The “Guide”

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We rouse from our sleep deprived night, most of it spent in futile attempts to cool down by lying on wet towels in our tent oven.

I have an early morning chat to our “guide” Ouma and ask her how she slept. She says fine. OK I suppose she’s Moroccan so maybe she’s used to the heat. I tell her it was way too hot in our tent and we hardly slept at all … and her response… “even with the air conditioner?”. Huh? So we paid for the best tent money could buy, but the “guide“ got air conditioning and we didn’t? I’m ready to kill someone and Issy‘s sensing I might not be too fussy about who it is. I take a deep breath and launch into my next chat … with the young Dutch couple who were with us on the bus. (Her name’s unpronounceable (I had three goes), so I breathed a sigh of relief when he told me his was Max.) They were in the tent next to us, with heavy emphasis on the word ”were”. They both thought they were dying in the oven-like heat in the middle of the night, so they rustled up a staff member who told them that if they paid an extra 10 Euro they could be moved to another tent - with air conditioning. We would have happily paid ten times that. I’m not quite sure what the next step up in rage from wanting to kill someone is, but whatever it is I think I’m nearly there.

So it seems it’s time to calm down with another camel ride. I’ve dubbed this morning’s steed Kevin. Kevin the Camel just has a really nice ring to it ….. or is that possibly just lack of sleep? I’m feeling a bit calmer when I get off. I can’t walk properly and I’ll be talking with a high pitched voice for the next little while … but at least the urge to kill has at least partially subsided.

There’s a swimming pool here, and a very nice one at that. I had to look hard to find it and no one else seemed to know it was even there … which leaves us wondering a bit what the point of having a swimming pool is if no one knows about it. Now I would have thought that water might be quite a valuable commodity out here, so why has someone left the tap on so that it’s overflowing vast quantities of liquid gold off into the dunes? I ask one of the staff whether it ever rains here, and he tells me that “heavy rain” is expected next month. I suspect that’s probably something more akin to light drizzle anywhere else in the known universe, but I’m sure it’s better than nothing.

Despite having slept in air conditioned comfort, “guide” Ouma still seems a bit fuzzy on today’s itinerary. But our plans are set in concrete compared to those of Stan and unpronounceable girlfriend. They’ve signed up for an extra day, but no one seems to have any idea where they’re supposed to be headed, least of all them. At least they seem to be able to see the funny side. None of us are quite sure what “guide” Ouma’s role is in this whole exercise. She might have spent five minutes of yesterday’s ten hour drive describing things to us, but even that’s probably stretching it. Eventually we’re told that we’ll be heading to the nearby town of Rissani for a short tour. The sand dunes fade into the background and now it’s just stony plains for as far as the eye can see in every direction, well except for the large modern petrol station sitting all by itself out in the middle of nowhere. It looks ridiculously out of place.

We’re handed over to our Rissani guide who leads us into the local kasbah. It’s not particularly attractive - none of the character of Fes or Marrakech or Tangier. It’s all in a rectangular grid, and there don’t seem to be many people here … and it’s dark, like can’t see the nose in front of your face unless someone turns a torch on type dark. Oh well, it’s all in a grid, so at least we’ve got some hope of finding our way out … provided of course that the torch doesn’t go out. And what do all tours in Morocco have in common, well they all end up in a rug shop … sorry not “shop”, that’s a dirty word - a rug “display” … where everyone sits around drinking tea watching layer upon layer of rugs being laid out on the floor. Of course no one’s got any intention of buying any of them. Rug man says there’s no obligation to “do business”, but we suspect he’s keeping that urge to kill someone if he doesn’t make a sale very well hidden.

We walk back to the bus in the now again nearly 50 degree heat. We pass a row of coffee shops with men sitting outside, only men, hundreds of them, sipping coffee and discussing the day’s business. So where are all the ladies? Well there’s half a dozen completely dressed in black, even their faces, sitting huddled in the gutter in the blazing sun on the other side of the road. This place is starting to feel distinctly creepy. I think now would be a good time to leave.

The Dutch couple have now disappeared forever - I hope their parents eventually find out what happened to them. We weren’t sure our other companions, the French family of three, spoke any English, but we eventually get chatting to them over lunch. They are delightful people, particularly their only child daughter who’s about to head off to Canada to study engineering at a university near Montreal. She says she’s trying to prepare her parents for the shock. Good luck with that - we can feel their pain. We’ve lost a daughter to Canada, but at least we’ve got two other offspring who are still in Oz. We can’t imagine the pain of saying goodbye to 100% of your brood.

The rest of the day is a rewind of yesterday, well except for the “are we there yet?” bits - we’ve seen it all before so now we know better than to ask. So twenty hours of travelling, or rather ten hours viewed twice, when we expected twelve in two lots of six, for two camel rides, a meal, a night spent trying in vain to sleep on wet towels, a “guide” who didn’t do any guiding, a bus driver in too much of a hurry to let us stop to take happy snaps of the stunning scenery from the many lookout points along the way, and a tour through a very unattractive town. What were we thinking? On the upside the scenery was indeed stunning, both on the way there and out in the desert, and we met some really nice and interesting people. And the rest of the experience … well Issy says at least we’ll have something to look back on and have a giggle about ….

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

It's hot in the tent tonight
Lying on wet towels.... that says it all. Don't kill anyone. Hopefully, you'll have air soon. We were there in October and it was much more comfortable.