Grass Camels in the High Atlas

"How sour the knowledge the travelers bring away! The world’s monotonous and small; we see ourselves today, tomorrow, yesterday... " - Baudelaire

"Alone with his heart at last, does the fortunate traveler find, in the vague touch of a breeze, the fickle flash of a wave, proofs that somewhere exists, really, the Good Place?" - Auden

In the morning, while the Dutch children's inner windmills whirred gently in their beds, I crept downstairs to use the hotel wifi. The lobby was the only place with a signal.

It was dark as I moved down the hall. Through the open windows I could see the stars had all paired off and gone home, but the moon lingered (still hoping to get picked up). The lobby floor and furniture were carpeted with sleeping men, the hotel staff.

I had experienced this in Vietnam as well. If you work for the hotel, you sleep in front of the front desk at night so you can be there for the bakery man in the morning, I guess. Or the fruit man. It's just how they do things. It felt weirdly intimate to tiptoe past the busboy while he snored. I think in Hanoi, I said it was like being in Sleeping Beauty's castle after the wicked fairy's spell.

But here, thanks to the folk tales I'd read in the Sahara and thanks to Ismail's stories, I imagined I was Ali Baba sneaking past the dozing thieves.

Wrote some emails and watched the sun rise. The staff snuffled awake and went about their tasks. They had slept in their clothes, so it was easy.

Breakfast was hard-boiled eggs, thin crepes, and mint tea. There was also coffee, which the Young Hollanders must have smelled, because they came clomping down the stairs in their wooden Nikes to slupper it all up.

Ismail appeared from nowhere, as was his wont and his way. I'd gotten very good at packing my two little bags, so we were out the door pretty quickly. Pretty light schedule planned. Most of it would be driving up and through the massive High Atlas mountains. I asked him to make it lighter by skipping the visit to Morocco's Biggest Silver Mine.

Because I was sure it was just going to be like the necklace kiosk at any mall in any city, and I felt like asserting myself early was a better strategy than standing awkwardly while a salesman showed me about "bracelets for my sweetheart." I mean, while I "learned about the science of metallurgy" or however they were going to position it.

This made it kind of silent in the car for a while. Like, we were kind of friendly, and I liked him, but there was this constant subversive tug of war. This whole country is a Sears catalog. Colors and objects floating in the air trying to entice you to buy them, market stalls flipping by like pages.

I broke the tension by asking for clarity on the Gazelles thing. I asked if "the gazelles" was a nickname for Ali Baba's gang or if they were actual gazelles. He said, "Oh no, gazelles are what we call beautiful girls in Morocco. He has forty girlfriends."

Yesterday, you said they help him steal.

"No, no. They are his wives."

Ali Baba and the forty wives!

"Well, he isn't married to all of them. He still likes to have his fun."

As we passed through villages and towns, he pointed out the capes the women wore. They were knotted at the shoulder to show they were married. "When they wear the knot, they are safe from snakes."

Like the horrible asp?

"No, men are snakes."

So, women are gazelles and men are snakes?

He laughed at this. The picture being painted was that if you're a woman in these traditional villages, you have to get married or anyone is allowed to abuse you. Once married, only your husband may. I had learned previously that women do all the work (and the optics bore this out), but he told me it's also expected that husbands beat their wives "lightly" to keep up appearances and because it's expected. 

So, Spain was a bad place to be a pig. Tangier, a bad place to be a mouse, and most of the world is a bad place to be a woman. 

We stopped at The Valley of One Million Palm Trees. It was pretty stunning. Golden mountains rising dramatically over a bending "river" of palms, most heavy with dates. The trees make a gorgeous curve as your eye follows them to the horizon, and the contrast of the green against the dusty valley and the burnt yellow fruit was marvelous to experience. 

On the other side of the highway was a centuries-old slave market.

We stopped for lunch in The Hollywood of Morocco. There's tons of film production here and has been for many years. Lots of famous movies, Lawrence of Arabia, parts of Cleopatra, Gladiator, etc. I can see why. Picturesque, cheap labor force, plenty of people who speak English, easy access to the desert, etc. Plus, there's the momentum of it having been here before. 

So, there's also lots of TV production. Over mint tea and a tajine (!!), Ismail told me the amazing story of how a dude from the show Prison Break was injured during a shoot and live-tweeted about how terrible the hospital was. He said the operating room was full of cats who licked his blood. I would, of course, have paid extra for that. 

He, Ismail, then went on to say the health care in Morocco was a scandal and a crime, and that most people's health plan was "don't get sick." I told him it was the same in America. It was so depressing, we got coffee. 

He asked me to choose between Tom Hanks and Nicholas Cage and say who was the nicer person and who was the better actor. I said Hanks was the better actor and Cage was the nicer person. He said I was half right, that Hanks was both. 

Apparently, he had been a runner for several recent productions, a job that involves having a car and knowing where to get whatever an actor needs at three in the morning. At the end of the Hanks shoot, he took photos with the cast and shook their hands. At the end of the Cage shoot, he told them to meet him somewhere and flew off in a jet while they waited. Classic Cage! 

We wrapped up. The cashier stood in front of a picture of himself standing next to Ben Kingsley. Ismail asked if I wanted to go into one of the studios to see a plaster Sphinx. I declined. So we were off once again. A fountain had a giant film reel that squirted water. 

As usual, just a few minutes outside of the city, we were in the wasteland, cruising through dark valleys or across barren plains. This region was known as The Road of One Thousand Kasbahs. Kasbah, apparently has several meanings: Fortress, castle, house. I guess a man's home is his kasbah. They can last a long time or they can be washed out in a minute. 

We saw many melted mud huts with satellite dishes. "So they can watch football." The Moroccan team is addicted to hashish "this is well known," so they never win. So, the locals have adopted the Spanish teams. They love the Spanish teams. I was told. 

Often on the side of mountains, we would see Arabic words spelled out in white rocks. He told me they said "God, Country, King" to remind you of the order of your obligations. I didn't tell him I despise all three of those entities back home. My mountain says "Cats, Records, Fernet!" Sometimes Pernod. 

We pulled into Ait Benhaddou, the cool old village of kasbahs that have been the background of a million shows and movies. Man Who Would be King, Jewel of the Nile, Last Temptation of Christ, and cetera. 

It was quite beautiful and very interesting. The sunlight made strange gilded shadows on the ancient walls. I was given to a tribesman in a Dodgers cap while Ismail took a smoke break. He didn't give me his name, so I called him Tommy Lasorda. 

I followed Tommy through a dry riverbed and through a gate that had been built for Game of Thrones. This place was used as one of the cities Daenerys liberates. Pretty cool. There was a long, winding walk through the village and up the hill to the lookout structure. Plenty of rugs for sale along the way. 

Tommy could tell I wasn't a buyer, so he didn't push. He did show me a very interesting collection of wooden locks that use a cunning system of pins to open and close. I was tempted to buy one. But it seems now ridiculous that I was. At the top, couples took selfies and asked other couples to photograph them. There was a glorious view of the valley and the mountains and the sheltering sky. 

It was fun to imagine being on top with a bow and arrow and firing down on goblin wolf-riders. 

I got my fill and Tommy took me back down a different way. An aggressive rug seller tried to get me to enter his home. I declined and he was incredulous. "Not even to see and not buy? Not even to know? Really? Really??!"

His voice pitched very high at the second "really" and he continued to say it to my back as I picked my way through the stones and back to the new village. We crossed a bridge Tommy said had been built to help people during flood times, and it was so strange to imagine the cracked earth beneath ever being a raging river. But apparently it is so.  

Gave Tommy a nice tip and hooked back up with Ismail. He suggested I eat the couscous at a place he knew (got a kickback from) so I did. 

And then it was many hours of driving. That was the end of the official tour -- if I was sure I didn't want to see the silver mine, that is. I was sure. So, we drove and talked and listened to more of the hot beats from Mali. We talked about girls. We talked about cars. He said the most important car part in Morocco is the horn.

"When you test a car in America, you kick the tires. Here we honk the horn. If it is loud, the car is good."

His car, the horn was great, had a turbo function and whenever we passed another car, I would shout TURBO! in a "Sunday Sunday Sunday Monster Trucks!" voice, and we would giggle.

We stopped at certain vistas to take some nice shots. Children would manifest from nowhere and offer grass camels. He had warned me not to take them saying, "I know you are good and maybe have pity for them, but if you pay them for grass camels, they will never go to school. You must refuse the camel, and if they force it into your hand, place it on the ground and say, 'Go to school. Go to school.'"

It was, of course, heartbreaking. The children were small. I couldn't make myself say "go to school," so I just murmured "la shukran."

This happened everywhere we stopped.

One area had weird rock formations that I was told were called Monkey Fingers. It looked more like droppings to me, but Ismail said he thought they looked like monkey penises, so I named that stretch of the trip "Escape From Dick Valley."

                                                                        (not my pic)

Then, long climbs, winding up up up, often passing strange double-decker trucks with terrified cattle on top. Lots of construction. Apparently, one of the world's largest solar panel installations is being set up here, huge international investment. There were signs of the roads being widened to prepare for the forthcoming heavy equipment.

We stopped for candy bars at a truck stop. Truckers drank coffee and played with their phones. Ismail asked me to make sure I left him a five-star review on a travel site. I said I would. Then he asked if it was okay if I paid him now. I said, "I ain't payin' you SHIT!" in a Brooklyn voice, which I thought was funny, but he looked legitimately distressed.

I paid him. It wasn't funny.

The road was slanting down now, and the mountains became hills and the hills olive groves and the groves small houses, and then... Marrakech. The Red City. Spread out and strange, palaces and markets and city sounds, crowds of men in white robes. Dark men with fists full of watches. Oil-rich bachelors in expensive suits.

At the Jamma el-Fnaa, we made our too-sudden good-bye. Through the window at a roundabout, he shouted something in Arabic to an old man with a wagon. While men on donkeys complained and men in cars honked furiously, the door was suddenly open, the old man took my bags, tossed them into his wagon and started off. I had to follow him or lose them.

Goodbye, Ismail. Goodbye and thanks for all the gift shops. I looked back once and he made an embarrassed smile, which I returned.

The wagon was now far ahead and disappearing into the crowd. Pipes played. The air was full of spices.