In Morocco, Part 2: On the Point

A welter of trails ran through the thorny scrub that covered the dunes. Partway along the path, I found a camel barring my way.

The beast was enormous, perhaps two meters high at the shoulder, and it showed no inclination to move.

"Hey," I yelled, throwing my arms up to shoo it away. "Hey, dicknose!"

The dromedary tore another mouthful of leaves from the top of a bush and cast a baleful eye down toward me, but otherwise it did not move. I found another track to the beach.

The old town of Essaouira was built by the Portuguese in the 1500s as a base from which to conduct their trade on the Barbary Coast. On this late winter afternoon with the leaden sky and the wind drawing hissing veils of sand over the beach, it looked as it might have 500 years ago -- a lonely outpost on the edge of a wild sea.

It was nearly sunset by the time I passed through the arched portal cut in the meter-thick walls of the old city. Before me was a cobblestone plaza where merchants had laid out their wares, beyond that two narrow passageways between ochre walls led into the souk. I chose the larger of the two and set off.

In a moment the stillness of the town was rent apart by a voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was the muezzin’s call to prayer. The voice was young, plaintive and passionate, as if the singer could call heaven to earth by the force of his devotion alone.

Around me shutters were closing and rugs were being rolled up as the men of Essaouira prepared to go to mosque. I felt a chill of recognition then, that rare elixir of travel when in a timeless ritual the world seems new again.

I lingered into the evening. Down by the harbor fishermen had set up tables lit by kerosene lamps. There, for a few dirham, you could point to the fish you wanted and have it grilled up on the spot. I sat down at a wooden table with a few other tourists and some locals. We ate without utensils, using only our right hands.

Later, as I was leaving a cafe in Essaouira's main plaza, I was approached by a young man. He was tall with African rather than Arab features. He said he was from the south, one of the Taureg tribe. It was impossible for me to say if this was true, since he was wearing jeans and a tight tee-shirt. He shivered a little in the cool night air.

"You are alone?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied.

"What do you do here?"

"I am traveling, surfing," I said.

"I am also traveling," he said, "and looking for work, but it's hard."

"Yes," I said, "I imagine it is."

"Buy me a coffee," he suggested.

I turned him down and made an excuse about meeting someone at a hotel. I wasn't interested in what he was selling. Walking back to my van, I wondered what would become of the boy who apparently had nothing to offer but himself.

The following evening I was driving down the coast road long after the sun had set, looking for Tamri Plage. Grinding up yet another headland in second gear, I spotted a few lights south of the village of Tamri, and a faint track leading off the road. I followed the track down, around several steep switchbacks, until at last it opened onto a broad flat area. The lights I had seen were two campfires, burning beside the low dunes. I pulled the van up near one of the fires and got out.

There were three long-haired men illuminated by the firelight. One had a guitar.

"Hello," I tried.

"Bon soir," came the reply.

We shook hands in a brief round of introductions and I immediately forgot everyone's name although I did learn that they were surfers from Lacanau.

I found a bottle of not-so-bad Portuguese wine I'd stashed in the van and the Frenchmen rolled a few spliffs. One of the guys had been to Morocco before and he was telling tales of his last visit that I could only partly understand because of my poor French.

Later that night we had a visitor from town. A middle-aged man wheeled up on an ancient bicycle to a round of warm greetings. Evidently, he knew this crew. He was an odd character, perhaps 45 with a bushy mop of black hair, western clothes, a broad, black mustache and a matching soul patch below his lower lip. He was, in fact, the spitting image of Frank Zappa.

I mentioned the resemblance and the French surfers cracked up. "Oui, oui, il est Zappa!" they shouted.

Our guest did not seem put out by any of this. "C'est vrai," he admitted with just the trace of a smile, "je suis Frank Zappa."

I was waiting to see what Mr. Zappa wanted. After several weeks in Morocco I had come to expect that any local who sought out Westerners wanted something. But I was wrong about Zappa; all he wanted was to talk to somebody who wasn't from his tiny village.

Out of his rucksack Zappa pulled a small radio receiver, a tin kettle and a block of mint tea. He filled the kettle with water and put in on the fire while the Frenchmen rolled another round of spliffs. Zappa switched on the radio, adjusted the tuner and set it down beside the fire.

Far from the lights of any city, the stars seemed brighter there, closer. Over the static of the wind and water, I could hear a trumpet solo -- cool, round notes riding on a syncopated beat.

"Jazz from Paris," Zappa explained in an aside to me. He listened to the fluid blue notes of the horn with his eyes closed and nodded. "Miles Davis," he said. "Yes."

I awoke out of a black sleep to a scratching noise on the outside of the van. It was daylight. Then the scratching noise again near the door of the van. I wrenched the sliding door open and found myself face to face with a small boy.

"Avez-vous un stylo?" he asked. He was about nine years old with coal-black eyes. His cheeks and tunic were smudged with dirt and he had a dried booger fastened firmly below his nose.

"What!?" I demanded. The boy took a step backward, frightened by what he had found in the van and repeated in a small voice, "stylo."

"You want a pen?" I said in English. He looked at me blankly. "Un stylo?"

"Oui," he said.

I looked around, over the kid’s head, to see who he belonged to, but there was no one. The French surfers were gone and the camper parked beside the other fire was locked up tight. "OK," I said while I fished around in my bags, "un stylo," and handed him the pen I had found.

He stared at the tool in his hand with surprise and then ran off, shouting "merci" over his shoulder.

"You’re welcome," I said.

Tamri Plage is a white, sandy beach in a wide bay. In the morning sun, the water was bottle green. There were small waves, breaking unevenly, but no surfers.

Less than 100 kilometers south of Tamri is Agadir. The road to Agadir follows the contour of the coast, looping into bays, climbing over headlands and passing through the occasional village. The country here is dry, dotted with low, scrubby trees and thorn bushes, patches of brown grass and everywhere else the hammada, or stony desert. From the road I could see a few points that looked certain to have a wave, but no surfers.

In the previous months, driving down the Atlantic coast of Europe, wherever I found waves, or the potential for surf, I found surfers. In Morocco, large swaths of wave-rich coastline are watched over only by shepherds and their goats. It wasn’t until I’d gone halfway to Agadir that I spotted them.

Gazing down from a hilltop, I saw a cluster of 20 or so multicolored vans scattered along the edge of a plateau fronting the ocean. From that distance they looked like so many toy cars left in a sandbox by a bored child. When I drove in among them I saw that the sandbox had all the signs of a semi-permanent encampment. Around the vans were the accoutrements of a nomad suburbia: tents, tarps, fire rings, rugs and lawn chairs.

I parked my van a ways back from the cliff edge and walked to where a man was staring out over the waveless sea.

"Not much going on is there?" I said.

"It’s been flat for a week," he replied. "But, it can only get better." He was in his twenties with long hair and a wild blonde beard. He looked like a Viking, but the stoic way he stood, with arms folded across his chest, reminded me of a farmer surveying a failed crop.

The farmer, I learned later, was named Aaron. He was a New Zealander who had been working in London. He and his girlfriend, Sarah, had driven an old Mercedes van down from Britain, surfing in France, Spain and Portugal along the way. They had been camped on that plateau for three weeks.

After Aaron gave me the lay of the land, I put the van back on the road and drove to Agadir. In 1960, Agadir was leveled by an earthquake . Fifteen thousand people were killed in the quake and the city was eventually rebuilt as a tourist destination. With its broad avenues and high-rise hotels, modern Agadir could be any resort on the Costa del Sol. This newness and focus on tourism makes Agadir unique among Moroccan cities.

By the town beach I found a string of posh cafes and a three-day old copy of the Times of London. I took a seat in one of the cafes and ordered a beer. The beer wasn’t very good -- a fizzy lager called Flag -- but it was cold and it went down easy on that hot day.

Agadir seemed to have its own climate as well. Further north in Essaouira it was still winter, yet here on the beach it was midsummer. Over the water parasails bloomed, on the sand girls in bikinis sunned themselves and at the café tables nearby ageing Germans and French roasted to fine red hues in the afternoon sun.

It was all very pleasant, but before the sun had set I’d returned to the plateau and parked my van in the suburb of surfers.

The next day there was a small swell and the area around camp started to show its potential. I could see three or four distinct breaks from the plateau and, by the time I’d finished my morning coffee, all of them had a few riders.

It had been almost a month since my last surf and I took my time getting into the water. The board needed to be waxed, the wetsuit fished out of the bin where I’d stowed it and I had to stretch. Meanwhile, I noticed my neighbor had emerged from his white Renault van and was gazing at the ocean over a cup of tea.

"Morning," I ventured.
"Morning," he confirmed.
"Off for a surf?" he asked.
"Yea," I said. "Do I need booties?"
"Depends where you go. Where you off to?"
I pointed to the wave peeling below us, "Figured I’d go out here," I said.
"Doorsteps? Nah, you don’t need booties there. It’s mostly sand."

After my surf, when I’d picked my way up the bluff to where the van was parked, I found my neighbor and his girlfriend sprawled on a rug, soaking up the sun.
"’Ave a good one?" he asked.
"Yea, fun," I said. "It’s been awhile; it was good to get wet."
"Didn’t get your name before," he said, extending his hand. "Mine’s Simon, and this is Esther."

Simon was in his late thirties; Esther looked to be about 10 years younger. They had been camped on the point for a month, having surfed their way down through Europe. They met in Hong Kong, Simon told me later, where they were both working, and took off on their journey more than a year ago. With stops to work in Amsterdam or London, they planned continue for several years yet.

Before the day was out, Simon had introduced me to the rest of the crew: Aaron -- who I’d met earlier -- and Sarah; their pals Grant and Amanda, also from New Zealand; and Simon the Younger, an Aussie with a thick, black beard.

In addition to the crew camped on the point there were other surfers who were staying in the nearby village of Taghazout. Over the next few days I met Matt, Claire, Smitty, Beefy and Pat who had all rented rooms in town. Patrick Malone was the only other American I met in Morocco. A goofy foot from Northern California, Pat had taken the Marrakech Express down from Tangier and a bus out to the coast. He was on the first leg of a world-circling surfari.

There were, of course, other surfers camped on the plateau. A cadre of young Germans had set up tents overlooking La Source, a spring of questionable quality with a reef break of the same name just below it. There were also the French hippies parked up the hill in the van emblazoned with the slogan "Free Tibet" and the Brits bivouacked in the scrub on the southern edge of the plateau. Each day brought one or two new arrivals, refugees from the northern winter.

In Morocco, where there are tourists, there is commerce. It started at dawn with one of the three Mohammeds delivering fresh baguettes and oranges on his moped. Later the local kids would tote trays of sweet donuts from town, shouting, "Bini, bini, bini!" As the sun climbed higher in the sky we would be visited by carpet sellers, fruit vendors, olive oil impresarios and little Afid with his goats. One toothless old merchant lugged a dozen rugs up to the plateau every other day. He was quite mad. We’d come to know him as Fuck You because some Aussie jokers had taught him that the English words for "hello" were "fuck you." When he hove into view with his rugs, he always waved and called out that cheery greeting; we waved back and replied in kind. The whole procession was a bit like the Home Shopping Channel, except you couldn’t turn it off.

In the evening things were quieter. It was still the month of Ramadan, so visitors to the plateau would disappear as the sun dipped toward the horizon. Sunset cast a spell of its own on the camp. People would stop stirring their cook pots to watch our star vanish on the western rim of the Atlantic.

"Le rayon verte," one of the French surfers remarked as we stood by the edge of the plateau to see the end of another day.

"Sorry?" I asked.

"The green ray," he said. "At the moment of the sun’s disappearance you sometimes see a flash of green light. If you are lucky enough to see this, you will find true love."

I looked again, but the sun was gone.

Two days before Christmas the swell arrived. In the pre-dawn darkness you could hear it rumbling below the plateau and feel the slight tremor in the earth as the sets slammed ashore. First light found the crew in the line-up at Anchor Point. Simon, Simon, Aaron, Grant, Matt, Pat and Beefy were all there, bobbing in the swell and grinning.

"Guess somebody was a good boy," Pat called over, "we got our Christmas present early."

"Yea, it was too dark to see when I paddled out," Matt said, "but this is fairly well lined up."

I looked past the old factory that gives the place its name and down the long, rocky sweep of the point with its cluster of earthen houses and date palms to the hills in the east, just touched with the sun’s fire, then back to the surfers around me. "It’s amazing," I said.

Seaward, a set was walling up as it approached the point. The pack shifted out of the way leaving Simon the Younger in position. He took a few strokes toward the rocks and then turned to line up the wave and, as he took the drop, Simon yelled into the spray, "There is no God but Allah!"

Beefy paddled for the next one. As he vanished down the face of the slab, we heard the Aussie’s rejoinder: "... and Huey!"

The swell continued through Christmas and the lassitude of the previous days was forgotten in a happy exhaustion.

Sarah and Amanda, who had gamely endured months of van camping with their Kiwi boyfriends, organized a Christmas dinner for us at a restaurant in town. "Restaurant" is an optimistic term for the café known as Panoramas, although the location alongside the bay was hard to beat. With Amanda and Sarah’s patient coaching, however, the staff of Panoramas had plates of chips, chicken and tajine -- a hearty Moroccan stew -- ready for their English-speaking guests.

Because there was no booze, we toasted the occasion with pots of mint tea, soda and a steady stream of hash and tobacco joints rolled by Simon the Elder and Smitty.

"It’s been a good year," said Simon to his girlfriend Esther.

"It has, too," Esther said nodding to the sunset.

"It’s been the best bloody year of my life," Simon the Younger said.

"You’ve got around a fair bit, eh" Grant noted.

"Mexico, France, Spain, Portugal and here" Simon replied, "and I’ve got another year to go."

"How’d you manage?" Smitty wanted to know. "I barely put together enough to get myself out of England for the winter."

"Been saving for five years, mate," Simon said. He glanced around him and out over the water. "It’s been worth it though."

ON TO PART 3 ....