Saturday, March 22, 2003
Another rainy morning. Breakfast was included in the price of my hotel room, so I headed for the lobby to eat my "free" omelet without any pork accompaniment. When I got there, I spotted the Japanese girl I had met at the port in Algeciras days earlier. It seems that tourists in Morocco are like ants blindly following each other's trails around a punch bowl.
She told me that she had just signed up for a day excursion to the Cascades d'Ouzood, which are waterfalls that Let's Go says "are not to be missed." I wanted to see the falls and I considered telling her I would go with her so that we could share the cost of the van ride, but it would mean staying an extra day in Marrakesh and skipping a day I had wanted to spend on the coast. I also thought we would be running the risk of hiking in the rain, so I decided to miss the falls.
I left the hotel with the intent of seeing El Bahia (The Brilliance), which is supposed to be a beautifully preserved palace built in the 19th century. Instead, I ended up at El Badi, which is a much older palace that hasn't been preserved well at all. It is little more than crumbling walls and orange trees, although the underground corridors were kind of neat. There were only two other tourists inside the palace. I didn't realize I had gone to the wrong palace until after I returned home.
I also saw the Saadien Tombs, which served as the royal Saadien necropolis during the 16th and 17th centuries.
I returned to the hotel to check out and then did some more exploring before taking a bus three hours west to the coastal town of Essaouira (pronounced "Uh-Swear-Uh"). What attracted me to Essaouira? This time I have a much more respectable answer than Gilmore Girls--it was Jimi Hendrix. Essaouira was his hangout in the 60s. In fact, he tried to purchase the nearby Berber village of Diabat, but the Moroccan government decided they didn't want a hippie colony filled with American drug addicts, so they ran the "experienced" one out of the country.
My guidebook and I weren't communicating very well, so after exiting the bus in Essaouira, I walked in the wrong direction for fifteen minutes and stopped only when the town ended and the dessert began. I was in a typical third-world neighborhood and couldn't see any sign of a beach or the medina. This was the neat little beach town that attracted Jimi Hendrix and Cat Stevens? I started to reconsider my plan to spend the night there.
After retracing my steps and walking another fifteen minutes in the other direction, I found where I was supposed to be. As soon as I entered the medina, my mood changed for the better. There were few tourists and even fewer faux guides, although one guy tried to offer me a room at his hostel. Rather than narrow crooked paths, this medina was crisscrossed with wide, straight avenues. Tall thick palm trees added to the laid-back atmosphere. The town had once been a Portuguese port, so the architecture was a nice change.
After passing many shops and restaurants, I came to the port, from where I was able to see the beach. I then turned around and started hunting for a hotel. The first two were full and the third was too expensive. I then started trying places at random and found a place that was only 50 dirham for a quiet room on the roof. Stepping out of my room and looking over the roof wall, I had a great view of the palm-lined avenue and the Atlantic Ocean just beyond the city wall.
The only bad part was checking in. In the reception area, I sat down beside a television set on which Al-Jazeera was showing images of Iraqi women screaming in anguish over their war dead. There were three young Moroccan men grimly staring at the screen. As I pulled out my U.S. passport and laid it on the table for all to see, my level of discomfort reached a new high. It occurred to me that all of these guys would know my room number and that I was traveling alone. Running through my head was the text of Osama bin Laden's fatwah, in which he urges the killing of all Americans wherever they might be found.
I left my bag in my room and headed for the beach outside the city wall. The water was too cold for swimming, but I pulled my shoes off and let the Atlantic lick my toes. The sun was setting and the view was relaxing. Just off the shore, I could see the Purple Isles, which contained purple dye factories during the Roman Empire. The remains of a castle and fortifications are said to have served as an inspiration for Jimi Hendrix's song, Castles Made of Sand. (That song got a lot of play on my tape deck during my college days.) I was precisely where I wanted to be and decided I had chosen wisely in giving up a trip to the falls for Essaouira.
With my shoes back on, I headed to the port. It was lined with outdoor fish grilles, all cooking up the day's catch. Walking further, I passed Skala (fort) de Port and then came upon rows of commercial fishing boats. I watched the men rolling up their nets and then I headed back towards the town.
A heavy rain started and I ducked under an awning for shelter. That's where I met a tall, thin, Berber man who invited me to have supper with him at one of the nearby fish grilles. I had the grilled squid, which was just that--a whole squid thrown on a grill. There was no batter or seasoning of any kind, so it was like eating a bus tire.
After we had finished eating, the Berber invited me to go with him to have tea and hear some Berber drums. I suspected I would get a sales pitch at some point, but I thought it would be worth it to hear an authentic Berber performance. I followed him and--surprise, surprise--he took me directly to his shop. There, he pulled out a Berber drum and started beating on it. That was the performance; there was no tea; there was definitely a sales pitch. He told me that all of the items in his store came from his Berber village in the Sahara. It looked like the same stuff I had seen in every other shop, so I assumed he was lying to me, but I'd already decided I wanted to buy some earrings for my mother and this shop seemed as good as any.
The negotiation process was long and arduous. I kicked it off by pointing to a pair of earrings and asking how much they were. I then insisted that I really didn't want any earrings and I continued insisting as he showed me various pairs and kept lowering his price. I settled on the pair I liked the best and he quoted a price of 400 dirham. I offered 100 and he countered with 300, 250, 200, 140, and finally let them go for 100. I think I also agreed to Palestinian statehood, but I can't remember for sure.
Sunday, March 23, 2003
The temperature had dropped during the night and I had done a lot of shivering beneath the thin blanket on my bed, but at least it had been quiet in my room on the roof and I hadn't had any uninvited guests. When I saw the manager, he told me that he had come by my room earlier in the evening to see if I needed another blanket, but I hadn't been in. That's probably a good thing, because had I been there when he knocked on my door, I would have jumped out of bed screaming bloody murder.
I wanted to see some more of Essaouira before heading for the bus station, so I once again walked in the direction of the port. This time, however, I turned north, following the seawall to the other fortification, Skala de la Ville. I climbed to its top and walked along the rampart lined with canons facing the harbor. Below, I could see the waves crashing onto the rocks, sending mist into the air. No guides . . . no tourists . . . tranquility.
For breakfast, I decided to find a place that served almond milk like I had enjoyed in Fèz. Doing this without a Mohammed would prove to be more difficult that anticipated. I tried going to two different cafés and asking for "LOOSE," which is how M2 had pronounced it, but none of the waiters knew what I was asking for. Not realizing I was speaking Arabic, they kept trying to give me orange juice. At the third place tried, I had a brainstorm. I pulled out a bag of almonds I had purchased in Marrakesh and pointed at it. The waiter's face lit up with understanding. However, to my surprise, he took my bag of almonds. He then dumped the entire bag into a blender and added milk. That was an entire kilo of almonds! That drink ended up costing me $5 and it had only a slight resemblance to what I had in Marrakesh. Not surprisingly, however, drinking an entire kilo of almonds turned out to be quite filling. I wasn't hungry again until 4:00 in the afternoon.
The hustlers at the Essaouira bus station pushed opportunism to new limits. One man wanted 10 dirham for escorting me from the gate to the correct ticket window inside the station. Another man wanted 10 dirham for escorting me from the ticket window to the bus. (I told these two guys they'd have to share 10 dirham.) Then the kicker came when the man who had sold me my bus ticket approached me on the bus and asked for 10 dirham for having performed the service of ticket salesman. I argued with him about it until he gave up and went away.
I had asked for a bus to Rabat, but I'd discover later that the bus they put me on would go only as far as Casablanca. It was a 5-hour ride, taking us through many impoverished villages in which donkeys were as plentiful as automobiles and the mud-packed sidewalks were littered with garbage. At one of the stops, a bus passenger added to the ambiance by tossing a plastic bag filled with vomit out the door. It hit the ground with a wet smack several feet from a garbage can.
In another village, we stopped for lunch. The preferred food vendor seemed to be a rice cart. A man would scoop white rice into a bowl and then poor milk over it that he ladled from an old beat-up metal vat. A customer would wolf it down and hand the bowl back to him, whereupon he would dip it in a bucket of dirty water and then replace it on top of the cart for the next customer. I patted my tummy full of blended almonds and just shook my head.
Once I realized our final destination was going to be Casablanca, I started wondering how I was going to get to Rabat. Then in the middle of Casablanca, the bus stopped on the shoulder of a six-lane highway and the "conductor" pointed at me and asked, "Rabat?" I said yes and he started motioning for me to get off the bus. He then pointed me in the direction of another bus pulled off on the shoulder. Considering how many stops we had made, I was impressed at how well timed this transfer was, but then a wrinkle appeared. There were two buses from two different bus companies, both going to Rabat. Both conductors were pointing me to their buses and they were yelling at each other. A Moroccan woman making the same transfer motioned for me to follow her as she picked one of the buses and got on. We found our seats and the yelling outside continued for a while before we started moving towards Rabat.
There was more yelling when we got to Rabat. The bus driver decided it was too much trouble to actually pull into the station, so he stopped a half-block away. There was an eruption of anger from the passengers. If I had paid attention, I probably could have learned some Moroccan curse words. I didn't know what was going on, but the same woman who had helped me before was nice enough to motion for me to get off the bus.
I took a taxi to the cheapest hostel listed in my guidebook, which was an HI youth hostel across the street from the medina. It was the first hostel I had stayed at on this trip that was of the traditional dorm style. There were separate dorms for men and women divided by a neat open courtyard. There were approximately 14 bunk beds in my room, but it looked like only three of them were spoken for. I claimed a bunk and then headed for the medina in search of supper.
I managed to find Café Restaurant Taghazout, described by Let's Go as one of the best in the medina. The place was filled with locals and I was the only tourist. I downed a plate of brochette and an entire loaf of bread. Before returning to the hostel, I bought some fresh oranges and bananas, as well as some sort of pastry.
Back in my dorm room, I met two of my roommates. The first one I met was a Canadian in his late 20s. He had already spotted my Let's Go book on my bed and so was anxiously awaiting my return. He told me I was the first English-speaker he had come across in almost a week. He had been travelling alone in Morocco for six weeks. I was enjoying Morocco, but I couldn't imagine being there for that long.
I was a bit jealous when he told me he had gone on a camel trek into the Sahara. That's something I had wanted to do, but ultimately decided it wouldn't be worth an additional twenty-four hours on a Moroccan bus just to see some sand dunes. Still, going to Morocco and not riding a camel is like going to Hawaii and not seeing a volcano. So I felt a guilty satisfaction upon hearing how miserable his trek had been. His guide overcharged him and made all sorts of false promises, including promising him there would be other English-speaking tourists. It turned out to be just him and the guide, who seldom said a word. The Canuck seemed to be a gregarious fellow, so I'm sure that two days and nights of silence in the desert was hard for him to take. On top of that, he suffered a bad case of heat stroke.
My other roommate was from Great Britain. He looked to be about twenty. He said he had been working at a Moroccan language school. Since he didn't speak any language other than English, I'm assuming that's what he taught. He said that when school officials got the word that the students were organizing a war protest, the government simply shut the whole school down indefinitely, so now he was doing some sightseeing. He said he was Muslim, so he had the advantage of access to all of the mosques. But after asking him a few questions about Islam that he couldn't answer, he conceded that I knew more about his religion than he did. That made me think that I could probably bluff my way inside a mosque if I wanted to, but I didn't think it was a good time for an American Christian to be caught trying to infiltrate a mosque.
Before going to bed, the three of us ended up talking politics for at least two hours--mostly about the war. (I can't escape it!) The Brit told me he hated Bush, but when I pressed him on it, he couldn't give me any reasons why. The Canuck said he didn't hate Bush and that he seemed like an all-right guy. That made the Canuck a real rarity over the course of my trip.
Monday, March 24, 2003
I spent the morning exploring Rabat with my two new friends. We began by walking to the eastern edge of the city and exploring the Chellah. The Chellah was once a Roman city. In the 14th century, the Merenids encircled it with walls and converted it into a royal necropolis. So it's like a two-for-one deal for tourists. A portion of the interior consists of Roman ruins and the other portion contains the remains of a mosque and the 13th-century tombs of Sultan Abu Yacoub Youssef.
There was also a pool containing eels. An old woman would lure them out of their holes by tossing bits of boiled egg into the water. The Brit asked us if the eels would shock him if he tried to grab them. "No, I don't think so." He also seemed interested in the many stray cats we saw. He wanted to know if it would be difficult to take one home with him to Britain. "Yes, I think so." Was I that simpleminded when I was 20?
Rabat is the capital city of Morocco, so that is where all of the foreign embassies are located. After leaving the Chellah, we took a walk down embassy row. We passed the U.S. embassy, which didn't look very inviting. The Brit seemed determined to visit the British embassy for no reason other than to say hello to his countrymen, but we dissuaded him.
Next, we made our way to the Mausoleum of King Mohammed V, built in the 1960s as a tribute to the king who led Morocco's independence movement.
Nearby was the Hassan Tower. At a height of 144 feet, this massive minaret can be seen for miles. It is all that was built of the Hassan Mosque, begun by Sultan Yacoub al-Mansour in 1195. Had the mosque been completed, it would have been the largest in the world. A courtyard filled with stubby reconstructed support pillars gives some idea of just how grand the sultan's plan had been.
We ate lunch at a pizzeria--with the Brit running across the street for a McDonald's Happy Meal--and then my new friends walked me to the train station. They were both staying another night in Rabat. I was enjoying their company, but I had already seen more of Rabat than I had planned. I wanted to make it to Tangier by day's end and it was going to be a 5-hour trip.
Arriving at the train station in Tangier, I found myself back where I had been a week earlier, but with a hundred times more confidence. I was so confident, in fact, that rather than getting in a taxi, I crossed the street to the city bus stop. Without any guidance from Let's Go or any faux guides, I thought I'd just hop on a bus and hope that it would take me in the right direction. I thought that no matter how lost I might get, I could always hail a taxi to deliver me to safety. Fortunately, one of the first buses to stop had the word "Port" on its front, so I didn't have much to worry about. The driver let me know when we got to the port and I once again found myself in familiar territory.
I decided to spend another night in an HI youth hostel. Following the directions in my guidebook, I was almost there when a faux guide latched onto me. His name was . . . Mohammed. Even though I hadn't told him where I was headed, M3 suggested that I stay at the youth hostel. He then started walking me there and so I feared he'd expect payment for taking me somewhere I was already going. But at the door to the hostel, he departed without asking for anything. Still, I wonder whether the hostel upped the price of my stay to cover a finder's fee they might have paid to M3.
There were about fourteen beds in the room, but less than half of them were occupied. There were no English-speakers, so I wouldn't be making any more new friends. I dropped my backpack on one of the beds and then left to search for supper. Unfortunately, M3 had anticipated this move and was waiting for me outside the hostel. He was talking to someone I recognized, although he didn't recognize me. It was the guy who had talked to Jeff, Marty, and me by the ATM machine on our first day in Tangier. That certainly seemed odd, since that ATM machine was almost two miles from the hostel, but now that I saw where he was hanging out, I realized he was a hustler of some sort and that I had been naïve a week earlier when I thought he was just being friendly. I was glad he didn't recognize me and that he decided to let M3 have me all to himself.
M3 was on me like stink on a jelaba and he wasn't going to let go. He walked with me to the medina, talking all of the way. I told him I was leaving Morocco rather than arriving and that I wouldn't be doing any more sightseeing, but this didn't deter him. He would tell me which way to go and I would disregard him, but he persisted. After winding around several turns inside the medina, I told him I was going to a pastry shop we had passed, whereupon he asked if he could eat with me. Somewhere along the way, I managed to lose him in the crowd and was greatly relieved.
At the pastry shop, I once again made an attempt to order LOOSE. Again, there was much confusion. Neither of the workers could understand what I was asking for. A Moroccan customer who spoke a few words of English tried to help out. "You want orange juice?" No. I said "LOOSE" about ten times, but it did no good. They didn't understand the word "almond" and this time I didn't have a $5 bag of almonds to show them. After much struggling, the customer suddenly understood. "Oh, you are wanting LOOSE!!" I told him that's what I had been saying. "Yes, but that's what it's called in Arabic." I wanted to say, "I'm sorry, I thought you spoke Arabic." But I didn't. The workers made the elixir I was craving and although it wasn't exactly like what I had in Fèz, it was pretty close.
It was after dark, so I wasn't able to see the main sights, including the only one I was really interested in. That would be the Old American Legation, which was the first foreign property acquired by the U.S. (I think I remember reading that Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States as an independent country.) I did, however, go by Café Paris, which is one of the few corners of Tangier that reflects the image of Morocco depicted in old spy movies. During WWII, it served as the rendezvous sight for various secret agents and it looks like it hasn't changed much.
I returned to the hostel, making a cautious approach on the lookout for M3. In my head, I was practicing what my response would be to his complaint that I had lost him. Fortunately, he was nowhere to be seen as I ducked inside.
That was my final night spent in Morocco.