Morocco II: Rendezvous

It always takes a few days to get used to a new country’s driving style. Initially the Moroccan drivers were polite but further south it became clear that the white lines, if any, were largely ignored. Another habit they’d embraced, which I believe was borrowed from the Argentinians, was to make a pass without actually leaving the lane. This caused several missed heartbeats when visions of past lives flashed before us. Overall though the driving was easy and the way well signposted in Arabic and French, and sometimes the beautiful but incomprehensible Berber language. It’s not often you can claim “ⵡⴰⵔⵣⴰⵣⴰⵜ” as your destination. Our riding days were similar to those in South America, so much so that we sometimes forgot we were here and not there. The same red brick infilled the small square buildings while their second or third floors remained good intentions, the vertical rebars a casual promise of a return to work, someday. That said, the rooftops were neither idle nor empty with lines of laundry flapping like oversized prayer flags in the wind.

The day began on a high both in altitude and in spirit. Beni-Mallal had reminded us why we avoid the cities and the morning brought so many varied terrains they may as well have been different countries. One minute we were climbing above dry valleys into the greenest of forests and the next, it was a race to outrun a sandstorm on what was probably once an ancient sea. There were straight, solitary roads and mountains like black, whipped ice creams who’d lost their cones. It was magnificent. And then came the reckoning.

Ascending one dark slope the road began to deteriorate and the asphalt slipped into stretches of gravel. This was fine, after Chile’s ever-shifting, out-to-suck-you-in stones, we appreciate this kind of substitute. A pattern emerged: good road, then a jolly red-bordered triangular sign with a black exclamation mark in the middle, then more gravel. At the summit, high rocks formed a roofless tunnel where we hoped in vain for an end to the roadworks. We began our descent into a black environment, a wide cauldron whose trail spiralled to the bottom. All pretence at a road was gone, the Prince of Denmark was driving on rubble, crumbling rock and jagged shards of black shale.  He didn’t know what hit him. No two surfaces were alike and there was the constant threat of the bike sliding out from under us. If only we were on Bolívar, with his 70/30 tires instead of the Honda’s 100% pure road. I caught a glimpse of the odometer and saw we were doing a whoppin’ 3 km/h. Concentrating on keeping still I let the bike take me wherever. That’s my job: not to be there. I longed to take out the camera but my hands were clammy inside my gloves and getting them off required unnecessary movement. Besides, I couldn’t risk falling off with bare hands. ‘Been there, regretted that.  

Even the bottom of the crater wasn’t the end. Ahead a grey line trickled back up the mountain but now large river stones and broken chunks of old road were added to the mix. This was taking a long time and we still hadn’t met a single soul. Many false downhills later, we came to a green river and were passed by two teenage boys on a scooter, the passenger waving a small transistor radio so the driver could hear the music. The new ascent was visible only through clouds of yellow dust. When it cleared, two very large orange diggers emerged, sitting quite impossibly side-by-side. The drivers were engaged in a leisurely chat out the windows, all that was missing was the teapot. With a steep slope of falling rocks on our left, and a trail crumbling down to the river on the right, we stopped for the first time and waited for permission to advance. When it came, we inched forward, squeezing between the slope and the first digger, with Fran, like his politics, leaning desperately to the left because on our right I could smell rubber and had become mesmerized by the grooves in the excavator’s still-rolling tracks.

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At the end of it all a nice sign read: “Merci pour votre compréhension”, a courteous contrast to the zippy exclamation marks that announced the dreaded trail in the first place. Still, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” wouldn’t have gone down so well, even if it was written in French. With the cauldron conquered, we now crossed a great, barren plateau and this time we were the ones to pass the scooter. The radio was still bleating its tinny music, the driver still staring straight ahead but the passenger was now asleep. With his arms crossed, he reminded me of me, except my backseat slumbers usually last just seconds (I hope), this boy was out for the count. I’ll never forget his hair, beautiful inky black blocks standing vertically in the wind. Eventually we reached the edge of the Drâa Valley. It had been another six-hour day, total kilometres completed: 285. The average pedestrian could have passed us many times over. The first thing our riad owner in Ouarzazate asked, after serving a tray of mint tea, was why we hadn’t taken the road around the mountain. I politely posed that same question later and was told that over the top was more scenic. It probably was but the ordeal had left us wanting more than a glass of tea. We set off in search of the impossible, and surprise! found not only a Carrefour (our second real supermarket), but shelves upon shelves of beer with proper numbers in their percentages. There’s definitely advantages to stopping in a tourist town.

Many historical greats have left their footprints in the sands of Ouarzazate: Peter O’Toole and Russell Crowe to name but two. Known as Africa’s Hollywood, it’s probably the reason we were able to buy alcohol in plain sight. At the fortified village of Aït Benhaddou we crossed a narrow pedestrian bridge to wander the souk, made a half-hearted attempt at finding Gladiator’s arena and outside the 17^th Century gates, watched little boys play in the dry riverbed. Later, after passing ruins and pink adobe hamlets, we stopped for a break outside a house where a woman watched us from behind her window grill. I smiled and waved and she responded with the same, and I wondered if I’d become a tiny part of her day, just as she’d suddenly become a big part of mine.

We spent most days exploring outside the city, returning in late afternoon in time for tea in the cushioned caves in the garden. There we congratulated ourselves on not having children. These musings were inspired by the three other guests, well two and a quarter to be more precise. They were a middle-aged French couple and their seven or eight-year-old whose sex we never determined. It was a very good-looking child, and extremely cool too, sitting cross-legged daily at a laptop with gigantic headphones on its little blond head. ​The mother floated about with a pained, clenched-jaw expression and kept a wide berth while the father opted for a strategy of appeasement that would’ve put Chamberlain to shame. Personally, I think they’d have been far better off taking the dog on vacation and leaving the sprog behind.

It was a harsh landscape on the road to Tiout.  Depressed-looking trees had goats grazing in the branches while others loitered below waiting their turn. When we got to town someone had abandoned an old truck, plastic piping and a large mound of rubble at the entrance to our street so we had to remove the side boxes to get to our riad. Fran somehow managed to squeeze between the pile of rocks and an old house, which I hadn’t thought possible, and neither did the two little boys standing by holding hands. Things didn’t improve on arrival. When asked for the advertised “parking garage”, one of the ladies from the kitchen came out with a metal triangle. This was apparently a ramp, so small I could have put it in my pocket. It didn’t even reach the step so of course the engine sump got stuck on the concrete. We’d packed light, the Prince’s toolkit is the size of a first grader’s pencil case, but even so he’s a heavy boy and his suspension’s not high. We were just preparing for a fall when a dashing man in long white robes descended. Immediately taking over, he began issuing staccato instructions in German. Between the three of us we got the bike up, over and inside the front door. Once again, he was settled on the tiles under the King’s portrait.

The riads were beautiful places to stay. As well as breakfast, they also served an evening meal in courtyards lush with oversized plants and cascading blossoms. Faced almost daily with exotic displays of food however, our experiences at the dining table were surprisingly simple. Tajines were on every menu with couscous a close second, the latter though not readily available: “No. It’s not Friday”. The sizzling pots delivered to the tables were tasty but bereft of the giant gingers and spice mountains we saw at every market. Main dinners aside, the breakfasts, breads and accompaniments were wonderful, with not only new discoveries like Amlou and M’semen, but old favourites like dates and olives awakening new taste buds. The town was monochrome and quiet but there was a kasbah on the mountain behind and a long oasis stretched in front. In the local Women’s Agricultural Cooperative, we discovered that all those sad little trees were in fact Argan trees, and their oil was something I’d once bought in the hopes of making my head look like a shampoo ad. It didn’t, but spread now on my morning flatbread it gave no end of comfort on the days I was depressed about my hair. Which is every day I’m not wearing a helmet.

In 2019 we spent some time with two solo motorcyclists in Colombia. The German we’d previously met in northern Costa Rica and the Belgian had seen our Ural parked on the roadside on that country’s southern shore. By pure chance they now were in Morocco. Our paths finally crossed in Taroudant, in a paradisiacal hotel of terraces and pools, with copper sculptures of pirouetting ballerinas and prancing horses. We parked alongside some very dirty, very sandy motorbikes. The guys had just finished an off-road, Sahara ride and were resting on their laurels, aided by several bottles of Flag Spéciale Gold. It was a ten-minute-walk through date palms to reception. Our room was already booked and speaking in French, Jonas introduced us to the manager. As his “Mum and Dad”. Now this was a bit of a blow. We’d been feeling quite cool, reuniting with these two, with their dusty motorcycle boots and friend who once rode his moto from Brussels to Ulaanbaatar. The trouble is, throwing the leg over bike and baggage every day without artificial assistance only makes you feel like you’re thirty. This illusion can continue for many hundreds of miles, but at the end of the day, you’re going to dismount like a seventy-five-year-old, even if you’re still only sixty(-ish). But never mind, we picked right up where we’d left off, pre-Covid, six years prior. Three of the four of us were now in a new decade, and the one who’d stayed young, well, he made up for it by now being a Dad.

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After a stop in the silver city of Tiznit we headed north. The road to the coast brought two days of fierce winds and sandstorms. The warning signs were more polite than the weather: Prudence – Vent Fort. Visibility was reduced to a yellow, smoggy haze and in the towns, shoppers bent over double. No matter what time of day we were travelling, school was always out and we slowed down often to avoid small boys insisting on a quick high five. The innocence of it all charmed us until bumping through a white clay village one morning, I looked over to see a pretty little thing in a filthy pink dress. As my eyes softened and momentarily locked with hers, she quietly lifted her right arm and extended her middle finger at us. Now that’s another sprog who should have stayed home.

There’s nothing sadder than the seaside on a rainy day. On the beach in Essaouira, a group of camels sat bored and disinterested while a few faded balloons blew out of sight in disgust. Further up the coast the Atlantic merged seamlessly with El Jadida’s iron-grey sky. I began to wish we’d never left the mountains. It wasn’t a night to be out so we squeezed-in among the men in a warm café, dark suits hunched over silver teapots and black and tan coffees, like miniature Guinness in a shot glass. But things were looking-up. Another rendezvous was planned, this time with a Coloradan we’d met in Chile, and as if in celebration, the sun burst forth as he rode into town. His bike, MechanicO, was a rebuilt BMW F800GS, held together by nuts and bolts and pipes at odd angles, straight out of Mad Max. Parked beside the Prince of Denmark (‘plenty for them to discuss), it was a case of Beauty and the Beast (but who was who depends on your vision of each). We never imagined we’d meet again, but some ships passing in the night have a habit of reappearing someplace else.

Morocco is a country we’d like to return to, if only to give the finger back to little Miss Pretty-in-Pink. While the landscape was a familiar one for us, the culture was not. The separation of men and women was the most difficult to observe and I won’t say any more about that. But for somewhere that’s long been on the tourist trail, it was a remarkably fresh and welcoming land. Many small niceties, and even basic amenities, of the hospitality industry have fallen by the wayside since the pandemic, without so much as a backward glance or flicker of regret. That hasn’t happened in Morocco. Simply put, they’ve kept the hospitable in “Hospitality” and are justly proud of it. As for the meeting of old acquaintances along the way, who could have foretold that yesterday’s brief encounters would become today’s reunions? It was just a bit of a surprise when one turned out to be a family reunion, but on the road I guess, surprise is what it’s all about.