Fifteen foot high ceilings, four central columns, rugs on walls and floor, a pile of instruments next to a straw bale bar, low tables, benches and pillows. Candlelight faqat. Walid, our English-speaking guide, had changed. Earlier, he wore sneakers, tight jeans and striped sweater. Now in a blue robe and turban, Walid was savoring a Marquis cigarette. Seeing us, his fingers swam across the haze towards an empty seat. “Tafadhil.”
Marcela Gara Garcia Huidobro and I sank into the soft cushions, drained from the road. Personally, I was still perfecting comfortable camel riding. We had left Marrakesh a few days before, crossed the High Atlas in a swaying bus, and spent a day in Ouarzazate, a mellow town known as a gateway for desert tourism. “It means ‘without noise’ in Berber,” Walid said with almost a German accent, translating the name. Throughout the trip, he gives specific heights of mountains and centuries of history in single breaths. We had found skinny Walid and a Mergouzi driver named Habib the same night we arrived, boarding their four-wheel drive truck the next morning.
Habib looks like a trim and tan Elvis with a slight overbite. He is a driver and burns rubber past Lake Ouarzazate and we take a two lane highway following the Dades River through the small town of Kchait into the Skoura Valley. It is a barren landscape but for the living shock of green from the river. Where it runs, there is life. We pass the oasis town of Skoura, founded in the 12th century, and photograph its 15th century palmerie, date farm. Kilometers of blacktop later, we reach Kelaat M’Gouna and drink coffee in pewter cups served by a man in a robin-blue polyester longsleeve. I buy a vial of rose lotion, its contents pink and pungent, and we hit the road again, crossing one of three rivers in Morocco that never run dry, the M’Gouna. Our route starts weaving through a large town, and we stop on a hillside over looking the river. Above, seemingly carved into the very hill, is a proclamation: Al-Sahara saharoona.
“The Sahara is ours,” Walid said.
The road, a ribbon of black in an arid expanse of burnt red, takes us further east. We pass a wreck. What looks like a Subara lies flipped on it’s back, the trunk a twisted metal chaos. Two external frame backpacks rest on the ground. Walid says something about these roads being dangerous for tourists, even with 4WD. Job justification? I nod, wishing health to the survivors. Habib turns north into the Ait Morrhad mountains at noon, through the city of Boumalne Dades to rest at Zakar Sharif, a large restaurant in a verdant, precious valley. A Berber named Moulay approaches us before the dust settles behind the truck. We follow him.
Moulay’s blue robe cuts across the road and down a rocky bank. Women are washing clothes in the rocks of the Dades river, children playing around them. We wave, pick a few figs, and enter the green. The Dades, the second non-drying river in Morocco, provides. Rows of beans, peppers, cabbage, aubergines, cannabis, tomatoes, peppers, figs, pomegranates and mint grow in its irrigated waters. Palm trees ripe with red and brown dates crowd the river banks. Risen from recent rains, the river had cut off our original return, forcing us upriver. We find a small aqueduct and balance across it to the other side. There, we walk ahead of a busload of tourists through the Todor Gorge. Half a kilometer on each side, we are stuck in the bottom of an immense crevasse of river-carved rock. The expanse of time, sediment layers and the concept of epochal erosion, shocks in concert with staggering magnificence.
We return to Zakar Sharif, sit on cushions, and enjoy tanjines and khboz under a wool tent. The visceral connection here between water and existence rumbles around in my head as I chew. It is a common idea for the wet-worlders in arid places, but dug in my breast it is, and beats noticeably when sand tickles the crows feet, crowds the gums or itches the nostrils.
Back in Habib’s truck, we rush towards Erfoud, last stop before the desert. Walid and Habib buy water, I stretch and look through my notes. Then, with dusk about an hour away, we point our car southeast towards the dunes of Merzouga.
Mergouza is Habib’s homeland, situated in eastern Central Morocco, forty kilometers from the Algerian border. We are not the first tourists to arrive that day. But, we certainly have the best ride: Habib gets in a race with a package tour caravan of white SUVs through the cedar colored dunes and esparto grass, gunning the engine, surfing across soft patches of sand, spinning the wheel with chaotic control, edging the truck forward. We don’t overtake the white caravan until they stop to take pictures of the sunset and we keep on, deeper.
“Berber massage,” Walid says, grinning at the bumps in the road. He is ambivalent to our race. He’s texting our next ride. Fast approaching on the horizon is a train of seven camels, two empty. Oh, those are for us, I think. Habib turns abruptly a few meters before the caravan, brakes. Our tires still in the sand, we pop open our doors, and shake Walid and Habib’s hands.
One of the camel guides starts hissing and beating a camel. He yanks its polyester rope, and the beast folds down on its front knees, then back. I sling my leg over its single hump, grip the metal rebar protruding from the saddle, and hold on as the camel tips forward, raising it’s back legs first and nearly pitching me off. I am almost standing in my stirrups, white-knuckled, looking straight down on the bald, monkey head of my new camel, himself rising on his forelegs, bringing the horizon into proper position. Dead ahead: a grouping of dunes draped in the red of the setting sun. Yee-haw, erupts from somewhere deep inside of me.
The seven camels take two hours to reach the mountain of dunes. The sunset is dampered by the same clouds that would later spit lightning and belch thunder. Still, the beauty stuns, and we sit on the edge of a dune with our thoughts. After returning through the dark, between the twin storms, and spending the night in a camel wool tent, I wake for the sunrise over Algeria. The chill of morning blues my feet, and I climb a dune for vantage. The sky is black, then dark purple. It fades in time to the blue of my father’s eyes and finally, the golden orb breaks out of the mountains and clouds. One of our fellow travelers had joined me, states flatly: “Last time I saw a sunset I was on top of a glacier.”
Our presence is sensed, profit estimated, and two toddlers come screaming across the newly lit land towards us. “Un sanc. Sura, sura, sura. Ana nomad, nomad, nomad nomad sura sanc sura sanc nomad...” they repeat, over and over. The girl is in a black wool dress with small colored pieces of fabric sewn in, her hair stiffly pointing east, then west, as she prances around our position. She will be beautiful. Her brother has short brown hair with a long, thin braid in the back. He begins running up and down the dune, and they both continue their requests. I give what money I have on me to the girl. They are joined later by another set of kids carrying a sand sled, and their pitchs’ pitch reaches heights I can’t take.
Breakfast is served on iron tables and chairs on a small dune near our tents: a jolt of color in a plain of sand. We are so alien, so obviously not part of the landscape with our coffee, tea and tanjines filled with oil, cheese, honey and jam, that my only frame of reference for the memory is the surrealism of Salvador Dali.
We reluctantly load up and take off early, taking a friend of Walid to the town of Rissani. Afterwards, we ford a river which had flooded the road. On the other side, a tall, emaciated hippy flags us down. Even though Walid commands French and English, the French long-hair speaks only to me.
What could I possibly know about your situation? I think as he explains his precarious feelings about taking his Volkswagen van across the flooded road. Five of his friends are crowded around said vehicle. Imagining their trip, from its inception to this road-bump, fills me with happiness and memories of road-trips down Highway 101 on the West Coast. I encourage him, offering caution and hope. With the pep-talk finished, Habib pops the truck into first and we rumble off, leaving the VW to its fate. The road we take back is an “ancient caravan route,” Walid explains (when he says it, it comes out as one word, that’s how many times he’s said it). Along the route is a farm cooperative with tamersk, acacia, mint, alfalfa, and red dates. Walid washes his face in a basin by a water pump. “Refreshing,” he said.
We continue through the ancient-caravan-route, past half empty villages. The population here is more West or Sub-Saharan African than the rest of Morocco so far. Some buildings lack roofs, doors or have walls crumbling. We receive more Berber massages as we descend, climb and rumble down the route. Kids scream words in Berber, Arabic and French as we drive by them. We stop on a bulb of black rock resembling a smoothed gurgle of cooled lava, to peer at the stretching valley, massive cliffs, and an old watch tower. One of what used to be many, Walid explains, as we reboard the truck.
Before the frigates, steamers, propellers and then petrochemicals, routes like these brought prosperity to the kingdoms of Africa. The use of camel caravans was necessary, not just economical, and they connected and empowered centers of Saharan power like Fes, Marrakesh and Tunis. They became nexus for the goods of Africa. Now that trade is airborne or floating, the ancient-caravan-routes are traversed mostly by the migrating or the curious.
Habib and Walid dropped us off in Ouarzazate at dusk. We thanked them deeply for the experience. The next day found us aboard a bus to Essaouira, the mythical town of Jimi Hendrix’s “Castles Made of Sand.” The myth is useful but not accurate: Jimi recorded the song before visiting, but it’s easy to see where he got his wardrobe à la Electric Ladyland.
Essaouira opened its arms to us, and we breathed its magic from the beginning. The western shore saw the Atlantic pounding away at weather rocks. An island with a ruined castle hung in the surf, alone, desolate and beautiful. We stood at the ramparts of the medina, watching the ancient rhythm of wave and rock, next to a line of cannons and a sandstone watchtower. A room in a beautiful riad at the end of a broken alley was cheap, the breeze calm and steady, the town relaxed almost to the point of sedation. We ordered cheap sandwiches and salad marocaine, played cards while sipping mint tea, wandered the medina and its brazen buffet of colors.
It was mostly junk, but it was here where I felt the most comfortable yet in North Africa with being exactly who I was: a rather large and pale American with ambitions, some Arabic, a First World standard of living and a socio-political mentality forged around the assumed complimentary ideals of justice and equality. Maybe it’s the age, maybe it’s the time spent culturally adrift, maybe it’s the books, but I’m beginning to doubt the stark lines recited by so many. Are we all the same?
The next day, our final one before we made our way to St. Cyprien in France, I wiggled into a wet suit and immersed my self in the waves with a board. It had been nearly a decade since I had tasted the salt water of the Mayflower and the Santa Maria. To get a taste, though, I first had to cross a beach literally made of shit and sand. This is where tourists, without time, guts or money, come to take “Sahara” pictures aboard the camels and horses filling the beach with awful offal. My first steps were carefully made, but by the end I had resolved to let the worst happen. I would wash.
Wading into the water, I threw down the board and felt the delayed water trickle into the skin-tight suit. Gradually the suit absorbed the ocean and my body began heating it. Then I was floating in warmth, 1,200 miles from new home and 4,700 more from my old home. I let the waves take grip me, attuned to their motion, and put my slight skills to use trying to harness the inevitable, immortal surge. If only to stand on two feet for a moment.