Tea in Sahara

It was dark and I couldn’t see the face of the man I was talking to. We were sitting on carpets spread on top of the sand between two nomad tents, somewhere behind us the rest of the group and some of our Berber guides were on a sand dune, singing some Berber song. The man opposite of me was also a Berber, a nomad tribe from Western Sahara. He was the brother of one of the guides that took us with camels to the camp on the edge of the desert.
‘The Old Man and the Sea, that’s a great book. We are just like the old man, we struggle with the desert, but she is stronger than us, we must respect her, or we won’t survive…When you are in the desert you must remember all details on your way or you won’t be able to come back, and if a sand storm comes then you must stop or you will lose your way completely..’ I asked the Berber how come he knows English so well. He said he was lucky – when he was fifteen there was a period of great droughts so hs family had to move from the inside of the desert to the nearest oasis town. There he went to school and learned English. His father and the rest of his tribe were in the desert even right now, he stayed here to work with tourists. I could hear strange chanting and music coming from a village on the edge of the desert, some 10 kilometers away from the camp. ‘The desert is quiet at night, as there are no sources of noise’, said the Berber in the dark ‘and that’s why you can hear sounds coming from far away.’ Nights in the summer desert are the only times when you can forget about the heat and relax. The darkness and the silence are filled by distant vibrations hours before the sunrise would burn our desire to sit down, listen and think about the empty spaces filled with sand….

The Desert, ‘nothing’s quite the same after you’ve seen the desert, nothing’s quite the same after you’ve seen the desert…’ this phrase got stuck in my head on the next day after we came back to the sun-scorched Marrakesh. Me, Sergei and Quan were back to that mad square full of snake-charmers, street musicians and dancers, fortunetellers, traders, orange juice squeezers and water sellers, traders or just some local lunatics trying to sell you something. Before that we spent another 8 hours on that bus that took us down the road from Zagora to Marrakesh, through the 50 degrees heat, the empty and scorched passes thru the Atlas mountains, back to the end of the railroad that took us here all the way from Sofia. Ahead of us was another 5 days interrail journey back home, through Spain, France, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia..
Nothing’s quite the same after you’ve seen the desert…I must have had a sun stroke that day, a minor one , or maybe I just had a total information overload, I saw way too many amazing and new sights in a way too short period of time. We slept for only 5 hours that night, the Berbers woke us up before sunset with mint tea ( they call it Berber whiskey) and bread. We had to get on our camels and head back to the town before it was too hot for us to take that two hour ride. The sun was slowly climbing up in the sky through the mountain pass, called the entrance to Sahara by the Berbers ( Sahara in their language means ..desert). After some twenty minutes on the camel back I decided to get off and walk for the second hour of our trip. It was 7 am and the sun was already so hot that I must have had some 2 liters of water for an hour( hot as tea of course, there’s no cold water there). I was trying to grasp how far away I was from home and still I would have to be back there in some 4 days before my interrail pass expires, a 4 day nonstop ride on trains through Europe. You can’t feel that way if you know that you have a plane ticket that can take you to the other side of the continent for just 3 hours, the only way to really feel the distance is to travel it on land, kilometer after kilometer, for as long as it takes.
Far out dude, far fucking out…

I could have spent a month exploring the places I saw from that bus, the people, their language, the cities, the villages in the oasis, the moon landscape in the mountain passes, the peaks, all of it under the hot Sun, hotter than any sun I’ve ever experienced… nothing’s quite the same after you’ve seen the desert… and we could have easily ended up in the bottom of one of those valleys in the mountain, I could see it so clearly – the mad bus driver accelerates a bit too much, the brakes fail in the wrong moment, our bus flies out from a sharp turn, crashing into one of those souvenir stands full of minerals and fossils, we take off and land into the roof of a red-bricked village house in the bottom of the valley. Luckily our driver was really good, Sergei however didn’t quite enjoy my descriptions of our bus flying off the cliffs…
Getting to Marrakesh was a long and eventful journey, unfortunately I cannot recall everything that went through my mind during these days in Morocco, I guess it is a bit like the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, if I try to remember and write down everything while being somewhere, I won’t have time to really experience the place, and if I just go with the flow and let things happen I won’t remember the details later.. Anyways, here it is :

Our hotel room is overlooking the green-tiled roof of a mosque with a tall minaret, around it are the roofs of houses in the old part of the town, somewhere in the background is the port where we got off the ferry from Spain earlier that morning. Europe is lost in the fog on the horizon..
Tangers is the entrance to Morocco, however we met the Orient before we were there. On the night train from Madrid to Algeciras we had two old men and an old woman – Moroccans traveling with us. They were talking in Arabic (which really frustrated a Spanish woman traveling with us) and we couldn’t get a word, the old woman kept staring at us all night, her husband was even weirder, he would start praying in Arabic in the middle of the night while everyone is sleeping, in the meantime he was just snoring and trying to take as many seats as possible..
The ferry was full of Moroccan families coming from France and Spain for a vacation in Morocco. I, Sergei and Quan were the only Europeans onboard. We met Quan on the ferry terminal in Algeciras, he was American, he had spent the last 2 months traveling through Vietnam, Cambodia, then took a plane to Istanbul , crossed Greece and Italy, went to France and Spain ( turned out he also went to the San Fermin bull running festival in Pamplona). We figured it’s not a bad idea to travel together and it seemed he had some experience with traveling in ‘exotic’ countries.
The moment we got off the ferry in Tangers we were intercepted by a friendly looking and English speaking Moroccan who told us he was a government employee from the Agency for the Protection of Tourists. That seemed highly improbable of course, but since he showed us a badge and somehow he knew all the customs officers and policemen we decided he’s trustworthy and we followed him to a ‘cheap hotel’ not far away from the port. In the meantime he introduced us to some peculiarities of Morocco and gave us some tips on how to travel safely here ( stuff like wear local clothes and try to blend in… while taking photos with digital cameras and checking a map, right ). He took us though a labyrinth of narrow streets through the medina – the old part of the town , to the hotel where I am while writing this ( I’m retyping in a shady room in Northern Germany , I haven’t seen the sun in a few days actually..). Of course the price we had to pay for our room was a bit higher than what the Lonely Planet guidebook told us was ‘acceptable and cheap’, but somehow we were left with no other option but to stay there. Our new ‘friend’ took us to a Moroccan restaurant with really tasty couscous, mint tea and special prices for tourists. After that we went back into the labyrinth of the streets of the medina, a really interesting and fun place to explore if it wasn’t for the crowds of shopkeepers trying to sell us stuff. The next stop of our tour was a ‘typical Berber market’, as our guide described it. It turned out to be a 4 floor store full of carpets and souvenirs..not exactly what I expected. The shopkeeper offered us some mint tea and tried to sell us some really beautiful and expensive carpets. Sergei was curious enough to ask about the price of a certain carpet, ten minutes later he was still trying to convince them that he really doesn’t have money to buy anything, even the carpet they neatly folded to show him how easily it will be for him to put it in his backpack and take it back home.. Hardcore bargaining like nothing I’ve seen before. The next stop on our tour was a spice shop full of magic spices and teas, I bought some special spice that my mother still refuses to use in any of her meals…
We kept walking through the narrow streets, somehow all of them were full of little shops selling traditional Moroccan clothes, shoes, souvenirs, jewels, drums, spices, anything. The shopkeepers were really active in trying to persuade you to enter their shops and buy stuff we never really thought we would need. One of them chased me down the street for about 5 minutes trying to sell me some Moroccan shirt, every time I said NO, he would simply lower the price, in the end when he decreased it three times I told him I don’t like the colour so he ran back to get the one I wanted, so we escaped. That gotme thinking that somehow I prefer the western shops with fixed prices and brainwashed cashiers…
Around that time we were completely sure that our guide is not a government official , but simply the kind of people that the guidebook for lost European tourists ( aka Lonely Planet ) was warning us about – the famous Tangers tourist hustlers.. well, the guy helped us actually, and he showed us some really nice places, but he could have spared us the lies and the tour of the shops of his friends. We paid him some 30 dirham ( 3 euros) and we said good bye ( two hours later we met him again, he was leading a group of American backpackers coming from the port…).
We decided to go to the train station in the new part of the city and check for trains leaving for Casablanca, Fes and Marrakesh, crowds of Moroccan men coming back from the beach ( no women of course) were staring intensely at us on the way . The New Tangers consists of high storey concrete buildings on the seaside that looked like some utopian socialist era Black Sea resort, surrounded by nearly dead palm trees and a lot of dust and misery. Another place we found was the square called Pettit Socco, a place where the beatnics were hanging out in the 50’s , Allen Ginsberg, Burrows ( spelling??), Jack Kerouac ( he’s got a few chapters on Tangers in his book the Angels of Solitude). Our guide mentioned the name of Jimmy Hendrix, he said he’d met him there in the 60s, along with other musicians from the hippie times.. It could be that the place had some spirit in the past , but nothing of it was there now, it was just a dirty little square with suspicious looking Moroccans and even more suspicious looking Europeans drinking coffee in the bars around..
After seeing this I decided I’ve had enough of Morocco for one day and I went back to our hotel room, locked the door and started writing. Sergei and Quan went looking for beer, they couldn’t find any in the medina, which didn’t surprise me at all, we were in a Muslim country in a hotel room some 10 meters away from the minaret of a mosque , from which every few hours an Arab priest was shouting prayers through loudspeakers. I guess I can describe today’s experiences as my first ever culture shock. I’m thinking that my next big trip should be to some really wild and empty place like Siberia, the Himalayas, Mozambique, Patagonia, some really big mountain or maybe India, people seem to be more easy-going and fun there. We are leaving for Fest tomorrow , the guide describes it as the biggest Medieval Arabic city still existing…

I was woken up at 3 am by the sounds of a prayer coming from the mosque next to our window, it took me a few seconds to figure out where I was and why was this voice shouting in Arabic in the middle of the night, in the meantime I was dreaming of powder-skiing in Vitosha mountains..
We’re in Fes at the moment, it took us 7 hours to get to here from Tangers, on the way we went though Rabat and Casablanca, the first one is the capital of the country , the second is a huge city with 5 million inhabitants, quite impressive , quite poor as well..
Our hotel in Fes is right at the entrance of the medina, a really big place , probably 10 times the size of the medina of Tangers, it took us more than an hour to cross from one side to the other. It was a really crazy place to explore, on the entrance we were approached by a group of teenage Moroccans that tried to persuade us to take us on a tour of the old city. One of them was playing the role of the bad guy, he was threatening us and being quite violent, then the other guy came and ‘saved’ us from him, he told us that there are many other violent people in the medina and we can only survive there if we go with them. I got a really big adrenalin rush from this show, but getting into a fight in the middle of the weirdest place I’ve ever been to wasn’t a good idea. The medina is stuck in the Arabic middle ages, a labyrinth of hundreds of narrow and dirty streets going in all directions, a mosque minaret on every few hundred meters, innumerable little shops selling everything with Moroccan at its entrance ready to bargain with you till you drop, the air was filled with exotic smells and sounds ( the only things that were missing from my picture of a medieval town were people on horses armed with swords and a few buckets of shite being poured from the second floor on top of us…). It seems we are the only foreigners in there, we met a few European tourists on our way, they had this special look in their eyes, a mixture of excitement, interest and uncertainty ( is this really happening? Are we really here?, amazing place….and what is this guy trying to sell me, an antelope hoof?? Should I take photos, or will these kids try to steal my camera the moment I take it out…). We passed by the entrance of a big mosque, in the twilight of the courtyard we could see groups of men kneeling and praying, around us there were beggars and homeless kids with desperate and hungry expressions on their faces, a man in a the darkness of a side was street staring at me, as if trying to tell me something.. We walked on , fast.
Our hotel is an island of tranquility in the middle of this ocean of Arabs. We have a terrific view of the medina from it’s roof, the streets filled with the noises of crowds of people that came out of their homes now that the day is coming to an end and the temperatures are dropping, roofs of hundreds or houses, mosque minarets with prayers coming from them every few hours ( aaalaaaah aaaahkbaaaaaaaar, aaalaaaaah…..), a sun that slowly sets behind the mountains on the horizon, a sky filled with thousands of swallows flying like mad trying to get as much food as possible before it gets dark. It’s one of those places that makes you think how little you know of this world and how much more there is out there to see and experience, as our little everyday's life are nothing but a grain of sand on the beach of eternity. ( I didn’t really think that when I was there, I just came up with it, I had to write something smart in the end : ), at the time I was just wondering where did those English guys get the beer they were drinking..). We were leaving for Marrakesh the next day, another day on the train, another new place, and the end of our journey…