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Travelling in Morocco
"It all started late one night...
Because Kathy and I were the last two people to order our tickets from www.travelocity.com, we ended up on a 7:30 AM flight from Heathrow to Madrid. This necessitated catching a 4 am bus from Oxford. So, not having slept a wink, Katherine and I met at the Oxford bus station at 3:45 am on the morning of November 30. Although these travel arrangements were less than ideal, they did at least allow me to verify that the kebab vans are, in fact, open past 3 am. When we got to Heathrow, we had about an hour to kill before our flight, so we went to an airport cafe. Kathy had crepes. I, working on the theory that breakfast is what one has after one has slept, decided that no type of food would be inappropriate for me at this point. So I ordered the ""breakfast pasta"" which consisted of (seriously) linguini with bacon and cheese in an olive oil sauce with a fried egg on top - strange combination!
On the flight to Madrid, Kathy was seated about 10 rows ahead of me. I was one row ahead of the three most obnoxious people on the plane. In fact, they were the most obnoxious people over the age of three that I have ever encountered on a plane. I found out later that Kathy could hear their conversations just fine from her seat. I got less sleep than I had hoped for on the flight.
Once in Madrid, we grabbed our bags (the first 2 off the plane!), put them in storage, and headed into Madrid. We went into the national library, but they told us we weren't allowed to look at any of the books. This was strangely reminiscent of the Bodleian. So we gave up and got lunch and just wandered around the city for a few hours before heading back to the airport to retrieve our luggage and our friends -- Jacqui, Mike, Dean, Jason, Jade, Chris, and Nick.
From the airport, we took the subway to the Plaza del Sol, which was packed with people. Not surprisingly, none of the hostels in the area had room for 9 people. After a brief encounter on the street with a kindly old scam artist who claimed he knew the perfect place for us, we split into two groups and found lodgings for the night. After a huge paella dinner, we headed off to bed.
The next morning, after something of a late start, we headed off to the Prado, which blew me away. It has a long room almost entirely full of Raphaels. I could live in that room. After the Prado, Jacqui, Mike, Jason, and I left on a train for Sevilla. Dean and Jade stayed in Madrid a few hours longer and took the next train. Chris, Nick, and Kathy were meeting some other people and heading off in a different direction. Right after dropping us off at the train station, Dean and Jade were mugged by two guys. The exchange went something like:
Mugger #1 (playing good cop): You Americans?
Dean: Australian.
Mugger #1: Very funny. You're laughing now, but you should be careful on these streets. There are a lot of dangerous characters here in Madrid.
Mugger #2 (playing bad cop): (pulls a syringe out of his pocket, with the cap on the needle) Don't make me use this.
Mugger #1: That's okay, we don't need to come to that. Just give us some money, and everything will be okay.
Dean: (gives him 200 pesetas)
Mugger #1: I know you have more than that.
Dean: Listen, we've been very nice already.
Mugger #1 (pauses and gazes into the distance, possibly entering the Twilight Zone): You're right. You have been nice.
Muggers: (let Dean and Jade walk away)
This is the story as independently recounted by Dean and Jade.
In Sevilla, we managed to find a hostel room that had neither heat nor hot water. We didn't recognize the importance of the absence of this until much later, though. We headed out for dinner. After walking around for a while looking for a place to eat, Mike began protesting loudly: ""Why are we walking around so much? We're on holiday!"" (This mirrored his explanation of why he wasn't coming to Morocco with us: ""I'm on holiday! Why would I want to go somewhere where they don't have toilet paper?"") Getting into the Spanish mentality, we had dinner from 10 pm until about 1:30 am. And many, many jugs of sangria (which I hadn't liked when I tried it in the States, but wow, it was good in Spain). And Jason got a bit too drunk!. Dean and I kept taking his drink away; Jacqui kept giving it back to him. By the end he was (very loudly) protesting his sobriety with statements like (bear in mind that most of us at the table were either Politics or International Relations grad students): ""I'm sober! Honest! Ask me anything. Ask me about deliberative democracy!"" The six of us then stumbled home from the restaurant, with Dean, Jason, Jade, and I linking arms and laughing the whole way. Jacqui and Mike, embarrassed, walked behind us - at a distance.
We went to bed, froze all night, and woke to the possibility only of a cold shower. We switched hostels in the morning. Jacqui, Mike, Jade, and Jason headed for a day in Cordoba. Dean and I stayed and explored Sevilla. We spent an hour or so in the majestic cathedral, which is beyond description. Then we headed for the river and took out one of those two person boats that you paddle with your feet.
We all met back in Sevilla for dinner that night (not nearly as exciting as the night before), and then we went to a flamenco nightclub which was apparently an underground club during all of Franco's reign. It was really cool! That night we went back to the hostel and Dean, Jade, Jason, and I all lay on the beds in Jason's and my room discussing the interesting day we had had.
The next day, Jacqui and Mike stayed in Sevilla while Jade, Dean, Jason, and I went to Torremolinos, a tourist trap on the Costa del Sol. It was disappointing -- English is the first language there, everything is touristy, and it was off season, so no one was there. It was vaguely warm, so we went and defiantly sat on the beach, but then the sun got lower and we got really cold. So we were sitting on the beach, using towels to cover ourselves for warmth. With Dean's brilliant insight -- ""It's just not hot. That's the bottom line"" -- we went inside. That night, Jon, another student, flew in and met us.
The next morning, the five of us took an early bus to Algeciras, then a ferry to Tanger, Morocco. Immediately upon stepping off of the ferry, we were surrounded by a crowd of about 20 ""guides."" Guides in Morocco practice a naked form of extortion -- what you're really paying them for is to keep the other potential guides away from you. It's quite unpleasant, they try to rip you off at every turn, they're incredibly pushy, and everything they recommend is suspect because they get kickbacks from customers to certain taxis, restaurants, hotels, etc. Jason and I got money from a cash machine and recommended that the others do the same. Dean insisted that this was unnecessary, as the train station would undoubtedly take credit cards, and besides, there was bound to be a cash machine at the train station. Of course, they neither took credit cards nor had a machine. Jason and I paid for the train tickets to Marrakech for everyone. We had several hours until the train (it was an overnight one), so we decided to go get dinner. Deciding that the luggage storage place at the train station was somewhat suspect, we piled all of our luggage back into the cab that brought us to the station and told the cabbie to take us someplace for dinner. The cab's trunk didn't close, so it was held down with bungee cord. During parts of the ride to the restaurant, the crowd on the streets (pedestrians, mopeds, donkeys, and other cars) was thick enough that the cab slowed to a crawl. The pedestrians closed in on all sides of the cab, and Jason (who was sitting in the front) said to those of us in the back, ""Keep an eye on our baggage."" Seeing someone get too close to the trunk, Jon bolted out of the cab, and we all followed. Of course, no one was trying to steal anything from us, and the crowd around the taxi thought this was hilarious. ""Calm down, calm down!"" they said in English.
The restaurant was good, but radically overpriced, in order to pay for the kickback to our cab driver (a free meal and some money, too). When we left the restaurant, the cabbie gave some money to a kid who'd been watching the car for him. The kid immediately passed it along to someone else, who passed part of it to someone else. Everything there works like this. Amazing.
We headed back to the station to wait for our train. While there, we met a man who told us he knew 8 languages. He demonstrated this by counting to 10 in each of them. He turned out to be a drug dealer. We decided that's why his linguistic legerdemain was best expressed in numbers -- he could probably also say ""grams"" and ""the good stuff"" in eight languages, too. Dealers are everywhere in Morocco. Imagine an entire city of Washington Square Park and you start to have an idea about Tanger or Marrakech. Apparently, Western tourists are drawn there by Morocco's reputation from the 60s as a drug haven. But penalties, even for possession, are incredibly strict, and there are apparently a number of Westerners languishing for years in Moroccan prisons on possession charges. We told the dealer no thanks and got on the train.
Because we had different interests, Jade, Jason, and I split off from Dean and Jon when we reached Marrakech. It was about 8 am, and we went in search of a hotel. After waking the night desk clerk, we found a place to stay right on the edge of the medina (old city). We were the only people in the hotel. This is about as off-season as you can get. We decided to spend that day in Marrakech and use the next two days for day trips into the mountains, into the desert, and to some waterfalls. In order to start making our plans, we asked the front desk if they could help us plan our daytrips. ""No problem,"" we were told. Later, we asked how we could get to the waterfalls. ""Go to the bus station,"" they told us. Thanks.
So, we headed off in search of a travel agency to try to line up a guide or something. After going to several, we found Ahmed, whose office was less than inspiring (but, as Jada put it, ""at least he has a fax machine""). He arranged for a driver for us to take us over the Atlas Mountains to see some Kasbahs and the edge of the Sahara the next day. We wanted to go to the waterfalls (the Cascades d'Ouzoud) the next day, but left that up in the air.
Then we headed off to the souk (marketplace) in the Marrakech medina. The souk is essentially indescribable if you've never encountered it. The first thing that caught our eye was the snake charmer. He was trying to charm a cobra, but the cobra seemed like it would rather sleep. The charmer's assistant kept hitting the cobra with something to try to make it move, but the cobra was resolutely uninterested. So, I guess to keep the crowd interested, he brought over a smaller snake and draped it around Jade's neck. ""Not poisonous. Not like the cobra,"" he assured us. We moved on.
We walked around for a while, shopping and haggling with the local merchants. They start out by charging people (especially tourists) at least 5 times the real price. After a while, it occurred to us that we were really spending 20 minutes haggling over 2 quid, but somehow 20 dirhams sounds like a lot more than 2 quid. In any case, the proudest moment of the trip came when a merchant exclaimed to me, ""You're a tough bargainer. You must be Berber!"" I considered saying, ""No, just Jewish,"" but I refrained. We ate dinner at the food stalls that were amazingly good, amazingly cheap (we each had a great vegetable cous cous dish and meat kabobs for about 2 quid each), and not a little scary. As you walk through the area where all the stalls are clustered, the cooks come running at you and try to convince you to eat at their stall. All the food is sitting out and has been for some hours (last time I was in Morocco, in the summer, there were flies everywhere. Not so many, thankfully, in December). But great food!
As we were walking back towards our hotel, we passed the monkey area. This is where the guys with pet monkeys on leashes try to get you to pose for a picture with a monkey and then charge you for the privilege. We'd heard that sometimes the monkeys were sick, so we decided to steer clear. As we're walking along, Jade suddenly says, ""Watch out for the monkey man!"" and Jason turns around to see a guy charging at him with a monkey yelling (I'm not making this up), ""Touch the monkey! Touch the monkey!"" Jason gets out of the way, but the guy catches up with Jade and, despite her best effort, he gets the monkey onto her shoulder. She's sort of nervously twitching, trying to ask the man to take his monkey back, when Jason turns around and sees Jade with the monkey on her shoulder. Thinking that she asked for it, Jason says impatiently, ""Jade, come on. Quit messing around; we have to go."" Meanwhile, the monkey man is telling Jade, ""You touched the monkey! 20 dirhams!"" I couldn't stop laughing long enough to be helpful to anyone. Monkey jokes would recur for the remainder of the trip.
The next day, we woke up at about 6:30 to meet our driver at 7 for our trip to the Kasbahs. Our driver's name was Hamid, and Ahmed (the travel agent) came with us (we figured we were so overpaying him that he had decided he could take the day off). On the way to the desert, we had to pass over part of the Atlas Mountains, which were absolutely beautiful (and quite cold at the top). Driving over them required going over switchbacks along sheer cliff faces with no guardrails. But Hamid was good and went pretty slowly. Nonetheless, Jade got a bit sick on the way up. As we came down out of the mountains, we began to get into the desert, which was also gorgeous, but in a completely different way (and very hot). After a while, we stopped and went to walk around in a Kasbah in the middle of the desert. Hamid and Ahmed didn't want to stop there but we (okay, mostly Jade) insisted. And it was incredible. It's this huge structure made, essentially, out of mud. It has to be repatched every year because of erosion. And people have been living in it for hundreds of years. Absolutely astonishing. My reaction: ""This is the coolest sandcastle ever!""
On the outskirts of the Kasbah, we met a kid who offered to be our guide if Jason, in return, would transcribe a letter for him into French so that he could mail it to his friend in France. We said okay, but then when Jason offered to transcribe the letter, the kid hedged and said he'd find someone else to do it. So instead we give him 50 dirhams. He says he doesn't want money, he just enjoys making new friends (but, naturally, makes no move to give the money back). Then he gives us his e-mail address! Somehow, this failed to strike either Jason or Jade as incongruous, and neither of them really listened to me as I mumbled, ""But if he can't write...""
Then our guide says he wants us to meet his family, so he takes us back into the town near the Kasbah. On the way back, he asks if Dan and I are married. We say no, and he then says something like, ""Ah, so he must not yet have enough camels for you."" He then offers (half-jokingly?) a thousand camels for Jade. Jason and I consider the offer (our reasoning: if we come back without Jade, that's a net loss. If we come back with Jade, that's to be expected. But just think about what a major coup it would be if we could come back with a thousand camels! And besides, how cool would it be to stage an invasion of the Magdalen deer park with a herd of camels?) Ultimately, we rejected the offer.
When we got back to town, an older man -- possibly the kid's father -- comes in and proceeds to spend half an hour trying to sell us rugs and crafts. We have now figured out what the kid's ploy was. The older guy keeps telling us cheesy stories with lines like, ""It is the custom of the Sahara!"" in a low, hoarse whisper. I could swear I heard the swell of cheesy movie music in the background (and, indeed, this Kasbah was where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed), but it may have just been especially melodious bleating by the local goat population. We left, sans rugs, and promising to email our new friend.
Hamid drives us a little further, to Ouarzazate, the gateway to the Sahara. Another Kasbah there, but not nearly so interesting. It's now time to head back. Because we stopped at the first Kasbah, we're running late. This is important to Hamid and Ahmed because it's Ramadan, and they have neither eaten nor drunk since sunrise, and they want to get back in time to break fast with their families. So now we're going back over the Atlas, on switchbacks over sheer cliffs without guardrails, and we're going fast. This was a scary ride. We get back just as the sun was setting. The whole day, Jade, Jason and I had been snacking on dried dates and apricots. We had offered some to Hamid and Ahmed to be nice, but they of course refused. When he dropped us off at our hotel, Hamid literally dove at the fruit. It was really funny. Being in a Muslim country -- even as secular a country as Morocco, which observes Ramadan more as a cultural celebration than a religious one -- during Ramadan was certainly interesting. (And for those who think the commodification of religion is a Western phenomenon: we saw bottled water advertising a ""Ramadan special"" price?)
We were unsure as to whether we wanted to go to the Cascades the next day with Ahmed or whether we wanted to spend less money and arrange our own trip. Ahmed gave us his cell phone number and told us to call him that night. We later decided we did want to go with him. But he gave us the wrong number. We had dinner again that night at the souk and took in more of the spectacle.
The next morning, we awoke early, checked out of the hotel, and headed to the bus station. We had heard conflicting reports on how long it took to get to the Cascades -- anywhere from 1 to 4 hours -- and we had to be back in Marrakech in time to catch the 9:00 pm overnight train to Tanger. We got on a 9:30 am bus that went somewhere near the Cascades. We were clearly the only non-Moroccans on the bus. We got on the bus at about 9:10. At about 9:25, Jason -- the only one who speaks French in our group -- decides to get off the bus and go back into the station to mail a postcard. About 30 seconds after he gets off the bus, we start pulling away. Jade sprints to the front of the bus.
Jade: Do you speak English?
Driver: Non. Français.
Jade (in English): My friend's not on the bus!
Driver: (looks quizzically at Jade)
Jade: (frantically makes stopping hand motion)
Driver: (slams on the breaks, runs out of the bus)
Finally, we found someone to translate, and the bus driver burst out laughing when he found out what the ""emergency"" was. A few minutes later, Jason comes wandering out of the station, looks where the bus used to be, and visibly panics before we call him over. Finally, the bus gets underway. The bus is a 2-man operation: there's the driver and another guy who hangs out the rear door. The second guy, whenever he sees people walking along the street, yells at the driver to stop. The bus stops and then the second guy gets out and bargains with the pedestrians until they reach a price at which they agree to take the bus instead of walking. So we pick those people up and move on. It takes about 4 hours to get to the closest point to the Cascades where this bus goes.
At that point, we catch a cab, which takes about another hour to get us to the Cascades. It's now about 1:30 pm. The busses stop running back to Marrakech at 2:00 pm. Our cabbie is the only person in North Africa who doesn't speak French. (Jason, in the middle of nowhere in Morocco, is trying to call his dad (who speaks Arabic) on his mobile phone. Shockingly, he can't get a signal.) Finally, however, the cabbie manages to convey to us that no, he can't take us back to Marrakech after we've seen the waterfall. We panic.
When we get near the falls, we meet a local guide who tells us, no problem, he'd arrange for a cab to take us back and the cabbie would just break fast in Marrakech. He said the cab would cost us 500 dirhams, which was reasonable, and lucky, as we only had about 700 dirhams between us. The guide leads us around the falls for a while. They are quite possibly the most beautiful natural things I have ever seen. I can't even begin to describe it. The word ""Edenic"" fits, but isn't very descriptive. In any event, Jason, Jada, and I have tentative plans to just spend a weekend at the falls sometime in the Spring if we can. I wish I could say more about the falls, but I just won't be able to do them justice. The guide told us a story about an English man who had married a Berber woman, bought a plot of land near the falls, and was building a small hotel there. Jason and I thought that English man had his priorities perfectly in order.
When we get to the end of the tour, we were planning to tip our guide about 50 dirhams. (It was only a 1 hour tour, after all). He demands 500. Under other conditions, we would have just laughed and given him 50, but we were dependent on him to get us our taxi back -- otherwise we'd be stranded in the desert and miss our train. So we bargain him down to 200, which we just barely had. At first we thought we only had 680 between us (remember, the cab was going to be 500), and he started looking at our wallets as we were looking through them. He tried insisting that we take our dollars or pounds to other tourists and trade them for dirhams to pay him. He refused to accept 180 instead of 200, causing Jade seriously to contemplate directing physical violence his way (she's tough, you know -- she played basketball in college!) Fortunately for us (and perhaps more so for the tour guide), we finally scraped together 200.
Now it was time for us to get our cab. At first, the cabbie wants the 500 in advance. We refuse, afraid he'll strand us in the desert. We offer to pay 200 in advance. He says never mind, we can just pay it all when we get there. This really makes me think -- if all he wanted was some guarantee that we'd pay up, then why not accept the 200 up front? Maybe he really was planning to dump us in the desert?
Anyway, we got back to Marrakech, had one last dinner at the souk, said a fond farewell, and got on our train. During the night on the train, Jade got really sick. We got a cab in Tanger and asked him to take us to a pharmacist. By the time we got there, Jada was crying in pain. The pharmacist looked at her and said, ""You don't need a pharmacist; you need a doctor."" So the cabbie took us to a Red Cross clinic. The place was really clean, and the doctor seemed really competent, but I was still nervous about leaving Jade in the hands of third world medical care, especially when the doctor said that she wanted to give Jada a shot to help settle her stomach. ""Make sure the needle is sterile,"" I said to Med-bound Jason. ""Oh gawd, I didn't even think of that,"" he said. But it was sterile and everything was fine, although the shot didn't seem to do Jade much good.
If she was going to need any more medical care, we figured the best thing we could do would be to get Jade to Spain, so we got on the next ferry. Jade slept the whole time, and we landed in Algeciras a few hours later. Because we'd been in email contact with the people who had stayed in Spain (yes, Marrakech has internet cafes, but you would not believe how hard it is to type English on an Arabic keyboard), we were planning to meet a bunch of people in Granada, so we caught the next train there. Because the dividers between the seats on the train couldn't be raised, Jade slept on the floor of the train, which brought some looks from the conductors. I just kept saying, ""Ella está enferma,"" and they would move on.
When we got to Granada, we were met by Kathy, Chris, Nick, Scott, Dave and Seth. They had already got us a hostel room, which was incredibly nice. As we headed from the train station to the hostel, we told them some of our stories from Morocco. At one point, Jason began to tell them about how he took a picture of a snake charmer and didn't give the guy any money and the snake charmer picked up his cobra and started charging at Jason with the snake to demand money. The only problem was that this was what had happened to my dad and me the last time I was in Morocco, six years ago.
By the time we left the train station, it was about 10:00 pm, so we had literally been travelling for the past 24 hours, Jade was still feeling really bad, and we were all just ready to collapse. We put Jade to bed and got her what food we thought she could handle, and then the rest of us went out to get a quick dinner. We met up with Tegon, who was also traveling in Spain and who had, apparently, just run into Kathy, Chris, Nick, Scott, Dave, and Seth earlier that day on the streets of Granada. I hadn't met Tegon before but I really enjoyed spending time with her. After dinner, some people went out dancing, but Jason and I went back to our room and collapsed.
The next morning, Jade was feeling a lot better, but she still stayed in bed while the rest of us met for lunch. After lunch, everyone except for Jade, Jason, Tegon, and I left for Madrid. We spent a fairly lazy day in Granada, although we did climb up some hills overlooking the city, from which we had an amazing view. The next morning, we spent about 4 hours wandering around the Alhambra. The Alhambra was the old Moorish city in Granada, which was the last Moorish holdout against the Reconquista. The Alhambra is absolutely amazing -- incredible intricate Moorish architecture and carving and gardens. Stunningly beautiful. If you've never seen it, you really, really should.
That afternoon, Jason, Jade, and I took a 6 hour train from Granada to Madrid. We were met by all of the people who had gone ahead of us (except for Kathy, who had already flown home). Once again, they had already gotten us a room, which was, once again, greatly appreciated. By the time we got in, it was almost midnight, so we had a quick dinner, and then went to bed.
The next day, we all departed to return to the dear old UK. Because of logistical issues, a lot of us were on different flights, and I was the only one of our group on my flight. When we landed, I kept forgetting that we were back in a country that spoke English. I said ""gracias"" to the bus driver when he got my bag, and he looked at me oddly. That was when I realized how glad I was that I had a good amount of break left to recover from my holiday...
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