Jardin Majorelle

Jardin Majorelle is in Marrakech. It's a beautiful garden. It's very quiet and serene. It was fun to wander around with my camera taking lame pictures.

Most of the plants in the garden were cacti.

Since I spent some of my formative years living in Las Vegas, I was prepared not to be impressed. Until I saw these babies. Can you tell that they look fuzzy? Has anybody ever seen fluffy cacti before? I hadn't. I was duly impressed. Two thumbs up.

Jardin Majorelle was also home to significant quantities of aloe plants. I thought about breaking a leaf (is that what they're called?) open, but I wasn't sure what the Moroccan legal policy was on aloe breakage. I'd hate to go to an African prison for the sake of satisfying a curious whim.

The garden also had colorful flowers.

Good thing I spent $900 on a macro lens so that I could get shots like this, huh Steve?

This was my favorite flower shot. I'm kind of a sucker for purple.

This, however, was my favorite shot of the day. Turtles! I heart turtles! They were so outrageously cute stretching their tiny necks that I couldn't resist taking a pictures. Despite my 105mm lens, this was as close as I could get (they were kind of far away).

Fun fact: people in Morocco (probably tourists) carve their names into stalks of bamboo. It never would have occurred to me to carve my initials (or Steve's) into a stalk of bamboo. I guess my love doesn't run as deep as Ronald's (or did Ronald just exhibit a healthy sense of self worth by carving his full name? I really can't tell).

As a bonus, I got this great shot of Brahim's brother Ahmed. This the person with whom I have spent hours walking through the streets of Marrakesh. Two thumbs up.