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.
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