A brief glimps into 2 brothers' adventures in Morocco.

We missed the bus this morning, waking up at 6h15 rather than 5h30. Alarm clocks can ring as loud as they want but, after a constant stream of 3-4 hour nights, they tend to fall on deaf ears. Knowing that I have a hard time doing anything in the mornings, I should have known better. We ran for the 6h30 bus but missed it anyways. It turns out that this was the bus that didn’t abide by the rule of “Moroccan time” (anywhere from 15 minutes- 1 hour late) but actually came 15 minutes early and continued on after a brief stop of only a few minutes. We never had a chance. It was 7h00 and we sat on the dusty steps in front of the bus stop. The small village was already awake and most shops were open, Grande Taxi drivers walked up and down the street calling out their destinations trying to fill their old Mercedes’ with 6 people before starting their journey. Even at that hour the street was a cacophony of sounds. Donkeys pulled heavy loads destined for the day’s market and their brays were accompanied by the shouts by their drivers calling to each other while crossing the streets. Sidewalk café’s were already filling up and boisterous conversations drifted through the streets. Car horns blasted to announce themselves in the mostly human and animal traffic on the streets. Buses approaching the station let out 2 or 3 blasts of the horn to herald their approach. There was a well aged man standing in front of the bus stop with his ear cocked towards the direction of the busses and upon hearing the call of the busses, he start to shout out the destination of the approaching bus. The calls of the Grande Taxi drivers carried over all of this, with the drivers shouting “Khenifra! Khenifra! Khenifra!” or “Fez! Fez! Fez1” or any combination of sourounding village names which were norhing more than gibberish to my unaccustomed ears.
We crossed the street to have some breakfast, stoping at a street vendor to buy some flat and dense corn-bread like cake to eat with our morning tea. We sat at the café watching the comings and goings of the street in the small Moroccan village. 2 mint teas and one café alongée later, the bus arrived and my eyelids were a little less heavy.

We crammed into the bus, preparing for our 7 hour journey. Thankfully we found seats in the back (we had to move a trash can and some baggage) and we squeezed into our seats and closed our eyes. We hadn’t had too much luck with sleeping on long Moroccan bus rides so we were already travel weary. The bus sputtered and took off with the door still open and the ticket collector still with one foot on the dirt road outside. Within minutes we were lurching through the hillsides of middle morocco. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the window, the changes in the landscape were drastic and awe inspiring. The village buildings we were in gave way to magnificent red clay mountains dotted with dusty green shrubs and small clay and tin roof huts. Young boys and old men herded goats and sheep through the hills never straying too far from their huts where lazy smoke curled up through makeshift chimneys announcing the warm meals that awaited them. The crowded bus bounce through potholes and I started to wonder if the driver was actually trying to careen through the man sized holes in the road that caused passengers and overhead luggage to be haphazardly tossed into the air. I was tired but I couldn’t bring myself to give into my heavy eyelids because I didn’t want to miss anything that flew past the window. Sky reaching red clay mountains slowly melted into a flat patchwork of yellow wheat and green field farm lands. Houses were sturdier and sat squarely in the middle of their fields. Farmers seemed to have already been in the fields for hours, hand harvesting the fields or pulling water from the small stone wells that sat between the farms. Sheeps and goats were kept in small pens here and next to the pens were the tired pickup trucks that the animals were hearded into to be sold at the market in the village. All at once the rolling farm lands were gone and I was looking out to a cluster of buildings that made another village. The bus stopped and our dust trail momentarily covered our window. More passengers boarded the bus to stand in the aisle between the seats. Some of the more experience had brought their own plastic stools. The driver turned up the qur’anic verses on the stereo as if to muster gods graces and with a collectively murmmered “Bismillah”we were off again. The womyn sitting next to me had a child in her lap and she was saying the prayers along with the cassette tape. The buildings dissapeard and I was looking out at a deep gorge filled with water at the bottom. A stream of donkeys carted rock in and out of the path reaching into the depth of the quarry. In the distance I could see men on horses and donkeys kicking up small dust clouds as they crisscrossed the trails of the red mountainous backdrop.

Assad handed me head phones and started switching through classics of Johnny Cash, Sinatra and modern jazz artists. We were driving through dessert now and huts became more sparse and far more crude in construction. This was the land of nomads. Mountains still held up the horizon and I was having flashbacks to perilous bus rides through Tibet. The bus took a hard turn and everyone was thrown to the left side of the bus. Before we could right outselves, the driver found another pothole and threw us into it, tossing us all back into the air. Somehow we landed back into our seats and I started wondering if this was only a precursser to the camel safari into the sahara that we were embarking on that night.

To enter Morocco, we’d found our way onto a ferry that crossed the straight of Gibraltar from Algeciras, Spain directly to Tangier. We had avoided Tangier and hoped straight into a taxi to take us to the light blue mountain city of Chefchaouen. We relaxed within the cities blue washed walls for a week, rather the 2 days we’d planned taking solace in the quick friendships we’d made and the relaxed mountain air of the city. Assad and I spent our first night playing music with moroccan’s from Rabat and Chefchaouen in the medina square late into the night. We learned Arabic songs and drum beats and started to dance as the group started to sing the ever popular Bollywood classics. In fact, most of our days were spent in the medina drinking mint teas and fresh squeezed orange juice watching the world go by. We hiked through the mountains and swam in a tropical oasis hidden at the base of a dry and dusty canyon. Most of our nights were spent relaxing on the rooftop of our pension where we’d layed out our sleeping bags on dusty mattresses to sleep under the mountain stars and save money. Every night someone started playing music on their second hand guitars and eventually the Spaniards would start up with flamenco classic or Spanish versions of backpacking favorites like Bob Marley and Manu Chao. Our third day, we spent hours with Mohammad, the self proclaimed “Hat Man,” sitting in his closet of a shop marveling at the piles of knitted goods that seem to fill every inch of the tiny shop. There was no lighting inside save a small candle that he eventually lit on the only free inch of his table. The whole place couldn’t have been any bigger than the smallest of walk-in closets that are so popular in suburban American homes. There was little to no air circulation and the whole place smelled of sweat and wool. Every few minutes Mohammad would dip his head down to take a drag from his Kif pipe before setting back to crocheting the brown hat he had in his lap or telling us about how we were all brothers of the moon, sun and stars. There was a permanent smile on his face and he started to laugh when we took over his shop and started pulling unsuspecting tourists inside telling them that it was us who had knit the bottomless piles of mountain wool hats and scarves and that we would give them a “special good price, only today.” We stuck around Chaouen with our friends for the first night of the Alegria Music Festival to watch a Flamenco performance and a giant concert of Gnawa and traditional Riff mountain music.

We left the calm of Chaouen on a miserably hot 3 hour bus ride into Fez. We had assigned seats which ended up being at the back of the bus perched on top of what we later learned was the engine. We sat back there sweating more than we would in any of the hamams we later visited. Exhausted we arrived in Fez where we were slapped in the face by the rush of tourists, taxi drivers and “faux guides” trying to steer us around the old medina for an unmentioned price. Hustlers tried to take us into their “brothers” shops or into their hotels. Finally we found a pension and bargained our way into being able to share a room with some of the new friends that we’d made on the bus. Fez was a mad rush and even though we’d arrived on Friday, the muslim holy day of rest and prayer, the crowds were still a bit overwhelming after the relative tranquility of Chaouen. We started to treat it all as a game and found joy in inventing country names as hustlers shouted “India?! Pakistan?! India? Pakistan? Pakistan!!! India!!!” at Assad and I. We settled with telling people we were either from Narnia or Mordor and eventually told people we were from Kenya, which was closer to the truth than our previous answers. Street hustlers became nothing more than a gauntlet to weave our way through and bargaining was now the only language we spoke. We tried to find some of the fresh squeezed orange juice that we’d fallen in love and when we thought we’d found it, we gulped down the refreshing drink only to discover small worms in the pulp at the bottom of our glass. A wonderful experience ☺ We were more than ready to retreat to the terrace of our hotel. The next day, the souks were all open and we launched ourselves headlong into the mix. Doing a tour of the leather tanneries and wandering through the different markets in and out of the medieval medina walls.

It was after Fez that we met up with our Couchsurfer Jaouad in his village to join him on the trip to the dessert that we’re driving to right now. He took us to a very local Hammam where we sat on tiled floors with a handful of old Moroccan men and washed ourselves with steaming hot water and that we ladled out of buckets. It was a very unexpected and new experience. There was noone there to give out the traditionally Hammam dead-skin pealing scrub so we will go try another one when we reach Marrakech.

Morocco is what I’ve been looking forward to all summer and thankfully it’s been an amazing experience for both Assad and I.


Update:

After writing this blog Assad and I headed to the Sahara for a camel safari and camping. I fell asleep under the stars with my mouth open. I woke up with a mouthful of sand. Lesson learned. We woke up to see the sun rise over the dunes that surrounded our campground. It was completely silent and beautifully serene. Down below I could hear my camel fart. The whole time we were together, my camel had horrible stinking diarrhea. Very endearing.

From the desert we headed to the breathtaking Todrah Gorges. I couldn’t crane my neck enough to see the tops of the majestic rockwalls of the gorge. We spent the night on the terrace of the hotel we were staying at. We were surrounded by grape vines and a rushing river down below.

From the gorge we went to Marakech, finally escaping our couchsurfer who turned out to be scamming us, and spent a very busy night in marakech. We did go to a wonderful Hamam and got scrubbed clean. Probably cleaner than we’re going to be in a long time. We left Marakech and headed back to the calm of Aix-en-Provence.

Morocco was a whirl-wind trip. I can’t wait to go back there and spend weeks just traveling through the small villages. You can’t help but fall in love with the place.