In Morocco, Part One: The Road to the Coast

It started as a tingling behind the ears and along the forearms. The floor seemed to buckle and drop away beneath my feet. I put my glass of tea down and looked at my host.

Ahmed was talking about the day he got married. "My wedding day," he said, pressing a fat finger to a snapshot in a photo album. In the photo he was wearing Western clothes: a Don Ho print shirt and some creased slacks. His copper-colored eyes, which bulged slightly, reflected the camera’s flash dully.

He looked dazed, like someone walking away from a car wreck. We were sitting on a low, upholstered bench in the salon of Ahmed’s house in Chaoen, a village in the Rif Mountains of Morocco. It was my second day in the country and I had agreed to let this man act as my guide. I chose him by default, simply because I could not get rid of him and now I was sitting in his home, about to lose consciousness.

Ahmed put the picture album aside and fished a small purse out of the pocket of his robe. He was wearing a jelaba, the hooded robe traditionally worn by Moroccan men, and what looked like a hockey cap pulled down to his eyebrow. He wasn’t, I noticed, drinking any of his tea.

"So what you want?" Ahmed said. "Hash, kif, oil?"

"How about some food and stamps?"

"No this is the best!" he said, drawing a peg of blonde hash from the purse and biting off a chunk. "Double-zero, sputnik, top quality!"

When I didn’t say anything, Ahmed filled the silence by picking up his glass of mint tea and making loud slurping sounds over it. It was the kind of act an adult would perform to get a child to drink some vile soup. Clearly, the tea was drugged.

"Let’s go to the medina," I said, getting up to leave. Ahmed followed me out.

Until the early 1900s, Christians caught within the walls of Chaoen were routinely killed. According to my guidebook, the town was founded in 1471 specifically as a base to attack the Portugese near present-day Ceuta. Apparently the locals were now content merely to drug and rob infidels. Ahmed led me down labyrinthine cobbled streets too narrow for any car. At our approach a few robed figures disappeared into blue doorways.

Still unsteady from the effects of the drug, I followed the little, hooded man down steps and alleyways into the silent town.

Compared to the somnolent upper city, the medina, or marketplace, was a hive of activity. Merchants who had spread their wares out on blankets in the street called out for trade, while tatooed Berber women in loose-fitting burnouses stopped to gossip in the plazas.

It was the day before Ramadan and people were stockpiling food for the long nights ahead. Behind every door, it seemed, there was another workshop: weavers, woodcutters, leatherworkers and bakers. Ahmed showed me all this not out of a sense of civic pride, but because he would collect a commission on any non-perishable item I bought. Consequently, it was a bit of a struggle to get my marketing done.

At the end of the day, however, the damage wasn’t too bad. For the equivalent of $US 45 I had received two heavy loaves of round bread, a kilo of fresh goat’s cheese, a brick of coffee, a kilo of black olives, two kilos of fruit, another kilo of fried pastries soaked in honey, a half dozen postcards, one hand-woven blanket broadly striped in mauve and tangerine, a chunk of indifferent blonde hash and the invaluable knowledge that I was free to act like an asshole when necessary.

Within a day or two of their arrival in Morocco, most visitors find themselves seated in a rug merchant’s shop negotiating for a rug (or blanket) that they never intended to buy. This is not because of the irresistible quality of the textiles, or the merchant’s firm conviction that no visit to Morocco is complete without a souvenir rug. It is because of guys like Ahmed and a cultural misunderstanding.

Western travellers typically put on their best manners when they go abroad so as not to be mistaken for ugly Americans, boorish Germans, or British soccer hooligans. This ordinary politesse is construed in Morocco as a sign of weakness, if not outright stupidity. To prevent this misunderstanding, Moroccans like Ahmed should be shouted at and berated, if not physically abused. After years of French rule, it’s only what they expect.

For a New Yorker, like myself, it’s refreshing to find another place where you can behave like an asshole and the locals will greet you as one of their own.

The next day I drove south. The plan was to go as far as Marrakech and then bear west to the coast. I’d heard there was some good surf there.

The van I’d bought in London was running well, and the road through the mountains was clear. In the broad valleys of the Rif small-plot farmers could be seen tilling their fields with cows and donkeys hitched to wooden ploughs. Children offered baskets of bright red fruit for sale at the roadside and men in jelabas hacked at the hillsides with hoes. At a turning in the road, I glimpsed a young shepherd in a dirty pink snow jacket. She stood among the shadows in a grove of fruit trees, guiding her goats with a hail of rocks.

Late in the day I pulled up at the ancient Roman city of Volubilis. The bus with the inevitable Japanese tourists had gone and I was left alone among the ruins. Volubilis is a seam in the quilt of history. It was one of the far southern outposts of the Holy Roman Empire. Later, it was used as a quarry by the Moroccan Emir Mouley Idris II to build his own imperial city at Meknes.

Beyond the jumbled stones of a collapsed archway, I found the mosiac tiles of a remarkably well-preserved bath. Would the Roman worthy soaking in that bath 1800 years ago have guessed that one day his city would be a heap of rubble overlooking a plain of olive trees?

It was already dark when I parked the van inside the gates of the Hills of Zerhoune, a campground a few kilometers south of Volubilis. That December evening the place was deserted. It had the look of another abandoned kingdom -- a miniature Xanadu cast in plaster. "Hello," I called out in my bad French, "is anyone there?" In reply a faint light illuminated a series of rooms in the largest building. Eventually a young man emerged from a dark portico carrying a kerosene lantern.

"Welcome," he said. "I’m sorry, but the power’s gone out again." He was, he said, the owner of Zerhoune. By the lamplight I could see that he was a man of about 30 with a kind, intelligent face. We agreed on a price and I returned to the van to make my dinner.

The water had just begun to boil when I was startled by the crunch of gravel nearby. It was the patron, bearing a silver tray with a bowl of harira -- a spicy vegetable soup -- surrounded by fresh cakes and dates. "After a long journey," he said, "it is good to eat." It was, I realized later, the first night of Ramadan.

The road to Marrakech took me through the Middle Atlas and along the northern flank of the High Atlas, which at this season were capped in snow. Two days of driving brought me to the outskirts of the city.

From a distance Marrakech looks as if it could be a town in Southern California. It is a low brown city, below shining white peaks, presided over by an exclamation of royal palms.Up close, it is nothing like California.

Traffic is a poor word to describe the clanking, honking, bellowing knot of vehicles in Marrakech. There are trucks held together with baling wire and paint; there are donkey carts driven by toothless old men in robes; there were scooters and motorcycles and bicycles and camel carts and horses and those ageless Mercedes sedans that ply the highways between towns. And all of it seems to be headed toward the Place Djemaa.

The guidebook said there was a campground not far from the Place Djemaa, near the center of the city. I drove to where it should have been, but could find nothing except a large hotel and a construction site. Criss-crossing the neighboring blocks, I passed a couple of bedraggled European backpackers. I widened my search then doubled back to where the campground should have been. The same two backpackers were there, seated in the shade of a pepper tree, reading the same guidebook I had.

I stopped the van. "Hey do you know where there’s a campground around here?" I asked. The fellow with the book in his hand and a long beard fixed me with a forlorn look. His partner, a stout green-eyed girl with braids, walked over to the van. "We’re looking for it too," she said."It should be right around here."

"Yea, but it isn’t. Why don’t you hop in and we’ll look together?" Sam and Alex were their names. She was Sam -- Samantha -- and he was Alex. They were from Glasgow and they figured Marrakech was a great holiday spot. "Aye, it’s mad," Sam enthused, "in the square at night there’s magicians and jugglers and wee monkeys hopping about." Alex told me they had been there three weeks and were looking for cheaper accomodation than the hotel they were staying in.

We drove around for awhile and were finally told that the campground was now the construction site -- soon to be an office block -- but there was a new campground out on the road to Casablanca. I dropped Sam and Alex off at Djemaa el Fna Square, or Place Djemaa, near their hotel. The square was bustling. It was sunset and the call to prayer could be heard coming from minarets all over the city. Vendors rolled up their wares and the citizens of Marrakech hurried home or to mosque in every direction.

"Iftar," Alex said, shouldering his backpack. During the month of Ramadan, Iftar is the end of the day’s fast. "They’ll be back after dark."

"Where was that hotel you were staying at?" I asked.

"In the medina, the old city down that street," Sam said, pointing to a high stone archway and the labyrinthe of stalls beyond. "Aye, it’s a bit dear though," Alex said. "One hundred dirhams a night for the both of us." At the current exchange rate, 100 dirhams was about $10 US.

"I don’t suppose they have valet parking?" I asked. "No," Alex said, "but this one has a garage." The building he indicated was the Hotel CTM and it sat above a guarded garage. It would do.

We shook hands goodbye and I watched Sam and Alex disappear into the souk before I turned the van around and parked it beneath the Hotel CTM. There was a restaurant on the roof of the hotel that overlooked the Place Djemaa. As it turned out, I spent some time up there watching the ebb and flow of city life in Marrakech.

On my first full day in town I wandered deep into the souks, confident that I would find my way out eventually. Near sunset I had to admit that I was hopelessly lost. I employed a guide to take me back to my hotel. He suggested many detours -- to the old synagogue, the palace, to his uncle the rug merchant’s shop -- but I was adamant. There was an ominous rumbling in my guts and I knew I would need a bathroom soon.

Over the next few days I became well acquainted with the bathrooms of the Hotel CTM. They were cool, dark squat toilets cast in heavy stone and kept meticulously clean by a trio of silent old women.

The women seemed to monitor the course of my illness. Every time I shuffled from my room, down the dark corridor to the WC one of the crones would be parked in a corner, propped up with a broom, watching. Perhaps they were hoping I would drop dead so they could claim my possessions under a little-known codicil to Koranic law bequeathing all earthly goods carried by dead hotel guests to the first chambermaid on the scene.

Gradually, I got better and took long walks through the winding alleyways of the old city and along the broad avenues of the new.

Samuel Johnson wrote, "One town, one country is very like another. There are indeed minute discriminations of places and manners, which a traveller seldom stays long enough to investigate and compare."

Marrakech has many of the same characters -- the whores, hustlers an shopkeepers -- that inhabit any city. It is its situation that is unique. Marrakech is where Africa meets the Arab world.

It is also a place where ancient ways collide with the twenty-first century. In the earth-colored old town vendors stalls crowd narrow alleys overhung with multicolored canvas. In one quarter of the old city, tanners treat hides in vats of foul-smelling broth just as they did 1000 years ago. Across the Place Djemaa, where you can find mathematicians, fire jugglers, female impersonators, boxers and snake charmers entertaining the crowds at most any time of the day, the white towers of the new city seem quiet by comparison. In the new city there are office blocks and international hotels, teleboutiqes and stainless-steel cafes behind plate-glass windows. The only thing it lacks is the life of the old city.

If they were disappointed with my recovery, the old women did not show it. They continued to monitor my progress, in shifts, until the day I left. When my bags were packed and I started down the corridor for the last time, I met one of the sentinels at the head of the stairs. She was leaning on a mop and the only sign of life was the flickering motion beneath her hooded eyes. I put a 100-dirham note in her gnarled hand. "Better luck next time," I said.

"In shallah," she nodded.

The road to the coast was a ruler-straight line dotted in places by dusty towns whose names I never bothered to learn. On the sides of the road shepherds slept through the heat of the day while their flocks nibbled at the sparse grass. Strung across one low hill, a camel train navigated the red expanse between settlements. And in every town I passed there was at least one character wearing a Nike baseball cap, marked by the distinctive "swoosh" of the logo. What can the brand mean to a Moroccan shepherd? What does he have in common with Michael Jordan? Does the hat show that he belongs to an internationalist cult of "just do it", or is it just a status thing, like a pair of Gucci loafers worn in New York? Or maybe it was just an entry in a ledger back at Nike headquarters; a checkmark, another consumer unit sold.

The Atlantic came as a surprise. The van rounded a corner on a hilltop and the windscreen filled with blue. Far below, at the edge of the sea, was the ancient city of Essaoira. Beyond the city walls, three brown islands guarded the port. They were named on the map as the Isles of Mogador.

I made lunch at a campground two kilometers south of the city and smoked some of that mediocre blonde hash for dessert. Then I fell asleep. The soft patter of rain on the roof of the van woke me up. It was late in the afternoon and all was still. Even the dogs outside the campground that barked at every moving thing had gone quiet. I pulled on a raincoat, threw some things in a bag and set out across the dunes to the beach.