Crossing the Atlas (2017)

The road snakes against the high Atas, 2300 meters above sea level. We motored through dust and brush, heat and rock, Giant cranes expanded the mountain rode as we drove through it and sheep herders tended to their flock on the same slopes.

Caterpillars loaded rubble onto beds of 20 ton trucks and laborers shoveled clay bits into packs attached along the side of their donkeys.

History watched skeptically as present made its case and future stood around the corner weighing the likely hood that it's welcome in this land.

This was Morocco. It could have been Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Uruq.

The internet was born with my generation. My mom (Master in Math) took years to adopt the web. How do you get  youth raised on the Koran or the Bible to adopt bitcoin, or Python, which even I understand only superficially.

If the future of work is decentralized, hyper technical and reinventing itself every generation - how do people outside the top 10% keep up?

The deep red and orange adobe clay punctuated the lush greenness of the surrounding vegetation as we descended from the peak of the range.

The gnarly alpines shaped a bowl that encased an entire canyon with an oasis at the bottom and river flowing through its heart. The scale of the ecosystem was astounding.

I understand how someone feels humbled by such immensity of nature and assigns a divine will to its origin, thus resigning themselves from the initiative to understand and reshape their environment.

Clay mud brick huts seemed to sprout straight out of the mountains that donates raw materials for construction.  The modern dwellings look quite similar stylistically and structurally to the neighboring kasbahs built 1300 years ago,

I made friends with the owner of my hostel at Fez. The building was a newly remodeled riad that the proprietor was quickly turning into a Social Club where local mingled with back packers, the old with the new.

Its a new take on an old hostel model like a Wework for travelers. The other hostel owners feel threatened (according to my friend) by this innovation and try to make life difficult for the entrepreneur.

"People are hoping that you fail" he said wistfully. The culture seems inward looking. It celebrates tradition and skeptically holds reinvention at elder arms length.