It's true, ladies and gentlemen: While absent from The Gazette for two weeks I was gallivanting in the Kingdom of Morocco in the company of my wife, and I took a few photographs while I was at it (click HERE to view the photos) just so as to have something to do with my hands besides eat, the food there being especially delicious. And I refer not only to the tagine, for which the country is famous, but also to the french fries, which my wife requested when she got tired of tagine and which we both found to be the best we have ever had anywhere, even though we are not experts. I won't even go into the orange juice, except to say that when I got home and poured myself a glass of the 100 percent pure Florida variety that I had been accustomed to, from a container, I nearly spit it out, since all of a sudden it tasted like battery acid. Now I fear that Morocco has spoiled me forever in that department.

If you contemplate going there yourself, I can advise you that Casablanca, despite the romance of its name and the sentimental association of the movie, is a dump, and you should do as we did, if that's where your plane lands, and hie yourself straight from the airport to the train station and buy yourself a first-class ticket to Marrakech, or Fez if you prefer, and count your trip started only when the train pulls out of the station. It's a comfortable ride, and soon enough you will be in an ancient walled city that is like something out of the Thousand and One Nights, all narrow crooked lanes, donkeys, veiled women, hooded men looking like medieval monks, and gawking tourists like yourself. Not to mention aggressive merchants trying to sell you curved daggers and pointy-toed slippers and not letting go of your arm until you tell them your final price. (As a last resort you can buy a dagger and stab them.)

Besides Marrakech and Fez, we journeyed up into the High Atlas Mountains, where we visited a couple of Berber villages, and north to Chefchaouen, where the second language is not French but Spanish, to my great relief, since I have a little experience with Spanish while my French is limited to asking, "Where is the pen of my aunt?" which I mastered in high school but never got beyond. I asked that question over and over in Marrakech, especially to the vendors of daggers and slippers, and never got an answer I could comprehend. I don't think they speak the kind of French I learned.

I was greatly handicapped in the photography department, first by the weather, which consisted largely of rain, and second by the people, who, with the exception of the Berbers in the mountains, heartily objected to having their picture taken. I can't say I really blame them. If I were minding my own business in Schenectady and some outlandishly dressed foreigner popped up in front of me and started clicking his camera, I would probably be annoyed too. But they were especially vehement about it, even though, God knows, they were protected enough by their clothing.

I mean, when a woman is cloaked head to toe in black, with not even a slit for her eyes, what harm can be done by taking her picture? But object they did. One such a woman actually gave me the finger, which was an experience I will always treasure, such a combination of modesty and obscenity not being common in this world.

In any event, I was reduced to taking pictures on the sly, shooting from the hip and moving away quickly. Or pretending to be photographing my wife, who helpfully posed where I told her, and then swinging the camera a little to the side and shooting my real target. It was very different from India, where a lot of people welcomed my approaches and some even approached me first. I did what I could under difficult circumstances.

A special challenge was Chefchaouen, the town that is famously painted blue. I had seen pictures of the place all aglow in the sunshine, and I wanted to get some of my own like that, so you can imagine how disappointed I was when we arrived there and it was raining, just as it had been raining everywhere else for at least half of every day. We had only three days left in our trip by then, so there was nothing to do but make the best of it, and as I started taking pictures in the gloom I gradually discovered they were more interesting than the glowing swimming-pool-like pictures of the place that you can find on the Internet. (Try Google Images.) And the slimy green algae that besmirched the walls as a result of a month of steady rain made them more interesting yet, and weirder. So you can check those out and see if you agree.

Romantic that I am, I had of course assumed the town was painted blue for some deeply mystical reason, but when I inquired I got the same answer from everyone: It's to protect against mosquitoes.

Protect against mosquitoes? Blue paint?

Yes, more than one citizen assured me, the mosquitoes smell that particular color of paint, and they refuse to cross the threshold.

Well, that's certainly amazing, I replied. After thousands of years of experience, you are the only people in the world to have discovered something as simple as that, and no one else has even been smart enough to copy your discovery. I offered right away to nominate them for a Nobel Prize, and I told my wife as soon as we get home we're going to paint our own house blue. She said our swimming pool is already blue but it fairly swarms with mosquitos in the summer, so I didn't get very far with her. She has always been stubborn when it comes to science.

But I liked Chefchaouen anyway, despite the gloom, the algae, the silly superstition, and I will long remember our first night there, when the rain stopped and the clouds blew around in front of a full moon. We sat in the plaza at an outdoor cafe eating fried goat cheese with honey, almonds and cinnamon, while looming above us was the crenelated wall of the ancient casbah and the call to prayers wailed from a minaret off to one side. I said, "Even a full moon. Can you believe that?"

(To view Carl Strock's photos from his trip to Mexico last year, click HERE. To view photos from his trip to India, click HERE and HERE.)