Photos by David Gooley
Letter from the Editor: A Taste of Luxury
August 3, 2004
Fast-forward to the 1965 Bentley Flying Spur in this month’s Driver’s
Notebook. Beyond its beauty and timeless elegance, the car is a damned good
driver, and apart from period brakes and the lack of air-conditioning, the old
girl broaches contemporary notions of—dare I say it—luxury.
Certainly, what
one fellow construes as luxurious may well be another’s consignment to hell. My
recent trip to Morocco helped to put it all into proper perspective. An
eight-hour trip in our driver’s clattering 1987 Mercedes-Benz diesel was capped
with an hour’s off-road adventure into the Sahara. We were deposited in the Erg
Chebbi sand dunes, 36 miles from the Algerian border and in the literal middle
of nowhere. There, we met our Berber guide and I was given driving
instructions for my new luxury ride. I was informed that camels—more accurately,
our one-humpers were dromedaries—are quite comfortable and reliable, but do not
suffer fools. I grew concerned.; function voidFunc() { } voidFunc();)
The landscape was otherworldly but the ride
interminable, and when we arrived at our destination, luxury was one again
redefined. A traditional Berber camp offered blankets on the sand inside
camelhair tents. Our guide started a fire and began preparing
dinner—tajine—a stewlike concoction eaten with bread and the right hand.
Then a biblically proportioned swarm of locusts blanketed the evening sky. Our
host was elated. He eagerly scooped up some of the interlopers and, in
commendable English, offered to roast them for me. “Berry tasty.” (Click image to enlarge)
The entire
spectacle was horrific. When I demurred, he looked genuinely bewildered, and I
suspect my rebuff was tantamount to not belching at an Eskimo banquet or
refusing to sleep with some chieftain’s wife. But I could not eat a locust, no
matter how tasty. I remembered standing in line for a hot dog at Monterey in
August. Suddenly, such quotidian fare seemed
positively…luxurious.
Robert Ross
Editor/Creative Director
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