cops, the palmeraie, the sahara, surfing, gnaoua festival...

oh man where to start.
so the day after the brothel thing we met up with Hassan and Mustapha and took off for the Gorges du Dades, where we did not actually manage to see the gorge because Hassan was tweaked out by all of the OTHER faux guides hanging out but where we did have the best tagine I've had so far at this tiny place on the side of the road. It was some sort of meat with vegetables but it actually had flavour which is sometimes had to come by in a tagine. Yum, and so unbelievably cheap - like 5 or 10 dirhams I think, which is about $1.50. To feed 4 people. This place didn't have a bathroom so when I had to go the proprietors let me into their house to use the bathroom there.
Then to Tinehrir to visit with some of Mustapha's family (tea tea tea) and then to a little village called Ait Aritane in the Palmeraie to stay with Hassan's family (more tea). At first he said we were staying at a gite and made no mention of the fact that this was his family. What, like he didn't think we'd figure it out? What a tool. Anyway the home was very cool, rooms spread out through the old kasbah, and his parents and sister were kind and welcoming.





We walked through the green palmeraie in the evening watching the women working in the fields in their bright clothes, we ate apricots straight off the tree, we ate dinner (couscous) around a big plate with all the men in the house - and both Steph and I were admonished for holding our utensils with our left hands...awkward since we're both left handed. After everyone had eaten their fill the plate was passed to Hassan's mother and sister (who had prepared the meal) and they ate too. Was this the usual routine or was it just because with Steph and I there there was no extra room around the plate?
We watched sattelite television - Jon Cusack movies in english with no subtitles on Saudi channels, Al Jazeera, arabic music videos. And drank yet more tea.
At bedtime we were shown our room which was a nice formal living room with upholstered benches lining all of the walls. You could probably seat 50 people in that room easily.

Next day went to the Gorges du Todra...it started to rain the instant we stepped out of the taxi so we stopped in a restaurant for, you guessed it, more fucking tea.
As we waited the rain came harder and harder...at a break we tried to go outside and cross the little river so we could walk around the gorge a bit. At that moment someone started yelling 'look at the river' and we watched as the normally small clear river was overrun with masses of brown water coming down from the mountains.



This knocked out the little bridge and effectively stranded us in our restaurant.
Finally a system was set up where everyone took off their shoes, rolled up their pants, and waded across the stream...just when I thought it was safe to put my shoes on again the rain started, heavier then before and we had to run through the gorge and through overflowing streams to escape an anticipated flash flood or something. This never happened but everyone was running their asses off to get out of there so it seemed rather dire at the time.

That afternoon we went back to Tinehrir to hang out with Mustapha's family some more (tea) and buy food...in a dodgy part of town (it felt dodgy to Steph and I, like most of Tinehrir, full of leering men "hel-lo? hel-lo?") Hassan stopped to use the internet and Mustapha and Steph and I waited downstairs. Next thing we knew Mustapha was scuffling with some guy who was pulling things out of Mustapha's pockets...we had no idea what was going on and assumed this was yet some more guy who looked at us the wrong way, M didn't ask for any help so when they walked off together across the street we thought that maybe they even knew each other or were going to talk to somebody. We didn't figure out it was a cop until we saw them both in a car with a uniformed traffic cop leaning in the window talking to the other guy. We started yelling up at Hassan to get the hell down here and help his friend but he just stayed in the internet cafe. I'm sure the situation wasn't helped by the fact that H had a large chunk of recently purchased hash in his pocket but come on dude, leave the shit upstairs and come down to help your friend.
No doing so Steph and I walked over just as the car was taking off and refused to stop for us. So, forgetting we were in Morocco and not Canada we walked up to the poor traffic cop;
"what the hell? that was our friend! where is he going?!"
"the police station"
"what? this is so stupid! he's not a faux guide, he's our friend! and now we're alone here with nobody to protect us! you're so stupid! what are you doing! you think you're protecting tourists? what are we supposed to do now!? this is dangerous, look around!"
"you have to go to the station and get him out"
"well how the hell are we supposed to get there? we don't know our way around! this is so stupid!"
"look, I don't know, take a taxi. it's not my problem"

Thanks helpful traffic cop. Though as we walked away we realised which country we were in and that abusing the police is not a good idea even in Canada. I think he was too taken aback by our fury to do anything though.
So we had to get Hassan who reluctantly (what a dick! too bad the real faux guide didn't get busted) walked us to the station, through dark shitty alleys where people yelled "putain" (whore) at us and he didn't even look around. Of Mustapha's situation he said "oh we'll probably have to leave him in there overnight". When we got to the corner of the street the station was on he cowered behing a building and made us go find Mustapha on our own. Luckily he'd already been released (after apparently being hit and forced to pay 100dh in a bullshit 'fine') and was walking our way.
Mustapha later told us he thought that some faux guide had paid the cop to take Mustapha away so that this guy could scoop up Steph and I and our business but it all seems a bit paranoid. Nobody else approached us...however to be honest at this point I don't know. Anything is possible here.

Finally we got back to the house in the palmeraie, it was dark and late but Hassan's mother, Calo, and sister were hanging out with some other women outside the house. Steph and I hung out with them, I saw the donkey and cow and calf and sheep and learned the berber words for these animals...we were completely incapable of communicating with these women but somehow we managed to spend a good 15 or 20 minutes together all holding hands and laughing hysterically over I don't know what. One woman then started pulling me toward her house...huh? Did I just agree to sleep at her place? That's cool but I haven't eaten yet and all my stuff is inside Calo's house...I found myself really really wishing I could understand the language, really really wanting to stay in this place for a long time to get to know these people.
Unfortunately I have to eat and so separated myself from the other woman and headed inside for more couscous and tea. Steph and I watched Hassan's sister (I wish I could remember her name) make the couscous - working with her bare hands to pull the chicken apart to spread the meat out. She encouraged me to try it and I nearly scalded my hands it was so hot.

The next morning we were supposed to go to Merzouga but it turned out there had been even more problems with the rains out there and the village was closed, the police were not letting anyone in. So we decided to go to M'Hamid instead which is west of Merzouga - Mustapha had worked out in that part of the desert before and knew some people. Hassan stayed in Tinehrir since his faux guiding skills were useless in M'Hamid and he realized he wasn't going to get any more money out of us. We reluctantly gave him 300 dirhams for the food and accommodation - reluctantly only because we were pretty sure his family was not going to receive any of the cash from that shifty little weasel. Mustapha was outraged to see us giving Hassan money, especially since his family had also offered to take us in, for free. It was a weird situation. Steph and I were on the bus, M was sitting behind us, then he would have run off the bus to talk to Hassan, then he would come back all pissed off, then he would run off again...we looked out the window once and saw M standing with the traffic cop from the previous night...oh no! I nearly ran off the bus before M waved to indicate that it was all right and the cop was just telling him about our little conversation from the night before. The cop smiled and waved at us and all was well.



When we got to Ouarzazate we were looking for a grands taxi to take us to M'Hamid when M flagged down a passing 4x4 - it was his friend Ismail who he had worked with in the past. Ismail's brother Mohamed has a desert excursions business and they could take us out no problem.
Hopped in Mohamed's four-day-old Range Rover along with his mother and two other women - one of whom was extremely elderly and prone to fits of the giggles - and went to M'Hamid.

We dined on carpets outside the restaurant at Mohamed's empty hotel where he told us stories about asteroid hunting (apparently a good business in the desert if you can find them).

Then, finally, to the Sahara...hopped in the car with Mohamed and Steph and Mustapha and Mohammed the Cook and....drove around M'Hamid searching desperately for freaking ROLLING PAPERS of all things. It seems that some things are universal.

Then, once we had that taken care of we drove out to Mohamed's bivouac (camp) in the desert. He popped in a tape and as we drove over the dunes we listened to a collection of cheesy western pop ballads at full volume. The result? For me, the Sahara will always be indelibly linked with 'I Will Always Love You' and 'Winds of Change'.
What else:
- walking through the dunes at night is incredible, the stars in the desert when the moon goes down are like nothing else. No other light source for miles and miles and miles.
- camels are not really the most comfortable ride



- you can eat spaghettit with your hands and cook bread in the sand in the desert

- it turns out that the 'a-ok' hand sign, you know where you make your thumb and index finger into a circle and then fan your other three fingers out...that's not so good here in Morocco. It DIRTY. Unfortunately I had been doing it a lot to innocent people. In a restaurant if someone asked if the food was good? Obscene hand gesture. If some one asked me how I was doing? Obscene hand gesture.

- Mohamed offered me a job at the bivouac, staying there for free and doing excursions in exchange for translation work on their website and helping out with publicity and incoming tourists. I happily accepted but changed my mind when he made a marginally too aggressive pass at Stephanie and also when I saw how some of the guys at the camp started looking at me when they found out I was going to be staying, alone. At first Mustapha was all like "yeah, this is great, Ismail is like my brother, everything will be cool, I told him to look out for you, nobody will bother you". But this was all when he was really high. When he sobered up the story changed to "if you stay you're going to have trouble, beaucoup de derangement, Ismail isn't cool, I saw him bothering some other girls last night, it's your life but I don't think you should stay." Mutar the Camel Guy agreed with Mustapha and seemed to think I would be safer at his house. Yeah, I don't think so.
So unfortunately I had to turn the job down and return to Marrakech with Steph.

- On the way to Marrakech we stopped in Ouarzazate where I belatedly discovered the theft of 500 dh (about 75 dollars) from my wallet - since I hadn't been counting my money every day I have no clue when it was stolen but I am fairly certain it was Hassan. Of course it could have been someone in the desert or even Mustapha, I'm really not sure. Also in Ourazazate we stopped at Ismail's sister's house to drop something off for him and of course to drink TEA. Ismail suddenly decided that if I wasn't going to stay in the desert he wasn't going to either and if I was going to Essaouira, he was going to Essaouira, and why didn't I come with him?
No really, it's all right, I want to go to Marrakech with Steph first...
"Why you no want to come with me? Come with me to Essaouira."
"No thanks, really it's all right."
"Why. Why. No, you come with me. I am on vacation for one month, I take you with me. You don't pay for nothing. I have the truck, you come with me."
"NO I AM GOING TO MARRAKECH AND I AM NOT GOING ON VACATION WITH YOU."
"Why. Why you no want to come with me. Really is okay, you must come, Mustapha you must convince her to come,..."

And so on and so on...this seriously went on for about half an hour until we got up and left. Did I mention that this guy is absolutely enormous, like 6 foot 5 or something? I was so pissed off and stressed out that by the time we got to the train station and we were beseiged by begging dirty snot nosed six-year olds "dirham? stylo?" (tourists - stop giving these fucking kids pens, okay?) I had really had enough and had a minor breakdown of the "waaaah I want my mommy and I want to go home" variety while children swarmed over me and my backpack. Luckily Steph was there to look after me in my pathetic teary state.
Mustapha seemed completely bewildered...I tried to explain it to him: "all your friends are pigs! I hate all your friends! They are not nice! They bother me all the time! They won't leave me alone! If I ever meet any of your friends ever again tell him that I will never ever have sex with him so he should leave me alone!"
Poor guy, I'm still not sure he understands.

- I came to Essaouira on my own after Steph went back to Montreal and essentially didn't talk to anyone for 5 days.

It was a nice break after not having been alone since the end of April but after a while I got bored so went to:

- Surfland! At this time of year it's essentially a french children's summer surf camp but they do adults lessons and if there's space it's not a problem for adults to stay there as well. So I stayed in a tent for 5 days and tried to learn how to surf (from the most unbearably HOT surf instructor - unfortunately it seems the only man in Morocco who doesn't want to get in my pants). Surfing is really fun but very difficult. I was anticipating not being able to balance myself on the board but it turned out that was the easy part. The problem is paddling - both out to the waves in the first place and then trying to get enough speed on an incoming wave to be able to get up on it. I need to work on my upper body strength but I am determined to try again.
It was weird hanging out with these kids...well I didn't hang out with them all that much but did eat with them...in fact they were mostly teenagers and more than once I saw a girl start to quietly cry in the middle of a meal for really no apparent reason at all.

- Then back to Essaouira where I met up with Mustapha and also Phil! I knew he and Benedicte were here in this part of Morocco but we had been in different towns at different times and I thought they had already left Essaouira. Happily no and it's been nice the past couple of days to hang out at the cafe, talk about Toronto, etc.
The Gnaoua/Gnawa festival starts tonight and the town is filling up. Prices have gone up as well. It should be fun though.

Future plans: trekking with Phil in the High Atlas next week, then returning to Essaouira where I've been given a good deal on a sweet hotel room in a really nice riad for the entire month of July. The french classes I thought I was going to take are as it turns out not what I want, but I think I'll stay anyway and study on my own, speak as much french as I can, maybe try some more surfing down the coast.

the weirdest day so far, or: how we ended up dancing with sad eyed prostitutes in a moroccan brothel

Steph and I left Marrakech on Wednesday to head out to Ouarzazate.
It was a beautiful but nauseating ride through the Atlas Mountains, endless winding and speeding up and slowing down.

We arrived in Ouarzazte at dusk and who should meet us at the bus station but Mustapha! This was unexpected, I had told him where I was going but thought he was on his way to Merzouga or something. I do have to admit however that I very rarely understand what he says so maybe we had made a plan to meet up and I just didn't realize it.
Anyway, he walked us through the town to our hotel...it was a dodgy dodgy walk through a pretty crappy looking town, dark streets lined with dudes staring at us. Steph and I both admitted later to a brief bit of worry that Mustapha was actually just leading us to an alley to be robbed and murdered. Luckily we were just paranoid because he took us right to our hotel and then out to his friend's cafe for dinner (and I suspect to show us off).

We made plans to meet the next morning and he took us out to the famous kasbah at Ait Benhaddou (where a number of films including Gladiator and Lawrence of Arabia have been filmed).

Getting there involved the "grands taxi" - one of the more terrifying modes of transport...it's a big old car (maybe a mercedes or something) that will have 6 passengers and 1 driver crammed into it - 4 in the back and 3 in the front. Seatbelts are not an option and you will really get to know your neighbour.
The Kasbah was pretty cool, we wandered around, ate an orange, then walked back to Hassan's brother's hotel and restaurant where we met who else but Hassan. He convinced us that instead of going straight to M'Hamid and the desert, it was okay now to go to Merzouga and that we should go with him through the gorges and then go to the desert at Merzouga.

Then it was time to head back to Ouarzazate. There were no grands taxis around so Hassan flagged down a passing milk truck and convinced the driver to let us ride back to the nearest small town where we could get a real taxi.
So we climbed in the back with the flies and the giant milk tank and smaller bottles and drove through the rocky desert from remote dwelling to remote dwelling picking up and dropping off jugs of milk.


The people were always amused when the truck door opened to display us sitting in the back. At one home a tiny little girl less than 2 years old was passed into the cab of the truck to come along for a ride. The three men in the cab played with her and made her giggle like they were all her grandpas.

Finally we got back to Ouarzazate and Mustapha took us to a "music festival" which turned out to be like a local town fair complete with midway rides and stalls selling junky housewares. Just like home except there was no beer garden, just a lot of tea. The music wasn't going to start for several hours so we sat at the tea tent with some older guy Mustapha knew and a woman we assumed to be his wife.
We were pretty much the only tourists around...we saw one other blond woman briefly, but she disappeared and wasn't seen again. There were a lot of stares and I believe that a group of youngish guys offered Mustapha some money for us. It was nice of him to say no.
Waiting for the music we did bumper cars and ate cotton candy and watched boys breakdance and then finally it was about time for the music to start.

Mustapha's friend Said who-looks-just-like-John-Leguizamo appeared and we were introduced. Said's interests became apparent right off the bat; "you are both very pretty" and "do you have a boyfriend" being among his initial comments.
The performers were all verrrrry serious and dressed in suits.
For the first couple of songs, which were pretty slow, there were a few other local women in the crowd, mostly young kids and older women. But after the third song or so we looked around and we were absolutely the ONLY females around in a sea of guys. About 50% of whom were openly staring at us, mostly curiously but some hungrily. I asked M if it was all right for us to be there and he said yes, no problem...turns out he had paid the police to watch us and also we were right beside the barrier so
if there was any trouble I had my escape route planned.
It was really crazy actually - because of the limited contact between men and women men tend to be really physical with each other in a way that would be SUPER GAY at home. Everyone knows this already but yeah, guys here do walk around holding hands, arms around each other, etc etc.
When the music really got going dudes were dancing with each other, some really provocatively...my ass there's no homosexuality here. But for the most part it was pretty straight, just a bunch of guys having a really good time, dancing around in circles, doing conga lines, running around, jumping up and down.
I made the mistake of looking around and accidentally making eye contact with a short dude in a white baseball cap. After that where ever I looked, there he was, leering at us and dancing.
All of a sudden Mustapha took off and the next thing we knew there was a big scuffle and some guys were pulling him off of Baseball Cap guy. Turns out Baseball Cap had started doing some inventive dance moves with his tongue in our general direction and M saw this.
Steph and I are like "okay it's time to get out of here, we shouldn't be here" but the guys said no, it's fine, don't worry. However after the THIRD fight the guys finally conceded and we all took off.
I had mentioned something to Said earlier about missing beer (no beer in two weeks! that's harsh especially after Spain.) so he proposed that we go to a bar. Yaaay! Finally a chance to check out a Moroccan bar.

They took us to this place with live music, a few women dancing on stage, and a couple of tourists grinding on the dance floor.
We saw the older guy and his wife that we had been sitting with earlier. I'm so naive that Said and Mustapha actually had to tell me that "No, that's not his wife. That's a prostitute. All the Moroccan women here are prostitutes."
Yikes! Still, the atmosphere was pretty chill. The beer tasted great and it was such a weird environment to observe. There were far more men than women and even here the men were drunkenly dancing with each other.
The dancers on stage were wearing bulky robes and doing a shimmying sort of dance, one in particular, the one in white, could do some incredible things with her hips.

The dancers for the most part didn't really seem to be all that into it even though the music was so infectious that when I went to the bathroom even the old bathroom attendant was dancing her ass off.At one point all the musicians from the other show arrived at the bar and went up on stage to play too. They looked like they were having a much better time here.
Said and I had a conversation that mostly consisted of him trying to get me to talk about sex. For example, he started off with a sort of innocuous question about life in Canada and how it is different from Morocco. This somehow led to a discussion of homosexuality, specifically lesbians...like did I know any lesbians personally? Oh really?
"And so...when you go out for a drink with your lesbian friends...do you then experiment with each other?"
"Huh?"
"If you have a drink with a lesbian will you kiss after?"
"Uh, Said...lesbians aren't animals you know."
"Oh." A look of tremendous disappointment crossed his face.

Then, a few minutes later he tried again when I innocently asked him what Moroccan girls his age do for fun since they can't go to bars and stuff.
"You know, masturbation?"
"Uh, Said...that's not what I meant."
"Oh". More disappointment.

Finally he just decides to go for broke and asks me some very direct questions about my sex life...Said, you horny little bastard! Give it up!
"Uh, Said...that's personal and I'm not going to discuss it."
"Oh"
That's pretty much where the conversation ended.

After a while we decided to dance too - the other tourists had left and Steph and I were definitely the main attraction which was kind of weird. It was all very unsexy, what we were doing, really we were just jumping around, but all the guys were watching us. I felt badly for the hookers.
At one point the floor was clear so the woman in white took it over, was joined by a couple guys...then she came over to our table and pulled me up to dance with her. She looked a lot like Catherine Keener but with sadder eyes. I think she wanted to dance with us just to take a break from all the guys...she sat at our table for a while too but we didn't talk much.
It was a strange place.

quick update

we haven't had a hot shower in several days and Mustapha keeps getting arrested.

We had to take off our shoes yesterday to run through a river of mud at the Todra Gorge to escape the torrential rains.

Hassan is a chickenshit and we've left him in Tinehrir...

aside from that things are great.

heading to the desert at M'Hamzid tonight for 3 or 4 days then Steph has to go back to Montreal. Booooo!