My friends, I’m sorry that it’s been so long since the last time I’ve written to you, but the truth is that I’ve been doing things that are much more exciting than writing to you. Fortunately, however, I’m not doing any exciting at the immediate moment, so I’ll try to catch you all up.
I just spent the past three weeks touring Morocco with Salma. We went to almost all of the major cities in the northwestern part of the country – Essaouira, Marrakesh, Fes, Tangier, Chefchaouen, Rabat, and Casablanca – as well as a handful of the smaller ones, too. To tell you about everything we did and saw would take days and miles of writing, and none of us want that. Instead, I’ll save a lot of that for our continuing Moroccan Gazetteer series, and focus on important highlights of our trip and my first time bringing an outsider to Morocco.
I met Salma first thing in the morning at the Casablanca airport (not entirely true, I really met her back in high school), and, long before our collective sense of reality caught up with us, we shot off directly for Essaouira. The Casablanca bus station did serve as a great introduction. We had hardly stepped out of the taxi when we were whisked off by two mildly shady characters into a bus that we could only hope was destined for Essaouira. It’s a part of life in Morocco that you just have to accept or go crazy from trying to fight, but these bus guys get paid for the number of people they get into them, so there’s little use in trying to explain to them that you really don’t need their help to find where you’re going. Besides, it turned out to be the right bus.
And there’s something you should know about busses in Morocco, too. There are some that are like the Grayhounds and Peter Pans of America; that is, they have regular schedules, pick up and drop off at pre-determined sites, and sometimes even have assigned seats. The main carriers of these are Supratours, which operates from the train stations and continues along the directions of the trains on a schedule determined by arrivals, and CTM, which goes everywhere and in Arabic is spelled: “Seteyem.” Then there are the others that we tend to call “souk busses.” I’m not entirely sure why, since they don’t usually depart or arrive at the souk (bazaar, for those of you who’ve forgotten), but it might be because they are about as structured and ruly as the souk, which is to say pretty much not at all. They leave whenever the driver feels like it, and pick up people on the road whenever people flag down the bus and the driver feels like it. They don’t necessarily take that much more time to get to their destination than the more established lines do, but they can get pretty crazy. Such as ours, which, just outside of Essaouira, decided to pick up just about all of the folks finishing up at the souk and cram them into the aisle. Maybe that’s why they’re souk busses.
Essaouira is a beautiful town, just about as “chill” as everyone said it would be, and the perfect place to ease into a tour of Morocco. We stayed in a cute hotel right next to the water and could hear the tide through the window. We didn’t really do all that much in the town aside from stroll around and it was fantastic. We walked the seaside battlements, the medina, and the beach, and Salma had her first tagine (with fish) and first Moroccan mint tea. I got to have my first spinach in nine months by eating the sandwich her mom made for her. Salma bought a small wooden box (iconic of Essaouiran crafts), establishing a tradition of getting one souvenir of each city we went to, and, two nights after we arrived, we were back on the bus and headed to Marrakesh. This time, though, we took a Supratours.
Marrakesh is legendary among volunteers as being the number one place to avoid. This is because it is the domain of tourists, and since we are clearly foreign (it doesn’t matter what you look like, when you show up with a hiking backpack – whether you’re speaking their language or not – you’re a tourist), we’re usually treated like the rest of you. Nothing offends the sensibilities of a Peace Corps volunteer like being treated like a regular foreigner. It’s one thing to go to a city like Fes and be told that the price is a million dirham for something because I can respond in Darija and tell them that I know the real price, and my language is proof, and I’ll usually get it. Or the next guy will treat me like a Moroccan. Not so Marrakesh. These guys know that no matter what I tell them, all they have to do is wait about five minutes and an ignorant actual tourist will show up and pay. If I threaten to just walk instead of ride the cab, they reply, “happy trails.”
But I really didn’t find Marrakesh to be the Mos Eisley it’s reputed to be, and actually enjoyed myself. We did have to deal with our fair share of obnoxious taxi drivers, but I got to give one of them enough comeuppance to square us. Moments after we walked out on an offer to take us the 10-15 dirham route to the main square for 60 dirham, we heard a French couple agree to it. I wasn’t about to let that stand and told them not to pay, hailed a succession of taxis for them, and sent them off with a driver who had a counter. The look in first guy’s eyes made all the rest of it worthwhile.
I’m fairly sure, though, that Salma and I looked Moroccan enough to avoid the worst part of the tourist harassment. When we strolled through the markets the calls to buy things was pretty minimal, which was fortunate considering how much time we spent there. Marrakesh has a handful of sights – most of which we caught – but its main goal is to supply the tourist population with an overwhelming opportunity to buy any souvenirs they can imagine. We picked up a few ourselves, including a painting for Salma, but mostly just enjoyed strolling the alleys of little boutiques. That, and introducing Salma to as many other key Moroccan foods as possible, including mismin (greasy pancakes), harsha (similar to cornbread), kifta (spicy ground meat), Poms (apple soda), kook (macaroon cookies), Hawai (fruit soda), and mediocre couscous. Plus this one dish called tanjia that’s meat slow roasted in the ovens that power the local hammam that I’d never had either. And we also took advantage of a botched attempt to find the nearby palmery to go to the local people’s souk, where I purchased the absolute ultimate Moroccan souvenir. And every night we meandered through the chaos of the Jma’a al Fna’.
And it turned out that the hotel where we were staying was a regional Peace Corps office. Just as we were walking out, we ran into two other volunteers who’d been staying there, three of the brand new environment volunteers who’d just sworn-in about two days earlier, and two other Americans who were travelling around. We took the newbies to the taxis and got them on their way, and then discovered that all the rest of us were planning on going to the Cascades of Ouzoud, so we all did.
The guide book describes Ouzoud as "not too far removed from the Muslim idea of Paradise depicted on gaudy prints throughout the nation," and it’s so true. There are pictures of waterfalls everywhere. Ouzoud is also one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen in my life. When we showed up, like every other place we went, we hadn’t made any reservations ahead of time. Luckily, though, we made friends with the taxi driver (he even gave us his business card – a first for me) and he introduced us to a friend of his who worked at a campsite at the falls. This sounded great, and the price was even better. Then we found out it was at the bottom and we got to lug our backpacks all the way to the bottom, take a raft across the water, and take another short hike to get to the camp. The tents were traditional Berber tents, which are fixed in place and have an open front, but the view was phenomenal. We spent the rest of the day just relaxing at the camp café, watching the monkeys (there are monkeys in Morocco), yelling at the other tourists for feeding the monkeys, climbing all the way back up to the top, and enjoying the beauty of Ouzoud. And it was Friday, so the campsite cooked us proper couscous in a big communal plate (not the personal size you get at a restaurant that’s entirely inappropriate for couscous). While we were eating these two extremely frazzled British girls showed up and stayed with us. That’s the Peace Corps. We take care of everyone.
The British girls and the two American “normies” decided to catch a taxi back to Marrakesh, and the rest of us headed to a town nearby (sorry, folks, there’re volunteers there still). Salma and I were on our way to Truck Stop Number 9 (you’ll recall the place where I did my training) to meet Mama Naima, but we stopped for the night in this other place and hung around with the other volunteers so that Salma could get more of a feel for volunteer life and I could get some of what happens whenever volunteers all get together: Mexican food. We had a great time, and the next morning we got to ride through the beautiful High Atlas Mountains.
We arrived at Mama Naima’s late. As we were walking down the alley to the house, my little sister Selloua came running out to meet us, possibly because she hadn’t seen me in a while, likely because she wanted to see who was the Moroccan-looking girl in a jelaba walking with me, and almost certainly because they’d all been waiting to eat lunch with us. Salma got to have the best tagine of her life, followed by the best stuffed baked chicken, and it wasn’t ten minutes after we finished eating that they had a lady over at the house decorating her with henna. We spent the rest of the evening sitting around chatting about old times. The two volunteers each came by and hung around for a little while, and we managed to not go outside all day. When we woke up, Mama Naima had me make breakfast for everyone (I’ve never met another Moroccan woman who’s so down with gender equality), and we took a brief walk around the town’s sights. Of which there aren’t really any, but we did pop over to Selloua’s school because she begged for a visit. The rest of our time was spent trading gifts with each other. Salma and Mama Naima briefly got into an arms race of surprising each other with presents, which really only ended with the taxi driving away to take us to Freedonia.
To be continued…
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