Mark finds his happy place, in Fes. “The Moroccan salads, served with almost every meal and usually featuring eggplant, tomatoes, bell peppers, sometimes beets, onions, and more, suddenly had zing. The tagines had spice. The brochettes were dusted with flavorful spices and properly cooked.” Plus, the requisite camel ride in the desert, a calm and relatively uncrowded maze of streets, lots of wandering, visiting a tannery and a local baker, and just straight up enjoying the city.

Mark and Kathleen take a terrifying and exhilarating car ride to Magdaz, where the houses are built into the hillside, everyone tends animals (and animals live on the ground floor), almost everyone gardens, most of the trees bear edible fruit, and foraging and bartering are common. “It’s not the first place we visited that I want to go back to,” Mark writes, “and visiting here isn’t a picnic. It’s at 6000 feet, the main activity for a visitor would be hiking and, although I’m tired of making jokes about it, I’m getting old. But what a place.”