A ver...
Entry number one, a middling time coming. Starting to get used to these, the strangest of keyboards. I've been moving for about a month now and feel I should get some stories off my chest. Here I go, letting fall the pebbles into the well...
Arrive Madrid early in the morning. No habitation reserved, none easily encountered. I seem to have arrived at the beginning of a holiday weekend, no room at any of the inns. Content to settle into several many hours of unfrustrated searching slash wandering slash sitting down and watching the city. Talk to a Croatian man. I offer him a cigarette and he insists anomalously that he is not homeless, that he lives in a squat. He is a writer, he wants to have a book published in Ohio. Ohio? Yes, Ohio, in the United States. He speaks Spanish poorly. More busqueda, lunch of comida iraqi. Luck eventually had, leave things at pension, another bout of wandering. The city full, the festival that night in the street is enormous: people juggling fire on stilts, homemade harpsichords being banged away, men with sleights in their hands, storytellers searching ears, groups of Andino musicians blowing into reed pipes and pounding a contrabajo. The whole city turned out to mingle among the minstrels. I sat against a wall and read Goytisolo. De donde vienes?, an Italian from Napoli stops and asks. De la tierra... 'Y volveras,' he laughs, 'like Henry Miller.' An email address I never write to. Later, when the air begins to chill, make friends with a Venezuelan who doesn't mind talking politics. The talk turns to Chavez, of course, and our hearts turn frowns together. So we talk music instead. 'Si, Metallica son increible.'
Catch a bus to Granada. Same story, no rooms to be had. In the anteroom of the last place I try is hung all manner of dead beasts and game of the field. The sad family running it seems a family of sourhearted inbreds, timid as coyotes; the two sons with greasy hair and lazy beards, tee-shirts and slippers, darting eyes, the fat mother sitting on the couch with her legs up, compaining, next to her in a wooden chair the old man with a shy smile and a leathered face, the whole lot watching some obscure hollywood movie from the cold war era. The first son is copying from my passport as if each letter were mysterious shape, each one to be copied methodically, warily, as if he didn't know what word the funny designs under his pen were making. There is a silence. I ask the old man if he is the hunter. He might be mute. He offers up a wide toothless grin instead of words while he searches in his pocket, finally extending a crisp faded business card that he seemed to have been hiding away for centuries, awaiting just that question. There is a picture of a man pointing a gun at a bird on it. I ask him in Spanish if he used to own that hunting goods store. He nods happily as if he didn't understand my question. The wife, the whole of her bulk obscured by mounds of blankets, grunts with ill humour. The second of the sons looks at me slowly, intently, untrustingly. I smile. A man enters the room with a shotgun under his arm. The old man motions that he wants it, and the enterer, who may or may not be another brother, proffers it up to the old man. The old man takes it out of the case and examines it. He looks at me, but does not point the gun at me. The old man swings the rifle around examining it, nodding, and does not point it at me. He folds it open. It is not loaded. The first son is done copying my passport. I say goodbye and leave to meet up for (free bocadillo sandwich with every) beer downtown with a guy I met on the bus...
Granada is nice, I stay for a couple of days. The Alhambra, etc. A huge labyrinth extending up the opposite hill whose crowning peak is a perpetual hippie party: guitars, drums, and cetera. A crazy guitarplaying man from austria is banging a guitar. I join him in on some Beatles song. He doesn't speak spanish and tells me loudly in English that I need to shout when I sing, that I'm not playing rock n roll. I play him some Neil Young and Creedence and we are suddenly in agreement, him shouting and me playing. Later, I find that he used to lay railroad tracks. He tells me that old music like that we just played is worthless because it doesn't make money. I was unsure what he meant. Across the plaza is an Islamic center giving out tracts about the foundationlessness of modern government and the grave danger of paper money. Meanwhile, a juggler is beginning an act, and people are gathering around him.
Bus. Port town of Algeciras, 'the island,' which is a Spanish rendering of the same Arabic word as AlJazeera, the tv channel. Ferry is to arrive to port late, maybe an hour late I am told, but we wind up sailing at 10 instead of 7. Supposed to arrive to Tangier at 10pm, then, we dock at about 1am. Holding faith that the city will be peaceful at this time of night. A table is set up in the corner of the ship's main room. Moroccans apparently do not form lines in front of customs agents, they form instead a throstling mass. I linger at the back, am last to be processed, and find that the exit door has already been sealed by the time I arrive to it. Led down tiny steep stairs, through the veritable bowels of the ship, the steam room, etc. Exit, African ground. Having stepped from peak of Hercules to peak, I find it to be well past 2am, walking through the fields where shipping containers sleep, watching children break glass in the parking lot. They shout 'Mreekee!' ('American'). Taxi drivers screech and I wave them on, for I've been told (correctly) that cheap hotels are a short walk away. Pass the men whispering 'smoke', tell the clinging tout 'shukran, walaakin imshee,' shoo, pass the big hotel up the steep hill, find a hotel that is open and cheap, he can't take euros. Sandwich shop up the hill had 'change cambio wechsel' in the window. I go up and ask them for exchange. Sure. I pull out dollars, 'No, we don't want those. Euro.' I trade in my last euros for enough dinar to buy a sandwich and sleep the night across the street. All is well and exceedingly well.
Tangier is a sleepy, sleazy, creepy city, as if the whole of it is shrouded in a tacky leisure suit. A beach resort town that once sipped cool white international wine on beach, it now sits in the back of a dark sweetsmoky cafe with its eyes glazed, thinking about the past. It is the color of age, the aged color of an age that has past. The magnificent swath of its clothing has become greasy with grime and the sweat of long years in the red, its neon lights having burnt out their own eyes, its graveyards having become garbage dumps. It is with a strange vigor that the city lives on; it is very obvious that the life of this city is much older than the facade that was put over it in the 50s and 60s to attract tourists. It exudes a charm still, one that feels vaguely subversive.
Story. In a Tangier cafe, I meet Abdou, who offers to help me find a job teaching English. Well and good, skeptical but onward. He has a friend named Yusuf who runs the American Language Center, he will ask. Great, I shrug, see you later. A few hours later I am walking in the street, a man stops me presumably to tout but drops his tout face fast and we sit down on the curb and he starts telling me about his time in the circus in Germany, how it'd travelled to New York and Australia, how he lived in Spain that's why he knows Spanish so good, how for avoiding tourist treatment I should buy a chilaba cloak (from one of his friends), how Moroccans like to learn that's why they know so many languages, more about the circus, his fall and the end of his tightrope walking, how I should convert to Islam. Then he tells me he'll help me get a job teaching English, a friend of his runs the American Language Center. His friend's name is Richard. Maa Salaama. Wandering. Towards nightfall, a man steps in and stops the kid behind the counter from ripping me off of some change. He speaks excellent English and has the eyes of an aged pervert. He would help me find a job teaching English, he says, but his friend that used to run the American Language Center, a certain Richard who converted to Islam and took the name Yusuf, died three or six months ago. 'Thanks, I think I'm going to try teaching private lessons anyway.'
Tangier good for a bit, I look at the map and I'm still at the very top tip of the continent. Travelling guidebookless, hear talk of Chefchauen, ShefshWan, sounds like a reasonable next destination. Bus station, bus won't arrive for a bit, buy some bread and yogurt from the stand nearby. Up wanders the first drunk man I've seen in Africa, tooling around next to the buses, drooling, dirty, scabbed. He comes over and grabs at the bag in my hand, trys to wrest it or rip it, take my bread and yogurt. 'Hada lee, hada lee,' I say, that's mine. Another man pulls the drunk off, pushes him away, apologizes to me for the other man's behavior. 'Yes, I'm fine, it was nothing, thanks.' The drunk man is reeling, stumbles, pushes someone inadvertently. Everyone is watching. A man comes over, leans into the drunk's face, yells something loudly, then punches the drunk man across the face with an unsure fist. The puncher runs away as the drunk man falls backwards to the ground. He gets up slowly, grumpily, goes back to stumbling. He comes over to me again, grabs my arm, tries to grab the just-lit cigarette out of my hand. I hold his arm, extend the cigarette toward him, and say 'tomalo, naam, walakin imshee, idhab, scat.' He takes the cigarette and wanders away, barefoot.
Busride. Enormous fields checkered and spotted, glimmering, with white and black plastic bags. Rise out of the valley halfway up a hill, picturesqueness. Chefchauen, an unsublime town seemingly built for tourists, in its offseason. Walk up the hill, many idle youth around waiting to extract money or facilitate said extraction. "Amigo!, Amigo!" I don't see any hotels, so I answer the hello from a guy in a Che Guevara hat. The hotel he said would be 50 dirham or 60 turns out to be 70. Okay. We chat over a horrendous hollywood movie whose protagonist is seemingly a gun-wielding Soviet traitor who has come over to the good side of the cold war and now runs secret CIA missions or something or other, Guevara Hat thinks Che was from Brazil, doesn't quite believe me that he fought in Africa. He and the hotel proprietor try to convince me to go to their friend's spice and herb shop, okay, maybe he'll have something for my slightly strange-feeling stomach. Escorting a few door-openings down from the hotel, duck into the back of a shop, 'Sit down, be comfortable. Have some tea.' Oh, this is what this is, I'm thinking, I've read about this, can't believe I fell for this. 2 italians from the hotel and I smell a few spices and then have a hundred rugs unfolded and laid before us. Much chat, smiley rugstore owner knows niceties in manifold languages. Things unfolded before us, more things, 'which do you like?,' 'I'll write a starting price down on this piece of paper,' 'It's fun, bargain with me,' 'What price could you offer?' The man does not understand the concept of no. The Italian man and woman buy a star-wars-desert-planet-dweller looking chilaba cloak and a rug, respectively, I still don't want anything. 'It would be a personal favor, this is the off-season.' Since I buy no cloaks or rugs, smiley salesman won't sell me tea for my stomach. Night has fallen when we duck out of the shop. I walk around for a few hours. I can't shake the feeling that I'm one more set of footprints on a very well trodden tourist path.
I get out of Chefchauen early the next morning, running toward the hills. Chef Chauen in Berber means 'two horns' because the mountain behind the town has a huge cleft running down the middle of it, splitting the mountain in two and making it look like two horns. I buy some bread and water and hike up to the crumbling old mosque that lies about the city. The tourist trap looks very pretty from above. I talk to some French tourists and wander on. The first night I sleep up the trail around one of the mountain-halves. The second day I hike up the rockslidden slope up into the mountain. Much weight on my back, guitar in my hand, little ease. "No voy a maldecir esta guitarra, pero tengo ganas." Hours. Dustily and tiredly I find wherein to spend the night, halfway up the wall of one side overlooking a giant hollow in the run of the rift.
I make a fire and have dinner. A very small amount of city noise reaches up to me: the occasional car honk, a swell of voices that seems to swim in the breeze. The beautiful, tranquil hollow laying out before me. In the spreading graphite of the dusk, two or three dogs appear and trot into the clearing, carefully, warily, sensing me? A gaggle of goats follows in a single file line, then fans up into the rocks to seek green things. The goatherd enters, we wave, he is trailed by the proud king of the goats and his entourage. These also fan out and up the rocks. The goatherd moves forward, calls pleasantly, encouragingly to the stragglers. He gives the dogs a yell and they round up the goats into another singlefile line, to go down into the next hollow. They proceed. Their sounds fade away, and the sound of the city puffs up its frail chest again. Another group of goats and their attendants goes slowly beneath me, this procession similar to the last. Another. Then it is dark, the night has spilled out all her ink, and the last call to prayer begins to ring out from the muezzins, one voice by one voice by one, until there is a voice coming from each and every mesquita, from down in the city and from up in the hills, blowing in from all around and being blended up in the hollow beneath me, a mass of voices mingling to create one long and solid sound of 'Allahu Akbar'; 'Allahu Akbar' growing and gaining form, donning body in dozens of clashing and coinciding voices all rolling over each other, rising up, crescendoing, 'Allahu Akbar,' peaking, dying down in fatigue, there is only one voice left, 'Allahu Akbar,' the call to prayer is over. Sleep. I wake up and there are goats going up to pasture.
Bus to Fez. Big old city with a 15foot-tall thick clay wall running around it. This picture is taken from outside the city, you can see the big wall off to the lower right. Stopped to talk to a guy in the market more or less named Maa'Leeenee, he's trying to learn Spanish, we go to a cafe and talk in Spanish, ways lead on to ways, I fall in with him and his friends for a few days. They are all from the south, from the Sahara. Very friendly folk. Though each man tries to sell me his kind of product in turn, these offers are done friendlily, without pressure. The only deals I take any of them up on is a deal on a room in a hotel and some tea for my stomach. I stay for a few days. My stomach is really rebelling now, I decide to stay on for a few more days, have coffees and dinners with Maa-Aleeney and his friends, fall in for a bit with a guy from Croatia who is setting out to bicycle all the way south to the Sahara, talk with a Saudi Arabian Oud player, enjoy walking around the city and continuing to eat questionable meat from street vendors. My stomach feels very weak. A young man in the hotel is making sweet mint tea one evening, he invites me to some, he might have some good spices for my stomach. He is very recently come from the Sahara, his smile is slow and very sincere, his skin is very sundark. We go into his room and he has me sit on his bed and he pulls some spices out of his bag. Smell. Good. And this. Great, smells good. No, I don't really want any more stomach teas, I'll keep trying the one that I've got. Then he pulls out an ostrich egg, and an iguana. He sets the iguana in my hands. No, I don't want to buy the iguana, I just like it. Alhamdolillah, praise God for the iguana, for the ostrich. You are Muslim? No. But you look like a Muslim, in your face I can tell that you are peaceful, that you are really a Muslim, or that you will become a Muslim. No, it's not just your beard. All in the will of God. We are talking slowly, complicatedly, in Arabic, in FusHa. In good faith, he animatedly goes on to give me what I am pretty sure was a very long explanation of how Muhammad is the seal of the prophets, the last, final, necessary culmination of the prophets, and how Jesus was a prophet, too, but only a man and only a prophet, not a god.Since, I've seen more iguanas and heard more and similar good-hearted diatribes. I still don't have an iguana and I'm still unconvinced. I cut my beard shorter, and people ask me less often now if I am a Muslim...
Story. One night walking down from a lofty look-out spot near a fancy hotel from which you can look down over the walled city of Fez, Maa-Aleinee and Yassine tell me that if the police stop us, I shouldn't say that we were friends, I shouldn't say that we'd been to the top of the hill, I shouldn't say anything. It is 'interdit,' he tells me, to talk to tourists.
I go to Marrakesh. I see for myself: there are big yellow placards in the Place JaamaElFna, the biggest plaza in Africa, informing me that is is indeed 'interdit' to talk to tourists. Not a very useful rule.
I want to like Marrakesh, I think that I'm going to like Marrakesh, I have plans of staying in Marrakesh for a while, I can't like Marrakesh. I wander, trying to find nooks and crannies that will make me like the place, I cannot. Am I being cynical?
Story. I am walking in the Place JamaaElFna, the biggest plaza on the African continent, and as always there are several groups of musicians playing with groups of people around them. Some clipclapping brass finger instruments over there, a man playing an amplified banjo over here. This group, amazing, there are five or six single-string bowed berber instruments (ribabe) being made to ring out and dance around the notes of the melody without ever hitting them, several tapped finger drums veering in and out of the beat, a strong wavering pulse of sound, a wall of clishclashing almost-notes, a feeling of unity, a man bravely crashing overtop singing out what seems to be a song of loyalty to the earth. I stop at the back of the crowd to listen. One of the drummer boys runs over to me after only a few seconds, shoving his upturned drum toward my chest and smiling. 'Depuis, Alaan laa ana kull saamia,' let me listen first. He is pacified for a moment, goes back into the circle dancing and joins lightly again in the playing. I watch another moment, and he is back. 'Depuis. Limaada ta'asalnee faqat liana?', why do you only ask me for money so obtrusively? 'Parce que tu est turiste!', running back into the circle. Then the song is over all of a sudden and the men are reaching for there bags and the kids beck like a flash and he's not letting me get away this time. Not that I was trying to. I don't mind giving a few dirham, but I just wanted to enjoy the music like the others...
No, it's true, Marrakesh is nice; I think I would really like it if I were a Moroccan, if I spoke Darija, if I weren't assumed to be rich and stupid everywhere I go because I am foreign. If I had been allowed to be part of the crowd and not made be one of the scattered off-season tourists, I think I would have loved the JamaaElFna. But as it was, I was wandering around being cynical, doing things like taking pictures of Kuka-Kula signs and the monetary exchange-rate board in the middle of the souk(, which is comparably a very tame market, for those who have heard otherwise. Not easy to get lost in.).
But I had already been in some more authentic, real daily-life sorts of markets, and they made Marrakesh seem like a horror. It is not that everything happening in Marrakesh is centered exclusively around the tourists, but rather that no Marrakeshi made me feel like I was allowed any interaction that wasn't one of pure tourism and simple money-extraction. So it goes.So I left Marrakesh and have been two days in Inezgane, a few miles away from the coast near Agadir. It's a funny story how I got here. I've been staying in Marrakesh for about a week, and I've made 'friends' with a guy that works behind the counter. One night, we set to talking, and I eventually bring out some cd's: He doesn't like Robert Johnson, likes Sonic Youth pretty well, seems pretty keen on Leadbelly, who he says sounds like African music, like Berber music. Anyway, at some point I mention that I was thinking of going to the Sahara, to check it out. My friend brings this up a little while after I mention it, and he says he has a friend I should talk to. His friend will come by later that night. I meet his friend and he offers to drive me to the Sahara, to M'hamid, a town near the Algerian border, and to set me up with camels and food and a guide for a 6-day trek to the highest dunes in Morocco. I'm off the next morning at 7am. Long pretty drive, a car and an SUV in caravan carting folks my friend's friend's friends and he had picked up in Marrakesh. We get to the camp outside M'Hamid where the friend's friends cook and dinner for me and the other tourists. Some are going to drive around in the desert, some ride a camel for a few hours, etc. I feel like I've been caught by fishers of men, but feel pretty good about the deal, excited about getting into the desert. Later that night, friend's friend tells me that he's going to send me off with two guides and one camel instead of the other way around. I resist, but he is firm. Que va a hacer? It's all really about the same to me, though I had images of riding on a camel. The next morning, my friend's friend drives me to M'Hamid, drops me off next to two guys packing a camel, and I am off for 6 days.
They were a pretty amazing 6 days. I'll tell stories about it some other time, maybe. Though there aren't many stories, really. Just a good six days.
This is the camel. At this moment we're resting for the afternoon, and his legs are tied together.
These are my guides, Yusuf and Mulut.
This is the camel with me.
This is the camel without me.
Two trees and the anti-atlas mountains.
Serendipitous encounter with a group of German hanggliders at the top of the biggest dune in Morocco, at sunset.
The moon.A week later, I've still got sand in everything. But that's also because I slept on the beach the other night. To finish the story, I'm sitting on the curb the morning after I get out of the desert, waiting for a grande taxi to show up. There are no grande taxis. I'm sitting there, probably reading, when this guy with long hair and a beard walks up to me, I think I'd seen him around town earlier that morning, and he asks me in broken english whether any taxis are going to come. I don't know, 'No se' bien.' 'Oh, you speak Spanish, great, I don't speak English well.' We fall to talking, and eventually a guy with an SUV will take tourists to the next town over wherefrom to take further transportation. This Gallego Miguel's already told me he's no good at haggling, so I talk the guy with an SUV's price down for the two of us, and Miguel and I and some French tourists get a ride over to Zagora. On the way, Miguel and I compare our experiences in the desert, he tells me it's no fair to think of it as having played around in the antesala, the entry room, of the desert, that that was the real Sahara o me estas jodiendo. We talk about travelling, deride guidebooks, he tells me about Ghana and Jamaica, I tell him about Mexico, we discover a strong accord over the Zapatistas. We get along pretty good. I'd been thinking about heading west some, not really sure, he's thinking of going over to the coast and then south to try to see some of the small towns there, and we fall in step. He really doesn't speak much English, so we speak in Spanish the whole bit, which feels good, a welcome reversion back to communication in a language in which I can communicate on the level of real humans. French and Arabic are fun games at this point, but hardly very practical for much transmission of thought. So, he tells me about Galicia, I tell him about New York, he's done a lot of travelling, we agree on a lot of things, we cross the country together, sleeping out one night and in a hotel the next. It takes longer than he had factored on, and his vacation time runs out before he had got a chance to see the towns to the south of Agadir. The last day before he had to head back to Marrakesh to make his flight home, we get to Inezgane, it's not very inviting, we hop a taxi out to some random beach a couple of miles south, having met up in the sands of the desert we wound up in the sands of the coast. Along around sunset we watch some fishermen setting up their gear, they tell us it's a 2 or 3 hours walk to Agadir along the beach, we make a fire on the beach whereon to crisp our bread, we sing some Bob Marley songs. Next morning the city looks further away than we had factored on. Through the morning, walking on the beach, it's slow going, and after a while we sit down to rest and are invited to lunch with some fisherman. Well and good, I jabber some in Arabic, one of the fishermen knows some Spanish, I can interpret a little when they speak French. The fishermen are friendly, tell us they have jobs in the city but spend all weekend every weekend out here fishing in the calm of the (stupendously littered and dirty) shore. They tell us it's another 1 or 2 hours of walk to Inezgane. Onward. We finally turn up into the city through the poor suburbs on the coastward side. As we sit down with some water, children are playing wild games in the dust, men and women in cloaks are walking by. After another little walk through the town, we agree that this is the first place either of us had seen thus far in Morocco that seemed seemed really to be buzzing with a life of its own, on the main oblivious (or impervious) to tourism. Then, Miguel hops a bus to Agadir enroute to Marrakesh, his vacation's over, and I walk into where it looks like the center of town might be.
