Travel Notes -- On the Road in Morocco

            On the Road in Morocco

 

   I knew embarrassingly little about Morocco before arriving there, except that travelers were enthusiastic and that it had an interesting hipster vibe.  For example, I knew that Alan Ginsberg and William Burroughs had  lived in Tangier.  Then there was Bob Dylan’s lyric  -- “if you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier.” 

 

This  lyric decided to stay in my head the whole visit.

 

    On a ten-day trip there in October, I found that while there might be a few dharma bums  on the road in Morocco,  that’s  not unusual. Almost  everybody else was out there  too.  So there was a lot about Morocco that revealed itself just pounding down its highways. 

 

    Our group of five travelers included Antonio, Manolo, Pat, David and me. Antonio and Manolo are longtime friends who live in Barcelona and Valencia respectively. Years ago they bought a place in Asilah, a town on the Atlantic a 45-minute drive from Tangier. They ‘ve been going there a few times a year for many years.  Antonio says it’s like Spain was decades ago. 

 

  Pat and I are serial students in the week-long Spanish immersion programs led by Antonio and Manolo in recent years.  Pat is a trip in and of herself. She practiced medicine in Vermont for many years but also in Alaska and Peru and in jails and where migrants gather.  

 

   Hang out with her a while and you learn that she’s been a champion triathlete and a dogsled racer and a bobsled rider and a world snowshoe champion. She’s learning Catalan and Portuguese along with Spanish and takes care of a bunch of horses and you ask her, wait, when do you have time to eat and she cheerfully replies  she doesn’t, maybe yogurt,  and  hunger is good. 

 

    David is a Silver Spring neighbor who was kind enough to introduce my wife Cathy and I to Costa Rica where he and his wife Marcia spend part of the year. Through them we met a young Costa Rican dynamo named Jonathan who tries to teach me Spanish, and his boss,  another David, an American ex-pat who ran his own free school for years  teaching English to  young Costa Rican adults. They gave us a glimpse of the real Costa Rica, along with the tourist version.  My neighbor David is a serious traveler. He carefully studies places to visit, sleep, and  eat and is on the go every waking minute.

 

 All four of my traveling companions have that quality of turning toward and engaging with people and things that are unfamiliar. It’s a quality I admire from afar.  I’m happy to be along for the ride.

 

   We met at the airport in Tangier, David and I having flown in from Washington, Pat from Vermont, and Antonio and Manolo from Barcelona. There we rented a Duster, not the Plymouth kind, but a small SUV produced and marketed by Renault and its Romanian subsidiary Dacia. Antonio, a fast thinker with quick reflexes, did all the driving and did it superbly under difficult conditions.

 

   We spent the first night in Asilah, a city on the Atlantic with bright blue skies  overhead and old neighborhoods  painted white.  Antonio and Manolo’s apartment is near Asilah’s walled city and has a rooftop terrace.  It opens on an alleyway where little kids roam and roar around until midnight,  reminding me of the many hours of  unsupervised freedom my generation had as kids. 

 

  Their parents know where they are and their games while noisy are not disruptive and blend into steady street sounds that do not preclude sleep.  The call to prayer before dawn a few hours later awakens us, but it too is soothing rather than irritating. 

 

                                                    Larache

 

 We took our first road trip the next day to Larache. It’s  a nearby town also on the western edge of North Africa, nothing but Atlantic all the way to South America on the opposite shore. This was the day of the sardines, a ritual meal, freshly caught, served  hot off a charcoal grill at an outdoor cafe, a dozen per plate, crispy skin, witnessing eyeballs. Our hunger elbows aside squeamishness. Lentil soup, another bean dish, just-baked  bread, a drink,  the whole thing less than four dollars  each.  

 

   On the way there we begin to absorb some of the lessons of Morocco. Antonio and Manolo explain that few people have the money to buy a car or a motorbike or the gas. But it seems like everybody is up trekking along the blacktop. Aren’t there smaller roads connecting the villages along the highway? It seems not.

 

  You see toddlers, schoolchildren, teenagers, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, stray cats and dogs. The humans try to avoid walking along the shoulder but if they can’t they do. One of the ways they try to avoid it is by pointing a finger at the road in front of your car. This is the way they hitchhike.

 

     Antonio says they do not stick their thumbs up the way we do because this would be the equivalent of an American in the United States trying to catch a ride by giving people the finger. I wondered: What would it have been like back in my long-haired college days trying to get a ride by giving drivers the finger?

 

 As I stood by the side of the road in rural Ohio signaling to get a ride, what would those drivers have done? As it was, they were angrily giving me the finger.  What about the cops who picked me up for hitchhiking along the highway in Wisconsin, leaving me with a dollar in my pocket after  paying the fine and then no choice  but to hitchhike along the highway? 

 

      So you quickly learn along the Moroccan highway  that people are very poor but resourceful. There is also this very stoic look about them. I was struck by the determined faraway look in people’s eyes. It wasn’t just the human beings but the animals too. I wondered: what was that look? 

 

    Their eyes were telling me there is a lot of suffering here but also  a lot of strength. To me, it was something like, I’m out here for the duration. My mother isn’t coming to pick me up any time soon. She isn’t coming at all. I may not get a ride or something to eat for a long time. But I will wait. I will not complain.

 

      You also find out on the highway that there are a lot of cops in Morocco. No one speeds. The speed limit signs on the way to Larache seemed absurd. You’d see a sign that said the  limit was 80 kilometers per hour. Then about 50 yards later another  said it was 60 kilometers per hour. Then another saying it was 40.  We laughed and tried to imagine adhering to these limits in the very short distances between the signs. 

 

    Of course, what  they were really telling you was to slow the hell down. And you did. I’ve driven with Antonio in Spain, which has an excellent highway system on which he sometimes was Kirk hitting warp speed. But Antonio carefully followed the limits in Morocco throughout our trip. Groups of policemen flagged us  down about every 20 miles or so. You creep by them as you drive by, hoping they don’t motion for you to pull over and stop. They never did on our trip, but you always had a sinking feeling each time you crept past. 

 

   Why all the cops? “This is an absolute monarchy, John,”  Antonio patiently explained, more than once. With all the cops  it’s impossible to miss the message about who is in charge, not just about speed limits but about everything. When Pat went through airport security on her arrival in Tangier, they asked her where she was going. “To Asilah again?” asked one policeman. “Oh, you knew about that?” she asked concerning a prior trip. “We know a lot of things,” the policeman replied. 

 

      On the ride to Larache we also passed by roadside stands heaped high with hundreds of bright yellow melons. This was another surprising aspect of Morocco; although it encompasses the arid Atlas Mountains and the northern part of the Sahara Desert near Algeria, its agricultural produce is bountiful.

 

  The climate allows farmers to grow fruits and vegetables  all year. Much of the fresh produce in European food stalls comes from Morocco, which exports abundant quantities of tomatoes,  tangerines, green beans, melons, olives and blueberries. The outdoor markets in Morocco display open sacks of brightly colored spices and dozens of varieties of dates. Many vendors sell fresh orange juice and even pomegranate juice.

 

   Produce was plentiful in the roadside stands but there were almost no customers. This was true also at roadside stands selling hundreds if not thousands of earthenware domed pots called tagines.  I guess the farmers were making their money abroad. But it was a reminder perhaps that people have little money to spend.  

 

                                                      Fes

 

   Our next drive was to Fes, one of Morocco’s largest cities and an interesting place to visit for several reasons. Numerous mosques and madrasas have been built there. It has been called the “Mecca of the West” and the “Athens of Africa.”  It has a “medina,” or a walled city, that is a World Heritage site and is one of the world’s oldest and largest car-free zones. Its  University of al-Qarawiyyin , founded in 857, is said to be the oldest continuously functioning institution of higher learning in the world. 

 

    This was the drive of the  stray cats and dogs. We see relatively few stray animals traveling down our superhighways  in the United States. But to be on the highway in Morocco is to intimately enter the world of animals and our dependence on them and theirs on us. 

 

You’d look out into a field and see a pack of stray dogs headed somewhere. Where? 

 

    This reminded me of being a kid in the States when it wasn’t so unusual seeing dogs running free, sometimes two or three of them, intent on some destination, fulfilling some purpose on the dog agenda. They had their own lives to live, and we were not part of it. 

In Morocco out on the highway in the middle of nowhere we saw a beautiful, well-fed dog lying on the median strip, just taking it easy. There seemed to be no humans around for miles.

 

    But mostly the strays seem  to be up on the highway hoping the humans there will give them some food. They see us in terms of food and we see them in terms of food – or labor, with donkeys or mules or horses drawing carts behind them carrying supplies and people.

 

   The road to Fes passed through a town crowded with shops and places to eat and people on the sidewalks. We took our seats in a café where they were  serving various tagines, a word that refers not only to the heavy ceramic domed dishes but also to the type of food they are used to cook –  carrots, tomatoes, zucchinis and other vegetables with delicious spices on a bed of couscous, cooked on a low flame for a long time with the domed top trapping the steam and making everything juicy and tender.

 

 One tagine option was vegetarian. It was delicious  not only because the produce was fresh but because of the spicing, particularly if you added harissa, a hot chili pepper paste. There were also chicken and beef and lamb tagines, with meat falling off the bones. 

 

   Right next to us was an outdoor butcher shop where a man with a long sharp knife was disassembling the bowels of some animal while we ate our lunch. On the counter in front of him was a plastic bag containing the severed head of a goat, its eyes calmly intact.   

 

   In Morocco there is no escaping  the suffering  we inflict on animals as part of our human food consumption -- unlike in the United States, where there are few horrifying reminders that these are sensate creatures just as sensitive to pain and fear and anxiety as we are.  But in that manner of eating, make of it what you will, it is worth noting that at least no part of the animal goes to waste. 

 

     Our relationship to animals was much on my mind once we reached Fes itself and entered the medina, where we spent most of our time.  I have never seen so many cats in my life.  They were in parking lots  and food stalls and doorways and dark alleys late at night.  You couldn’t sit in a restaurant without a cat at your feet. 

 

   When was the last time you saw a pregnant cat in the United States? A mother cat nursing just-born kittens? Kittens on their own that were so tiny and fragile you wondered if they would survive? You saw all of these things in the medina and the chances are pretty good they would survive because there were food stalls everywhere. In some cases people even put out cat food on their doorsteps for the stray cats to eat. People in restaurants would slip some food to the cats sitting at their feet. 

 

    It seemed to me that the cats had figured just how far to go with the humans.  Any pet owner will tell you that animals study our behavior and learn how to get us to do things. These cats had figured out how to get food from us without making us angry.  With so many cats and  people jammed together in the medina, I expected to see people kicking at the cats or other cruelty but  saw none. 

 

     Some of the cats we encountered during our trip were pretty amazing. After I left the breakfast table at one stop, a cat jumped up quickly and grabbed a roll off my plate and took off – but not until I had left. 

 

    At another stop, a cat jumped up in Manolo’s lap while he was eating but was an absolute charmer, leaning into his chest like he was a long-lost lover and resting her head there in an amorous swoon. Manolo, a natural born traveler patient with all interactions on the road, contained his irritation even as I snapped a photo of this annoying but charming Hollywood diva on his lap.

 

    Morocco’s bountiful produce was much on display in Fes. We sat down at one café for breakfast and the waiter brought out tall glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice. Oh, how wonderful it looked -- and there was so much of it! 

 

    Pat, sitting across from me,  stared at the juice.   “I’m not drinking that,” she scoffed. She suspected the café had added water , dooming tourist intestinal tracts. The proprietor denied it.  Dazzled by the quantity, I pretended not to hear what Pat said, sealing my corporal  and psychological fate for the trip.

 

                 The Road to Merzouga – Humanity on the Highway

 

  We got a late start out of Fes on our trek to Merzouga, a town on the edge of the Sahara Desert, and didn’t arrive there until late at night. The highway was good, and we drove fast. Toward dusk it seemed everybody was out there , people of all ages, walking or riding bikes along the shoulder. I wondered what it would be like to be really old, shambling along with a decades-old spine. How far did they have to go? Did it seem endless? Were they depressed? How did they occupy their minds as they walked along?

 

  Then there were little ones walking with them. Toddlers really, not long out of the womb. Did they wonder what is this life I’ve gotten into? No, no of course not but still, what would you think when you were so little, walking in the dark, when time already moves so slowly at that age. No use crying, you’ve just got to keep going. Maybe a lifetime of this is how you get a certain look in your eyes.

 

  Antonio somehow managed to avoid them all, scores of them, maybe hundreds of them, as we barreled down the highway. At  one point we stopped at a roadside café in the dark to pee and have tea or a soft drink. There, something else was clear about Morocco – it seems men are the ones who enjoy the leisure time, at least publicly, because men were pretty much the only ones in the cafés.  They have a look that says we’re not leaving this café any time soon.

 

   Who knows, maybe the women were taking their leisure too, but back at home, not out in the world. Or back home working. At the café we had stopped at on the way to Fes, Antonio was so enthusiastic about the tagines we ate that he struck up a conversation with the proprietor and his wife. She said little, deferring to her husband who was very pleased when Antonio asked the two of them for a picture. Antonio kept beckoning to the woman to step forward so she and her husband could be photographed side by side, but she was clearly uncomfortable. Her body language said,  oh no, he is the one to be photographed.

 

    We had a few more hours to go in the dark to get to Merzouga after the café. I  yearned for a stretch of the highway where at least we wouldn’t have to be worried about hitting someone going along the shoulder. I was riding shotgun.  Clearly, my gritted teeth and stiff arms against the dashboard at strategic moments, my feet pressed on the floorboards, had  kept pedestrians safe to that point.  But I needed a break from my responsibilities.

 

  No break. Suddenly someone riding on a motorbike would loom up in our headlights. Worst of all were packs of adolescent boys with no lights on their bikes, excited at the adventure of pedaling furiously down the desert highway in the dark, drifting over into our lane.

 

   But in Antonio we trust. Eventually we made it safely into the environs of Merzouga, looking for a hotel where Manolo had stayed with his son on a previous visit. We could not find it. Memories drifted up of long-distance family car trips when I was a kid, the bleak feeling at the end of the day, struggling to find a motel. 

 

   David unearthed from the internet a name that sounded okay, and  our app directed us into a dusty boulder-strewn compound of what looked to be abandoned stone buildings. It seemed like something straight out of a bad horror movie. 

 

    The app gave us directions, but did it really know a path through this confusion of scattered buildings and deep ruts and boulders? The idea that there was a functioning hotel at the end of this maze – who would persist in finding their way back here? – seemed unlikely. 

 

  But there it was at last -- welcome to the Hotel Hell. Judging from the empty parking lot, we were the only guests. Had there ever been other guests? Would there ever be other ones? It turned out though to be a dusty gem. The rooms were clean,  the breakfast sustaining, the cats friendly. We had the dunes of the Sahara as our backyard to explore the next day, and from which to watch the sunset. Morocco.

 

                                               Ouarzazate

 

    In some ways, Morocco seemed  a stage set. It’s easy to imagine adventure and romance and epic battlefield struggles. There are  walled cities, a rugged landscape,  vistas of sea and barren desert, the calls to prayer, the women berobed from head to toe.  At our next stop on the road,  the city of Ouarzazate, the stage was real. 

 

    “Known as the ‘door to the desert’, the Moroccan city of Ouarzazate is where Hollywood directors go if they want to shoot a Biblical film, or one set in a war zone,” journalist Ruth Mclean wrote in The Guardian in 2016. “Gladiator, Lawrence of Arabia, Black Hawk Down and part of Game of Thrones were all shot there, as well as countless films about Jesus’s life, including Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.”

 

   My companions visited the setting where a number of these famous movies were filmed. Along with the world of make believe, they paid a visit to a hamman. It’s a traditional bath house that involves a ritual of soaping, scrubbing, rinsing and exfoliating. Hammans have a changing room, a warm room and a hot room in which to breathe in steam. It’s a place of renewal for many. However, Pat described the hamman as among the worst travel experiences of her life. That is not my story to tell. 

 

   My Ouarzazate experience involved a room as well, my hotel room. My travel aspirations during our day in the city had vanished. I aspired to nothing more than lying on my bed. I was thankful to be motionless and staring at the ceiling. I had no interest in food other than a couple of soft drinks and a few cookies. Something abdominal was going on and I had very little energy. This weird state eased a bit the next day but remained the rest of the trip. Really, the thing I enjoyed most from then on was riding along in the car, looking out at the countryside. 

 

    On our last day we drove from Ouarzazate back to Asilah. There,  we would spend the night at Antonio and Manolo’s place and the next morning they would drop Pat off at the Tangier airport to go back to Vermont and David and I at the ferry  to go to Spain. 

 

    The drive from Ouarzazate  to Asilah also was kind of a stage set. We traveled on a fantastic superhighway whizzing by such seemingly romantic stops as Casablanca and Marrakesh and Rabat without stopping because we had to get back.  The road was dreamy because it was wonderfully smooth and well-marked. I wondered: was this the best highway in the world?

 

    This was another lesson of the road in Morocco – there is money here. I wondered:  How could a seemingly poor country afford this kind of infrastructure?  Because Morocco has clearly invested in infrastructure. According to a 2020 report by the World Bank, total investment  “of between 25 percent and 38 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) occurred between 2001 and 2017, one of the highest rates of investment globally. Much of this investment has gone into infrastructure.” 

 

   Tourism, agriculture, and specialty chemicals add much to the growing economy. The superhighway seemed to announce: ”This isn’t the third world. We are a prosperous and very advanced country.” And it’s true that by African standards, Morocco is well off. Still, there are plenty of poor people for whom life is hard.  Even here, along arguably the world’s best highway, poor people were scrambling to get some money from the wealthy people whizzing by. Improbably, people were standing by the roadside trying to sell acorns to those driving by at 70 miles per hour.

 

     After we stopped at one point and began pulling away from the toll booth, two hyper little kids moved dangerously into traffic following us and pounding on our car to get us to open the window to give them money by offering small pieces of candy – what it would be like if someone tried to do this driving on I-95 in our country. 

 

   Also belying the image of prosperous modernity along the roadways was the frequent sight of long-abandoned, half-completed construction projects.  People dream big in Morocco, but the capital comes and goes. 

 

    But along with the divide between rich and poor what stuck with me was the sense of calm and cooperation amid what seemed to be chaos. Looking at the swarms of people moving through the narrow alleys and stalls in the walled city of Fes, or the swarms of cars and trucks and bikes trying to navigate through giant traffic circles, you might assume it’s every man for himself and people bullying their way through. 

 

   But there was never any sense of turf or hostility in my experience in walking through the crowded indoor markets in Fes. If anything it was more like, hey, we’re just a crowd, doing our crowd thing, going about our daily business, all trying to get from A to B. 

  

       When Antonio guided our  SUV into a traffic circle, you realized there were little negotiations going on between drivers, little courtesies, so people could get to where they wanted to go. It was a two-step of being assertive then cooperative, both steps essential. So Antonio might cut into a flow of traffic and then stop, motion for the other driver to go ahead. Drivers I saw didn’t hang back, but they weren’t aggressive or angry either.  

 

    Even if it was your turn to go, you might nod your head to the person angling in in front of you, nod to say, no you can go ahead. You realized people would make space for you too. I even wondered if this plays out when pedestrians are trying to cross busy roadways. Standing on a median between two-way traffic, waiting to cross, you’d see a small opening between cars in oncoming traffic, decide to step out and they’d slow down and let you cross. I think drivers are more apt to expect that kind of behavior from pedestrians in Morocco. Here you’d be dead. Well, maybe there too. 

 

   The last hours of our trip seemed to fly by, though I felt a little like a man in a deep-sea diver’s suit when we got out of the car in Asilah to walk into Antonio and Manolo’s apartment, or the next morning walking to and from the car to have breakfast at the nearby café. In my uneasy abdominal state, each step required an act of concentration.  I wondered: am I going to topple over here and create a scene on the sidewalk? 

 

    On our last short drive from Asilah to the airport and the ferry to leave Morocco, the feeling was a wistful one. Our little group was breaking up and something I’d looked forward to for a long time was coming to an end. We never really visited Tangier itself, and the hipster lore attached to the city came to mind as we cruised past grand old apartment buildings near the airport. Gazing back at the buildings and thinking about the people who had lived there I wondered what hidden tales they had to tell. Sara Dylan hadn’t been heard from over the decades – was she back in there somewhere?

 

     My internal abdominal drama continued to play out as Antonio drove up to the terminal to drop David and I off at the ferry to Tarifa.  Antonio counseled us that the crossing could be rough, and it was  best to sit in the center of the ferry if prone to seasickness. 

 

   Now I felt like a man in an astronaut suit trying to walk on the moon. My feeling was akin to that of someone who is trying to hide  from his companions that he has had too much to drink as they all walk along the sidewalk. Do they know? Can I get from the car to the ticket window and stand in line okay? Walk then to the ferry waiting area, and then on to the ferry? 

 

   It was a strange feeling. There was no alcohol involved, yet I was having real doubts I wouldn’t topple. But on we walked, me grateful to have the pop-up handle on my rolling suitcase to keep my balance, and we made it okay onto the ferry. One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.  On to Spain.