As a young lad, I enjoyed going on evening walks with my middle-class-suburban-nuclear-family.
Although I knew everything about the outdoors and that camping thing I even did once. I had of course
completed the standard walk through the park, and even a walk out at Grandma's house. What else could be
out there beyond my six year old horizon. I was new to the vertical world of mountaineering.
On one weekend in particular I can remember going up a long, long never ending hill. I believe I
was somewhat "verbal" about my dissatisfaction with the rate of our vertical increase, nor very fond in
general of the whole buggy, blistered, hungry, missing the saturday morning cartoons, "adventure," as my
mother pleadingly called it. However, we finally did get to the top of what must have been the highest hill in
the world, dad even went so far as to call it a mountain in an attempt to play to my vain adventurous side (it
worked), and I saw a view. It wasn't the grandest of views, but from that point on, I new that all of the uphill
stuff had a real good reason that was even better than mom's GORP she kept liberally doling out.
When I was old enough to read, I spent countless hours sifting through the many wonderful
pictures called "maps" my brilliant father recently pointed out to me. They had all sorts of neat lines, pretty
colors, funny and weird names, but most of all they had mountains. My favorite was the book of maps
called an "Atlas." It had such an official mystique about it that it became sacred. On one of my wanderings
through, what became "The Sacred Book of Maps," I one day bumped into Morocco. Having just heard the
tale of Aladin I looked closely.
There it was. A mountain range that was named after the Sacred Book itself! The Atlas
Mountains. How incredibly cool! And they had that white snow color on them as well, they must be real
big like Mt. Everest (another white colored peak) too! I knew then and there it was a place I would one day
visit.
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As I clung to a cliff I was unsuccessfully trying to downclimb, trying to convince myself that a 25'
jump into a steep 500' couloir that I could hopefully manage to glissade down and out of was a good idea,
and wondered just exactly what was I doing there in the first place, a serendipitous flashback, like in a bad
sit-com, reminded be that I was indeed destined since childhood to splat my body in these exact mountains,
and it was therefore justified.
Somewhere I got bright idea into my head that a solo climber, jumping onto a hidden rock, far from
any sort of foreign-language-speaking, non-VISA taking help might just be a bad idea. Besides, dead men
don't get to sit around telling stories.
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A fellow teacher friend, Nell, had gotten a job in an American School in Ifrane, Morocco, for a year
and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to throw myself to the financial wolves and fly over for the trip of
a lifetime whatever the cost. Nell met me in the train station in Rabat, the capitol of Morocco, and showed
me around for a few days until she had to get back to school. A week later we would meet up again during
her spring break and head off to the beach resort of Agadir for some R&R. A perfect plan I thought. It gave
me a bit of time to check out Marrakesh on my own, and then head into the Atlas for a few days of
"trekking."
I was excited to finally be "trekking", since regular old "hiking" involves neither passports or
llamas/ camels as "trekking" does. This was my first international jaunt, and as my hit-list of peaks I wanted
to climb had grown considerably over the years, I was anxious to climb at least one of them. As Nell pulled
away and I turned and started to walk to the souk, or shopping center a la Ali Baba, the scope of what I
wanted to do was begining to sink in. Here I was, in Morocco, speaking no Arabic and very poor French, in
need of camping supplies, with nobody to help out, and a city of beggars, con's and shopkeepers all angling
for my cash. Being tall, blonde, caucasian, and marked as an American was certainly not going to help me
blend in. I'm sure the shopkeepers were actually yelling out, "Here comes a loaded tourist, pass it on
down!"
I found the GORP stall, and was able to stock up on lots of nuts and prune type stuff. However,
not knowing my kilo to pound conversions very well, I soon found that the shopkeepers were having a ball
selling me way to much. I certainly wasn't as good as Nell was at haggling with them either. For that matter,
I had no clue even what a good price was. I wound up just paying them whatever they asked. Nonetheless,
my first forays into the ancient twisting streets and alleyways of Marrakesh worked out rather well I
thought.
I did get taken when I tried to buy a turban though. Nell mentioned that some of her friends wear
turbans to protect themselves from the sun, and look neither to stupid, nor to much like an over-eager
tourist trying to look local. I thought, "When in Rome..." and went out to find one so I could protect my
face from the sun up on the mountain.
I somehow got into a conversation with a casually slick fellow who seemed pretty relaxed about
wandering around with me. I had read in the guidebook about all the hucksters that would take you on a
tour, whether or not you wanted one, and then get in your face about paying them. When he finally got me
to the turbin stalls, he hit me up for a pack of Winston cigarettes. Being alone and very worried about the
Moroccain tendency to quickly fight (I had witnessed several yelling/ fight escalations in my short time
there already), I agreed and got out of there faster than Superman's speeding bullet. I'm told though that my
meager haggling got me a good quality turban for a decent price.
Some other forays around town helped me acquire some "Rodeo Rice," from the good-ol' USA,
some tins of "Tunny Fish," some chicken boullion cubes, some Power Bars I brought from home, and my
Moroccain GORP, and I was all set. The water in Morocco is bad enough that even the locals drink bottled
water, so the purification tablets were a life saver.
Getting to the mountains from Marrakesh is a fairly simple matter. All you have to do is head over
to the Bab er-Rob, and get aggressively propositioned by fourteen different taxi drivers at once, who know
a tourist when they see one. I had my French worked out so I could say where I was going and how much I
would pay for it. A better strategy than my previous strategy of just staring at them while they yelled and I
tried to slowly decipher what they said and figure out what I wanted to say. I eventually settled on a taxi
driver who looked decent enough, and didn't yell to louldy to take me up to the mountains.
I hopped in his aging Mercedes-Benz taxi to find myself accompanying five old women who, I'm
sure had not met very many Americans. They didn't seem to excited about meeting one either. Luckily for
me, none of them had bought any chickens while they were in town, and so the cramped car was livestock
free. From watching other people load chickens and even fully grown sheep into their car trunks, I thought
it might be an advertised selling point on TV there.
The ride up to Asni takes a little over an hour and goes through some beautiful but incredibly flat
countryside. The whole time the Atlas mountains are jutting strait up from the plains to their snow capped
peaks, and getting higher by the minute. It's quite an impressive sight. It's kind of like the Colorado front
range meets the Grand Tetons.
From Asni the guide book said that there were frequent trucks that departed for Imllil, which lay up
the valley further. Very soon after getting out of the Taxi with my climbers pack, a truck driver spotted me
and offered me a ride. With my French being so poor I wasn't sure about what he was saying, but it seemed
like we would be going sometime soon.
After about a half hour of me sitting next to the truck, and he sitting in the drivers seat looking at
me as if I were the worlds biggest loser, which I pretty much was at that point,
I decided I would rather sit in a nearby decrepid looking collection of broken plastic lawn furniture that was
posing as a cafe, and have some tea.
I had grown accustomed to Moroccain tea. The recipe is to stuff a small tea pot full of green tea
and mint. Add about a half ton of sugar, pour in boiling hot water and slowly sip it for an hour or more out
of a dixie cup sized glass. I really enjoyed the flavor but I could never quite hold off and not chug it down
after it cooled a bit. All the locals I had seen could drink a small glass for about an hour. Unfortunately they
didn't seem to have to hurry off to anything like a job, as there weren't many to be had.
After about two hours of hanging around what I was finding a filthy dirty deserted town, the truck
seemed to come to life. From out of nowhere about 15 other people showed up in about two minutes and
the truck roared up and nearly took off without me. I think it was all prearranged, but there was a
considerable amount of yelling at the driver and each other. I'm sure if I spoke Arabic it would have been
pretty funny.
The back of the truck had four and a half foot sides and made for a mostly comfortable ride to
stand up for.
