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Published: September 23rd 2009
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Sorry yall for not hitting back sooner but i have been just ever so slightly incommunicado. The main reason for this is that i was in the motherfucking SAHARA. Yes. Yes. Yes thank you. OK settle down. Please stop clapping or we will never get through this.... thats better.
Now, where to start where to start. I guess the begining is as good a place as any...
Connections are everything. I have never been very good at building them and have always been ever so slightly amused by people who make a habit of doing so. In morocco connections are the difference between a good trip that retains a certain level of genuineness and a rip off scam of the new millenium which reduces you and your wallet to tears.
For a few days before departure a few of my fellow travellers and I had been lamenting that the most beautiful and lesser visited areas of morocco: The Sahara, The High Atlas, The Mountain paths dotted by Berber villiages, are also by far the least accessible. Oh how could we possible explore these gems of nature, we found ourselves asking. The answer came from a somewhat reliable source:
The Gang
L-R Rueben, Ian (look at that pant bulge... unsightly), Sun, and Menja. Abdel the half breed Moroccan American. As a former native and tour guide in this country he suggested that if we hired a car he would be happy to show us around the country, providing of course we paid for his food, accommodation etc.
The difficulty in dealing with abdel is that Moroccan is still in his blood, and even at his most genuine he does tend to sound like a dodgy carpet dealer, "If you go alone it would cost 1, maybe 2000 Dhs per day, but i can get you a trip for so much less, i know a friend..." Unlike the vast majority of english speakers in this country he is not actually a scam artist, but i am not used to friends giving me the hard sell about something that i was going to do and pay for anyway. His way of justifying every little cost ad nausium became a recurring theme throughout the journey.
We all chatted for a little bit and decided that this was actually the best plan of action and most likely the only real way we would ever be able to get to these parts of the country. And
so the band of five was formed. Myself, dashing mister Michael (Ian being a totally impronouncable name in multiple countries); Abdel; Menja, a gem of a Norwegian who takes no prisoners on the negotiating table; Reuben, stupîd name great guy, also from Brisbane and a great source of occa language lurchings; and finally Sun, a Korean girl who was supposed to be in Marrakesh in a few days and whom we perhaps mislead just a little in telling that the trip would be half the time it actually was... meh, so we are bad people. Sue me, do me, everybody screw me.
Our car was cheap but lacking somewhat in size. In the immortal (yet reworked) words of the great bard Kelly 'shoes' Kelly, "Um, this car is kinda small...and your legs are kinda big!".
But none the less i demanded a squashed back seat and then we soldiered on.
Oh lord how to describe Moroccan city traffic. For starters traffic lights are one of the ultimates shows of judicial optimism by the police, sticking to your own lane is a guideline more than a strict rule, and 180° handbrake turns while going 100 km an hour down
a highway which leave you stranded and doing a three point turn in the middle of a bridge in peak hour traffic are apparently ok (Abdel swears that it works a lot better in Grand Theft Auto)
First stop was the local mega supermarket to buy food. If presented with the opportunity to visit a supermarket in a country renound for their thriving, vibrant and madcap street market cullture for the love of cod DONT DO IT! It was one of the most disturbingly sanitised experiences of my life and made me realize jst how used to mad moroccan street life i had become in the last few weeks. The other thing we had to buy, as proud and mildly disrespectful westerners, was vodka. Ramadan is a bizarre time in a country like morocco. The poplation becomes positively duplicitous. The country that is so liberal for a lot of the year dons the proverbial veil of modesty and pioty for this one month. Moroccan 'Muslims' who for the rest of the year will drink, screw and eat bacon suddenly discover that they are, in fact, Islamic, and turn up their nose at any Muslim irreligious enough to defy it. As such the vodka that is available for the rest of the year in fuck-off one litre bottles is now held behind discrete, opaque white curtains.
Our ragtag group ducked behind the lines and past the boxes and settled on a few bottles of 40dh vodka.... that is $6AUD for those playing at home. Another Ramadan quirk was the fifteen minutes it took to purchace our delicious liquid inhibitions loosener. Our lovely checkout chick fatima (or something), a fast living girl who im sure necks whole bottles of Russias finest for 11 months of the year suddenly couldn't even tough our bottles without destroying their sudden contract with god... neither it seems could any of the other twenty checkout chicks. Resolution came when abdel picked the bottles up, twisted them barcode side, ran them in front fo the scanner himself and passed over the money to the suprised young lass. Take that religious tolerance!
On a lighter note.... lighter AIR that is.... (cause we went up to the mountains..... which have a higher altitude... see what i did there... that is well worked comedy gold right there and i dont care who knows it). Morocco drifts from full city fury to super laid back country in such a beautifully swift manner... STREETS!!!! SHANTY TOWNS!!!! BEAutiful rolling prehistoric mountains stretching out across the distance and reclaiming the sky....
Shame about the police...but i will get back to them in the second installment!
An enduring memory of this trip is that the country drives were always beautiful. Spectacular, hold your breath and imagine that you've entered a fantasy world beautiful. This was capped on our first evening by one of Abdels contacts, a young man in a truely tiny villiage up in the mountains just north of Er-rachidia. Arriving at nighttime we where quickly rushed from our near palatial house into our swimmers and out into the very very cold air. It was black as pitch, the first time i had seen true darkness in this country. We were lead by Abdel's friends over some slippery as hell rocks towards a creekriver area, which i was most certainly not going to catch hypothermia in! Our guides stopped a little before the banks of the river and turned to a small pool beside it. There was a constant steam slowly rising from its surface. It was a natural thermal hot spring. And so, slowly as our dainty tootsies would allow, we drifted into the pool, half covered in heat, half in cold, over the french love songs played on gypsie guitars and the sounds of the gentle river flowing my eyes where drawn for the first time to the Northern skys. My god the stars. Like so many of the things i saw on this trip i do not have the skills to do justice to their majesty. It was as if a missing piece of a puzzle had been revealed, and everything about this place suddenly made sense.
And so lost amongst the unbounded sky, a truely enormous and slightly disrespectful vodka orange in hand, and surrounded by newfound friends, I was left to drift away, and dream of tomorrows quest.... Six hours south and into the Sahara Desert.
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Rou
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Michael is Hot
Dear Michael: (See! Ive been telling you for ten years that the name 'Ian' is both difficult to pronounce and weird to say), Im just so loving your trip. meeting randoms and sailing off is the best and like you, i've seen so many things that are hard to describe. the complete silence on a snowy day in Sweden, the cool air that blows in your face whilst looking at the stars in Uluru, the indescribable joy of that first spring day where u see flowers blossomingday after a long winter in Edinburgh. im glad you are taking it all in. anyway the most important thing is: you look soooo hot in that beard. i've always been into beards. its probably cos i married someone who comes from the least hairy ethnicity ha ha. love you