Burned and Frozen

I have arrived back in Marrakech after the most hellish journey of my life. In the span of 20 hours yesterday, I was sunburnt in the Saraha and shivering in the frigid early morning of Marrakech. The journey that spanned the hours between these two places was one of Dante-like conditions--a bus ride that crossed a huge Moroccan mountain range, moving through snow and rain along winding mountain roads. Treacherous drops lined the road's edge at nearly all times.

Luckily, the monotony and discomfort of the bus ride was punctuated by the occasional fight, argument, or physical ejection of a passenger. Ahhhh...Morocco.

Since I've last written, a great deal has occured, and I've been through experiences that I never expected to live, even in Morocco. My last day in Tinhrir (where I last wrote on this page), Hannah and I met Hassat, a man who claimed to be 35 years old, but who had the face and body of a 60 year old...As is usual in Morocco, the border between fact and fiction is blurry in the case of this man, and while I was unsure of his motives for probably lying about his age, I gave the question little importance when sizing him up.

Hassat was a friendly man, and began talking to us in the street outside the hotel, inviting himself along with us for a tea, walking us to the internet and bus station, to the taxi stand (only to find that taxis were too expensive to visit the gorges as we wished to), and eventually back into the main town square (if one can even call it that). Finding our plans changed, as usual, we took up Hassat on his offer to see the local environs, the nearby oases and fields, and to eventually join him for dinner.




And so we walked with Hassat through paths that led us beside plots of alfalfa and olive trees, and beneath date palms and pomengranate trees. We walked for a few hours, occasionally glimpsing the town in the distance, discussing the most remote and separate topics, and learning about the local history.

At the end of our walk, we returned to town, and after a few stops at some local stores (in one of these stores, i traded in my old djilaba, or Moroccan hooded robe, for a different, much nicer one), walked through the now darkened, cold streets to the home of one of Hassat's friends. We entered to find a strange scene--five or six people crowded into a tiny room, all sitting on blankets and pillows, hunched close together and huddled around a small propane heater. They were nearly all smoking and drinking tea and laughing, and I wondered if they realized how odd and wonderful they all looked to me. I wondered if they knew that where I come from I would never sit so close to people, and would never share one glass among five people, and would probably strangle my friends and family if I were forced to live in such cramped conditions.

I'm assuming that they did not know all this, because we were invited to sit with great smiles and much fanfare, and told that we would stay for dinner, and offered tea and asked questions, and after a few short minutes, treated exactly as if we had always been there. And so, we ended up staying for a delicious tagine (we paid for the raw materials and the beer that the head of the household, a widowed woman requested), getting yelled at if we slowed down in our chewing --"Mange, Mange, Kool, Kool," the daughter would say, speaking to us in both French and Berber and making sure that we filled our bellies as much as possible.

Here in Morocco, families eat around a low table generally, sitting on pillows on the ground. There are no plates or forks or spoons and generally no personal cups or glasses. There is one huge plate of food in the middle of the table, one cup that gets passed around, and bread serves as both plate, spoon, fork and napkin. This is actually a very nice custom, and one which is easy to get used to, and has the effect of making any outsider feel like part of the family and bringing strangers together quite naturally.

So we stuffed ourselves with chicken and bread and vegetables and left with many kisses and goodbyes and thanks, and returned to the hotel sleepy and full.

The next day, Hannah had to leave on a bus to Tangier at around two pm, and I wanted to head out the desert, finally...I put Hannah on a bus, armed with a bag of yogurt and bread and sunflower seeds, and I went off, once again traveling alone, to find a way to get to the Sahara.

I was immediately accosted by a young man named Lhoussaine, who assured me that his brother had a hostel in Merzouga (right on the edge of the dunes that lead into the desert), that we could travel together, that the last transport for the day left in a few minutes, etc, etc, etc...The same story that I've heard a million times and which I've now learned to laugh at and find funny, and not to be offended by the obvious untruths and various lies contained therewithin. I decided to let myself be dragged along with this guy, figuring that the worst that could happen would be that I'd find myself at an expensive, shitty hostel, and be forced to pay a little extra for a little less...What did I have to lose?

As it turned out, I made the right decision in trusting Lhoussaine, who joined me in an adventure that led us eventually to Merzouga, the gateway to my desert experience...

We started off in a transport van, packed in so tightly that my legs and buttocks fell asleep, crushed beneath my own weight and the weight of others with me on the floor of the van. I was immediately attacked with questions about my nationality and language and clothing, asked questions in four different languages, taught various local Berber expressions, and invited to join some guys on the roof once we reached the dirt road outside of town.

I did so, and we stayed up there, smushed between oranges and baggage, as we bounced down the road, fighting to keep our hoods on our heads and the dust out of our eyes...Some guys smoked a hash joint--I begged out, explaining that Moroccan hash would send me on a journey I didn't wish to experience while hanging on for my dear life atop a bouncing cargo van. I chatted with all of them, laughing and joking, accepting their offers of slices of stolen oranges, unfortunately declining their offers to sleep at their houses, located at various points along the way to my final destination...



We eventually headed back inside, driven in by the falling hail or sleet or freezing rain or whatever the hell it was. We were welcomed back in with smiles, and everyone laughed when I showed them my bright red, chapped hands destroyed by the cold winds up above...I was soon asked to show my guitar and then to play it, and I did so, and everyone in the van joined in with clapping and banging and cheering. They asked for another and another and I played sitting on the floor, crushed by local legs, unable to move my arm, moving only my wrist...When I was offered some snuff, I once again declined, only to be nudged by Lhoussaine and told that by refusing I was being quite rude...So I accepted their offer and held out my hand as they poured a generous quantity of dark brown powder on the back and then I snorted it and damn did it burn...

They laughed as my eyes teared and nose burned and offered me tissues and the old man next to me explained to me the real way to do snuff, how both nostrils should be used, and I told him that I'd remember for next time.

We eventually left the van and took a few taxis and waited in a few small towns and finally got out of the last taxi on a dark street before a large open field. I followed Lhoussaine's directions and began walking across the dark, muddy field with him, seeing only a few distant lights on the horizon.

It was at this point that I thought, "If my parents knew where I was right now, and with whom, and what I was doing, they would shit their pants." But Morocco changes one's ideas of trust and honesty and danger and risk, and I felt completely at ease at that moment, walking through a muddy field toward a distant, unknown destination with some guy that I had only met that morning. That's just how it is here, and you learn to accept it and relax or you spend your entire time suffering from attacks of anxiety.

We arrived at a beautiful building and I was given tea and shown to my own room with a hot shower and a lot of blankets and a couch, and after a little while with other travelers and locals, I fell into a deep slumber in the bed, and I didn't get up until late the next morning.

In the morning, I met Hisham, the man who would be leading me through the desert. He told me to pack a bag and get ready to go, so I quickly drank my coffee and got ready, and within a few minutes we were in the desert, me on the camel, Hisham on the ground, walking with the camel's tether in his hand, talking to me about trust and love and local history and the desert and his son in Spain and all sorts of things that I've surely forgotten by this point.



I only lasted a short while on the camel, unable to deal with the constantly bumping and pressure on my buttocks and the ole' family jewels, and soon joined Hisham barefoot in the sand, walking along, amazed and awed by the beauty and immensity of the desert, which was at this point not even complete, as we had just barely left civilization behind.

We soon reached a small oasis and joined up with a French couple and a Dutch guy, as well as the two other guides, Abdelah and Hassan. We ate a delicious lunch of olives and salad and canned tuna fish with flat Berber bread and headed off into the depths of the sand dunes of the Sahara.

I don't want to write too much about the Sahara. I'm not sure that I could conceive of any words, at least my words, that could possibly describe this place. First, the dunes are huge, really, really huge. We walked up the second highest sand dune in the world in fact, and I was exhausted by the time I reached the top. What is truly amazing about the place, however, is not the size of the dunes, but their shape, the way that the wind carves their sharp lines, and the shadows created when the sun hits them.

Looking around, it was nearly all sand. In the far distance, off to the east, lay the red rock mountains that make up the heavily militarized Morocco-Algeria border. There is no human creation in sight--no houses or cars or factories--there is sand and there is rock and there is sun, and nothing else.

Through this landscape we walked for hours, feeling the sun beat on our face (the air was not hot but the sun was merciless) and then feeling the cold chill our bones when the sun went down--the fastest sunset and the most drastic temperture changes that I have yet experienced anywhere in the world...

On the second day, we walked through the "black desert", which is more rock and stone than sand, and somehow much harsher, much more obviously desert, even if it is not made up of sand as one would expect. Beneath our feet were fossils, constant and never-ending supplies of fossils, making the irony of the Saraha's oceanic past something to consider with each and every step that we took. A few hearty plants stood, brown and still along the way, most dead and gone, but some eking out a life somehow in this deadly environment.

We passed small abandoned villages along the way, left to the mercy of the wind and the sand when the water in the area dried up and people were forced to leave. The date palms of what were once oases were now cracked and dried and falling over themselves. The inhabitants of these villages have inevitably gone to the slums of larger cities, adding to the worldwide problem of the rural poor's forced immigration into urban centers.

These ghost towns are eerie, as ghost towns always are, and seem somehow like an architectual version of the skeletons that one always sees in pictures of the American desert. I shivered a bit every time that we passed through one, and was always happy to be once again in the natural and strange empty landscape, away from all traces of humanity.

We finally arrived at a small town near Merzouga called Hamalia. The inhabitants of the town are all dark black, being the descendants of slaves brought to Morocco many years ago. These people continue to work to maintain their cultural patrimony, and with the drying up of this region of the Saraha, have turned to tourism as one of their sources of income, presenting their music and dance to the few tourists that make it to their village with the dromedary caravans each day. Their performance was incredible, nearly all religious and all very moving. I spent the rest of the night talking and playing music with the various members of the group, eventually falling asleep and waking the next morning (yesterday) to begin my trip back to Merzouga and finally back to Marrakech for my flight to Paris, from where I will return home in a few days.

And so here I am, back in Marrakech, alone and sad to be departing. Today is the fete, and due to the need to eventually catch my flight, I was unable to get to Ourzazate today to celebrate with my friends there. Nearly all transport and most shops, restaurants, etc, are not running or are closed, and so Marrakech is quiet, the streets mostly filled with tourists and some Moroccans...

It all comes to an end, and I am truly sad to leave, thinking only of when I will return next, how long I will be away from here, and of all that I have lived in the last few weeks. I feel that this place has changed me in a way that most places have not. It has been a long time since I have been so inspired and moved by a people and a place and a voyage, and I can't discount the importance of this.