Calling On The Kasbah
Last month I saw an opportunity to escape the desert landscape of Qatar and go somewhere interesting and new, and where did I choose to go? Why, the desert landscape of Morocco, of course. “What do you mean, ‘of course’?”, you might ask. There are a lot of places in the world where one might end up, why would Morocco be such an obvious choice?
Between the cart wheeling buskers, snake charmers, musicians and monkeys of Marrakech, the heat-streaked Kasbahs of clay in the dying riverbeds on the edge of the Sahara desert, and the salt-sea wind thundering against the fort walls of the eastern Atlantic coast there simply didn’t seem like a better place to spend some free time.
Tip-toed and talking tepidly in Arabic and French I climbed clumsily over the communication gap and whooshed my way into the country by plane and train, skipping the busy swarming mess of Casablanca in favor of a direct route to Marrakech.
I introduced myself to two other travelers from Britain and Germany en route, and we decided to go searching for the place I had planned to stay near the central medina of the city. Lead by a shifty mustachioed Berber man into the dark and twisty alleyways, there was a little doubt in the air, but I carefully asked questions about the area’s landmarks and it seemed he was on the right track. Children ran from doorway to doorway in the shadows and noise and revelry could be heard in the distance. Barely room for two people abreast we navigated through dark alleys and around a donkey, through groups of men loitering in doorways, and we came to a massive iron door with a tiny white button.
I pressed it.
It made bird chirping noises.
The door opened and we were welcomed into a wonderful hostel, glowing with light and multilingual hospitality. Three floors of balconies and bunk beds, lounge chairs and brightly colored carpets, sweeping swiftly up onto a terrace kitchen (and bar!) complete with sheesha pipes and a sunset view over the rooftops of the medina. We had found our base of operations.
Out into the medina we explored, spices and rugs and the usual souq fare were abundant, and although my travels had taken me to similar places in the past there was something special about Jamaa El-Fnaa in the colour and exuberance of its people. Local storytellers would gather crowds of Moroccans around them, bubbling and laughing as bursts of smoke from the dozens of food stalls wafted through the air creating a kaleidoscopic vision of brightly colored lights and motion. Music thundered from drums in all directions and characters garbed in bright silks danced and shouted and offered goods and services from fresh dates to hashish. We walked the city and ate at the bustling food stalls, clay pot tagines and skewers of vegetables placed in front of me tasting delicious amid the smoky smells and skirling horn sounds of the central medina.
Climbing on board a bus we headed south through the Atlas Mountains. Snow capped peaks were visible as the roads twisted and turned and lead us through Berber villages and down again out of the fertile highlands toward the arid desert of the Sahara
We came to the town of Ouarzazate and spent the night, and the next day rented bicycles to go off in search of Ait Bin Haddou, a famous Kasbah in the surrounding area. We cycled for hours along the desert highway, making way for speeding busses and beginning to lose morale as the mid-thirty degree heat began to blow against us. Then we arrived, the foundations of civilization along the banks of a dying river, still supporting life today. Homes and ramparts made of sun-baked clay stood surrounding the home-made irrigation allowing crops to exist so close to the Sahara. We spent the afternoon exploring, before climbing back on our bicycles and returning to the town (thankfully with the dusty wind at our backs).
That night in town I succumbed to my rubbery legs in a tiny souq and sat next to a curious man named Abdul. Unable to speak classical Arabic properly leads a man to struggle with the unfamiliar Berber dialect even more, but between patchwork blurbs of English, French, and Berber we came to the conclusion that we should indeed drink some tea, and that a tea without a frothy head is much like a Berber man without a turban. We stepped inside his tiny shop of trinkets, and when we ran out of things to say, he produced a large roughly-crafted Gambre… a three-stringed bass-like instrument made of wood and dried camel skin, strung with the intestines of a dead camel. Crafted by a Bedouin man 200km into the Sahara, it had obviously been well traveled. He played some songs for us and I asked about where one would get one of these instruments. He told me who had made his, but my plans were to head west to the coast the next day, and I couldn’t make it there and back in time. I offered to buy his for what he had paid for it some time ago, but he refused. Infatuated with the battered souvenir, I dumped out my paltry wallet, some postcards, a pen, some stamps, and after a few moments of moral struggle he agreed… but first we had to write his name on it.
I left Ouarzazate on a local bus and headed back through the mountains and Marrakech, where I would part with my travel companions and continue to the coast of Essaouira with my Gambre, “Abdul”, on my shoulder.
Essaouira was just the place for someone with music on his mind, and I thoroughly enjoyed wandering the windy coast of the old fort settlement. It had a balanced feel; a European artistic alternative to the extremes of Marrakech and Ouarzazate. I visited the art galleries, listened to some live music, and met a man who showed me how to replace the strings on Abdul and how it is supposed to be tuned (although that’s no easy task). It was hard to leave the salt spray smell and relaxation, but time was getting short… I pulled on my thin goat's-wool sweater, my pack and my Gambre and climbed onto a rickety bus smelling of oil, cigars and hashish at 1am and careened down the nighttime roads toward Casablanca. At a late night village pickup, a bent, toothless woman of indeterminable age asked me for some of my water for her baby, and I gave her my CNAQ water bottle and some change, not realizing the rushed trek for the next 12 hours of getting to the airport during the inferno-induced city-wide power outage would be very, very thirsty. But I survived, and I hope she did too, although I couldn’t be sure by the look of her.
Finally, in the manual electricity-less processing to board my flight, I pretended to be a member of the Moroccan Olympic track-and-field team to get priority boarding. I wandered onto the plane a tired, sun-browned, unshaven, scraggly Gambre-toting backpacker in goat’s wool... plopped down next to an over-dressed couple who used too much cologne/perfume, and drifted off to sleep.
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