Le Maroc

A couple of nights ago I had one of those moments that one has every now and again when travelling. I was lying on my sleeping mat on the floor of a Morrocan hotel room that I had paid too much to stay in. The room was boiling hot with the walls retaining the heat from the desert day, and my mat was slick with sweat. I wondered what the hell I was doing there, longing to be home where I have a comfortable bed.

Of course there are plenty of times when one lies in their comfortable bed at home and longs to be anywhere more exotic than their comfortable house. And there was the second largest market in Africa just down the road (though the market is remarkably uninteresting like most markets that target tourists... globalisation and mass production leading to five hundred stalls selling exactly the same rip-off Nikes.)

Six Out Of Seven

Ahoy from Africa! Last week Jamie, Rosemary (Jamie's sister) and I got the ferry from Tarifa in Southern Spain to Tangier in Northern Morocco. It was a short ride, with the coast of each country clearly visable from the other. On the ride over I realised that when I got off the boat I would have seen six of the seven continents, with only Antarctica left on the list.

Younger, and Fitter

My last post was from Barcelona where I was wondering if the luck of our over 30s hippy football team was going to change. Well it did - we won a game 6-1 with me scoring a neat hat-trick. We were fantastic, showing much younger and fitter players a thing or two. Some might say that the fact they were a team of girls lessens the value of our victory, but I won't listen to such sexist twaddle.

Hit The Road

Kiko and I drove south from Barcelona in a small hatchback rental, with three years of Kiko's accumulated possesions and his dog Acha. We caught a few hours of sleep beside some country road on our sleeping mats, and arrived at his parents' holiday house in Analucia twenty hours after leaving Barcelona. There I was well fed by Kiko's lovely parents, and we slept like rocks.

Andalucia is a state covering the southern end of Spain. The locals speak a fast and heavily accented Spanish (think of a Cockney version of Spanish) that leaves me cold a lot of the time. They eat good simple food, like the beach, and smoke far more hash than they should (which is a function of the distance from Morocco.)

Kiko took me to a set of beaches that near a town called Bolonia. The beaches take quite a bit of hiking to reach, and are part of a Paraque Nacionale (which means that camping in the forest next to them is illegal.) I set my tent up in the forest, and spent a few days swimming, doing yoga, cooking over a campfire, climbing trees and so forth.

One morning I found an Italian guy camping near me in the forest. We pooled our resources - his music player and speakers and my batteries - and started our day listening to Italian Reggae while making our coffee over the fire (my coffee, his sugar). He spoke no English, but luckily my Spanish was starting to get good enough for a bit of conversation to flow. The rest of the day was spent alternating between the shade in the limbs of an enormous sprawling gum tree that offered great views of the coast and the scorching sun on the beach. This was a typical day on the beach.

Jim

I left the beach to meet Jamie in Granada, a historic little city near the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Andalucia. We camped for a couple of nights in a camping ground near the bus station. I have got a lot of use out of my tent so far in Spain, which is a relief after I carried it around India for six months and only used it for a week. We had a good look around town, checking out the sights during the day and performing random quality sampling on the Mojitos at night.

Jamie very quickly started appreciating some of the things that make the Spanish so civilised, such as taking a siesta to escape the afternoon heat, and getting free tapas with every round of drinks bought at a bar. Jamie was also a bit distressed by the suntans and hot-weather-wear being sported by the Spanish girls - the poor lad had spent too long in the pasty UK.

Back to the Beach

From Granada we made straight for the beach. A long day of travelling that saw us take three buses, buy a stack of groceries and struggle for over an hour along the beach while the sun was setting. It was hard work, but the view and being alone on the beach as night started was fantastic. We got to our campsite just after dark and set up a fire and cooked up a tasty dinner.

The weather was fine so we decided to sleep in the open on our sleeping mats, which was just as well because we were busted by a local policeman the next morning. I explained in broken Spanish that we had been hiking along the beach yesterday and had got stuck out here when the sun had set. He was happy with our excuse, and let us go with a simple explanation that we were not allowed to camp here.

The next morning the same policeman found me sleeping under a gum tree, and was not so kind. I pretended not to speak a word of Spanish, and got off with a more sever warning. Jim and I packed up our possesions, made some coffee on the beach and made the hot return journey to the bus station where we got a bus to Tarifa.

Morocco

We met Rosemary in Tarifa, and after taking a day for Jamie to recover from some food poisoning we got the ferry to Tangier in Morocco. Some observations about Morocco.

Cafe Culture

Moroccans are particularly civilised when it comes to tea and coffee. Every square is ringed by tea houses, or salons de the as the locals call them. Each salon has as many chairs as possible lined up along the sidewalk for the (entirely male) patrons to view the street life while they sip their mint tea and coffee. They know how to make a good coffee here. Which is very important. Order a milk coffee and a waite dressed in black slacks, white shirt and black vest will bing out a perfect shot of espreso and pour in hot milk to until you say merci. Order tea and you get a strong tea with stacks of mint leaves squashed into the glass filled with sugar to the solubility saturation point.

Quiere una Propina

Moroccans are very good at finding your money. Sure, you have paid for your bus ticket, but there will be some asshole with the key for the locker under the bus who wants you to pay extra for your luggage. Maybe you payed your "luggage fee" when you bought the ticket, but that doesn't matte to the guy with the key. After a bit of yelling and pushing one can get the fee down, but it is still wise to pay the luggage guy something to ensure that your bag is looked after.

After haggling with one such chap, and getting a little violent and flustered in the process, at the bus station in Marakesh I got on the bus to find some street kids from whom we had purchased overpriced chewing gum had reserved some seats for us. We then spent fifteen minutes in the schorching heat on a stationary bus with children scrambling all over us trying to negotiate a seat-saving fee while selling us more tissues and gum. I found my patience and tollerance severely tested.

How Much?

I am used to be overcharged when travelling in less developed countries, it comes with the territory. As a result I have developed a policy for transactions - I am prepared to pay a bit of tourist tax, but I won't even try to bargain with anybody who takes the piss with the prices they charge. This means that I have a lot of trouble with vendors in Morocco, who sometimes ask for up to twice the cost that one would pay in Spain. It wasn't so bad in the first couple of cities we visited where there were few tourists, but in Marakesh and Essoera it is outrageous. The problem with Arab guys is that if they tell you a price, they expect that a deal will be reached, and they can get very unpleasant when you don't agree to purchase. This makes shopping rather difficult.

Che Calor

The dessert is hot. Really fucking hot. Don't go there in summer if you don't have a good reason to.

Hamams Are Hot Too

Hamams are the local equivilent to a turkish bath house. We found one in Larache, and payed three euros each for entry, massage and wash. The Hamam was three long tiled rooms joined by single doors, with each room being progressively warmer than the previous one. There is a fire under the floor in the last room, so one can create a sauna by throwing hot water on the floor.

We were instructed to wash ourselves with the provided soap, then I had water dumped on me by a strong little Moroccan man. He then dragged me into the next room, got me to lie down and went to town on me with a "scrubbing glove" to remove all of the dead skin (and some perfectly functional living skin too) from my body. After this I had some more buckets of hot water tipped on me, before I was roughly adjusted into various complex and painful positions. The room was filled with the sounds of our groans and our vertebrae and joints cracking under the strain.

We then tried to escape to the waiting room out the front of the hamam, only to be ordered back inside by our torturers to get doused in cold water. All in all a very rewarding experience.

Mr Fix-it

There are chaps everywhere who are what I like to call facilatators of fixers. They make money by helping foreigners who want to purchase large amounts of hash, or perform other high value transactions such as "meeting" Moroccan women. These guys make friends with you, then help you find a cheap restaraunt, a good hamam, a good-value black market money changer, a bookshop with local maps and so forth. They are faily honest in these transactions so that they can develop trust with you for any lucrative deals that you might have in mind. I don't want to buy a kilo of hashish or meet any loose local woment, but I am interested in their other services. We have found out some good local information in exchange for a tip or the purchase of a small quantity of hash (where they rip you off badly, but the rip off is worth it for the info that one gets out of them).

Ardios

I am probably going to spend another week or so in Morocco, heading north to the Rif Mountains for more tranquil surrounds. Then I want to return to Spain to spend a bit more time bumming around, camping and meeting the locals before trying to get some work in Barcelona. I don't have the relevant papers, but apparently it is possible to find such work, and the idea of extending my stay in Spain instead of returning to Ireland is an appealing one to me.