A Quest for Rest
Morocco
We awoke that morning to find ourselves in the middle of the Sahara Desert. How we had come to arrive there is still a bit of a mystery. I remember something about myself, my girlfriend Johanna and our friend Regan being accosted at a bus terminal, taken to a hostel and being convinced to climb on to the Meanest, most Uncomfortable, Gas infested, Stank-ass animal in the world. I believe they call this animal the camel, I will just refer to him as MUGS. To my surprise MUGS got me to camp without incident and that is where I found myself the next morning.
So, as I sat there in the middle of the Sahara, drinking my mint tea, watching the sunrise over the sand dunes, I realised that this was one of the most amazing moments in my life. Everything was so new and incredible and I really felt alive. This feeling lasted for about two minutes and then it was time to get back on MUGS again.
MUGS the camel
MUGS realised immediately (probably from the terror in my eye) that I was going to saddle up shortly, so he stopped lazily chewing his buddy’s poo and began barking like a dog. I am not sure if MUGS was more upset that I would be grinding my bony butt into his back for the next few hours or that he would be forced to stop chewing his buddy’s poo. My vote is the poo thing, but that is just me. He really seemed to enjoy taking a piece, rolling it around in his big fat lips and giving it a good chew, but only if it was his buddy’s. MUGS didn’t seem to enjoy his own poo that much because he would always spit it out, but if it was one of his buddy’s pieces he would really go to town on it and chomp away for hours, occasionally exchanging it for a different piece. He probably did the exchange because the previous piece had lost its flavour. Kind of like what we do with gum.
The guide finally calmed my camel down long enough for me to dig my bony butt into
the his back and then we started moving. We had counted on it taking about two hours on the camels to get back to the hostel from where this excursion had begun. As we teetered along on our now very laid back camels (they must be so dehydrated from sucking on poo all day that they just fall into a sombre trance), I couldn’t help but think that I was transcending through a Salvador Dali painting with the deep sand dunes and the exquisite blue sky. Unfortunately, I never saw any flying elephants, must need some pretty good drugs to see that part of the desert.
Never-ending ride with the camel man
As we continued to gently roll along, I didn’t yet realise that I would not stop moving for
the next 45 hours and the beauty I was experiencing would soon turn into a blurry-eyed fight
for rest. As the two-hour ride turned into a four hour ride and the brown sand turned into black sand, we started wondering where we were going. It turned out that our guide was taking us for the extended tour along the Algerian border. Although we appreciated this, I was having trouble feeling the lower half of my body due to the camel’s very wide frame and my very inflexible legs.
After about six hours we finally arrived back at the hostel from which we were based. The hostel was in the middle of nowhere, so we decided to head back to the nearest town for fresh food and maybe a chance to relax after our gruelling day on the camels. Fortunately for us a land cruiser just happened to be going to the town of Erfoud, so we hitched a ride and arrived in town about two hours later.
Upon arriving in Erfoud we realised that although we had come to enjoy the spirited adventure and the celebrity status that Morocco offers, we felt as though it was time to move on. The desert had been a nice reprieve from the street hustlers and the relentless “Welcome”, “Hello my friend”, “Where you from?”, “I’ll get you special tourist price” that cannot be avoided in any Moroccan Medina. We decided that we wanted the beauty of the desert to be our lasting memory of this magnificent land, and not the proverbial street hustler with deals so crooked that it makes their teeth look straight.
The sun started to set in Erfoud and we found ourselves boarding an overnight bus that would take us half way to Spain. After fighting off six people who offered to load my bag on the bus for the “special tourist price”, we were on our way. The trip had started off to be quite enjoyable. I had recently stuffed myself with some slightly grey meats from the street vendor and had drank about a half a pint of mint tea, so I felt as though I would either sleep like a baby for the next eight hours, or grow to be so violently ill that I would probably lose consciousness. Either way, I was bound to get some much-needed rest. I had been up since about 5 am that morning and it was now closing in on around 11pm when I decided to get some shuteye.
As I started to drift off with my very full belly, I felt this sharp pain in my kneecaps. I thought, “Geez, I didn’t think that rancid meat would take hold so fast and why were my knee caps so sore?”
Sunset in the Sahara Desert
Suddenly it all came together, it wasn’t the rancid meat that was making my knees sore, it was the Moroccan lady in front of me trying to put back her seat. I was having none of that, so I put my knees up and played some hard defence. She pushed and pushed, but she couldn’t get that seat down any further. On this night, I won a small victory for tall people everywhere. Every time I believed the woman had given up, I would start to drift off and every time I would start to drift off she would come at me with the seat again. So up would come the knees and I would be forced to play hard defence again. This carried on for quite some time, my guess is seven hours, but I was later informed that this was a gross exaggeration and it was actually closer to 15 minutes. Either way it was very annoying.
Finally the sharp pains subsided and I drifted off to sleep. I awoke later that evening, unable to move, with great pain in my legs and a very large Moroccan lady sleeping in my lap. My immediate response was “What the fuck?” which I proceeded to yell very loudly. Immediately her seat became fully erect and she began yelling at her husband in Arabic (probably telling him to break my skinny legs, but I can’t be sure about that). At least she wasn’t yelling at me, I thought. For the rest of the night I watched her like a hawk, and every time she would shift, up would come my knees. Needless to say I didn’t get much sleep on that bus ride.
We pulled into the bus station with my skinny legs intact and right there I declared that that was the last bus I would ever be taking in Morocco and that we needed to find other means of transportation immediately. It was about 4 am at this point and we decided that we would take a cab back to Ceuta which would be about another 8 – 10 hours and then catch a ferry back to Spain from there. Having had next to no sleep for the past 23 hours, I was in no shape to bargain with the cabbie, so not only did we pay the “special tourist price”, but when he asked if his wife Fatima could come along I merely said “Sure why not, all I want to do is sleep.”
If I had been thinking clearly instead of being on some sort of sleep deprived rancid meat binder, I probably would have realised that three Canadians, one Spaniard (a girl we met on the way), one Moroccan wife and one cab driver does not make for the best sleeping conditions. As we began to drive and everyone jockeyed for position, we started to notice a slight change in Fatima. Fatima was a very nice woman who had started off to be chatty and friendly, but she had grown quieter and quieter as the trip lingered on. I figured it was probably because we smelled like camel dung from the previous day’s excursion and she probably wanted to avoid opening her mouth. Who could blame her?
Then suddenly it happened, she began to buck and jolt in the front seat and before we knew it she let fly with one incredible retch. Fortunately she had got the window part way down, so very few of the vomit fragments came back and hit us. We pulled the car over and continued to watch Fatima barf for the next 15 minutes. I thought that meat I had eaten was bad, I had nothing on Fatima. I took pity on poor Fatima and gave her my water bottle. When she gave it back full of chunks, I told her she could keep it.
Instead of maybe catching a few winks which I desperately needed by this point, there was no way I was going to catch any sleep with someone tossing her cookies in front of me. In addition to the vomiting issue, another problem started to persist. The heat had started to beam into the car and the stench factor had grown to an all time high. The extreme stench factor is not that surprising considering we crammed six people in one car for what was now a 10 hour drive. Three of these people hadn’t showered for at least five days, and they had just finished hanging around camel dung for one of those days. Another person had spent three hours getting sick both in and out of the car. To top it off it was 35 degrees Celsius outside and the car had no air conditioning. I felt as though we were some sort of putrid baked goods. We were all quite grateful that it was only Fatima getting sick and not the rest of us. I know I was almost sick a couple of times, but we all hung in there and made it to Ceuta.
Sand and sky
We thanked our new Moroccan friends and wished them luck on their journey back. We only had one thing left to do and that was to take a Ferry back across the Mediterranean, so we couldn’t stop now. After close to 40 hours without sleep, what were a couple more hours? No one looked more forward to this boat ride and a little touch of western civilisation than our friend Regan. He did not really take too much of a liking to the squatter style toilets, so he just didn’t use them. After being in Morocco for close to two weeks, and not using the squatter once, I have never seen anyone so happy in my entire life. I have heard of a shit-eating grin before, but this was ridiculous.
The sun was setting once again as we finally made it back to Spain and headed for the nearest hostel. As I lay my head down for the first time in over 40 hours, with the intention that I might actually get some sleep, I assumed I would dream of sand dunes, sunsets and mint tea. To my amazement, every time I closed my eyes all I could see was MUGS eating poo, large ladies asleep in my lap, rancid meat, backed up Canadians and nice ladies throwing up. It’s strange, the things you remember.
