Abomey’s reputation is larger than life, where you can still catch a glimpse of the throne set on human skulls, or the palace walls painted red with human blood. But in the kingdom whose kings descended from the son of a princess who slept with a panther, what impressed me most was left unspoken.

The Harmattan descends upon Benin in a pale, chilling mist, obscuring the horizon, blotting out the buildings in other neighborhoods, and filling the air with choking dust. No other season I’ve experienced, from the monsoons of Southeast Asia to the 6 month Central American drought, is as oppressive. It’s hard not to be impressed by just how powerful the Harmattan really is, and in Benin, the Harmattan is not just a wind, it’s a season.

When the captain started the diesel engines the giant steel military ship shuddered to life. It backed away clumsily from the dock and pointed towards the port's narrow mouth. Then, pressing past the tip of the rock jetties and through the first of the Atlantic's first swells, we were seaward-bound. Our whale-watching expedition in Benin had begun.

New Year's Eve, 2007 finds us at the gateway to North Africa: Tangier, Morocco. A sin-city only a generation ago, Tangier is now poised between the charm of yesteryear and the promise of modernity. Elsewhere in Morocco it was hard not to be conscious of the events of centuries before, but Tangier's heyday was in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and we wandered the narrow streets mindful not of ancient sultans but of the Beat Generation's Usual Suspects.

The best memories of travel are of the people we meet along the way. This is, after all, why we travel: because we learn as much about ourselves as we do about others, but what we learn about ourselves we learn through others' eyes. In that spirit, one of my fondest memories of Tangier will be of Mustapha Cherqui, the caretaker of St. Andrew's Church.

Touring Morocco means spending long hours looking up, because the Islamic architects that crafted Morocco's most dramatic cities carried their talents high up into the sky in the form of splendid minarets. In fact, were looking up not so dangerous - it seems like every time I lifted my head I narrowly escaped being run over by a donkey bearing goods down the cities' narrow streets - I would have spent more time admiring the delicate craftsmanship that makes Moroccan cities such a pleasure to experience.