With forward face and unreluctant soul;
Not hurrying to, nor turning from the goal;
Not mourning for the things that disappear
In the dim past, nor holding back in fear
From what the future veils…
Henry van Dyke, Life
Marrakech: Finding a Rhythm
I remember at the end of first grade, when my teacher pointed out all the places we had studied that year on a globe. Someone asked where we were. She turned the globe, placed her finger on California, and said, “We are here.” It was so specific, spinning past the countries, cultures, languages, and histories of billions of people, and landing right where we were. We were not there, we were here. I felt an electric feeling and my imagination was swept away by how many here’s there were in the world.
Anyways, this was not how I felt my first day abroad. On the scale of “electric/swept away” to “sweaty/jetlagged”, I was definitely “sweaty/jetlagged”. My flights to Spain on a sleek Norwegian Air flight were some of the nicest I had ever experienced. But when I arrived in Malaga, I had to hand carry my bicycle box (now torn from the airport handlers) and all my other luggage, then speak in a language I had not practiced in years for a taxi and at the hotel. I started the next morning by consulting my Almighty Spreadsheet, the bible of my trip, which had a daily detail for more than half the journey. My first day was packed, and everything had to go right in a short window of time or else I would be out at least a few hundred dollars, and would not make it to my riad in Marrakech, Morocco. Like all other Moroccan riads, its rooms faced an inner courtyard, but in mine there was a small pool and on the roof, a lantern lit lounging area surrounded by mountains, and it was cheap. I was on a mission, and was in my head for much of it. I had a bicycle to mail out, a train to catch to Seville where I had a flight that evening, taxis to take, and luggage to lug around. I had been very fortunate to have a good hotel staff who arranged a driver to take me in the morning to FedEx to ship off my bicycle to a storage facility in Madrid where my cousin Jennifer would soon be arriving to deposit hers as well. In Spanish fashion, it took more than an hour, because the office opened late. When it was finally on its way to be shipped, I was so thankful that I only had a 50 pound duffel bag, a foldable backpack, and a DSLR camera to carry. The thought that I might have overpacked crossed my mind, but I mentally filed it away as “Naysaying”. After a short excursion to a noisy, crowded beach, I got a taxi to the train station, and took the next train to Seville. I locked everything in the train station lockers and then navigated to La Plaza de España with its wide half circle plaza, misty fountain, Moorish gardens, and shady walkways.
A taxi to the airport, a long delay sitting in a stuffy waiting room, and a short crammed Ryanair flight passed by in a blink, and I landed in Marrakech late in the evening. I got my visa without much pain, exchanged some euros for dirhams, and I eventually found the driver my riad had arranged amongst all the pushy, haggling taxi drivers. I insisted on carrying my not-overpacked luggage to the van myself, as I did not want to see his suffering. We took off and drove until we met a long medieval wall surrounding the medina, the old part of a North African city, often dating back to the Middle Ages.
We carefully drove through one of its old geometrically ornate, colorful, keyhole shaped gates, avoiding slow moving people rolling carts, leading straggling donkeys, or carrying small bundles of whatever they were done selling for the day. The commotion was dying: nearly every shop had closed its roll up metal door and most people were disappearing into the small side streets and alleys. Near a mosque up ahead, a curly headed young man in western attire waved at us with a phone in his hand. We stopped suddenly. “You will get out here, this man will show you to your riad,” my driver said. I was unsettled by his command, but obeyed and got out as they struggled with my bags in the back. I paid the driver and he drove off.
“You are Patrick? I am Mahmoud,” the young man said. “We are waiting for some others to come. Your riad is having electrical problems. They paid for you to stay in a nicer riad. It has hot water.” It was all very suspicious to me. We waited for the others in that little square a while, drinking small glasses of orange juice from a nearby vendor (he only drank one at my urging). Then he received a call, and he told me the others would not be coming now. He called over a boy who had a small cart, heaved my bag into it, and we took off. I trailed behind a cautious distance, fearful I might become a victim of organ harvesting, and took pictures with my camera at every turn.
Further and further up dusty streets and winding alleys we went, some were lit by yellow street lights, others were dark. Finally we stopped, and Mahmoud knocked on a thick door with inlaid iron. An old, bent-over woman opened it, speaking rapid, punctuated French at the both of us. Realizing I did not understand, Mahmoud talked alone to the old woman, while the young boy extorted me for $3 worth of dirhams for using his cart, and scurrying off. Then Mahmoud told me that this was my “other riad” and that he would be back in the morning to move me to another “other riad”. We shook hands, and he was gone. Following the old woman, I lugged my bag upstairs to a luxurious room, lit by a punched copper lantern above. I felt underdressed in my cargo pants and and multi pocketed shirt for such a place. “Bon nuit,” she said as she exited, and I locked the shuttered windows and door after her, and collapsed into sleep on a luxurious queen sized bed.
In the faint blue of morning, just before the sun rose, I was startled into half consciousness by some commotion outside. I ran to the window in my bathroom overlooking a small alley, thinking the organ-harvesters had come at last, only to find some papers rustling in a breeze. Then I heard an unmistakable sound coming from a minaret in the distance, and realized what had awoken me.
“Allahu akbar,” the Muslim call to prayer of “God is great” on loudspeakers rolled like a wave through the streets, and more and more mosques picked up the song in strange, varying melodies. “Allahu akbar. Allaaahuuu Aaakbaaar.” I felt an electric feeling as the breeze picked up. I was here.
Later, I was moved along to my next riad, where Mahmoud lived. He sat me down, and we talked over a cup of super sweetened mint tea, which he poured with finesse from high above, descending down until the pot nearly touched the cup just at the point it was full. He was obviously a very trustworthy person, and gave me pointers on when to give people money, when to refuse (which I should have done the night before with the boy who pushed the cart), and how to find my way around. Then he gave me a great deal on a tour to the desert for Jenn and I, including a camel ride, the fulfillment of a childhood dream. I was embarrassed at my organ harvesting suspicions the night before.
I left the riad to explore the medina. Houses inside the old walls are jammed together so that the residential areas would look like a maze of red and tan walls zig-zagging up and down in height with bundles of electric cables running across the middle of each structure, and a tangle of wires, clothes, and satellite dishes on top. A medina is divided into quartiers, each having its own mosque (and sometimes a small square in front of it), and a community fountain which is not always kept in working order nowadays.
Then there are the marketplaces, called souks. They are often long streets or small squares, some are shaded and some not, with vendors shouting, donkeys braying, and smoky scooters and small cars delivering overloaded stacks of goods (and everyone organically making room for them, often without looking behind to see what it was). At first, navigation is a daunting and burdensome task. But, perhaps out of survival instinct in the overstimulation, the mind quickly begins catching on, and it arranges and contextualizes everything until each street begins to take on a character of its own.
I spent the afternoon trying to achieve two goals: first, deliberately getting lost in the souks and haggling for whatever I felt like buying, and second, into improving my sense of direction by navigating out of them with only a paper map (I could not afford cell service in the country, so Google Maps was out of the question). Every website or guidebook I read could not prepare me for the assault on the senses. The sometimes grimy, sometimes dusty cobbled streets closed in between ochre colored buildings were filled with sharp witted vendors pitching their sale tirelessly, tactically switching languages (“Bonjour! Hello! Guten tag! Hola? D’où êtes-vous? Where are you from? America? La France? Deutschland?”).
In some corners, it was all dried fish, lamb, piles of bread, oranges waiting to be juiced, and mountains of dates, all covered with hundreds of feasting flies. In other corners, it was all lamps or metal lanterns punched with crescent moons and other shapes, or stacks of colorful clothing or handwoven carpets. The people, the colors, the smells, they were always shifting, always moving, always pushing and pushing. It was chaos to me at first, but I soon caught the rhythm, especially when I learned that just a smile and a shake of the head was enough to be left alone. If anyone really bothered me, I would just say “I am Russian” in Russian (“Ya russkiy”). I never met a Moroccan vendor who spoke Russian.
By the end of the day, I had overpaid for a Berber (nomadic people of the desert) style blue and yellow gandora, a traditional cloak, and for a taxi to buy overnight train tickets for later on. It hurt to be suckered, but I was sharpening the skill of negotiation. On the taxi ride back, I held my ground on the price we agreed on before we set out (which was lower than the meter), and the driver eventually gave in.
Jenn arrived later that night. She had flown all the way from her adopted home in New Zealand, which means nearly twice as many hours of flights and layovers as me, and we would be traveling together for more than three and a half months. We had not seen each other in years, but connected immediately, exchanging stories of all the typical first-day-abroad frustrations, then laughed about how giddy we were about having those kinds of frustrations instead of the nine-to-five office ones. I shared some cookies my mother had made, and gave her the REI backpack I had been carrying for her since it arrived at my house (it is too expensive to deliver to New Zealand), as well as a few extra camping supplies I had. She expressed surprise at how much I had packed, and having that reinforced by an outside perspective, I considered it deeply, and came to the conclusion that she was just naysaying. We talked and schemed for a couple of hours, and remembering our early start for the desert tour the next day, we hurriedly went to bed.
I slept well, but Jenn did not, and unfortunately would not for a while. We were on our way just as the sun rose, in a packed, diverse van. There was an uncomfortably affectionate Spanish couple next to us; a few mysterious Romanian-Spanish girls in their twenties whose “father and uncle” took a suspicious lot of model-pose pictures of them; a flight steward from New York City, and his German postgrad student friend; and up front, a greasy, balding Frenchman and a West African call girl who seemed disgusted with him. I spent good portions of the tour swallowing a sick feeling from watching that lonely, pathetic man exploit a woman who’s “better life” was prostitution in Morocco. But all the varying colors and textures of the mountainous desert were enough to distract me. We drove through red and orange rocky areas (remnants of ancient lava flows), jagged mountains, clean deserts, and green oases with small mudbrick villages covered with wind strewn trash. The drive passed by while I slept at times (I was still jetlagged, and got sweatier over the drive with no air conditioning) and snapped photos at others. We made a stop at the city of Aït Benhaddou, well restored and Hollywoodized by film and TV, and parked at roadside cafés every once in awhile for relief. All along the way, we were constantly overcharged and extorted for money by cafés and tour guides. That was disappointing, and though it may sound strange, there were times I looked with envy at the local people on their rusty steel bicycles on the hot roads. I wished I could understand what it was like to not be looked at as a potential sale. At sunset, wearing my gandora in full tourist fashion, we mounted groaning camels, they picked up their legs one by one, and we marched them into a few pathetic dunes (I wondered if these were brought in from the real Sahara just for tourists) to our “Berber” tents arranged in a circle. After nightfall, there was a tajine dinner, and then we made a fire, and sang and danced while our guides played drums. I was humbled by it all, and could only listen to the alternating French, Spanish, and Arabic, absorbing as much as I could. And yes, I took carefully framed pictures to my touristy heart’s content. So there. I’ve owned up to my touristy-ness.
We were surprised at how quickly we were back in Marrakech, and now it was Jenn’s turn to experience the pace of Marrakech. Though her cell service made navigation through the maze of the medina easier, two tough night’s sleep gave her a harder time with the assault on the senses. The vendors, mostly men, were also a lot more troublesome to her than they had been to me, and where there was not overt haggling and chasing her down for a “deal”, there were plentiful kissy noises and whistles. Whatever indignation she felt, she toughed through it, and over the next two days, we both began to enjoy that frenetic city.
We returned frequently to the main square, called the Djemaa el-Fnaa, where we tried different foods from the steaming, smoky food booths, including my first taste of escargot. There were snake charmers and talented street performers, each with their own keen eyed knife wielders, enforcing a strict pay-as-you-snap photo policy. Though its name means “place of the dead” because of the gruesome public executions performed there in the good old days, it is now thriving with life, and is called the “busiest square in Africa”.
We also met the New York flight steward and the German student from the tour, with whom we explored the tanner’s quarter and the impressive medieval quranic school Medrasa Ali Ben Youssef. I gained a better understanding of Islam, a religion so mysterious to me, from that quiet, peaceful oasis in the city. There were no images of animals or people, but on every surface there were intricate, intertwining geometric shapes, quranic verses in fluid Arabic script, and brightly contrasting colors. I discovered there that Allah is a god of irresistible order, whose fingerprint is on every aspect of life; a logician who makes sense of all the disparate pieces of their world.
Jenn and I left very taken with the “Red City” of Marrakech on an overnight train, the same one from the James Bond film Spectre, to Tangier. In the morning, we boarded a couple of buses through the reefer-covered Rif Mountains to the steeply nestled “Blue City” of Chefchaouen. When we were let out, a new, spellbinding side of Morocco opened up before me.
To read Part Two, click here
To read the next installment, click here