In Morroco, Part 3: South

The swell dropped after Christmas, only to be replaced by a new pulse from a system far off in the North Atlantic.

We were seated on a rug in front of Simon and Esther’s, passing a fat one around and watching our wetsuits dry in the sun, when a new truck pulled up. It was more of a bus really, customized with a blue and red gypsy paint job and a massive rack of gear on top. New arrivals were always the subject of some curiosity, so we waited to see who the new neighbors were. It was several minutes before a folding stair was flipped down from a side-door of the bus and a little girl alighted. She was perhaps seven or eight years old, dressed in a spangly blue frock with a tiara on her head and a silver star-tipped wand held upright in her hand.

"Bloody hell," Simon observed.

"It’s a fairy princess," Esther said.

"Excellent hash," Smitty added.

The fairy princess was followed by a tall man with dreadlocks and a couple of other kids, also in costume. Simon got up to greet the newcomers and returned later to report that the gypsy bus contained a theater group down from London and that the gear on top of the rig was sound equipment. "So it looks like we’ve got the music sorted for New Year’s" Simon said.

The gypsies did set up a pair of speakers, powered by a generator on board the bus, to add another dimension to life on the plateau.

The following day I was out surfing through the late afternoon to a soundtrack of dub, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, the patron saint of the Third World. I was riding a righthander called Mysteries. Sitting in the green water, looking back at the land, our little suburb of surfers seemed like a mirage. It was a mystery how this community came about or if it would last. Late in the session the gypsies broadcast another song, a raga I didn’t recognize. The chorus was appropriate though: "The ocean refuses no one."

The gypsy bus packed up and left just before New Year’s, but the party went ahead. Firewood had been scavenged from the hills above the camp and several of us had made trips to Agadir to buy booze at the Uniprix supermarket there. I even found a bottle of Irish whiskey I’d been saving since Gibraltar.

There were several fires on the plateau that night and friendly visits with the French and German parties nearby. Afid and a few of the kids from Taghazout also came up to see what was going on.

Like nearly every other night since I’d arrived, the sky was clear. The crescent moon had risen and the lights on the boats putting out to sea shone like the stars in the sky. It was just another night of trawling for the fishermen on those boats. Arab new year wouldn’t come until April and, according to their calendar, the year was 1421. By our count it was the last day of 1999 and I couldn’t think of any place I’d rather be.

"Bini, bini, bini!"

It was morning and the donut kids were knocking on the side of my van. Being raised in the Muslim world, these kids had no idea how debilitating a hangover could be for grownups. I slid the door open and croaked out a greeting.

The first day of the new millennium was bathed in brilliant sunshine, and the surf had gone flat. I could hear the ocean making pathetic gurgling noises on the rocks below the plateau.

Flat spells cast their own insidious magic over the camp. At first errands were tackled -- dings repaired, leaky radiators plugged, laundry done. But as the waveless days wore on, activity came to a standstill. It was La Vie du Slack, perpetuated by cheap and plentiful hash.

I spent a lot of time reading and swapping novels with the other campers. In return for a Paul Auster, I got Wilbur Smith. It didn’t matter -- it was just another story to fill the day.

There was talk too about a break to the south, a place called Desert Point. One of the German kids claimed to have met a guy who rode it. The guidebooks only had sketchy information about spots south of Agadir, and beyond Sidi Ifni there was almost nothing. The Michelin map, however, showed a road following the coast south of Sidi Ifni and a series of points, any one of which could harbor this famous wave.

Five days after the New Year we set out. There were eleven of us in all: Aaron and Sarah; Amanda and Grant; Simon and Esther; Simon the Younger with Smitty and Matt in his van; and me and Pat. We stopped at the weekly souk in Tamrhakht -- AKA Banana Village -- for supplies and again in Agadir.

By sunset we had found our way out of the maze of streets in Tiznit and back to the coast near a village called Mirhleft. We camped on a rocky promontory, blasted by a cold wind. It looked like a new swell was breaking on the beach far below, although it was all torn up by the squall.

The next day our five vans followed the winding coast road down to Sidi Ifni. Sidi Ifni and its port was built by the Spanish in the 1930s. It was one of the key ports in what was then Spanish Morocco and it retains the crumbling Art Deco architecture of that period. The Moroccans laid siege to the town for many years, but it wasn’t until 1969 that the Spanish ceded Ifni to the Kingdom of Morocco.

Our caravan reached Sidi Ifni by noon. There was a good-sized beach break in town and another left breaking into the port area south of Ifni, but we decide to press on to Boat’s Point. The pavement ended at the port and a wide dirt road led south along the coast from there. Within a kilometer or two, the graded road gave way to a dirt track. It was the only track between the steep coastal range and the ocean, so we kept going.

Every kilometer or so, a faint road peeled off the main route to the water. We scouted a couple of these detours until we found a break we reckoned was Boat’s Point. It was a thick and hollow righthander breaking over a rock shelf to the south of a headland. The new swell had arrived.

I felt butterflies in my stomach, but Aaron and Grant were already suiting up, so I made ready to get wet. I watched the younger guys pick their way down the bluffs, through the boulders on shore and paddle out to the line up. By the time I had traversed the channel and reached the line up, the whole crew was already assembled.

"Ah, there he is," Aaron said.

"Didn’t think you’d make it," said Simon the Elder.

"What and miss this party?" I replied. My mouth, I noticed, was dry. On the way out I’d watched Pat and Matt pull into stand-up tubes that clapped shut on them with a fearsome thunder. Grant, I think, was the only one who had successfully threaded the barrel to the shoulder.

Inevitably, my wave came. I made the drop, pulled an ungainly bottom turn and set up in time to see the feathering crest of the wave pitch over and blot out the sun. It sent me deep, although I surfaced quickly in the foam, laughing.

"Man you should have seen your face," Simon said.

That night we camped on the headland. Smitty had found a warren of rock-lined chambers dug into the earth. After dinner, all eleven of us crammed into the largest chamber for "a proper cane session," as Smitty put it. Smitty was from Nottingham and even fellow Brits Simon and Esther had to concede that he had the most English of accents.

We’d set up board bags as couches in the subterranean room and lit the walls with candle stubs. It was a cozy effect, kind of like church. Smitty planned to sleep there after the party. "Except," he told me, "I’m a bit concerned about these dirty, great bugs." "Bugs" as Smitty pronounced it, sounded like "boogs."

"Don’t worry," I said, "there are probably only a few thousand beetles and earwigs in here."

We told stories and smoked spliffs late into the night. Outside the surf set up a steady roar. The conversation lagged and stopped at times, but being there was the main thing. These young travelers, I realized, carried only their stories while in transit. At home they would be sons and daughters, workers and students, but out here they were nothing more or less than the sum of their experiences.

The next day the surf had jumped beyond double overhead. We watched it for awhile, feeling the bruises from the day before and the places where sea-urchin spines had punctured our feet. At that size, it would be punishing. Without much discussion, the decision was made to head south.

Back on the main track, a couple of kilometers south of Boat's Point, we came upon a man walking in the desert. On his back was a pack and a small grip, like a doctor's bag, was clutched in one hand.

"Whaddya suppose this guy's doing walking out here?" I asked Pat.

"I dunno," Pat said, "but I bet he's English."

I stopped the van beside the backpacker. "Hey," I asked, "do you need a lift?"

"Oh, that’s alright," he said.

"Yea, but it might be a long hike to the next water hole," I explained "and we’re going the same way."

"Well, maybe just as far as Foum Assaka," he said. "There’s supposed to be a spring there."

Chris was his name, a bearded forty-something hippy from England. He told us he’d been coming to Morocco for more than 20 years, although he felt the north had been ruined by tourism, which was why he was visiting the south on this trip.

The south was certainly less populated. We hadn’t seen a soul all morning. The countryside was more arid too: no trees, sparse scrub and everywhere else red earth and stones. And the track was getting worse.

After one particularly nasty second-gear descent, we paused at a wide spot where the road bridged a wadi, or dry riverbed. There was a path leading down beside the riverbed toward the ocean. Pat and Smitty followed the path while the rest of us pulled out the maps. A short while later, Pat came running back up the trail. "You gotta see this!" he said. "Bring a camera."

A hundred meters from where the trail ended on the beach was the rusted hulk of a freighter. A shipwreck, a vessel that had once been known as the Zahara, according to the name painted across the stern. It was hard to tell how long it had been there -- five years or ten -- only that the hull was more or less intact and anything on this exposed shore would be pounded to bits in a few decades.

A crowd of kids had gathered around the vans when we returned. I guessed they’d come from a cluster of small buildings further up the wadi. They tried out the few French words they knew and introduced themselves. Then they broached the reason for their visit. "Bon bon ou stylo?" the largest kid asked, holding out his hand.

"Oh, Christ," Chris said. "Even out here. Don’t give them anything. It just makes it worse."

He had a point. If every visitor distributed candy and pens on demand, the kids would develop unreasonable expectations of tourists. Apparently, though, it was too late. As I ratcheted the van up the track in first gear, one of the boys jogged alongside chanting, "Bon bon ...stylo ... bon bon ... stylo." When I gained the plateau and shifted to second, pulling away, the boy spat on the window.

"No stylo," Pat said.

Late in the afternoon we came to another wadi and this one had a track leading down toward the water. Simon the Younger was in the lead and he signaled his intention to turn. We followed his van down into the river canyon.

"I don’t like this," Pat said. "It’s an arroyo."

"A what?" Chris asked.

"A dry wash," Pat said. "If it rains in the mountains, this place will flood."

I parked the van in a clearing above the beach. The ruins of an old compound perched over the dry riverbed. Up on the headland that defined the northern rim of the canyon was another house. Spreading out to the west was a broad, flat beach. The reeds growing along the wall of the compound were the only signs that this wadi had been flooded at one time.

While we were debating the relative dangers of camping in the wadi an old man wearing an indigo turban walked down the track. Age had bent his body into a question mark. He had no French and we didn’t speak his language, but he used his hands to describe a great deluge that would wash us all into the sea. Then he crept up the path that led to the house on the hill.

"Oh, bullshit," Simon the Elder said.

"I don’t know," Pat said, "I think the old guy is right."

Finally we decided to split up. Simon, Esther, Smitty, Chris and I would camp in the wadi; the other three vans would spend the night up on the headland.

After dinner, we made a crackling driftwood fire in the courtyard of the ruined compound. Stars glutted the sky above and the roar of surf echoed through the canyon. Smitty started rolling the first of several joints and paused to look at his watch. "It’s spliff O’ clock," he informed us.

In the morning Grant, Amanda, Sarah and Aaron announced their decision to turn back. They would take their two vans back up to Sidi Ifni and wait for us there.

It was tough going south of the wadi. First gear up and over a rocky and rutted track. By midday our three vans were traversing a broad tableland. Simon the Younger took the lead, racing off toward a distant promontory, leaving a trail of dust hanging in his wake.

We caught up with him on that far point, where the road ran close to the sea cliffs. I pulled my van up behind Simon’s and cut the engine.

"Are we there yet?" Pat asked.

"We’ve arrived at lunch," I said.

"Just in time for spliff O’clock," Chris said, nodding to where Smitty was rolling another fat one.

I got out of the van and walked to the edge of the point. To the north and south, sea cliffs tumbled to the wild shore, which was empty as far as the eye could see in either direction.

"We’re really out the back of beyond, eh?" Matt said.

"Well out there," I agreed.

"Any ideas where this Desert Point is?" Matt asked.

"Could be any one of these," I said, waving at the point breaks layered along the coast to the north.

The road ended in a dry valley, where a few abandoned huts overlooked a golden beach. On the southern edge of the strand was another headland, wrapped in an apron of rock reef. It looked promising and we decided to make camp and wait through the tides.

Toward evening Esther called me over to her van. Simon was down on the beach collecting firewood. "You should listen to this," she said.

The old Renault had been converted from a bread truck and you could stand up inside. Esther was preparing dinner in the kitchen area and a tape was playing on the stereo. It was an ethereal voice, twisted around a sinuous melody. The back doors of the van were open, affording a view of the vast Atlantic and the sun dropping to the western horizon. I perched on the bed and gazed out over the ocean.

"It’s lovely isn’t it," Esther said.

"It is," I agreed.

Esther came to join me on the bed and we both watched the final minutes of the sunset.

"Did you see that?" Esther asked when the sun had gone.

"The green flash?"

"Yea."

"I think so," I said.

The next morning Smitty, Matt and I scrambled up to the top of the headland to get a better view of the pointbreak. The swell was still strong, but the point wasn’t working properly -- the waves just didn’t line up.

"This can’t be Desert Point," Smitty said.

"Maybe," I said, "Maybe not."

"Maybe," Matt said, "Desert Point is just a state of mind."