It still surprises and amuses me how much of traveling is a constant lava lamp flow, continually changing and moving and re-setting in mid-stream… dictated by some unwritten law of synchronicity… knowing things will change 9 different ways, every minute, depending on any random number of happy accidents or chance meetings (or missed trains, delayed flights, whatever). I can’t think of a better way to travel and I have made so many friends and seen crazy miracles by just being open to that hippy freestyle thought and letting the unpredictable, unscheduled, unmapped glitches breathe and appear…

We picked up two more team members today at lunch, Miguel and Sandra, (from Portugal, now living in France).

Naturally, they speak 9 or 10 different languages like everyone else who is not American, and since French is the common denominator, I am sometimes swimming in a lost sea of swirling Frenćais… In the eye of the storm, I can still have complete peace and solitude as I easily check out and think of pretty things in my head (in English) while their conversations and jokes and stories shoot around me like a flurry of ricocheting bullets… (I guess I do the same thing back home during meals with family and friends, too).

Later on, after a family style, rooftop tajine dinner and impromptu folk concert (with Shisha), we piled into deux petite taxis, and raced down to catch the final night of the Ouarazate music festival. We arrived just in time for the climactic ending with reggae legend, Alpha Blondy. It was a little scary at first, as I slowed down my brain long enough to realize I was in the middle of a sea of 3,000 mad, chanting, dancing, spirit-filled, crazed locals… it felt like a riot could break out at any moment… in the middle of the dark… in the middle of nowhere… the music was still raging as we snuck away at one in the morning to beat the crowd and make a clean getaway… coco rasta fantastique, mon…