30 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
letter from morocco
ONLY DISCONNECT
Wealthy travellers are paying people to dump them in the middle of nowhere.
by ed caesar
ILLUSTRATION BY TOM HAUGOMAT
O
ne 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 sev-
eral hours educating me on the rudi-
ments 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.
I had stuffed my backpack with ev-
erything that I thought I might need,
within strict guidelines set by Asher: no
matches, no tent, no phone. My pack
contained clothes, paper maps, a com-
pass, two G.P.S. trackers, spare batter-
ies, notepads and pens, a big knife, a
sleeping bag, flashlights, fire-lighting
equipment, dried food, a few energy-rich
snacks, three litres of water, a mosquito
shelter, a roll mat, and a tarpaulin. I also
carried an old Samsung handset with
its sim card removed, so that I could
take photographs. Asher reckoned that
my bag weighed fifty pounds. I was
going to trek for two days, at altitude,
with the equivalent of my six-year-old
daughter strapped to my back.
If I got hurt, I was to press an SOS
button on one of the trackers, which also
featured a rudimentary text-message ca-
pability, for sub-SOS emergencies. Asher
would leave another three litres of fresh
water at the site of my next camp, along
with some firewood. Other than that,
the assumption was that I’d navigate un-
assisted to the finish line.
“See you in a couple of days,” Asher
said, as he left me. “Don’t do anything
I wouldn’t do!”
He walked away at 3 p.m. Soon af-
terward, I deliberated whether or not
to erect the tarpaulin. The mosquito
shelter was mesh: excellent for keeping
out bugs but not the rain. Though the
area where I found myself was close to
the desert, it sometimes rains—and
sometimes violently. The tarpaulin was
waterproof but tricky to set up. That
morning, in a tarp-training seminar,
Asher had emphasized the need for
geometric precision, accurate assessment
of wind direction, the proper use of
knots for the guy ropes. I’m not a knot
person, and I had butchered every at-
tempt to make the correct series of loops
to fix the ropes.
I decided to skip the tarp. The sky
had been blue all afternoon. I wanted
to gaze at the stars once the sun went
down. Moreover, I was uncertain about
what kinds of animal or human threats
I faced. On the long drive into the moun-
tains, I had been informed that I was
in a part of the Atlas range known as
the Anti-Atlas, which is near the Sa-
hara desert. That morning, Asher had
aired the possibility—rather casually, I
thought—of “the odd scorpion, and
maybe some snakes.” It also seemed pos-
sible, if unlikely, that someone living in
the area might choose to do a lone hiker
harm. I preferred a clear view of what-
ever might approach my sleeping spot.
On a f lat and sheltered patch of
gravel, I laid out my roll mat and put
up the mosquito shelter. Satisfied to
have completed these tasks, I admired
During the various lockdowns, unable to travel, I had longed for adventure. Here it was—with an enticing sense of scale.
