Travelogue Part Three: "Please, Take My Money! I obviously don’t need it because I am a rich American."

If you are ever in Marrakech, I daresay your visit is incomplete without a visit to the bus station. Elizabeth and I were met at the front entrance, on the morning of the 29th, by a very nice guide who showed us where to buy our ticket, where to purchase food, and how to find our bus. At one point, before we actually went out to the buses, I tried to offer the guy some money and he turned me down. I thought, not so illogically, that maybe we had just found a helpful guy in Morocco. Later, I would look back at my naivety and laugh at how young and inexperienced I was (I was judging myself in this way only hours later—I grow up quickly). When he finally led us to the bus, which was unmarked and impossible to find without a guide—in fact, none of the buses were marked—he demanded 35 dirham for each of us, plus 20 dirham for baggage “insurance.” We haggled helplessly for a few minutes, as I’m sure he had us well-pegged as stupid Americans, until we finally forced him off with whatever change we had and a one euro coin.

By the time he left us, E and I had a chance to look around the bus and take stock of our situation—the only Westerners on a bus that looked like something Nicolas Cage would be wrongfully imprisoned on. And for the sake of responsibility, we had gotten on the bus one full hour before it left. Luckily, as we were starting to despair about our isolated plight, two British girls hopped on. E and I, silly gits that we are, started happily whispering, “look, more normal people!” And then, just as we were about to head out, 8 more Brits boarded, which meant that the bus now had become standing room only for a 3 hour trip. I’m not sure that standing was actually worse than the narrow confines of those seats—oh, and did I mention I had to piss the whole ride? On the ride there, we got to chat with all the Brits, or I did, sitting at the aisle, while E just was squished and forced to be anti-social. Most of the Brits, it turned out, had actually hitchhiked from London to Morocco for charity. Coolest charity ever? Possibly. It’s called Link, and it does this every year. It is like Run for the Arts when I was young, where kids and their parents strong-armed neighbors into giving money for every lap of a track the kids could walk/run in a certain time period. Except that instead of a track, these university students (500 of them were in Morocco at this point) got money for sticking their thumb out from England to Spain to Morocco.

Three hours later we arrived at the Cascades D’Ouzoud, which includes a massive picturesque waterfall, a river starting at the waterfall that meanders for several miles before forking into two tributaries, and a large valley where the party is (camps, outdoor restaurants, no electricity, no toilets, etc). I describe the waterfall thusly in my upcoming fraternity newsletter:
When you first look on a large waterfall, with its massive streams of water jumping off of tall rocks only to loose their dominance of gravity and fall, plummeting into pools below, the sheer majesty of nature drives itself home. Try catching sight of a certain area of water as it shoots off the top--instead of staring at the waterfall as a whole, follow that water with your eye as it falls to the earth. The whole of time seems to slow to a crawl as your eye perceives the water shooting out, falling, and speeding up until it smashes itself on the ground below.



It turned out that of the two British girls who had first boarded the bus, and who were not hitchhikers but instead a fashion student and a hairdresser, the hairdresser had been to the Cascades twice before. This meant our guide on the 25-minute walk to the bottom of the valley didn’t try to charge us, and we were met by one of the camp hosts, Mohammed, partway down because he remembered the girl, Becky, from her previous visits.

Pasty Brits:

Our whole merry band ended up camping together and hanging out together for the next two days. In the daytime we sunbathed, ate tagine (a chicken and potato dish that is very common in Morocco), swam, hiked, and generally enjoyed the land. In the evenings we read, played numerous card games, talked, tried the amazingly bad fig schnapps, and were entertained by some of the locals. Our collective favorite was a Berber guide named Hamid who was relatively fluent in English. A tour guide to the daytime tourists, in the evenings he would join our little party and tell jokes, play bongos, drink the fig schnapps mixed with Hawaiian Punch, and smoke cigarettes and weed. The highlight though, as Elizabeth pointed out in an email she sent to all her friends, was when he decided to play for us some traditional Moroccan music that he and his friends had recorded. To play the tape, he brought out, on a dolly, a car stereo, a car speaker, and a car battery, all of which he proceeded to stack on the table. Jury-rigging at its best. The only question we had was where the car had gone or if there had ever been a car.

On our last day there, E and I joined the rest of the group in taking turns diving off the only bridge in the valley into the icy cold water below that flowed from the waterfall. At the end, we all went jumping off a rock into another area, where we used body soap to perform a crude approximation of a bath, all the while trying not to get swept downriver by the current.



So E and I headed out, along with Shez, a secondary school teacher in London, and Alistair, an Australian who lives in Edinburgh. We shared the backseat of a Mercedes-Benz taxi all the way back to Marrakech. Our initial perceptions of luxury were quickly dispelled by the loss of a hubcap only 5 miles after leaving the Cascades. Elizabeth quickly grew bored and slightly irritated as Shez and I argued heatedly about economic theory (his specialty as a business economics teacher) and praised our mutual favorite football team, the Arsenal Gunners. When we arrived back in Marrakech, we agreed to meet at the Grand Hotel Tazi for drinks an hour later, as E and I had 3 hours to burn before our train left to take us back to Tangier overnite. We sat for 90 minutes and chatted with Shez, Alistair, and Sarah, an Australian who teaches theater and acts in London. We finally left them, grabbed pizza (yes, they have pizza in Morocco) and caught our train. It was a horribly uncomfortable ride all night long because we were dead-tired and were forced to try to nap sitting up in a compartment that was nearly full. When we arrived in Tangier at 7 am, we wanted to kiss the ground. Instead, we headed out immediately to find the port from where our ferry back to Spain would depart. Having been to the port before, albeit in the middle of the nite, E and I decided to shun the overeager taxi drivers and walk. This strategy would have been fruitful if not for the fact that our always dependable Let’s Go guidebook somehow had fucked up the map of Tangier, which had us walking 20 minutes in the wrong direction before thumbing a cab on the side of the road and being taken much farther in the opposite direction than our map could have ever indicated (of course, Let’s Go is put out by Harvard students. Fucking arrogant pricks).

We caught our ferry, a huge Spanish liner of high quality, to Algeciras, where we immediately caught the bus to Sevilla. We planned to head straight from Sevilla to Salamanca (where Elizabeth is living) on the overnite bus, but we arrived in Sevilla 25 minutes after the last bus left. So instead we got a room at a hostel, grabbed some food, and watched the Spanish equivalent of Saturday Night Live (it was even worse than this season’s cast) before calling it a nite.

And here, before the plot thickens, I’ll put an end to this third installment. Ta ta!