Trivia

Publishing such a document (Bowles' diary) demonstrates
the way in which the hours of the day
can as satisfactorily be filled with trivia
as with important events.

- Paul Bowles on his Tangiers Diaries


Bus rest stop, Cafe El Atlas, Marrakesh to Essaouira -
- Now there's a troop of piping Berbers with a goatskin tambourine.
- My hair feels like a bush - no conditioner and matted from train and bus seats
- Back amongst the backpackers - wondered what Moroccan gone-ethnic looked like. Talked to aussie couple - 6 months west africa, german with 2 french girls. They're sitting on the deserted side of the cafe and obstinately not ordering.
- Should know better than to think every town on a map is romantic. They're tiny dustbowls.

Hotel Riad El Medina, Essaouira
- Sure once charming, horrible now. Clue from name - dumbly redundant ostentatiously claiming an entire quarter. That it's a riad I don't doubt but with crumbled and frayed nautical/grotto theme rooms, cot mattresses on cement platform, watered down fruit salad. Cafe au lait and baguettes keeping it from the brink.
- Tourists have over-run. The town's for sale. The fish market is full of tourists taking fish pictures.
- Overcast and my room is a cave. Point of beach visit not clear.

Marrakesh - various places
- My god this fruit salad is good
- I think some women pack their smallest shorts in anticipation of a muslim country. Maybe in fez I'll see them flogged.
- Some of the younger girls in the djellabas (no head cover) look so relaxed it could be a beach cover-up.
- They've set a single place for me at breakfast. That I'm writing about it as I'm sitting at it is sad.

Sefi Fatima (Berber barter market)
- Men kiss 5x here.
- Berbers descend with their wool blankets and rugs to buy rubber shoes, polyester tops, soap and tin teapots. Only vegetables retain the authentic.

Fez - train and arrival
- This tour guy may be legit and I may be mean but he should leave a single woman alone.
- Fez seems depressed - repressed? Packed in and layered - voices from below amplified so run the tap.
- Attar of roses. I don't know what that is but that sounds right. It's cloying.
- Nothing's not carved or crenelated here, or tiled.
- 4 kinds of breadstuffs - rolls and puffy crepes, sweet toast and a croissant. Interchangeable starches.

And so on.

C - all minutia, all the time

Lost

...that the more one was lost in the unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there..

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities


I was lost twice in Marrakesh (in Fez I had a guide):
First, lunging alley-deep into the medina with a confidence unmatched by knowledge, skills. I was led home by a child who demanded DH 20.
Second time I was made lost by a fellow who said he'd lead me to the Berber auction. I found my way back amongst the tourists by true directions finally canceling the untrue ones.

I emerged unscathed, of course - but it wasn't the worst feeling. To be spun in circles brings a clenching and all of a sudden the future, just briefly, is rendered unsure.

C – in a land where even the unfamiliar's on a grid

Sunset at Jemmna al Fnna, Marrakesh

Place Jemmna al Fnna, early eve

Marrakesh is the great market of the south,
not only the feudal chiefs and their wild clansman,
but all that lies beyond of heat and savagery:
the Sahara of the veiled Touaregs, Timbuktoo...
here come the camel caravans...

-Edith Wharton, In Morocco
(Whom I almost wish had traveled to Algeria instead so I wouldn't feel inadequate. Ms. Wharton owns this country, with the slight advantage of being a guest of the Governor General wherever she went.)

The Place Jemmna al Fnna - handy during the day as a center point, assumes its true character at night.

Dusk and out come:
Henna ladies. I got hi-jacked - assaulted with flowers up my arm. I made her rub it off, which seemed harsh till she demanded money.
Snake charmers - ubiquitous.
Witch-doctors/healers with ostrich eggs, herbs, dust of ___ and potions. The popular ones make a big to-do of their powers and draw large crowds with their claims and diagrams of intestinal tracks.
The man with a tray of rubber dentures and a mound of teeth
The numbered stalls of the white jacket men who serve kabobs and fish



Orange and date men (pockets of calm)
Dancing West Africans - various colors and hats and rhythms
The Water Men in funny hats who became redundant around the time of bottled water and now would like you to take their picture.

High above, third floor of the Cafe France, the flash bulbs go off.

C - amidst and observing, trying to take pictures without paying

Balance

Dar Vedra (my riad, Marrakesh),
the courtyard 'neath my room

As riads sprout, an assessment:

The Europeans eagerness to buy such wonderful buildings (riads)
is matched only by the local Marrakesh's willingness to dispose of them.

- Tahir Shah, The Caliph's House

C - fan but wary of french invasion deux

Spanish ate French

grand choix en el medina

Moroccans are taught arabic and french in schools. They switch mid-sentence, they switch and you almost don't register it.

Some also speak Berber - of which there are 3 dialects.

A few, I'm going to guess more in the north, also speak Spanish. Morocco is close after all, a few kms.

I speak English, crummy but animated Spanish and gruesome french.

The sad part's been that my French might have had a fighting chance - given me a little go at navigating this country - but my Spanish ate it.

My Spanish eats every last French word that might live in me.

(Blind cannibalizing the blind)

C - je ne peut pas comprende usted.

Seaside medina

Essaouira, Morocco

Brighton-on-the-beach except with a souk.
Or, Fez's darkest alley except it's one that ends in a beach side cafe.

Odd this: that the ladies are taking the promenade in the djellabas and the men hovering by the fish shack are hooded.

Arrive at Essaouira this evening (from Fez -6 hours on a train then 3 this afternoon on a bus) and it's unsettling me.

My heart might still be in that dark alley, and can't reconcile the call to prayer going out over thatched beach umbrellas...

C – seaside

Fez: doesn't bite

a minaret, a lamp - fez medina

Now that I've left I can say that
many people (Marrakeshis) warned me against going to Fez.

I would get:
Kidnapped from the train station
Knifed en route to the medina
Dragged across the cobbles of the souk
Thrown across a mule
Made into tea

They dissed Fez big time - the two have been going at it for 1,000+ years.

Assumed defensive: antennae up, important papers(!) tucked in close, covered to ankles and wrists, mean to everyone genuinely trying to be helpful.

What I found was:
Absolutely nothing untoward.
In fact, felt safer (Marrakeshis take that) in the Fez medina for the simple fact that everyone there was going about their business. I was not on their list. They did not give a flying because they needed to buy a pound of lamb and pick up the re-soled slippers.

Not that the tourist trade has skipped over entirely (Marrakeshis would love that), but the medina's so big, so old and so essentially working that tourists - even groups of them - are absorbed in just as traders and berbers and heathen have been for centuries.

So - Fez is a yes.

C - no longer there

An olive and a loaf

Loaf vendor (off with dustpan vendor), medina Fez

You can make a respectable meal of a dish of spiced olives and a round loaf of bread in Morocco.
No one will look askance.

(Which is not to diminish a culture's justly famed cuisine, just to highlight its flexibility.)

That you can't have a beer in public is get-aroundable.

C - mint tea-toasting hors-d'oeuvre meals

Muezzin

Church bells and chanting processions and elephants held aloft.
I haven't traveled in a Muslim country in ages.
What I'd forgotten - but here you can't forget - is the call to prayer.

You (I'll speak for me) are a passer-through.
The faithful are called and the faithful gathered in.

It was a strange relief to hear it begin
allahu akbar...
and the veil drops
allahu akbar
and we turn back to tasks impermanent.




C - humbled

Midieval

Buildings, people, customs,
seem all about to crumble
and fall of their own weight:
the present is a perpetually prolonged past.

To touch the past with one's hands is realized only in dreams;
and in Morocco the dream-feeling envelops one in every step.

- Edith Wharton, In Morocco

What Marrakesh is no longer, Fez remains: inwards turned, spooky feeling...
Or so it's seemed in the few hours I've been here.

Its medina is the oldest continually operating medina in the Arab world...
modern around the time of the Crusades.

A Star Wars market cast by Lord of the Rings, propped by Indiana Jones.

I'd braced for the medina in the morning - a better map, day light, a guide -
but seeking a couscous, it was inevitable.

The vendors atop their wares looked through me,
the shrouded forms pushed by me
and only the men at the cafes
(aside: it's creepier to be watched by men drinking tea than beers)
registered me with indifferent disdain...

(This medieval place eats little travelers for breakfast)

I found the gentlest face, attached to a cafe with the highest perch and had my couscous. I looked on with my mint tea.

Tomorrow, I tour.

C - in the medieval

the trick

Horse cart shadow falls across an Audi
coke can beside the thali,
burkha-ed beside the over-exposed,

such ia the modern world and all being dragged along with it.

To these I add another.

With my guide the other day to see this place (Seti Fatma)

What's your favorite music?

(I hold out. It's always loaded, my list never ever overlaps and I'm a loser either way.)

Okay.

And he puts on the Koran, on his iPod.


C - juxtapose

Mint tea protocol

A shopkeeper (of antique jewelry that probably ought to be in a museum) told me there was a new protocol.

Shopkeepers no longer offer mint tea at the beginning of discussions.
This was too forward, implied a debt.
Now they close a chat or sale with the offer of tea.
You choose to buy, you choose not to - we are hospitable either way.

It's a bright and shiny new souk protocol.

Amidst

Varanasi's deepest Papua New Guinea,
Siem Reap's Easter Island.

A few thousand Europeans (French happily following a proper baguette) -
all of whom right now in the medina -
have Marrakesh squarely in their holiday sites.
Americans not yet, not so much - it's still a bit glossy magazine stuff.

Though it's embarrassingly easy to get lost in the medina if various factors are in play (more on that),
the medina is signposted if you follow paddles held aloft by tour shepards,
or stick to alleys densest with leather items and decorative tangines,
or close your eyes and follow the "ooh, that's a lovely lantern..."



A culture/country is a big hit with a world scrambling for the foreign;
that I can't except myself is only tempered by the fact that I take up no space on a tour bus.

Your storieed souk is neatened, chickens hung elsewhere, shopkeepers only mildly wheedling, come-ons mild even as jezebels roam in Ibiza-attire, prices are firmed, nothing suspect's underfoot and ATMs are located in the main Place Jemaa-el-Fna.

Still the burnoosed figures hug the souk walls, the odd donkey cart, dates being bought but little mystery really. (until you get lost as I mentioned).



C - amidst them all (and adding to even as she gripes)

In Marrakesh

In Morocco since Friday but challenged to get online. Now on hybrid french/araabic keyboard. Ny already bad typing to gibber.

While I track down the the "w", a breather:
Voila The Dar Vedra

My riad - Moroccan turned-inwards-to-a-courtyard house - 2 stories, balcony around and a marble fountain in the center, rooms narrow but with high shuttered windows and french doors; all the cooling tricks of the tropics in play.

Riads are like safe houses tucked through the medina (logically, people live somewhere) - indicated by no more than a small sign. In the unlikely chance you've re-found your own, you must be directly in front of it to confirm arrival.

Run like bed and breakfasts but by French people - ever so slightly disdainful proprietors. A teddy bear on the bed cushion about as likely as pancakes at breakfast.

My Dar Vedra is wonderful, all that said. Proprietor Sebastian greeted me with a pot of mint tea and small cookies. I got a kea to the secret door. The courtyard fountain is bright pink with roses and there's a small turtle who wanders the tiles. There's also a plunge pool but it's in the midst of everything so I haven't plunged.

Pictures when I sort out wi-fi and so return to a familiar keyboard.

C in the medina

Do not require

Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail.
The description does not describe them to you,
and tomorrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.

- Emerson, The Over-Soul

C - stopping reading

NG Bias

Morocco 4x
India uncountable...

I have inherited (grandmother and paper-recycling bin at dump) an incomplete collection of National Geographics. They live, spine-side out, as wall-stacks in my library, just in case.

Just in case I'm going to Morocco and would like to find out what the respected traveler has said.

Imagine.

India this, India that, Hindu Kush here, Rajputana there. Morocco? not so much.

Mysterious land of berbers and medinas? not during the years in my library. 80 years - none during the years in my library.

Imagine the National Geographic editor's office
(lined in maps of the sub-continent).
Assisant Editor Graves: Sir, I was thinking __________ for our May issue.
Editor Grosvenor: Nonsense Graves, we'll do India.
(repeat)


C - looking elsewhere

Maghreb el Aqsa - at Africa's edge

Almost on Morocco time.

Studying before Thursday departure: today, by showy gesture and self-evident observation, the establishing of Islam.

Maghreb el Aqsa:

When General Oqba Ibn Nafi rode fully armed
into the Atlantic in AD680 to proclaim,
with sword raised to Allah,
that he could go no further,
it marked the dramatic arrival of Islam in Morocco.
Henceforth, this newly conquered Islamic frontier
would be known asthe Maghreb El Aqsa
'the land furthest west'.


C - a little less in awe of a mansion built,
and state established,
just 300 years ago.
No swords were raised or uniforms wetted
as our forefathers rode into the Hudson.
Young us.

Packing

“You have no right to go about Africa
in things you would be ashamed to be seen in at home.”

Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 1897

(in stayed black silk, black button boots and a hat for her travels)

c - amphibious sandals or the button boots

My trip (photos)

Finally into a lumpy package - photos from my travels...

A Travel Slideshow

None are labeled, but within you'll find (somewhat ordered)

In India
Darjeeling,
Sikkim,
Manali,
Dehli,
Jaipur,
Pondicherry,
Cochin,
Bombay,

In Nepal
Bhaktapur,
Jomsom,
Kagbeni,
Kaligandaki Valley,
Muktinath

In Cambodia
Angkor Wat
In Bulgaria
Koprivshtitsa,
Old Plovdiv,

In South America
Rio
Uruguay
Argentina

and, bruefly to the Carribean for
Antigua and Harbor Island.