Morocco
The third taxi driver we haggled with was willing to give us a fair price to the train station: thirty dirhams. Overpriced even still, but a bargain relative to the two hundred and ten for a grand taxi fifty meters away. Although most of the city’s souks, palaces, and restaurants are located in the ancient part of town, one is more likely to be treated with some semblance of normalcy outside the medina. One grows accustomed to the stares, which stem from interest, not malice. We're told that a group of scrawny westerners strolling by is oftentimes the most entertaining part of someone's day.
There are places that immediately let you know you’re there, and Marrakech is one of them. It is an intricately designed and painfully detailed city. Like much of the architecture and design in this part of the world, there is beauty in every doorway, arch, and alley. Vibrant colour schemes and rich patterns hand-carved into cedar make even the most dilapidated structures something to marvel at. It is difficult to distinguish between form and function. But the city is hot in May and the sellers are abrasive, and every man is selling something: corny Africa t-shirts, photographs with a snake, bets on teenage boxing, tours of the souk, fresh-squeezed orange juice, low-grade hashish. A typical unsolicited and one-sided interaction might go something like this: My friend, you haven’t heard? Today is the final day of the Berber market! Follow me, mon ami, I’ll show you. Handcrafted leather that is authentic. Good quality. Don’t worry, this is Morocco, not Iraq. I have friends in London and Amsterdam. Where are you from? United Kingdom? Italy? USA!?...
I caught my first glimpse of Marrakech at night. The airport taxi grinded to a halt at a red light just outside the medina, where I glanced out my window and saw a family of three on a motorcycle, young daughter sandwiched between mother and father. Dad drove and was the only one who donned a helmet. It is common to see a family on a motorbike and notice that only the men are wearing protective headgear. Sons are, after all, the undisputed golden calves of the culture - the be-all-end-all of parenthood for both women and men of religious devotion. We later ate and spoke with the owner-operator of a home-style cooking restaurant in Meknes, which lies just east of Fez. The man's life revolves around women: his mother, the chef, and his wife, the prep-worker and cleaner. His baby daughter Nour is six months old. Mounim, the owner and visionary, pours mint tea, commiserates with guests, and prays for a son.
Three of us - my travel partner Jordan, myself, plus our new Danish friend Asbjorn - arrived at the Gare de Marrakech searching for quiet. Since one is hounded every minute in the city, you’re left with no choice but to include resistance as part of the experience. It’s mostly fun and games, until you're taken aback by a man in his late twenties trying to sell you dinner. He whispers rather menacingly in your ear that he’s “fucking ashamed of [his] job,” and then proceeds to stand back and go into the rehearsed, colourful pitch that fills his days and nights. So we searched for an escape and boarded the Marrakech Express. The train makes stops in Casablanca, Rabat, Meknes, and Fez, among other places. A six or seven hour journey across the desert, along the coast, and over the rolling hills.
We met a revolving door of three warm and helpful ladies in our cabin: Nora, a woman in her sixties, whom we communicated with in broken French; Asna, a friendly narcotics officer, with whom we spoke in slightly better French and limited English; and Salma, an upper-class, trilingual girl of twenty-four. There were three very different Moroccos in that cabin, and it was good to finally meet the place we were seeing. They were eager to welcome us to their country, give recommendations we'd heard before, and chuckle at our naivete in not having a place to sleep that night or knowing where we'd disembark.
The three women departed one by one at different stops in Casablanca. Left alone, we were joined by a man who introduced himself as Muhammed. He presented himself with a ready smile, upright posture, a respectable watch, and a strong command of English. He thanked us for choosing Morocco and engaged the three of us in a conversation about places to see and where to eat, claiming he was the owner of a restaurant in some nondescript location in the south. He was merely visiting Fez to see his aging grandmother and acquire an array of spices. He was initially friendly, but began to express some palpable awkwardness, fidgeting with his phone and avoiding eye contact. The silences between exchanges grew longer and louder, and I could tell he was nervous.
I asked clarifying questions about his story in a friendly manner, his spurious claim about missing the Tokyo Olympics due to Covid in response to "Why did you open a restaurant?" reinforcing my distrust. He began sharing serious and communicative looks with an unknown third-party lingering awkwardly outside our cabin. He repeatedly referred to us as "brothers from different mothers." He excused himself to use the restroom, and I grew seriously alarmed when he left his backpack behind, it just recently been made clear to us by Asna, the narcotics officer, that one never leaves his bag unattended aboard the train.
The tension intensified as Muhammed's assumed partner-in-crime - a tall, pot-bellied, rather intimidating guy with a goatee - knocked on the glass window of our cabin and singled Asbjorn out to ask for help next door. We sharply declined his advances, recognizing they were trying to split us up, and after Unknown-Goatee relinquished, we noticed the train's lone police officer making increasingly frequent rounds up and down the hallway of our car. Muhammed returned, sat awkwardly for a few moments, claimed he needed a snack, and left with his almost empty bag. The train came to a stop at a small station in a seemingly deserted village, where the two of them disembarked discretely and separately, Unknown-Goatee giving us a sly wave as he stepped off. We did not see them again.
Touring Morocco, there are some blatant realities that are difficult to cast aside. As one hostel owner in Chefchaouen - a picturesque blue mountain town in the north - later told me, we have a country whose majority population is under thirty and bored. Unemployment is rampant. Men sit in street-side cafes for much of the day, sipping sweet mint tea and smoking. Many women are relegated to the home, the older apartments having been built with only a skylight in order to prevent wives from seeing outside. The country is changing, but it is hard to shake the past. Progress ebbs and flows, and the country is divided on what constitutes progress. Many ask earnestly, "Why are you here?" Their confusion instils doubt and some degree of shame, given that I get to pick up and leave whenever I so choose.
If nothing else, Morocco is a challenge - to live in, visit, and understand. But a rewarding one at that, making visits to places like Chefchaouen uniquely enriching. Chefchaouen is, for all intents and purposes, the birthplace of hashish, and the vibe there is properly relaxed and strange. The exchanges happen in restaurants during service. You break bread with the dealer. Still, the hustlers in Chefchaouen simply push something else: tours of the hash fields. We politely declined those offers, wishing to avoid being caught in the crosshairs of an international drug trafficking incident. Apparently the local product goes for about eighteen euros per gram in Amsterdam, a point of pride in Morocco's blue city, or as we coined it: The Source.
Being in Tangier to finish the trip, I imagined the previous weeks' experiences would crystallize, and I'd be able to reckon more clearly with this country. I have a slice of clarity about it now, one month later. It comes back to the production that is Marrakech. It is a place in which it is impossible to settle down, or to relax. Which is an odd paradox, given all the sitting around occurring at all hours of the day and night, a product of heat exhaustion or boredom or tea culture or all of the above. But it is a place where one can certainly settle into the madness. Joe, the hostel owner from Leicester, England, has situated himself in the eye of the storm quite nicely. He enjoys the rush of putting on a stone-cold look, walking the crowded streets with severe intention, and knowing with certainty that "none of these fook'n guys are get'n a single dirham outta me." He's moved his mum down there as well, who is supposedly a top haggler in 'Chaouen.
And we began to like it too, being entirely out of place, sticking out like sore thumbs, responding to absurd questions with outrageous answers, or simply maintaining a deadly stare that says I am the only one to ever exist in this world and not even the loudest, highly abrasive, dreadfully obnoxious, most persistent offerings can convince me that you are standing here in the flesh. If there is something twisted about that, so be it. Much is twisted and tangled there, yet it still calls me back, like it does Joe, Jordan, Asbjorn, and countless other colourful characters who can't gather why.
