I wrote this 10 days ago, but the internet ate it - I like the idea, though, so I decided to finish it up. I'm catching up on messages and news in Nouakchott now, so look here for a couple posts soonish. And now, onward!
My life on the road is dense with experiences. There are far, far too many to adequately write up, even when cybercafes are common. One of my worries, then, is that posts will more often be broad than deep. Posts like the last one serve a purpose, to be sure, but they have obvious limits.
With that in mind, then, I think I'll confine this post to describing, in more detail, June 15th, 2009. This wasn't a particularly "typical" day, as it involved a border crossing. It was simply a day that brought a smile to my face, and perhaps a day that can give a sense of the rhythm of life as a solo traveller.
8 AM - I wake up in a little hotel room in Dakhla, Morocco, the last town before the Mauritanian border. For a city 1000 kms from anywhere, it's a surprisingly developed place. There is lots of governnment money here, and a few foreigners either passing through en route to West Africa, or staying to Windsurf. There's even a Best Western. In my little 7 dollar hotel room there is just two twin beds and a closet, with a wood-shuttered window through which I can get a glimpse of the ocean from between the buildings. I'm a little bit bleary-eyed this morning, my neighbour's Rihanna obsession having kept me up later than I would have liked. I roll out of bed, dress, and scoot down the hall to wash up. This done, I head out into the streets to get breakfast.
Morocco is not an early-rising sort of place, and the streets around me are still largely shuttered at 8 30 AM. As in any Moroccan town, though, I can smell that the patisseries are up and running. I stop in at one and pick up a couple pains au chocolat for 30 cents each. Chucked into a paper bag, they accompany me around the corner to one of the many local cafes, where the usual rank of men with newspapers is sitting starting their days. I grab a seat outside, exchange some mumbled greetings with the fellows, and order a cafe au lait. After 30 minutes of munching and sipping and watching the world go by, it's time to hit the road.
(Luck treated me well 2 days previous. Rolling into Dakhla after 27 hours on the bus, I decided to have a look round for rides into Mauritania before committing myself to paying an extortionate 50 dollars for a seat in a shared taxi. It being low season, I hadn't been optimistic, but lo and behold, on walking in to the only place in Dakhla with beer, I had found the only 2 customers, a couple of French fellows headed my way who happily offered me a place. They were staying at a campground outside of town, so it was to this campground that I had to find my way the morning of the 15th.)
With this in mind, I grab my pack from the hotel and flag down a taxi with a free seat (essentially all taxis are shared here). Ten minutes and a dollar later, I find myself sitting in a cracked plastic chair at the campsite. The French folk are nowhere in sight, but the manager tells me they're expecting me. Eventually, one pops up on his way to the shower and says hello. I wait around for a while, petting what must be the world's most lackadaisical cat, until the French fellow appears again, this time driving what must have once been a fish delivery van in its French past life. He takes off into town to get gas. Soon after that, Frenchman 2 - Jacqui! - appears in a beat up Renault wagon and stops to chat. The Renault is crammed with garage sale bric-a-brac: air conditioners, bikes, radios, food processors and such. Jacqui tells me that his friend and he plan to drive it all across to Senegal, where they will sell everything - including the cars, the bikes, even their suitcases - before flying home. There is a small group of French traders who regularly do such trips, as you can actually make a solid profit on an old used car if you're willing to drag it that far.
Although shooting the breeze in the sun is nice, it is now getting towards noon, and with a long drive ahead, it's past time to go - but Frenchman 1 has disappeared! To my rescue come Helodie and Antoine, a French couple about my age, also staying at the campground. They're off to Niger in their 1986 Peugot hatchback, and they gladly clear a space for me in the back seat. By 12 30, we bid goodbye to Jacqui and hit the road. After a quick stop at the police checkpoint outside of town (this being disputed territory), we hit the open road - a smoothly paved 2 lane highway that shoots 365 kms through the desert to the border.
Antoine and Helodie are very French. We make the border quickly, barrelling down the empty road at 130 kph, windows down, Edith Piaf blasting from the stereo as my hosts chain-smoke stinky roll-your-owns and we all stare out at huge white sand dunes to our left and the Atlantic to our right. We stop once to spend our last Moroccan change on chocolate and coffee at a gas station, where some travellers coming the other way sell me a bit of Mauritanian cash; enough, I think, to get me from the border to town.
Arriving at the border, it's bureaucracy time! The police first must radio our port of entry to confirm our identities. This takes about 30 mins, as we sit in the shade and shoot the shit with jolly and bored border guards. As it turns out, they have no doctor on base, so when they discover Helodie is one, she is drafted into making a quick diagnosis of one man's stomach troubles, which involves him engaging us all in a long narrative about his gastrointestinal history.
Approval having come through from the police, it's customs' turn. The customs fellow is much more interested in flirting with Helodie than inspecting her car, so that goes quickly. Finally, we hand over our passports to the Gendarmerie (the RCMP equivalent) and are motioned on our way. This gives us the privelege of driving 200 metres to another Gendarmerie post, where we wait for 30 more minutes. Finally, we are ushered out of Morocco.
Leaving Morocco also means leaving the paved road. Although the highways on both sides of the border are in good shape, the 4 kms of no-man's-land between them has no road at all, only a rough track surrounded by car carcasses. Our trusty Peugot bottoms out hard a couple times in the 20 minutes it takes us to cross this. On the other side, we are met with another series of offices to scurry between. First is the customs shack, where the fellows are far more interested in buying the car than inspecting it. Next comes passport control, passed with a smile. Finally, we buy some mandatory insurance for the car and are on our way. I had bought my visa in Morocco, which was good, as Helodie and Antione are a shade to honest with their plans and are only granted a transit visa that they must extend.
We roar out from the border back onto paved road. About 5 kms on, we come to the intersection where a gendarmerie post marks the branch of the road that heads to Nouakchott (where the French folk are headed) and Nouadhibou, where I am going, 30 kms the other way. I say a quick goodbye and good luck, grab my pack from the car, wave my arm in the air, and within 30 seconds a banged up old Mercedes shared taxi stops for me. I begin to feel properly African as I see the live goat lashed dubiously to the trunk. They have a free seat, so I hop in the front - that makes it the driver, myself, another fellow, and my pack in the front, and another 4 in the back. We roar off down the road, chatting amiably in French as the folk in the cab welcome me to Mauritania.
After a couple police checkpoints, we pull into a dusty lot that is the Nouadhibou "station". After a day of sitting, I decide to stretch my legs and walk to my auberge - I see a sign pointing to the centre ville, ask to confirm it, and head off down the main drag. The walk is pleasant, in the fading sun at 6:30 PM. The town is noticeably poorer than Morocco, with its main components being low, concrete buildings, drifting sand, and lots of goats. It's also loads friendlier, with everyone smiling, waving, or shaking my hand as I go by. I walk on. And on. And on. By the time I've walked for 45 minutes, I begin to think it wasn't the greatest idea, but by now, I'm stubbourn about finishing, and I walk on. Finally, in the last light of the day I reach the central town, ask some friendly folk, and find my way to the illustrious Camping Abba.
The auberge is largely set up for overland drivers, with a large lot for parking and camping that sits empty, surrounded by whitewashed walls and some few rooms and shared spaces. There aren't many guests, so they give me a 3-bed room to myself for the price of a dorm. I think it helps when I tell them I walked - turns out I had just schlepped about 8.5 kms with my pack on my back! The hotel staff are amused. My room isn't much, just a few beds, a tiny window, and paint peeling off the walls, but it suits me just fine. I drop my backpack, wash up, and shoot the breeze with the folks there for a while, until I notice that I'm utterly starving.
I promptly set off back into the centre looking for an open restaurant. The streetlights are broken, and it is not in every African city that I would happily trundle in darkness, but this is Mauritania, one of the safest places on earth, and I don't have a worry. As I'm starving, I decide to stop at the first place I see, which is a 24 hour restaurant on the main drag. The lady running the place laughs when I ask whether they're serving food, says "of course!" and tells me the menu. It's pricey, for the area - a meal is 2000 oughiyas, or about $6, but I'm too tired to go hunting around for cheaper. I settle on the fish (this is a port), and the lady asks me whether I want fish eggs? Of course, I say, being a fan of the things in sushi form. It's good that I do - when I get my meal, it emerges as an enourmous plate of fried fish, with a sort of hockey-puck cake of eggs that was utterly lovely. With salad (fresh veggies are a rare thing in my life these days), bread, and fries, I was laughing. I pass my meal chatting amiably about Islam with some folks in the restaurant as we watch inane Moroccan soap operas.
With a full belly, I wander out onto the street again and over to the fruit stalls, which are lit by bulbs on strings hanging over their wares. I see with joy that I've come far enough south to be in cheap mango territory, and spend $1.50 on 2 kilos of deliciousness. After a long trundle back in the darkness, I tuck into a huge mango and read a chapter or two of "Wuthering Heights" (classics are all I can afford to buy!) until, at about 10:30, my head gets droopy and I hit the pillow.
Such was a day.
Peace
Josh
Showing posts with label Morocco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morocco. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
All this running-around!
This is too cute not to be apocryphal, but I had someone tell me once that the East African slang term for a white person, muzungu, was etymylogically descended from another piece of slang, kazungu-zungu, which means "drunk" and literally translates as "my head's going round and round". The connection? What else do we foreigners do but meander pointlessly about? Not to mention drink. In any case, if anyone is reading this from East Africa and can check this piece of traveller gossip, feel free. I'll work with it, because going round and round is exactly what I've been up to for the past few weeks, in the best sort of way.
As of last actual travel update, I was writing from the Atlantic seaside town of Essaouira, where Mr. Mike Brown and I were doing our best to chat up the town drunks and stay attached to the ground in the face of some of the fiercest seaside winds you've ever seen. We did, in fact, have a showdown with nature on our last full day there, when we quested down the beach on hearing rumours of there being a ruined house in which Jimi Hendrix had written. We found the ruins, alright. We even startled awake the homeless fellow who was squatting in them. Upon further googling, of course, Hendrix had never actually been there, nor had he based "Castles in the Sand" on them. He had, however, spent a good long time in the area, and it was a quite interesting walk. Walking back, however, reminded us just why that town is the windsurfing capital of North Africa. In any case, with good food, a gorgeous old town, cold beers and sunsets to be had, Essaouira was a winner.
Life isn't all seaside and sunshine, though, so the following day it was up early and off to the bus, with a brief iterlude as we were pursued down the early-morning street by a rather disturbed fellow mumbling nonsenses, pointing at us, and throwing some pretty hefty rights at the air. I think he got distracted by a plastic bag, and we made our escape. After a couple hours of highway cruising, we arrived in Casablanca and settled in the lovely Hotel Colbert, a hotel 2 floors up in an old art deco pile for which we fabricated some sort of relationship to its satirical TV host namesake.
Casablanca, amongst travellers, gets a bit of a bad rap. I blame Bogie for filming the whole movie on a Hollywood soundstage. As the major port of entry to the country, and as the biggest city, most people pass through it. Lots of them expect some orientalist vision of Moroccan souks, or a city straight out of the 40s, full of piano bars and intrigue. You get neither. What you do get, though, I rather like. Much of the central city was built in the prewar years, and there's something I've always liked about old art nouveau and art deco buildings gone slightly to seed, with washing hanging from wrought iron balconies and clanking elevators in stairwells. That's central Casa. It's full of old cafes and bars in which the decor clearly hasn't been updated since the French left in the 50s, which when combined with the ubiquitous bow-tied waiters, does give it a bit of a decadent edge. Mike and I explored just that by launching into a proper pub crawl, managing 8 or 9 fine establishements before last call (at 11!). Hookah pipes were smoked, locals chatted to, and when one place turned out to be a brothel, prostitutes effectively dodged. A fine evening. Interestingly, although this was less true in Casa than it has been in some other Moroccan cities, bars are the one place where you may see the gender balance even out. While sitting at a sidewalk cafe table drinking tea is an exclusively male preserve, bars are socially transgressive enough already that you do find a reasonable feminine presence. As far as atmosphere goes, think the grungiest suburban strip mall joint and you might be on the right track.
This is not to say that we spent all our time in Casa just drinking in the local culture. Wandering around the city led to some cool finds, including the unfinished Catholic cathedral, where a few dirhams got us climbing the bell tower and running roughshod on the roof. Continuing the religious theme, we took in Casa's major tourist attraction, the feck-normous Hassan II mosque. Built on billions of dollars in public subscriptions in 1993, to designs by a French architect, the place holds 25,000 people inside and 60,000 in the outer courtyard. I was marvelling at the intricately carved ceiling so far above me when the tourguide mentioned nonchalantly that the whole bloody thing was on rails and opens like a stadium roof! Oi vey, oi vey...
Rounding out our major monotheistic religions, Mike's last day in Morocco was partially spent chasing down the Jewish museum, the only one in the Arab world. Our taxi driver clearly had no clue where it was, but neatly solved the problem by driving to the Jewish part of town, finding one of Casa's 5000 remaining Jews, and asking him! Blunt, but fairly effective. Eventually, we got there, and the museum was actually fairly interesting, with most Moroccan cities having hosted large Jewish communities until the foundation of Israel drew them away. After that, it was time for one last beer, and Mike headed off to catch his plane and resume his madcap African cris-crossings.
As for me, the next day saw me hopping on a go-train-esque commuter run to Rabat, capital of the country and a rather different place than Casa. When the French built them, they intended the relationship between the cities to echo the Washington DC/New York one, and so it does. Casa is the brash, busy economic powerhouse, while Rabat is a lower-rise, tidier, hassle-free government town. It also happens to be rather pretty, with a pleasant old town, some beautiful old whitewashed homes in the old Kasbah (fortress) and a new town with plenty of cafes and palm trees. I heard mumblings that day of concerts in the evening, and upon a quick internet check, discovered that I had wandered in for the final weekend of the Festival Mawazine, a "festival of world rhythms", and would be treated to a free Alicia Keys concert that night, and Stevie Wonder the next. Both shows were fantastic, although it was interesting to see the local audiences, normally so quick to dance, a bit unsure how to come to grips with Western idioms and English stage banter. Surreal. Rabat, otherwise, is a city of small pleasures - cheap fish sandwiches eaten overlooking the sea, quiet cafes and gardens and other little escapes, all a pretty good way to recover from the surprisingly crowded concerts. At one of the other shows, there was a stampede that left 11 people dead, something I wasn't even aware of until a few worried comments popped up on my facebook wall!
For all its joys, Rabat is a difficult place to kill more than a few days, so by the 24th I was off again, to Asilah, a tiny seaside town famed for gorgeous beaches and one of the prettier medinas in Morocco. Pretty it was - but I must admit, I wasn't a fan. Having been thoroughly gentrified, bought up by rich Europeans and filled with galleries, it was eerily quiet, completely unlike the old towns anywhere else. I rented a shack on a family's rooftop for a couple nights, which was lovely, although finding it involved a frustrating experience with some rather agressive touts. In any case, it's hard not to be a bit charmed by whitewashed walls and seaside castles, so I was far from grumbling. The main beaches were nothing to write home about, being coated (as, unfortunately, many are) with plastic bags and other sea detritus. Nonetheless, I spent a gorgeous day reading a book, attempting to swim in 6-foot waves, and turning myself a nice lobster-ey shade of red before hitching back from the beach in a dump truck and cracking a can of beer at sunset. Not bad, not bad at all.
It is, however, way too early in my trip for me to need a vacation, so I was soon off from Asilah to Tangier, another city unfairly slighted (in my mind) by foreigners for dirt and hassle. I suppose if you do arrive on the ferry from Spain and are chased through the streets by touts as soon as you pass customs, you might think something like that. With my arrival by train and easy settling into a cheap hotel with orange trees out my window, I wasn't complaining. Tangiers itself is a historical oddity, a city that was an international zone, run by a pretty dodgy council of representatives from 26 countries. As such, it was never a part of French or Spanish Morocco, and long served as a shelter for all sorts of shady dealings, artists seeking refuge, and other misfit things. That atmosphere lives on in a fairly pleasant way, with a thick layer of decadence lying over the place. The night I arrived there was the night of the European champion's league final, and the city was divided tribally, with different cafes devoted to Barca and Man U fans. It was the only time I've seen a female majority on the streets here, as essentially every man between the ages of 15 and 50 was in a cafe watching. Now, I'm no football fan, but I arbitrarily decided to support Barcelona because their shirts had "Unicef" on them instead of a corporate logo. Since they gave Man U what can only be described as a royal whupping, I was well placed to enjoy the festivities, which turned the city into a giant mass of car horns until well into the night.
After a few days there, it was goodbye to the seaside and off into the mountains. My first stop was Tetouan, which was once capital of the Spanish Protectorate and still maintains a distinctly Hispanic style in the new town, as well as the old, which is sometimes called Little Grenada (after the capital of old Islamic Andalucia). I spent a couple days there chatting with locals, making meals out of generous free beer snacks, and kicking my feet up on the balcony of my hotel room (which I shared with some impressively girthy roaches!). Continuing with the Andalucian theme, it was then off to Chefchaouen, the town in Morocco that probably draws the most backpackers.
This is not without reason. The town itself is gorgeous and clearly shows its Andalucian heritage with blue-washed walls and red clay roofs and pretty little squares. More important, from a backpacker perspective, is that 2/3 of the region's land is devoted solely to the growth of kif (marijuana), making this place once a famous stop on the hippie trail. Although those days have passed, there are plenty of stoned backpackers about, and plenty of people offering you everything from copious amounts of weed to the finest colombian coke (the path of which I would love to trace). Not being one for the international drug trade, I still rather enjoyed the place. I met up with the ever-affable Simon, a Quebecois fellow from Montreal here for a short trip, and we scrambled up one of the mountains hanging over the town, which took a solid day's climbing.
Since we were going the same way, Simon and I stuck together for a couple days, and he made pleasantly intellectual company as we made our way to Fez, grand-daddy of all ancient Moroccan cities, with an old medina that defies description (or navigation). Mile upon mile of twisted alleys leading to all sorts of mosques and squares and markets and workshops and other such chaos. As it happened, we also showed up for the Fes Festival of Sacred music, which led to encounters with sufi devotional chanting, Islamic rock reggae, dubiously religious pop, and other such fun. Having a tight schedule, Simon left quickly, but I lingered in Fes until last Thursday, wandering the "new" (post 14th century) town, taking in the tunes, and making 4 meals out of a huge watermelon, something my guts were regretting for a couple days.
Having heard that Mauritanian visas were no longer being issued at the border due to the upcoming elections, I needed to head back towards Rabat. Since embassies are useless on weekends, I stopped a couple days in Meknes, another old imperial city of some import. The town itself was nothing too impressive, it being a Friday (which sees most old-town places shut their doors), but it was well worth the stay for a hotel with loaner novels (I read 3!) and the chance to hop a couple shared taxis and walk through the countryside to Volubilis, the best-preserved Roman site in Morocco. I had the good fortune of arriving just after a school group led by a Canadian prof, who I stalked around the site all day for interesting tidbits. I'm not normally much for tours, but when visiting a huge ruined site, they can do wonders. Instead of colums and stones, I could see in my mind's eye this little provincial Roman city where only 2 actual Roman families lived, the rest made up of local Berbers frantic to imitate their Roman rulers by ordering Mosaics and columns from catalogues. Neat. The setting also helped - that part of Morocco is a solid Mediterranean climate, and the rolling hills of grain and olives around it look a lot like Tuscany.
And so it goes. From Meknes, I've now returned to Rabat, where my passport has been dropped off, along with $50 and a smile, to the Mauritanian embassy for a visa. With luck, it'll be ready tomorrow, and the next day I can start making my way south. I must admit, I'm looking forward to a bit more rough-and tumble travelling. Enough of these 4 hour train rides and sit-down toilets, I say! And I think I'll get my wish. From here, it's a quick 5 hours by Train to Marrakech, and then it'll be a 25 hour bus ride to Dakhla, the last town in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. There, I have to hunt for rides as there is no scheduled public transport, but within a few days I should either have found a spare seat somewhere, or paid for one in a 4WD. It'll be a long slog the 500 kms across the Mauritanian border to Nouadhibou, where I'll stop to rest, get some cash, and then wait for a trip I've been dreaming of for years - rattling my way across the desert for free in the empty hoppers of the world's longest train as it heads back to Zouerat to pick up another load. I can't wait.
So there we go. Now y'all know where I'm at. If I have the energy, I'll post a couple more times about Morocco. I'd love to discuss, for example, the food - but we'll see. In any case, look to my facebook tomorrow for some photos to go along with this long stream of babble.
Peace
Josh
As of last actual travel update, I was writing from the Atlantic seaside town of Essaouira, where Mr. Mike Brown and I were doing our best to chat up the town drunks and stay attached to the ground in the face of some of the fiercest seaside winds you've ever seen. We did, in fact, have a showdown with nature on our last full day there, when we quested down the beach on hearing rumours of there being a ruined house in which Jimi Hendrix had written. We found the ruins, alright. We even startled awake the homeless fellow who was squatting in them. Upon further googling, of course, Hendrix had never actually been there, nor had he based "Castles in the Sand" on them. He had, however, spent a good long time in the area, and it was a quite interesting walk. Walking back, however, reminded us just why that town is the windsurfing capital of North Africa. In any case, with good food, a gorgeous old town, cold beers and sunsets to be had, Essaouira was a winner.
Life isn't all seaside and sunshine, though, so the following day it was up early and off to the bus, with a brief iterlude as we were pursued down the early-morning street by a rather disturbed fellow mumbling nonsenses, pointing at us, and throwing some pretty hefty rights at the air. I think he got distracted by a plastic bag, and we made our escape. After a couple hours of highway cruising, we arrived in Casablanca and settled in the lovely Hotel Colbert, a hotel 2 floors up in an old art deco pile for which we fabricated some sort of relationship to its satirical TV host namesake.
Casablanca, amongst travellers, gets a bit of a bad rap. I blame Bogie for filming the whole movie on a Hollywood soundstage. As the major port of entry to the country, and as the biggest city, most people pass through it. Lots of them expect some orientalist vision of Moroccan souks, or a city straight out of the 40s, full of piano bars and intrigue. You get neither. What you do get, though, I rather like. Much of the central city was built in the prewar years, and there's something I've always liked about old art nouveau and art deco buildings gone slightly to seed, with washing hanging from wrought iron balconies and clanking elevators in stairwells. That's central Casa. It's full of old cafes and bars in which the decor clearly hasn't been updated since the French left in the 50s, which when combined with the ubiquitous bow-tied waiters, does give it a bit of a decadent edge. Mike and I explored just that by launching into a proper pub crawl, managing 8 or 9 fine establishements before last call (at 11!). Hookah pipes were smoked, locals chatted to, and when one place turned out to be a brothel, prostitutes effectively dodged. A fine evening. Interestingly, although this was less true in Casa than it has been in some other Moroccan cities, bars are the one place where you may see the gender balance even out. While sitting at a sidewalk cafe table drinking tea is an exclusively male preserve, bars are socially transgressive enough already that you do find a reasonable feminine presence. As far as atmosphere goes, think the grungiest suburban strip mall joint and you might be on the right track.
This is not to say that we spent all our time in Casa just drinking in the local culture. Wandering around the city led to some cool finds, including the unfinished Catholic cathedral, where a few dirhams got us climbing the bell tower and running roughshod on the roof. Continuing the religious theme, we took in Casa's major tourist attraction, the feck-normous Hassan II mosque. Built on billions of dollars in public subscriptions in 1993, to designs by a French architect, the place holds 25,000 people inside and 60,000 in the outer courtyard. I was marvelling at the intricately carved ceiling so far above me when the tourguide mentioned nonchalantly that the whole bloody thing was on rails and opens like a stadium roof! Oi vey, oi vey...
Rounding out our major monotheistic religions, Mike's last day in Morocco was partially spent chasing down the Jewish museum, the only one in the Arab world. Our taxi driver clearly had no clue where it was, but neatly solved the problem by driving to the Jewish part of town, finding one of Casa's 5000 remaining Jews, and asking him! Blunt, but fairly effective. Eventually, we got there, and the museum was actually fairly interesting, with most Moroccan cities having hosted large Jewish communities until the foundation of Israel drew them away. After that, it was time for one last beer, and Mike headed off to catch his plane and resume his madcap African cris-crossings.
As for me, the next day saw me hopping on a go-train-esque commuter run to Rabat, capital of the country and a rather different place than Casa. When the French built them, they intended the relationship between the cities to echo the Washington DC/New York one, and so it does. Casa is the brash, busy economic powerhouse, while Rabat is a lower-rise, tidier, hassle-free government town. It also happens to be rather pretty, with a pleasant old town, some beautiful old whitewashed homes in the old Kasbah (fortress) and a new town with plenty of cafes and palm trees. I heard mumblings that day of concerts in the evening, and upon a quick internet check, discovered that I had wandered in for the final weekend of the Festival Mawazine, a "festival of world rhythms", and would be treated to a free Alicia Keys concert that night, and Stevie Wonder the next. Both shows were fantastic, although it was interesting to see the local audiences, normally so quick to dance, a bit unsure how to come to grips with Western idioms and English stage banter. Surreal. Rabat, otherwise, is a city of small pleasures - cheap fish sandwiches eaten overlooking the sea, quiet cafes and gardens and other little escapes, all a pretty good way to recover from the surprisingly crowded concerts. At one of the other shows, there was a stampede that left 11 people dead, something I wasn't even aware of until a few worried comments popped up on my facebook wall!
For all its joys, Rabat is a difficult place to kill more than a few days, so by the 24th I was off again, to Asilah, a tiny seaside town famed for gorgeous beaches and one of the prettier medinas in Morocco. Pretty it was - but I must admit, I wasn't a fan. Having been thoroughly gentrified, bought up by rich Europeans and filled with galleries, it was eerily quiet, completely unlike the old towns anywhere else. I rented a shack on a family's rooftop for a couple nights, which was lovely, although finding it involved a frustrating experience with some rather agressive touts. In any case, it's hard not to be a bit charmed by whitewashed walls and seaside castles, so I was far from grumbling. The main beaches were nothing to write home about, being coated (as, unfortunately, many are) with plastic bags and other sea detritus. Nonetheless, I spent a gorgeous day reading a book, attempting to swim in 6-foot waves, and turning myself a nice lobster-ey shade of red before hitching back from the beach in a dump truck and cracking a can of beer at sunset. Not bad, not bad at all.
It is, however, way too early in my trip for me to need a vacation, so I was soon off from Asilah to Tangier, another city unfairly slighted (in my mind) by foreigners for dirt and hassle. I suppose if you do arrive on the ferry from Spain and are chased through the streets by touts as soon as you pass customs, you might think something like that. With my arrival by train and easy settling into a cheap hotel with orange trees out my window, I wasn't complaining. Tangiers itself is a historical oddity, a city that was an international zone, run by a pretty dodgy council of representatives from 26 countries. As such, it was never a part of French or Spanish Morocco, and long served as a shelter for all sorts of shady dealings, artists seeking refuge, and other misfit things. That atmosphere lives on in a fairly pleasant way, with a thick layer of decadence lying over the place. The night I arrived there was the night of the European champion's league final, and the city was divided tribally, with different cafes devoted to Barca and Man U fans. It was the only time I've seen a female majority on the streets here, as essentially every man between the ages of 15 and 50 was in a cafe watching. Now, I'm no football fan, but I arbitrarily decided to support Barcelona because their shirts had "Unicef" on them instead of a corporate logo. Since they gave Man U what can only be described as a royal whupping, I was well placed to enjoy the festivities, which turned the city into a giant mass of car horns until well into the night.
After a few days there, it was goodbye to the seaside and off into the mountains. My first stop was Tetouan, which was once capital of the Spanish Protectorate and still maintains a distinctly Hispanic style in the new town, as well as the old, which is sometimes called Little Grenada (after the capital of old Islamic Andalucia). I spent a couple days there chatting with locals, making meals out of generous free beer snacks, and kicking my feet up on the balcony of my hotel room (which I shared with some impressively girthy roaches!). Continuing with the Andalucian theme, it was then off to Chefchaouen, the town in Morocco that probably draws the most backpackers.
This is not without reason. The town itself is gorgeous and clearly shows its Andalucian heritage with blue-washed walls and red clay roofs and pretty little squares. More important, from a backpacker perspective, is that 2/3 of the region's land is devoted solely to the growth of kif (marijuana), making this place once a famous stop on the hippie trail. Although those days have passed, there are plenty of stoned backpackers about, and plenty of people offering you everything from copious amounts of weed to the finest colombian coke (the path of which I would love to trace). Not being one for the international drug trade, I still rather enjoyed the place. I met up with the ever-affable Simon, a Quebecois fellow from Montreal here for a short trip, and we scrambled up one of the mountains hanging over the town, which took a solid day's climbing.
Since we were going the same way, Simon and I stuck together for a couple days, and he made pleasantly intellectual company as we made our way to Fez, grand-daddy of all ancient Moroccan cities, with an old medina that defies description (or navigation). Mile upon mile of twisted alleys leading to all sorts of mosques and squares and markets and workshops and other such chaos. As it happened, we also showed up for the Fes Festival of Sacred music, which led to encounters with sufi devotional chanting, Islamic rock reggae, dubiously religious pop, and other such fun. Having a tight schedule, Simon left quickly, but I lingered in Fes until last Thursday, wandering the "new" (post 14th century) town, taking in the tunes, and making 4 meals out of a huge watermelon, something my guts were regretting for a couple days.
Having heard that Mauritanian visas were no longer being issued at the border due to the upcoming elections, I needed to head back towards Rabat. Since embassies are useless on weekends, I stopped a couple days in Meknes, another old imperial city of some import. The town itself was nothing too impressive, it being a Friday (which sees most old-town places shut their doors), but it was well worth the stay for a hotel with loaner novels (I read 3!) and the chance to hop a couple shared taxis and walk through the countryside to Volubilis, the best-preserved Roman site in Morocco. I had the good fortune of arriving just after a school group led by a Canadian prof, who I stalked around the site all day for interesting tidbits. I'm not normally much for tours, but when visiting a huge ruined site, they can do wonders. Instead of colums and stones, I could see in my mind's eye this little provincial Roman city where only 2 actual Roman families lived, the rest made up of local Berbers frantic to imitate their Roman rulers by ordering Mosaics and columns from catalogues. Neat. The setting also helped - that part of Morocco is a solid Mediterranean climate, and the rolling hills of grain and olives around it look a lot like Tuscany.
And so it goes. From Meknes, I've now returned to Rabat, where my passport has been dropped off, along with $50 and a smile, to the Mauritanian embassy for a visa. With luck, it'll be ready tomorrow, and the next day I can start making my way south. I must admit, I'm looking forward to a bit more rough-and tumble travelling. Enough of these 4 hour train rides and sit-down toilets, I say! And I think I'll get my wish. From here, it's a quick 5 hours by Train to Marrakech, and then it'll be a 25 hour bus ride to Dakhla, the last town in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. There, I have to hunt for rides as there is no scheduled public transport, but within a few days I should either have found a spare seat somewhere, or paid for one in a 4WD. It'll be a long slog the 500 kms across the Mauritanian border to Nouadhibou, where I'll stop to rest, get some cash, and then wait for a trip I've been dreaming of for years - rattling my way across the desert for free in the empty hoppers of the world's longest train as it heads back to Zouerat to pick up another load. I can't wait.
So there we go. Now y'all know where I'm at. If I have the energy, I'll post a couple more times about Morocco. I'd love to discuss, for example, the food - but we'll see. In any case, look to my facebook tomorrow for some photos to go along with this long stream of babble.
Peace
Josh
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Markets and Mountains and Missions, Oh My!
Internet cafes are surprisingly interesting places. I come to get caught up on my e-mails, check the news, creep around on facebook for a bit, and (heaven forbid) update this blog. I must admit, though, I also come to peep at the various social dramas going on around me. This has gotten to be even more amusing since the invention of Skype - at this moment, I'm sitting on the top floor of a dank old building in the middle of old Essaouira, a port city on the Atlantic coast full of history and beautiful architecture, and all I can do is listen to the dreadlocked Moroccan across from me try and seduce someone (in English, albeit abrupt) over video, while the girl at the other computer whispers sweet nothings in Arabic into her mic. The trademark of our generation must be just this - the gradual disintegration of the barriers between public and private spaces. But I digress. I'm in Morocco. Here's a brief run-down of the last week or so.
I arrived in Marrakesh on Monday morning courtesy of a 2 pound Ryanair cattle-class flight that had me sleeping on the floor of Luton airport the night before. A short city-bus ride later had me at Djemma-el-Fna, the centre of the old town and one of the world's great public spaces. During the daytime (such as when I arrived) it is populated by fruit-juice sellers, dried-fruit dealers, flower salesman, snake charmers doing all sorts of odd things to gaggles of cobras, and men who try and place a monkey on your head in return for whatever protection money they can extort. As is so often the case, the hotel I had thought of was suffering from Lonely Planet Disease - the decline in quality and increase in price that comes from the guaranteed business of being included in the guidebook. After an hour of backstreet meandering, checking what must have been 2 dozen hotels, I settled on the second I had looked at - the rather well-named Hotel des Amis, running about $12 for a double room, and worth every penny.
Marrakesh really is quite full of the scenes one would expect of a Moroccan city - covered markets full of bright fabrics, carvings, and metalwork, carpets (and their salesmen), minarets blasting the call to prayer 5 times a day. What it isn't, though, is some sort of anachronistic hangover from the middle ages. Those minarets are blasting their call from loudspeakers. Buried in the market are umpteen mobile phone shops. Internet cafes abound. Motorcycles are absolutely everywhere, including in alleys barely big enough for two people to walk, let alone drive. It's noisy, smelly, chaotic, and alive. I was pretty sold after one afternoon, and after tracking down Mike Brown at the train station, we spent a few days getting even more sold on the place.
On the first day there, we spent much of our time getting thoroughly lost - perhaps the single best thing you can do in any foreign place. We put a good many kms of alleyways underfoot, and got caught in more dead-ends than I care to count. Excellent. We did, later, get to seeing some of the tourist sites - the Saadian Tombs, with their beautiful plasterworks, the ruined, but beautifully empty Palais el-Badi, and the gorgeous Palais al-Bahia, pieces of a history that is headed toward 1000 years. There was a good deal of mint tea sipped throughout the process, with Moroccans being fond of a blend that runs about equal between tea, mint, and sugar. Excellent. After a good walkabout, we jumped round the corner to the neighbourhood hammam, or bathhouse, for a good steaming.
Once again, noteable mention must go to Djemma el Fna, which at night transforms itself magically into a huge open air food market, with stalls serving up piles of food of all kinds. Over a few successive nights, Mike and I downed good portions of sausages, local fishes, steamed snails, sheep's heads, and other delicacies of the kind that travelling makes one more prone to enjoy. All of this to a background of storytellers, drum circles, singers, and one man who tried to make money somehow from a hedgehog. To each their own.
The city's delights, though, can only last so long, and with the mountains shimmering in the distance from the roof of our hotel, it was time to head for the hills. We caught a couple shared taxis (involving 7 people shoved into an old Mercedes banging up the mountain roads) to the town of Imlil, starting point of the trek to Jebel Toubkal, tallest peak in the High Atlas range.
One of the many reasons I like Mike Brown, and like travelling with him, is that he possesses an invincibility complex that rivals or even exceeds my own. Unlike me, tricked out with a pile of shiny new MEC gear bought for a year of adventuring, Mike arrived with what he had available from his Sierra Leonean stash of cold weather gear. I went with boots, toque, jacket and sleeping bag. Mike went with running shoes, windbreaker, and warm thoughts. Even with the acquisition of a hat in Imlil, he definitely had to tough it out.
The trek itself was gorgeous, and utterly exhausting. We started from the village with a steep scurry up switchbacks that took us to a path that overlooked another village, snagged onto a hillside like a barnacle on a ship. We pushed forward, hopped a few streams on some well-placed rocks, and pushed up a rocky path that moved steadily (and occaisionally steeply) up the hills, following a stream of meltwater up towards the source. The first day's hike takes around 6 hours, at the end of which you find yourself at the mountain refuges set up with chalet-style dormitories at the foot of Toubkal itself, in a little valley surrounded by grey peaks and bits of snow. Having hauled 40 pounds of food and gear up to there, I was a wee bit sore, but exhilerated by a perfect day. After a night piled into a chilly dorm, listening to the drunken singing of a huge group of Slovene climbers, it was 5:30 am, time to rise, shine, shove some bread and Vache Qui Rit cheese (it's everywhere) into our mouths, and get climbing. Stepping outside the lodge at that time of morning was pretty magical - you could look towards the end of the valley and look down at the cloud deck sitting over the countryside. Over us, it was only blue, sunburn-inducing sky.
The ascent to the top of Jebel Toubkal took about 4.5 hours, and although never a technical climb (ie, no crampons or ropes) was often a bit of a scramble, with long stretches up very steep snow slopes, or hopping from rock to rock, or simply wheezing our way ever upward. Although I left my big bag at the bottom, I was definitely feeling my lack of cardio, with a good many breathless stops on boulders. In any case, by 11:30 AM we were surveying the mountains around us from the highest point in North Africa - 4 167 metres up. I took a quick nap, a tone of photos of the utterly stunning view, and headed down a bit after Mike, who had managed to mangle his knee solidly, making the descent pretty torturous for him. We had decided early in the day to descend all the way back to Imlil and catch the taxi back to Marrakesh, which proved a wee bit ambitious. We did make it to Imlil, to stagger exhaustedly into our hotel at 8 30 PM, after 14 hours of trekking. With the resteraunts closed, we fed ourselves on general store food, making it a full 2 days without a real meal. Needless to say, we slept well. One hell of a trek, it was - I've climbed things called mountains before, but neither of us had really experienced the proper alpine thing, glaciers and crags and all. It was absolutely sublime.
The next day, it was back to Marrakesh by shared taxi, and then right onto a luckily timed bus - we had decided to head to the coast instead of back to the valleys of the Atlas, with both of us a good bit debilitated by the climb. It took us about 4 hours to get to Essaouira, with one bus breakdown in mid-journey to make it a bit more entertaining. Essaouira itself is something else entirely - a gorgeous, whitewashed town on the Atlantic, surrounded by 17th century French fortifications that can be climbed for incredible views. It's full of little treed squares, cafes, restaurants with soft pillows against the walls, a windy beach and a busy fishing port. Mike and I being who we are, we found our way to the local seaside drinking den - bars being few and far between in Muslim lands - and had a few beers with the local drunk. Indeed, the pursuit of beer has taken us to great lengths here, hidden as it often is in unmarked little places, reserved for the sketchiest of men - never women. Today, our mission was made easier by a further revelation - the local wine shop, unmarked and surrounded by local ne'erdowells. How did we find it? A friend of ours collared a local who was visibly drunk and asked him. This information was passed through some other acquaintances, and presto - a 5 dollar bottle of Cab Sauv to drink on the terrace as the sun goes down.
Essaouira is lovely, and will be home for a few more days - it's perhaps one of the most picturesque places I've been in a long time, with wrought iron and carved doors and bright fabrics and markets all demanding your attention, and great fresh food filling our bellies. It's a tough life, let me tell you.
I arrived in Marrakesh on Monday morning courtesy of a 2 pound Ryanair cattle-class flight that had me sleeping on the floor of Luton airport the night before. A short city-bus ride later had me at Djemma-el-Fna, the centre of the old town and one of the world's great public spaces. During the daytime (such as when I arrived) it is populated by fruit-juice sellers, dried-fruit dealers, flower salesman, snake charmers doing all sorts of odd things to gaggles of cobras, and men who try and place a monkey on your head in return for whatever protection money they can extort. As is so often the case, the hotel I had thought of was suffering from Lonely Planet Disease - the decline in quality and increase in price that comes from the guaranteed business of being included in the guidebook. After an hour of backstreet meandering, checking what must have been 2 dozen hotels, I settled on the second I had looked at - the rather well-named Hotel des Amis, running about $12 for a double room, and worth every penny.
Marrakesh really is quite full of the scenes one would expect of a Moroccan city - covered markets full of bright fabrics, carvings, and metalwork, carpets (and their salesmen), minarets blasting the call to prayer 5 times a day. What it isn't, though, is some sort of anachronistic hangover from the middle ages. Those minarets are blasting their call from loudspeakers. Buried in the market are umpteen mobile phone shops. Internet cafes abound. Motorcycles are absolutely everywhere, including in alleys barely big enough for two people to walk, let alone drive. It's noisy, smelly, chaotic, and alive. I was pretty sold after one afternoon, and after tracking down Mike Brown at the train station, we spent a few days getting even more sold on the place.
On the first day there, we spent much of our time getting thoroughly lost - perhaps the single best thing you can do in any foreign place. We put a good many kms of alleyways underfoot, and got caught in more dead-ends than I care to count. Excellent. We did, later, get to seeing some of the tourist sites - the Saadian Tombs, with their beautiful plasterworks, the ruined, but beautifully empty Palais el-Badi, and the gorgeous Palais al-Bahia, pieces of a history that is headed toward 1000 years. There was a good deal of mint tea sipped throughout the process, with Moroccans being fond of a blend that runs about equal between tea, mint, and sugar. Excellent. After a good walkabout, we jumped round the corner to the neighbourhood hammam, or bathhouse, for a good steaming.
Once again, noteable mention must go to Djemma el Fna, which at night transforms itself magically into a huge open air food market, with stalls serving up piles of food of all kinds. Over a few successive nights, Mike and I downed good portions of sausages, local fishes, steamed snails, sheep's heads, and other delicacies of the kind that travelling makes one more prone to enjoy. All of this to a background of storytellers, drum circles, singers, and one man who tried to make money somehow from a hedgehog. To each their own.
The city's delights, though, can only last so long, and with the mountains shimmering in the distance from the roof of our hotel, it was time to head for the hills. We caught a couple shared taxis (involving 7 people shoved into an old Mercedes banging up the mountain roads) to the town of Imlil, starting point of the trek to Jebel Toubkal, tallest peak in the High Atlas range.
One of the many reasons I like Mike Brown, and like travelling with him, is that he possesses an invincibility complex that rivals or even exceeds my own. Unlike me, tricked out with a pile of shiny new MEC gear bought for a year of adventuring, Mike arrived with what he had available from his Sierra Leonean stash of cold weather gear. I went with boots, toque, jacket and sleeping bag. Mike went with running shoes, windbreaker, and warm thoughts. Even with the acquisition of a hat in Imlil, he definitely had to tough it out.
The trek itself was gorgeous, and utterly exhausting. We started from the village with a steep scurry up switchbacks that took us to a path that overlooked another village, snagged onto a hillside like a barnacle on a ship. We pushed forward, hopped a few streams on some well-placed rocks, and pushed up a rocky path that moved steadily (and occaisionally steeply) up the hills, following a stream of meltwater up towards the source. The first day's hike takes around 6 hours, at the end of which you find yourself at the mountain refuges set up with chalet-style dormitories at the foot of Toubkal itself, in a little valley surrounded by grey peaks and bits of snow. Having hauled 40 pounds of food and gear up to there, I was a wee bit sore, but exhilerated by a perfect day. After a night piled into a chilly dorm, listening to the drunken singing of a huge group of Slovene climbers, it was 5:30 am, time to rise, shine, shove some bread and Vache Qui Rit cheese (it's everywhere) into our mouths, and get climbing. Stepping outside the lodge at that time of morning was pretty magical - you could look towards the end of the valley and look down at the cloud deck sitting over the countryside. Over us, it was only blue, sunburn-inducing sky.
The ascent to the top of Jebel Toubkal took about 4.5 hours, and although never a technical climb (ie, no crampons or ropes) was often a bit of a scramble, with long stretches up very steep snow slopes, or hopping from rock to rock, or simply wheezing our way ever upward. Although I left my big bag at the bottom, I was definitely feeling my lack of cardio, with a good many breathless stops on boulders. In any case, by 11:30 AM we were surveying the mountains around us from the highest point in North Africa - 4 167 metres up. I took a quick nap, a tone of photos of the utterly stunning view, and headed down a bit after Mike, who had managed to mangle his knee solidly, making the descent pretty torturous for him. We had decided early in the day to descend all the way back to Imlil and catch the taxi back to Marrakesh, which proved a wee bit ambitious. We did make it to Imlil, to stagger exhaustedly into our hotel at 8 30 PM, after 14 hours of trekking. With the resteraunts closed, we fed ourselves on general store food, making it a full 2 days without a real meal. Needless to say, we slept well. One hell of a trek, it was - I've climbed things called mountains before, but neither of us had really experienced the proper alpine thing, glaciers and crags and all. It was absolutely sublime.
The next day, it was back to Marrakesh by shared taxi, and then right onto a luckily timed bus - we had decided to head to the coast instead of back to the valleys of the Atlas, with both of us a good bit debilitated by the climb. It took us about 4 hours to get to Essaouira, with one bus breakdown in mid-journey to make it a bit more entertaining. Essaouira itself is something else entirely - a gorgeous, whitewashed town on the Atlantic, surrounded by 17th century French fortifications that can be climbed for incredible views. It's full of little treed squares, cafes, restaurants with soft pillows against the walls, a windy beach and a busy fishing port. Mike and I being who we are, we found our way to the local seaside drinking den - bars being few and far between in Muslim lands - and had a few beers with the local drunk. Indeed, the pursuit of beer has taken us to great lengths here, hidden as it often is in unmarked little places, reserved for the sketchiest of men - never women. Today, our mission was made easier by a further revelation - the local wine shop, unmarked and surrounded by local ne'erdowells. How did we find it? A friend of ours collared a local who was visibly drunk and asked him. This information was passed through some other acquaintances, and presto - a 5 dollar bottle of Cab Sauv to drink on the terrace as the sun goes down.
Essaouira is lovely, and will be home for a few more days - it's perhaps one of the most picturesque places I've been in a long time, with wrought iron and carved doors and bright fabrics and markets all demanding your attention, and great fresh food filling our bellies. It's a tough life, let me tell you.
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