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Letter from Morocco
November 29, 2021 Issue

The New Luxury Vacation: Being Dumped in the Middle of Nowhere

The joys--and absurdities--of finding oneself abandoned in a desolate
landscape.

By Ed Caesar

November 22, 2021

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Person looking out at red mountains
During the various lockdowns, unable to travel, I had longed for
adventure. Here it was--with an enticing sense of scale.Illustration
by Tom Haugomat

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One recent afternoon in Morocco, a fifty-nine-year-old former Royal
Marine Commando named Phil Asher walked me into a desolate valley in
the Atlas Mountains, shook my hand, and abandoned me. Asher, whom I
had met only the previous evening, has a gray beard, a piercing gaze,
and a bone-dry sense of humor. He teaches survival skills to people
who have never fast-roped from a helicopter or killed their dinner.
That morning, he had spent several hours educating me on the
rudiments of living in the wilderness, alone. Now I was in the
wilderness, alone.

The travel firm that organized my trip, Black Tomato, calls this
experience Get Lost--a playful misnomer, since the idea is to do the
opposite. A client is dropped somewhere spectacular and scantly
populated, and challenged to find his or her way out within a given
time period. From the moment that Asher left me in the valley, I was
allotted two days to walk to a rendezvous point eighteen miles away,
over and around mountains.

Published in the print edition of the November 29, 2021, issue, with
the headline "Only Disconnect."
[ed_caesar]
Ed Caesar is a contributing staff writer to The New Yorker. His most
recent book is "The Moth and the Mountain."
More:TravelVacationsLuxuryRich PeopleTravellersMoroccoTravel Bureaus
TravellingLostExpeditionsAdventures

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