That’s what I’m thinking at least. It’s Day 6 in Morocco and we’re on our way back from Ouarzazate to Marrakesh through the Haute-Atlas, the High Atlas Mountains. It was one turn too many on the way over and one person lost her lunch somewhere around the Tichka Pass. Caroline almost lost hers, too, when she looked at the sheer rock face plunging a thousand feet straight down. Now, coming back, the driver is taking the same hairpin turns more carefully… not for our sakes but because it’s snowing outside. Visibility is down to about a mile and the few tracks left by other vehicles are rapidly disappearing. And I am wondering about snow plows.Amazingly (to me) most of the other 30-odd passengers on our bus seem oblivious to the changing world around them. Once in a while someone looks up and says the French equivalent of “Look, George, it’s snowing!” But then they go back to their pictures and their crossword puzzles and their intense conversations and seem to forget all about it. We pass a bright red sign that says “Barrier du neige.” Barrier of snow. Our Moroccan guide, Moad, stands up to announce that he thinks the pass will still be open. “Insh’allah,” he adds. God willing. The pass, Col du Tichka, sits at 2260 meters – about 7500 feet. I know that’s lower than Tioga Pass in Yosemite but I can’t remember by how much. Tioga Pass is closed by a “barrier of snow” for a good five or six months every year.
No one is paying much attention to Moad. They’re really good at tuning out things that might interfere with their vacation. I’m not comfortable tuning things out so I quietly watch the snow from my cosy back-of-the-bus window seat.
It’s been a good trip so far. We’ve played in sand dunes in Tinfou, at the edge of the Sahara Desert; we’ve woven our way through narrow alleys and pitch black tunnels in a Berber village; climbed to the ruins of a medieval citadel called d’Ait-Ben-Haddou; walked along the berms of paddy fields in an enormous palm oasis in the Dades Valley; gotten lost – but really lost! – in a labyrinth at sunset… it’s been a good week.
I didn’t know what to expect from the landscape of southern Morocco. I was surprised how much it reminded me of the desert Southwest in the US - Arizona, New Mexico, Utah… vast expanses of brown, rocky scrub with rare patches of yellow and purple wildflowers; red, striated buttes rising from the flat desert floor; massive crags of rock jutting up in diagonal layers of browns, yellows and reds… I remember I am in Morocco only because the adobe-style rammed earth structures are not tourist attractions but real, lived-in villages, and because the people who live there ride donkeys instead of horses. Caroline and I tried to remember the difference between a donkey, a burro and an ass, but we eventually gave up. Occasionally, we would see a solitary human being riding through the desert on a camel for no apparent reason.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for both of us has been how little we have been harassed, whether by beggars, men, or people trying to sell us stuff. What the guide books put under the category of “annoyances.” Not that those things don’t exist at all, but Caroline says she is approached by more people asking for money on the streets of Paris than on the streets of Marrakesh. I would say the same of downtown San Francisco. And in the market (souk) of the small town of Ouarzazate it was actually quite peaceful. Caroline is a shopper and I am an observer of shopping. I’ve gotten a little pressure to look at things myself now and then while I watch her shop, but just as often I am approached by someone who just wants to talk.
One afternoon, we stopped for lunch in the souk in Ouarzazate. All our meals are included in the price we paid for the trip, but we wanted to try some street food instead of eating at the hotel every day. We’d just wandered through the raw-and-living-food court, where you’ll find beef cut to order from the slab and chickens in cages stacked five high waiting to be thwacked with a butcher knife and plunged into a pot of boiling water. Amazingly, no flies. We followed our noses from there to the cooked-food area. At least we knew the chicken would be fresh.
We sat down at a small restaurant with an open air grill. Many people in Morocco speak French fluently, but you don’t have to wander far from the touristed areas to find people who speak only Arabic or Berber. The man at the grill was somewhere in the middle. Caroline took a stab at identifying the kinds of meat on his grill. It reminded me of Vietnam where, even though I learned the words for beef (bo) and chicken (ga) I sometimes had to resort to making animal sounds to identify the source of a prospective meal. Bah-ah-ah for lamb, moo for cow, and ruff ruff for… well, you get the picture. Anyway, I was hoping for lamb in the souk of Ouarzazate but all we could get out of the conversation was chicken, something in Arabic or Berber that we didn’t recognize, and “viande normale.”
“De boeuf?” Caroline asked, thinking that beef sounded the most “normale.”
“Pas du boeuf,” he answered. “Viande normale.”
“Normal meat,” she translated for me. “I wonder what that is.” Caroline ordered the chicken.
“Normale pour moi s’il vous plait,” I said to the grill man.“ And in English to Caroline, “It’s probably goat. I saw a lot of goats from the bus.”
“Bien grille,” she added… well grilled. This from a woman who eats raw horse. We also ordered a tagine, which is a Moroccan stew cooked in a special clay pot. There are all kinds of things you can do with a tagine but we wanted to see how Moroccan people have it when they’re not making it for tourists. It was a simple but delicious stew of potato, tomato, carrot and onion in large chunks, green olives with the pits, one large whole chile that infused the entire dish with flavor without making it spicy, and a single piece of fatty beef at the bottom. This, we decided, was the best dish we’d had since arriving in Morocco.
At the table next to us were four men, all wearing either hooded tunics (djalabas) or hats of some kind. In front of us, two middle-aged women, both in headscarves. Passing us by, two young women walking arm in arm, one in a scarf and the other bare-headed. This was a fairly representative cross section of what we saw among people in town. Most people, male or female, covered their heads. A few women covered their faces as well… we saw maybe three or four women who showed only their eyes during our four days in Ouarzazate. And some women wore nothing on their heads at all.
The middle-aged women leaned close together and whispered, glancing up once in a while but pretending not to notice us. We did the same, whispering in English and pretending to watch the people walking by in the souk but glancing over at them when we thought they weren’t looking. For us they were exotic looking with gold-rimmed teeth, headscarves and layers of colorful patterned clothing. Finally they smiled at us shyly and we smiled back, also shyly. When their food came, they offered some to us. We were eager to talk to them but they were speaking either Arabic or Berber… we couldn’t even tell which it was, so we accepted a plate of olives from them and settled for sign language. I love olives so to me these were delicious. For Caroline… not. She tried really hard to control herself but she might as well have eaten a raw chile pepper. There was no way that olive was going to stay in her mouth. Out came her tongue, her eyes all squinty, hand shaking, and pit and pulp went flying back down onto her plate.
That was it for the middle aged ladies. For about an eighth of a second I worried they would be offended by the sight of their food being spit out. But Caroline making a face like that is not to be missed. They laughed so hard they had to cover their mouths to avoid losing some crumbs themselves. By the time they left we felt like friends, even though we never had a single word in common.
Suddenly the bus comes to a halt and I stop daydreaming about the middle aged Berber ladies. About a third of the passengers rush up to the front saying “ooh” and “ohlala” in ominous tones. I’ve been watching us kick up a snow wake for the past half hour so it is no surprise to me that we’ve run into trouble with the road, but I do wonder what we’re likely to do about it. The sign a while back implied that the road might be closed, but how closed is “closed?” Do they plow it or just wait for the snow to melt? And would that melting be likely to occur later today, or later this week, or later this season? In other words, are we going to wait it out, go around, or try our luck? I’m not one of the half dozen people now up front pestering Moad for answers but it is a bit disconcerting. Visibility is down to about a half mile in constant snow. The only other vehicles in sight have pulled over to the side, like us. One is installing chains. Another is just getting buried. Our driver is out conferring with a couple of guys in djalabas who seem to be in charge. The smokers get out of the bus to light up, and I get out with them because I don’t have anything better to do and I feel like being cold.
After a while, the guy with chains is ready to go. For reasons we don’t understand, instead of using the paved surface of the road he chooses to scoot around our bus in the dirt, which puts him very close to the metal guard rail. The smokers scatter to let him by. His wheels get stuck and the men in djalabas come over to push. With their help he makes it past, and we all recongregate to smoke cigarettes and play in the snow. After another while a pair of dim headlights appears from around the bend. A bright yellow truck, moving very slowly, with a V-shaped plow strapped to the front and three men in the back shoveling salt on the roadway. This looks promising. And behind the snowplow is a… a tour bus. Just like ours. It looks absurdly persistent.
The other tour bus pulls away from the snowplow and scoots around us on the dirt side as well… we never figure out why. Smokers jump out of its path and some of us take refuge in our doorway. The clearance between the two buses is no more than a few inches and it’s about the same on the other side before its wheels reach the edge. We all breathe a sigh of relief after it passes, glad that our driver isn’t in such a hurry. Eventually we get clearance to move on as well and we make it to Marrakesh with time to spare before lunch. We’re glad for that. We only have two more days in Morocco and we plan to spend at least some of it exploring the city with our new friends Ines and Badis.
No comments:
Post a Comment