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I Have a Friend in America! ~
April 13 through May 8, 2000
$1 U.S. = 10 dirhams
(Remember
to click on the thumbnails for enlargements of the photos)
Chaouen, Morocco
April 13 through April 15
(ccl) Let me start off this
section by saying if you've only been to Tangiers, you haven't been to
Morocco. The rest of this country is so vastly different from the port
city on the Straits of Gilbraltar, it's sometimes hard to believe Tangiers is
part of it. Certainly, part of it can be attributed to the attitude we had
when we arrived in Tangiers. We had been warned by the guidebooks to Be
Alert! in Tangiers, that there were many touts and crooks (as we found out for
ourselves; see Wiley's account in Touts in Tangiers),
and I had even been accosted by a woman in the veterinarian's office in Atlanta
who told me she had been beaten up in Tangiers for smoking a cigarette in public
(I'm not sure I believe her story, she was quite hysterical, but women don't
smoke in public in Morocco). We were very much on our guard in
Tangiers, and I think it's difficult to get comfortable in a place when you're
constantly worried about who's trying to rob you. But after traveling for
several weeks through many other areas of Morocco, I believe I can say with some
certainty that the percentage of charlatans is high in Tangiers. When you
think about it, it's not surprising. Lots of people come over to Tangiers
on day trips from Spain, so there is a cottage industry of people there waiting
to take advantage of them.
Which leads me to an explanation of
the name of this page. Moroccans are friendly people. The vast
majority expect nothing in return for the kindnesses they offer to the many
strangers that visit their homeland. Typically, if they speak any English
at all, they will ask if we're from England. When we say, no, we're
American, the average Moroccan inevitably replies, "America!! I have
a friend in America!". Some of them will even go so far as to ask if
you know the person, who invariably lives in New York or L.A. Moroccans
love Americans, and they don't see many of them, so we are a rare commodity over
here. You probably didn't know this, but when the colonies declared their
independence from England in 1776, Morocco was the first country to recognize
the United States of America as a sovereign nation.
So for the people who are trying to
get us to buy something, or trying to take us to a shop that sells carpet or
ceramics or whatever, this phrase, "I have a friend in America!"
is a great opening. We've heard it a lot since we've been here.
It's important when traveling
anywhere to be alert and aware of your surroundings, to keep track of your
belongings at all times (we're getting better at this one), and to be on the
lookout for people whose main goal in life is to separate you from your
money. But when you do this, you run the risk of missing out on meeting
wonderful people and having the kinds of experiences that people travel to
have. One of these experiences occurred as the result of a trip we took to
the lovely little hamlet of Chaouen, which is an hour and a half and a world
away from Tangiers.
Chaouen is a beautiful blue- and white-washed town set in the Rif Mountains in
Northern Morocco. Populated in the 1500's by Muslims and Jews fleeing
Spain and the Spanish Inquisition, most people speak Spanish there, in addition
to French and Arabic. All Moroccans speak at least three languages, and we
were quickly humbled by even the most humble Moroccan's language
abilities.
Chaouen's kasbah dates to the 15th century. If you, like us, have been
pretending to know what a "kasbah" is since the Clash's big hit of the
80's, "Rock the Kasbah", I am now going to clue you in without your
having to embarrass yourself by asking, "Exactly what is a kasbah
?". A kasbah is simply a fortress, and pretty much every town in
Morocco has one. The one in Chaouen is especially well-preserved, and it
contains a great museum with an exhibit of local costumes, weapons, and pottery.
We enjoyed exploring Chaouen for a couple of days. Like other Moroccan
towns, Chaouen has an extensive medina , or medieval quarter, which dates
back several hundred years, and where people still live today. As you can
see from the picture above, the medina in Chaouen is particularly attractive, as
the walls are washed with blue and white paint. The locals are really
friendly, and there are an abundance of friendly cats, which we of course
enjoyed. We bought a beautiful carved wooden picture frame that we will no
doubt pay twice the purchase price in shipping to get it home.
Meknes, Morocco
April 15 through April 19
(ccl) Riding the buses in
Morocco is an adventure in and of itself. You walk into the bus station,
and several men are shouting the names of different cities, advertising the
buses that are leaving soon. Many of them are shouting directly in your
face, and often it sounds nothing like the name of the city you want to go
to. After the bus pulls away, the driver stops to pick up at least five
more people who are running alongside, beating on the door. Somehow in
Chaouen we managed to understand that the morning bus to Meknes was full, but
that we could take another bus at 2:15 that afternoon. We bought our
tickets, ate some breakfast, bought a few more souvenirs, and arrived back at
the station at 1:30. Around 2:10 we still weren't able to determine which
bus was ours. Finally a bus pulled in, and I asked two Moroccan girls who
were sitting next to us, "Meknes?", and I pointed at the newly arrived
bus, expecting them to just answer,
"Oui,", since we had not met any women in Morocco who spoke
English. Actually, we hadn't met any women in Morocco, period. To our surprise, one of them answered us in complete English
sentences, told us that they were going to Meknes also, and even saved us a seat
on the bus. In Morocco, it's important to get a seat where you can keep an
eye on the baggage compartment where your bags are, so that when the bus stops
intermittently along the way, you can make sure your bags stay on. Our new
friends got us seats right over the baggage compartment.
Along the way we were stopped several
times at police checkpoints. Typically, the police would have a
conversation with the bus driver, then one of them would get on the bus and walk
down the aisle, scrutinizing each passenger. At one stop, a man on the bus
began verbally berating the policeman. One of the girls told us that the
man was crazy, that he was insulting the king (Morocco is one of the few
absolute monarchies left in the world. The new king is 32 years old.
His father, the much beloved King Hassan II, whose picture hangs in every
business establishment in Morocco, died in December after ruling almost 40
years.), which is something that is not done in Morocco. Later, we found
out that what's really going on is the common practice of transporting
"black market" goods via bus into towns in Morocco. These goods
typically come duty-free from Spain, and the buses transport the goods.
The police make a big show of getting on the bus and looking for contraband, but
they've already been "greased" outside by the bus driver. They
never "see" anything.
As we pulled into Meknes, our friends
gave us advice on where to find inexpensive hotels, and pointed the way for
us. Much to our surprise, one of the girls invited us to her house to have
dinner with her family. We were delighted, and accepted the invitation for
Sunday night. Later, Wiley and I talked about what our mothers would have
done to us if we had come home saying, "Hope it's OK, I've invited a new
backpacking friend I met on the bus home for dinner."...
We tried to explore Meknes the next
day, but it was rainy and cold, and I was fighting off a cold, so we didn't have
much luck. Tourist attractions in Morocco open at 9:00, close at 12:00 for
lunch, and open back up again from 3:00 till 5:00. We hit everything
shortly after 12:30, so we saw nothing.
As we waited at the bus station to
meet our new friend, Nabila, to go to her house for dinner, we watched with
interest as a woman walked up to a taxi driver with a full-grown sheep and
proceeded to tie the sheep's feet together and put him in the trunk of a
Mercedes taxi. Nabila met us with her little sister, Tatiana, and we
walked to her house. There we met Nabila's mother and father, her brother,
Hafid, who's a computer programmer, and her sister, Noel, who's in law
school. Nabila had just finished her degree in computer science, and
Tatiana was 12.
It was somewhat strange coming to
dinner at the house of someone you've only exchanged a few words with, but
Nabila's family made us feel at home immediately. I kept thinking about
our friend Mike Dalsey in Atlanta, and how had asked us before we left to
observe people we met around the world and tell him if people were basically the
same everywhere. As I watched Nabila's family joke and flip channels on
the TV, I could only think, Yes! People everywhere in the world are doing
this very thing right now.
The Moroccan style of eating is very
relaxed. Everyone is seated around the wall in low bench-style seats with
thick cushions underneath and at the back. The table is low, and everyone
leans forward and eats. It's a very communal way of eating. Nabila's
sisters brought in the dinner table, which was on wheels, and when I saw what
was there, I thought we had been mistaken, and that the invitation was for
dessert, not dinner. The table was laden with several kinds of cookies,
two or three cakes, fresh bread, jam, cheese, and olives. And we were each
given a glass of Moroccan mint tea. As we ate
our cakes and chatted, we found out that this meal was tea, and
that dinner would be out shortly.
We enjoyed getting to share time with
this wonderful family. Nabila spoke the most English, so she did most of
the talking. We talked some about religion, and told Nabila that we were
Christian but not Catholic. She told us that her mother and father are
good Muslims, that they pray five times per day and go to the mosque, but the
children aren't as good. She told us that she believes in God, but that it
is too hard to be a devout Muslim. She told us how difficult it is to be a
woman in Morocco, how they must do all of the work around the house, and often
they must work outside the house as well. It's
a cultural thing, and the men seem to spend more time with each other than with
their families. Every night the cafes are packed with men sitting
together, drinking coffee or tea. Women are hardly ever present, and when
they are, they're with other women.
It was interesting to see how Nabila
balanced the traditional world and the modern western world. She wears regular
clothes in the New Town, or ville noveau, but wears her kaftan in the
medina. She also wore a
beautiful kaftan while we were at her house, which she wears only when she’s
at home. She showed us some other kaftans that she wears on special
occasions.
We were both full by the time dinner
came, but we dove in. The main course was tajine, a Moroccan specialty
cooked in a glazed clay dish with a conical top. I guess you could call it
the Moroccan equivalent of the Crock Pot. Tajine contains meat and
vegetables, and the slow cooking process makes everything very tender and
juicy. The tajine that Nabila's mother had prepared contained beef, fava
beans, and artichoke bottoms. It was delicious, and we ate in the
traditional Moroccan style, using no utensils, only pieces of homemade bread to
scoop up the food. Everyone eats out of the same dish, so the meal is very
lively and the atmosphere is familial.
We ended the evening by showing them
pictures of our house, families, and the cats, and they shared some family
pictures as well. Nabila's dad, Mohammed, is an Arabic professor, and his
hobby is raising and training canaries. He enters them in competitions
where the bird that sings the best wins. He had lots of pictures of his
birds, and was obviously extremely proud. When we left, Nabila, Hamid, and
Mohammed walked us outside and got a taxi for us. It was such a special
evening, and I couldn't help but think as we left that one of the reasons we
went on this trip was to make connections with people like that. On the
way home we talked about what our mothers would have said if we had come home
from a weekend trip and announced, "Oh, by the way, Mom. I met some
backpackers on the bus and invited them to dinner tomorrow night.".
We talked about how your life could change if you just opened yourself up to
people like that, and gave the gift of friendship to complete strangers.
We thought of our friends, Michael and Dana Persons in Atlanta, who have a
phenomenal number of friends all over the country, because they do just
that.
The other highlight of our trip to Meknes was a side trip we took to the Roman
ruins of Volubilis, about 30 minutes away by taxi. In 24 A.D., Volubilis
was the capital of the Roman kingdom of Mauretania, and was occupied by various
peoples up until the 11th century, when it was abandoned. During this
time, Volubilis was a thriving agricultural center, and was key in the
production of olive oil. Many ancient olive presses can still be seen
today around the ruins, and it's possible to get a sense of how they worked,
using a stone that went around to grind the olives and press out the oil, which
then ran down stone pipes to collection tanks. 
Probably the most impressive things
about Volubilis are the many well-preserved decorative mosaics. The
Romans loved mosaics, which are made by setting small, colored pieces of stone,
pottery, glass, tile, or shell to form a design. The richer and more
important you were, the better and more elaborate the mosiacs in your
house. There are the remnants of mosaics to be found all over the
former Roman empire, but those in North Africa are much better preserved than
any others, due to a combination of climate and lesser pressures from
population. 
There is an incredible feeling in the
air at Volubilis, one that is ancient at the same time as it is current.
The ruins have been partially restructured, which gives you an sense of what
life was like there 2000 years ago. The surrounding countryside is heavily
farmed today with Morocco's number one crop, wheat, so there is vibrancy of
daily life as well. It definitely has a magical feeling. 
Fes, Morocco
April 19 through April 22
(ccl) In order to avoid the
chaos of the bus station, we took a grand taxi to Fes. A grand taxi is
bigger than a petit taxi, and makes trips between cities. Grand taxis are
always Mercedes, and at least 20 years old, and the drivers wait at the taxi
stand until they have a "full" load, five or six passengers, before
they leave for their destination. We snagged the front seat, which is
usually the best, since they cram four people into the back.
In Fes we experienced our first
run-in with the European "Easter Vacation Week" phenomena.
Apparently, a lot of Europeans get the entire week after Easter off, so the
hotels in Fes we almost all full of vacationing French and Spanish people when
we got there. We managed to get one of the last rooms at the Hotel Amor, a
nice place for 190 dirhams a night.
Fes is a fascinating city, and has the best-preserved medina in Morocco. We
explored it on our own the first day, and hired an official guide the
second. Hammid, our guide, took us throughout the medina and showed us
both the monuments and the craftspeople. According to one of our guide
books, when the rest of the European craftsmen's guilds started breaking up in
the 19th century, as mechanization became more prevalent and people stopped
making things by hand, Morocco's craftsmen kept their ancient ways. In Fes
we were exposed to the entire craft "lifecycle", from the shearing
("live" wool) and skinning (naturally, "dead" wool) of
sheep, to the guys who stand in the streets of the medina spinning the wool into
thread using a hand mixer to twist it, to the dyers of the thread, to the people
who take the thread and weave in into the beautiful cloth from which djallabahs
(traditional caftan-like garments with hoods that many Moroccans wear) are
made. We saw leather tanners tanning fresh skins and dying them yellow
(from saffron), red (from poppy flowers), purple (from sea shells), blue (from
indigo), and green (from mint and pidgeon droppings). This definitely
looked like the worst of the jobs, as the tanners are required to stand in the
vats of dye, often mixed with cow urine, and stir the skins to get the color
into them.
When we toured the medina, it was Friday, the Muslim holy day, and we happened
to be walking past the main mosque just as the midday call to prayer went
out. As non-Muslims, we aren't allowed to enter the mosques or other
Muslim holy places, but we could stand outside and watch as the faithful
gathered to participate in one of the five daily group prayers. Muslims
must be ritually clean to pray, and we watched as they washed themselves in the
fountain in the midha, the absolutions area of the mosque. The muezzin,
or prayer leader, calls out to the Muslims in the area via a loudspeaker at the
top of the minaret, which I suppose would equate to a steeple in a
Christian church.
One of the goals we had for this trip
was to learn more about how other people worship, so I had a lot of questions
for our guide about the Muslim religion. He told us that a devout Muslim
must answer the call to prayer five times per day, and after prayer he must face
Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, which is in Saudi Arabia, and prostrate himself. It's OK to
pray anywhere, but it's best if you can get to the mosque to pray with
others. There are five basic central points of the religion, called the
Pillars of Islam. They are:
-
the shahada, or profession
of faith, which involves reciting, "There is no God but Allah, and
Mohammed is the Messenger of God;
-
the salat, or prayer, done
five times per day;
-
the giving of zakat, or
alms, to the poor (you see a lot of people begging on Friday, when everyone
is trying to be a good Muslim!)
-
sawm, or fasting during
the month of Ramadhan, which is the Muslim equivalent of Lent;
-
and the hajj, or
pilgrimage to Mecca that every devout Muslim must make once during his life,
if at all possible (typically something that is not financially feasible for
the average Moroccan).
I was interested to know more about
some of the gender issues within Islam, but it's difficult to ask such questions
without offending. It's hard to understand in a Muslim society where
religion and culture begin and end, because the culture is such a product of
their religious beliefs. In Morocco, society seems, to the outsider, to be
extremely polarized along gender lines. Men sit for hours in cafes,
talking and sipping coffee, while women tend to the home or spend time in groups
with other women. Rarely do you see groups of men and women
together. According to one of our guidebooks, the Koran, the Muslim
equivalent of the Bible, stresses the equality of men and women, but early
Muslim rulers decided that they needed another source of laws to govern the
people by, so the hadith was written. The hadith contains short
statements that recount what Mohammed was supposed to have said,
and this is where much of the current philosophy about the role of women has
come from. What's interesting to me is that, much like Christianity, the
intent of the original messenger of God, in this case Mohammed, was good, but
those who came after him re-interpreted the message, leading to possible
distortion. The
Sahara Desert, Morocco
April 22 through April 24
(ccl) We have always loved the
desert, Wiley since a childhood trip to Death Valley, and me since my first trip
to the Anza-Borego desert in California. So it was never a question that
we were going to make the trip out to the Sahara to see the amazing sand dunes
at Erg Chebbi.
We rented a car from a truly
irritating woman in Fes, who tried to insist that we had to by the supplemental
insurance from her, which we knew was covered if we charged the car on American
Express. Luckily, we quickly forgot about her as we got the Fiat Uno out
on the open road. There's a great feeling of freedom that comes from
having your own car and being able to explore at your own pace. Moroccan
roads are typically pretty good and pretty deserted, and the speed limit is 100
KPH (60 MPH). The Uno wouldn't do much more than that anyways, so we felt
free and happy.
We encountered a myriad of vehicles
on the Moroccan highways. Children and adults riding bicycles are
everywhere, especially in the towns we passed through, and understandably, they
like riding on the road better than the gravel shoulder, so it was a bit dicey
getting by them at times. In many cases, they're balancing their best
friend on the bar, so that adds to their wobbleiness. I thought about how my
father used to (and I'm sure, still does) get mad when slow-moving vehicles
like tractors drove down the highway and slowed him down. We passed
tractors, combines, donkey carts loaded with hay, camels - you name it, it's
moving down a Moroccan highway, somewhere.
On our way to the desert we passed
through some beautiful cedar forests. At one point, we saw a tour bus
pulled over and many tourists out observing some kind of wildlife. We
thought they were deer, but it turned out to be a large group of some type of
monkeys, who were aggressively grabbing for pieces of bread offered to them by
the tourists (NO ONE should EVER give food to a wild animal. They become
accustomed to humans, and lose their fear of us, and then one day they hurt
someone and somebody decides that they have to be killed, and that's not good
for any of us.). 
We stopped for the night in Er
Rachidia, a non-descript but pleasant town about 100 kilometers from the town of
Merzouga, which was to be our base of exploration for the Sahara. Over
coffee that afternoon we met up with a couple of guys who said they were going
to Merzouga on the bus the next day, would be like to go with them? We
explained that we had a car, and they proceeded to tell us how confusing the
road to Merzouga is, and how sometimes tourists get their rent-a-cars stuck in the
sand that blows across the road into drifts. By the end of the evening, we
had invited them to ride to Merzouga with us, believing that they were just guys
who worked there who needed a ride back, and that the trip would be mutually
beneficial.
We left Er Rachidia at 9:30 the next
morning after picking up Hammid and Adeal. By this time, we had developed
some skepticism about their intent, mainly just because a lot people who offer
help in Morocco are going to eventually want a tip for it. We resolved
between the two of us that we would make it clear if they asked that we had no
money for that.
It turns out that once you leave
Erfoud, the largest town on the western edge of the Moroccan Sahara, the road
gets pretty bad. We saw literally hundreds of 4X4 vehicles out
there. Apparently, off-roading is quite a popular sport amongst the
Spanish and French. At least some buyers of 4X4's are using the 4-wheel
drive features of their vehicles, since most Americans aren't. Anyways,
the road never really disappeared, and it wouldn't have been hard for us to get
there on our own. The "road" actually became several roads, all
of which led to the same place, and some of which were better than others.
The biggest danger is getting stuck in sand. We made it to Merzouga with
no problems, and it was quite hilarious at times as Hammid and Adeal tried to
direct us, "More on the right", or "Left, left", when they
actually meant the opposite direction, but got their English words confused.
We stopped at a little inn on the
edges of Merzouga called Tombucktu, where it just so happened Adeal worked in
the kitchen sometimes (nothing in Morocco happens by coincidence, I'm
convinced), and made a deal with a "camel man" named Bari to take us
out in the desert by camel that night, cook us dinner, and let us sleep in his
tent at an oasis. Over mint tea, the crew showed us pictures from a
Moroccan magazine of Hillary and Chelsea Clinton's visit to Morocco last year,
and told us that the Moroccan leading Chelsea's camel was Bari. It could
have been Omar Shariff, as his face was completely obscured by his head
covering.
Nobody seems to do much of anything
in the Sahara during the middle of the day. Most people at the inn were
just sitting around, chatting, playing drums, or swatting flies. Whatever
used the least amount of energy. As we sat in the shade on the back porch,
we watched at three figures approached the inn from the dunes. As they got
closer, we saw that they were men pulling little sand "sleds", using
ski poles and wearing the sand equivalent of snow shoes. They were
Spanish, and told us that they had been hiking around in the desert for three
days. Wiley asked one of them how many times he had done this, and he said
that this was his first and last time. One of the guys working at the inn
brought them each a cold Coke, and you could have absolutely filmed a commercial
for the stuff. Who am I to criticize what other people do for fun, being
someone who once ran 26.2 miles for a t-shirt and a medal?
That afternoon we headed out for the dunes around 4:30, each of us on our own
camel with a guy leading us. Wiley suited up in his djellabah and turban
and looked very similar to a young Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia.
He quickly named his camel "Wildfire", and after I was completely
uninspired with a suitable name for mine, he also came up with "Horse With
No Name". The dunes were beautiful, and some seemed as high as
mountains, and as sunset approached, they changed colors, from oranges to roses
to purples. We rode for about two hours. Camels have a smooth gait
and are pretty easy to ride, but we were both a little sore the next day.
The oasis we went to was used by lots of "camel men", it turned out,
so there were probably 30 tourists spending the night there. We were the
only ones that had signed up with Bari, however, so they cooked a delicious beef
tajine just for us, then sang songs and played drums under what seemed like
millions of stars. They made an incredible bed for us out under those
stars, with beautiful white sheets and three or four heavy, warm blankets.
It was a magical place to spend the night. The next morning we left right
after sunrise to head back to Merzouga for breakfast, then drove out of the
desert and on to more adventures. 
Click
here to continue in Morocco with "Parasites, Amateur Dentists, and Snake
Charmers"
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