Morocco

Morocco is not for the faint hearted but it is for the adventurous.
My first time in Morocco was in 1972 and I was not long out of school. The Beatles had just made long hair fashionable so me and my friend had grown ours long, but long hair was a sign of non-conformity to the authorities so getting into and out of Morocco one had to slick back the hair and tidy up or be detained and searched as a drug runner subversive, it was that bad, but it was the price that had to be paid in those days.

We didn’t have much money between us so we decided to go by train. Whenever the ticket collector would come around we would hide, usually in the toilets or under a seat to elude him and also by getting out of the train at a stop and moving down the train and getting back in so he would think he’d already checked our tickets.
We got as far as mid Spain before we were caught and were put off in the middle of nowhere. We slept in the dust that night then got on the morning train that took us to Ceuta where we tidied up and got the boat to Tangier.
Morocco back then was different than it is now, there were not so many tourists and apart from the odd gift shop selling Moroccan silver trinkets and such it all was as it had always been.

We were assaulted by crowds of kids wanting to buy our boots and Levi jeans and it took a while to get away from them.
In a square we came to, more kids tried to sell us girls, and hashish. We gave the girls a miss but tried a roll of hashish and then everything became strange and the birds in the trees sang so loud. Then the boys asked us to pay what we owed them so we gave them a few coins and walked away but they followed us demanding to be paid. It got ugly and we had to run for it straight out of town along a dusty road onto the beach which was used as a road by the locals.
We saw many strange things on that beach as we walked along it. One man was all bloody and beaten up and told us there were bandits around.

The next town we came to we used the last of our money to buy two steaks and a couple of cokes and went up into the hills to cook and set camp.
We set our tent on top of a grey grass mound with a good view and made camp for the night. I went for a pre-dinner stroll while the steaks were doing and saw a man crawling through the bushes towards the camp. I ran back then and looked around carefully and saw two more converging on us so I grabbed my friend and we ran for it and left our tent, clothes and steaks behind.
We got away but regretted not being able to eat those juicy steaks. I guess the bandits had them and maybe that’s why they didn’t chase us. Such was life for us in those days; we were always leaving things behind.
Without our tent, clothes or any money we decided to go to the consulate and ask for assistance to get back home. They paid our fare home by train but kept our passports until we paid the money back which we did eventually.

The next time I went to Morocco was twenty two years later. I was a lot older and had money. I hadn’t seen my friend for twenty years, the last time I had seen him was two years after we got back when I visited him in a mental institution where he was brought out to sit on a chair in a room with me, but he was totally unresponsive and was beyond anyone’s help by then. I think he’d taken too many acid tabs and had withdrawn so far inside himself he couldn’t find his way back.
Never did know what became of him, someone did tell me they thought his parents took him to Argentina but no one really knew. I did go back a few times to try to find him but the years went by and I finally gave up.
1994 was a good year for me until it ended. I had a beautiful girlfriend and we travelled to Paris, France to see all the art museums then hitched rides all the way down to Portugal then got a midnight train to a campsite just south of Madrid and spent a few weeks there then down to Ceuta and got the boat over to Tangier for the day.

We hired a guide and set off to explore the town, bought some silver things, got delivered to a carpet shop where a Moroccan who said he’d been to Eton for his schooling tried to sell us a carpet at a very good price and sweetened us with mint tea. We got out of there somehow without buying a carpet and visited lots of other shops and we even went in a bread shop that was stone and dust with a huge oven where we had some warm buns straight out of the hot heat.
Then we walked into a Kasbah with very narrow alleys and felt too claustrophobic and paranoid about being attacked so we went and found a tea shop and watched men smoke out of bongs.

Eventually we got back on the boat after a full day of adventures and crossed over to Spain.
I never really saw that much of Morocco but what I did experience was enough to know that one day I’ll go back there and see a lot more. It’s a whole another world there and just a boat ride from Europe and although tourism has changed it there somewhat, you can still see how it has always been.

Images from Pixabay