morocco concluded

Well I have now left Morocco and feel it necessary to see if I can sum up my experiences as they seemed to me.  My observations and conclusions may very well be wrong.

Morocco in 4 words.

Religion - everybody I met except one man claimed to be Muslim, though many  said they did not practice it strictly. Men spoke to me of the beauty of the Koran, how its words were poetic to the point of tears and brought peace and incite to the reader. When translated to English it lost half of the magic in the words. Few people drank alcohol and you would find people down on their rugs in the oddest places, like the middle of the pavement, depending on where it was when prayer time arrived. I found it nice taking part in the Ramadan fast, though I only did 6 days. It creates a great feeling of unity and brotherhood amongst all of the people when you starve together during the day, then feast together in the night, with strangers inviting you in as everyone is excited to feed you.

Simplicity - The Moroccan seems to have little in his life. Few possessions, few aspirations and few recipes (tarjine, tarjine, tarjine, cuscus, tarjine, tarjine and kababs). The houses both rich and poor often had no art or books, just space to eat and sleep and a tiny framed page of the Koran hanging high up where nobody can read it.

Sociability - The people love to sit and talk. Be it in a coffee shop, under a tree, on the street or on a rug in the home. They often  share meals with friends and work together. They always take at least 3 times the required workforce to do a job. One to supervise, one to hold the chair and one to change the light bulb. They don't seem to have much personal time, space or partake in solitary activities. I did miss seeing men and woman socializing together, which seems to be rare both inside and outside the family.

Family - Families live together, share money, and sleep in one room all in a small house. This is largely due to poverty but I think it is still a large part of the culture with a feeling of obligation to look after one another. I can't say I saw much jovial interaction amongst the family or partaking together in leisure activities.

The Music
I am told that lyrical the music is primarily about life, political issues and the rich and poor. Few songs are about love though I was given a translation of one song which went roughly along the lines of "I will never fall in love with an educated woman, but will find my woman in the home." I can't determine what emotion to tie to most of the music other than how one might feel after 10 days riding a camel. It is all rhythmically inspired by a steam train and you are up out of your seat every 10 seconds because you think the CD is skipping. Moroccan musicians have found that you can turn 2 seconds of composition into a 10 minute song simply by utilising the art of repetition. That or they have a very short memory span.

The Home
While the house of the poor is prisonly basic, a bare grey concrete shell with a rug on the floor and a gas bottle and hob in the corner, the house of the rich is decoratively the opposite and the palaces are a like a Muslim Christmas tree. Every possible surface, floor, wall, door, ceiling, is elaborately decorated to the point of nausea. It is as if each room held captive for 50 years an autistic mathematician with nothing but a scalpel and a paint brush. The surfaces are decorated in plaster reliefs, mosaics and painted carved wood. It is beautiful but you must look at the room through a toilet role to prevent a visual overload.

Overall I believe they are a tranquil, friendly, generous people with a diverse beautiful country. I loved my time in Morocco but for now am happy to be back in Europe where church bells ring and shops display Christmas trees and crucifixes for sale.

Burning sheep heads and offal Tarjine

I hitched north away from the warm desert, spent one night with my tent pitched in a village construction site then the next in a cold wet mountain village in the home of what appeared to be a very poor man. We squatted as it seemed, the night in his house with no power around a small fire and drank hot packet soup which to me was the taste of heaven purely because it was not tarjine or a date. Again this man asked for nothing in the morning and did not appear to steal anything from my bag. I bought us some bread for breakfast then hitched on through the snow stormed town of Efrane, receiving a ride just as frost bite was creeping into my hitch hiker thum and arrived in the great old city of Fes with Morocco's largest old Medina. Here I ended up giving the last of of money to a family in exchange to live 3 days with them and eat with them in their Medina home. The first night involved me helping them to move home and lug beds up 3 strorries of narrow stairway. Fes is the capital of artisan work and you can see lots of people working with bronze and silver. Unfortunately I arrived in the days of the Muslim holiday of Eid and nobody was working. This festival required that every muslim family must slaughter and consume a sheep. I was interested to spend the holiday with the famiily and see how the festival was played out. The night before the first day of the fest, I lay under my rug in the lounge with the rest of the family anticipating what I hoped tomorro would be the muslim form of Christmas. Through the window I could hear our sheep which had been purchaced that day, It made a few confused sheep noises from its unlikely new home in the household terrace 3 storries above the city street where it was securely tethered but seemed generaly indistressed and unaware its destiny being forfulled in the morning. The morning came with no special greeting or sign of joy shown by any member of the household. I sat on the roof top and hear the cries of one million sheep radiating from the streets across the entire city. The usual breakfast of bread and oil was served though a small piece of sponge cake was now present as well. At around mid day the other son arrived along with a man with a large knife. The sheep´s throat was slit there on the terrace  and we all watched casually as he kicked and gurgled for a few minutes while filling the floor with blood which the son encouraged me to join him in bathing my bare feet in. The in home butchery continued with the sheep being strung up, peeled of its skin and gutted. I took a walk in the streets and everywhere you looked were sheep skins and burning sheep heads. Back at home a casual unceremonious lunch of offal kebabs was cooked by the mother and eaten by the two sons and I. Later that night a potent dinner of offal tarjine was served. I was disappointed to see very little appearance of other family or friends, no extra time spent enjoying the company of others, very little expression of joy or any of the usual traits one would expect on christmas. This seemed to me, mealy an in home butchery exersize. Never the less it was educational. This night I slept as usual under my rug in the lounge with the rest of the family, except we were now joined by the sheep who lay along side me with two rigid muscular legs protruding from beneath a rug of his own. I woke in the morning to a terrible stomach ache, and offal tarjine diarrhea. The entire city smelt of offal tarjine and I was glad to hitch away into the mountains to Katama the home of hasheesh. This was the last day on my Moroccan visa and I was determined to reach the Spanish border of Cueta to avoid a fine.  At 5pm however I was still standing at the roadside in the cold in Katama unable to catch a ride towards Cueta which was still 3 hours away. A skin headed leather clad man pulled up in a car and offered to take me home for the night. I reluctantly accepted due to the cold night approaching and spent the night waited on hand and food by this enthusiastically hospitable gangsterly dressed host as he poured me tea, covered me in blankets, delivered a television to the foot of my bed and tried to force feed me goat kebabs which I ate very apprehensively with my still unsettled tummy. In the night I woke to vomit on his floor and he was up immediately to assist in cleaning up the mess. In the morning he did not accept my offer of apples, mentioned the word tranquelo and left me to hitch away to Spain hoping that one day over due on my visa would give me no hassles at the border.

Poisoness Dessert Vegetables and Berber Medicine

A few more days were spent in the home of a rastafarian man in the town of Tenirghir with a beautiful oasis of date palms and vege garden and mud kasbah buildings. My days however were spent at the bus station searching for english tourists for my host to take on excersions. I did sneak off into the garden at one stage only to recieve a phone call from my host saying come quick I have some clients. Ok I'm just around the corner I said and sprinted my head off through the palms, past all the old ladies and over loaded donkeys like a frantic superman unable to fly, only to arrive too late and rasta man had taken them to the next town without me. I then left the village intending to see the sahara sand dunes of merzouga and got as far as the roadside camel fur tent of a large black man resembling a giant date selling fossils who convinces me to live with him in his tent and simple family home for a week. My job was to sit by the road side on a small plastic seat. Every 15min a car would aproach and I would jump to my feet and start winding a well winch with great enthusiam, while waving my free arm at the aproaching car of hopefully tourists, pursuading them to come and join in the fun. If they stopped I would reluctantly cease my game and aproach the parked car. If they had still not pulled away I would greet them and ask if they would like a tour of the underground tunnels behind the tent dug to carry water fom the mountains to the date palms. These from the surface looked like a hundred giant mole holes where the dirt had been excavated to the surface from the tunnel by these well winches. I would take the tourists to peer down the holes while abdu the big black man would disapear down one of the holes and pop up another 30m away like a large blue robed marecat. Afterwards the people would hopefully come into the tent and buy a fossil, but alas this never happened. During the long lethargic days a poor man in a camel jalaba, and thick round glasses named sugar or so it sounded would come around and smoke alot of kif. The 3 of us would share meals, talk sex occasionaly pull out Abdu's secret wiskey bottle, and mark out the sizes of ones male member on sugar's kif pipe, marveling at the comparison between that of the western man and that of the nomad moroccan clearly sharing some ginetic information with the donkey. One day I went for a walk in the desert to see a great stair case leading into the sky buit by a german a few years back for unknown reasons. On the way back I discovered a small green desert vegetable. After 3 months of tajine I was craving some raw vitamin C and took a bite, only to spit out the foul sour flesh imediately. I returned to find Abdu and Sugar giggling drunk on the tent floor claiming I had just missed a car load of sweedish girls with 3 bottles of wine. In the nights we would go to a school with a computer and I would de english translations for his web site for excursions. The night of the desert vegetable I slept in the home of abdu's mother who said my feet needed medicinal henna after my previouse weeks walking. So I went to bed with a pultus, news paper and rags on my feet. The next morning I woke horribly sick , with sore stomach, head ahce and achey bones. It turned out my desert vegetable was very poisoness and the locals would not even touch it with their hands. His mother gave me some Berber herbs to swallow. I will always remember my times with Abdu, sitting behind him on his moped zooming through the village streets in the night, past donkeys, children and palm trees and by request singing Tracey Chapman "Run, run, run, run" in his ear and masaging his great fleshy shoulders, but I eventually told him I must leave. It is not you, but I simply must fly and see more of Morocco. 

living with the Nomads

I cry Abdul told me the night before I left. it was hard to determine how depressed he really was and how much was culture. I was heading off to spend the  next week walking in the mountains. After hitching to Nkob I trecked over the mountain mule trail through rocky pinicals, at dusk meeting a young wide eyed mountain gardener tending to olives and nothing else but  a huge crop of leafy green stuff that his family allown lived on and probably little else. " Twa, dormy in Masion avec Mwa"  he comunicated. So I spent the night in his small stone hut. We had a dinner of cuscus,  for my 5th night  in a row  with of course the leafy grean stuff on top, then swapped notes on english and the Berber language. His mothr returned home after dark from her day tending the goats. She wore a wooly dress and socks pulled high. The night was spent between two rugs on the stone floor and in the morning I continued on over the mountain. One  small boy guided me up the slope with his donkey then asked "Une stilo". I think  I must return to Morocco with a thousand pencils as all the mountain childen greet you with this request.  The boy allready had a pocket bursting with stilos and I left him on a rock singin out into the gorge. How many days of his life had been spent on this rock and how many more stiIl were to spent apon it I could only imagion. I spent the night exhausted under the stormy sky but too tired to pitch my tent. Luckely the moon came out but with it the cry of wolves. I heard a nearby patter  as 4 white doglike profiles scampered past a few meteres away.  A few minuts later the noise was heard on my other side. Was I being circled? I gathered a collection of rocks and prayed to fall asleep and let the night take care of itself, but it was of course a long night. The wolves clearly did not want to eat me however. I walked to the Beautiful Dades valley the next morning, and through the 60km long vegetable garden. I was invited to sleep in a house with a farmer one night and then work with him and his tractor the  next morning. This started by me and 5 local men pushing it up a hill so it could roll down to start the engine. Little work is done in this garden but the men mainly sit and have tea parties under the trees by the river. The next night was spent in my tent at the riverside and was the night I descovered that at some stage between Marakech and here, I had lost my secret stash of maybe 300 euro and now had $50NZ to get me the next month in Morocco. It was in a way good to now feel I had nothing to loose. I reached the town of Msmrir 2 days later which was a cold miserable place but I was invited in by a cafe owner and played with local boys in the dust building a mud iglu in which to cook potatoes and then bash in the dirt to bury them. While we waited for them to cook, we showed off our tricks of physical masculunity with karate kicks and hand stands. The next morning an old bearded man in a camel cloth jalaba walked in to the cafe. He had feet like a camel and I could not tell where the foot finished and the leather started. The owner told me this man was nomad and I could follow him in to the mountains and live a few days with him. He was completely unresponsive to my conversation and looked through me with vacant eyes. Never the less I strapped my pack to his mule and followed him out of town. In the first hour he spoke to say, ,"Bulburro" and point at the rock. In the second hour he spoke to say some other long elaborate word and point at water that the mule stopped to drink.  I was sure this word was too long to be something as fundamental as water. He spoke in the 3rd hour to say, "Mzein" meaning fine. I asumed he was refering to my keeping up his fast pace with my pack now on my shoulders as it was not staying on the mules. It was a relief to finaly hear a word that I understood, and some confirmation thast he was aware of my following him for the last 3 hours. The pace was hard with my pack but I was happy to be burning into the small sump  full of syrupy sugar tea which had been accumulating somewhere in the proximity of my liver. He spoke in the fourth hour after unexpectedly collapsing onto the hillside groaning. He indicated throbbing in his joints and spoke what souded like "Taxi". As this was far from down town New York I had as much hope in my success of hailing a cab  as I did of him breaking into a Michael Jackson rendition. Yet I scoured the vast rocky mountains and hoped that he was just a drama queen. I was feeling very close to my quest to touch the remote yet now was hoping to arrive at a sunny plataue camp full of warm tents and freindly smiling topless woman. 20 min later he rose to his feet, recovered the wayward mule and stumbled 10 min over the ridge to a cold slopey hillside with a brown camel wool tent about 25m squared, head height in the middle and sloping down to the dirt floor. A warmly ragged woman greeted me and led me inside. There sat 2 other woman around some burning sticks. The lady pointed me to sit on a dirty rug scattered with goat poo. As I stepped on, she made a noise and indicated that I remove my shoes as if the rug were a prestine surface. There I sat as the woman peered at me like an animal. "Bye bye", said the witchy looking woman. Clearly I was not welcome. " Diram, fluce", she squeaked. "Makain fluce" I replied. I removed 2 loaves of bread and placed them at her feet. At this stage the other woman had left the tent. She glanced around shiftily and stuffed one loaf down her shirt. The other woman returned and continued to croak words to me and cackle with creepy grins. I indicated that I would sleep the night and leave in the morning, which they seemed to accept then left me alown in the tenst sitting awkwardly on my pooey rug. A few minuts later I went out into the cold to help the ladied bash some spikey weed with rocks and scatter out the pieces for the sheep and camels to munch. All the while thet spoke on nothing but fluce. I agreed I would give them money later one the entire family was present. As night aproached a young man returned with the flock of sheep. I introduced myself and was happy to be returned with a welcoming smile and some arabic conversation. That night he fed me generousely on an entre of kebabs of goat fat wrapped in stomach lining, or stomach lining tied up with intestine, followed by a main of mash potatoe soup eaten with bread. I went to sleep under 20kg of camel wool blankets, feeling I had eaten sufficient for an antarctic expodition. I slept next to the old man who snored and murmured while goats walked consistantly accross our lying boddies. All night was the consistant rhythical munch of the goats chewing their cud at my ear. I woke to a breakfast of boiled bread soup then stood by the friendly man as he lit bushes on fire to keep us warm while the sheep dispersed accross the hillside. Every now and then he would throw rocks to heard the sheep up the hill where he would light another bush for us to warm by. I returned to the tent, concerned the woman may be digging into my pack, repeated the fluce conversation, gave them each 10 Dh, a bracelett and a couple of apples. They still asked for more. I then had the old man sign my traveling snoopy doll. He was fascinated by the pen and needed a lesson on how to hold it upright so that the ink would flow to the correct end. He scribbled on snoopey's cheek and mimed that the pen was worth a lot of money. I offered it to him but he refused. The men were most hospitible, friendly and asked for nothing, yet the woman seemed mean and continually wanted things. I put on my pack, said goodbye and trecked off in the direction they said was the vilage of Tamtatuche. I spent the night in a hotel where I worked helping the man to make Tarjine for his guests, then shared a night of music with them. The man said I could stay as long as I liked but the village was too cold for me and I trecked on in the morning. In the Todrah Gorge I stopped to play some guitar with a blind man tending a turbin stall, who then invited me home to his room with an elctronic drum machine, PA, microphones and had a continued jam with him and another great black gimbri guitar player then spent the night for free in his friends hotel. Then next day was spent with and 18 year old boy as we tried to make replicas of my flute usinf babmoo from his garden, plastic bags and a plastic bottle. I phoned a man named Brahm who I had hitch hiked with  to see if I could still work in his garden in Tenighir as he had invited me to do so 2 weeks earlyer. He turned out o have no work for me, but we spent the night together in his shed with his 5 garden woman who married me to one of them using an olive branch ring. Thus was the end of my Nomad wanderings with my feet sore and blistered from one weeks walking.