Morocco page 11

Up early to greet a new day, showered then to the bar for breakfast. We're getting it together for the drive south to Aglou.

After heading south several miles on the main road we turned right onto a roughly paved secondary road. We're now heading in a south westerly direction toward the Atlantic coast.
The terrain here isn't much different than anywhere south of Agadir, mostly flat hard pack with several sand dunes here and there.
We passed through several small villages, maybe even stopping at one or two.
100 km way off to the east we could still see the peaks of the Anti Atlas range.

We're driving on a slight upgrade when just ahead of us was a large herd of camels. There must have been a hundred or more; that was my best guess. It was pretty cool to see.
We had to stop for a bit while they crossed the road.
This was the Moroccan version of a typical central plains cattle crossing.

As we continued our on drive we came across a fairly large oasis. Nestled down among the trees and cactus was a Bedouin and his camel.
We stopped to have a look and to take a picture. The guy sees us and starts running toward us.
We didn't know what the hell was going to happen next, but we were prepared for whatever.

As he got closer he started waving his arms. Didn't know if the arm waving meant he was going to try to harm us, or if he was just happy to see other people.
When he got up to the car he began putting his hands on it, feeling it in several spots, as well as rubbing himself against it's surface, he seemed to be enjoying this just a bit too much; I guess he didn't get to see that many cars, or make out with them either.
He came over to us and started to jabber in Arabic.
Of course we had no idea what the hell he was saying; he did however know the word cigarette.

All he really wanted was to feel up our car, and maybe have a bit of weird sex with it and bum a smoke. We gave him a couple of cigarettes, he was happy with that and went back to his camel.
That whole encounter was pretty entertaining.

We continued on our journey. We made another right turn which would take us directly into Aglou; which for most of it's not so recent past had primarily been a small fishing community, but now it's mainly a stop-over for travelers.

Noteworthy: At the time we were in Aglou, development was beginning to occur which would eventually tie directly into elements of Morocco's tourist trade.

This area is frequented by many hippies as they travel around the country.
Because it's a small community that has a large turnover of travelers, that makes it easy to score Hash.
Some of them even come here and stay for short periods as there was some very cheap accommodation available.
When I say accommodation I use the term very loosely.

Let me fill you in a bit about the cheap accommodations.
Some were just caves dug into a hard dirt hillside, and I mean caves in the literal sense, they were dirty filthy disgusting shit holes, and probably not very safe. .
.

Others were rundown rotting whitewashed shacks, few of them had floors or doors. But they were all covered in a great deal of dirt, sand, garbage and a wide variety of creepy crawlers, and no toilets; at least not that I saw.
These places were absolutely the worst accommodations you could imagine.

It was suggested that maybe we should look into seeing how much it would cost to rent here for a week or so.
Mine and Eve's response was, "you guys do what you want, but there's no fucking way in hell are we going to live in a shit hole like this". The idea was never spoke of again, at least not to us.
To me, this was barely one step above living like a caveman, the only thing missing from the picture were large wild animals running about.

There was however a bit of an artistic upside to some of these dwellings, there were floor and ceiling drawings. It looked like every square inch was covered with psychedelic patterns, futuristic and fantasy designs, incredibly fantastic looking artwork, but not fantastic enough for me to wanna to live there.
Caves and hovels were way below the minimum dwelling standard for Eve and I.

We took a walk along the beach. It was absolutely beautiful.
The sky was a deep and rich shade of blue, which was reflected onto the ocean surface.
The air was so clean that it almost seemed to have an cleansing effect as you breathed it in. And as everywhere all along the coast the waves would roll in and deposit thousands of tiny shells all along the shoreline.
The sand was so fine in structure that under your feet it felt more like powder than sand. As beaches go, I think this is as good as it gets; it was awesome.

During the afternoon we met a guy named Fred who drove a white Mercedes convertible, but I don't remember the actual circumstance of how we met him.
He was originally from California but had been living in Morocco for the past five years. He had to leave the States because some organized crime guys were after him; that's the story he gave us.

He made his living in the hash trade and he had some to sell so we bought a small chunk;  really good hash too, equal to that of Double Zero. In fact, it could very well have been Double Zero.
We spent the afternoon just hanging out with Fred, smoking bowls of hash, exploring the beach and the small urban area, just taking in all there was to see and enjoying ourselves; yup, it's been a really good day.
But now it's time to start heading back to Agadir.

Not only were we were all really high when we started to pack up to go, we were also completely fucked up.
I wasn't sure if any of us could safely and effectively drive in our condition. Although, Al seemed to be in better condition for driving than the rest of us, so he's going to give it a shot.
At least I think it was Al that drove this time. All I knew for sure was that I couldn't drive, so I'm not even going to try.
Well here we go, we're on the road again.

Along the road in spots were these narrow beaten paths that go off into the deep southern desert regions.
Mel pipes up and says, "lets take a drive on one and see where it goes". Everyone was all over him, "no fucking way man".
These paths into the desert are last places you should ever go. You could venture out into these regions and there's a good chance you may never be heard from again. We didn't go.

Further along the road we see a kid, he's maybe 8 or 10 years old and just standing at the side of the road out in the middle of nowhere.
There were no dwellings in the area, so we're wondering where this kid came from. He's too far away from anywhere to have walked, so we decided to stop.
The kid wouldn't let us get any closer to him than twenty or thirty feet.
We had maybe five pop bottles in the car so we put them in the middle of the road in an effort to get him to come closer, he just wouldn't move toward us.

We walked back away from the bottles and the kid ran up and grabbed all five, then ran like hell off the road into the dirt and disappeared into the underground.
This just blew our minds.
I was as if a gaping hole opened up in the earth and swallowed him down, to a point of living underground like a fucking mole, how bizarre.
However, given how many unbelievable things we've seen since we came to Morocco we shouldn't have been so surprised or shocked, but never the less, we were still blown away.
We'll add this to the list of firsts since coming to Morocco.

Al didn't want to drive any longer so Mel was going to over. At least that's how I think this whole driving thing went down.
Further on down the road we saw a couple of big motorcycles coming toward us. As they went by we saw they were cops. Our butt holes clenched up a bit.
We were really high and totally fucked up, and in possession of a 15 gram chunk.

The cops were several hundred yards past us when all of a sudden they made a
u-turn and they're coming after us.
Fuck man, we gotta hide the hash, and we sure as hell weren't going to throw it out the window. So in a state of really stoned desperation we stashed the chunk down in the back seat, which would have probably been the first place they would look, there was just no where else to put it, and in our pockets was not an option.

Now we're all paranoid, and I'm having visions of spending years in a dirt floor rat infested Moroccan prison eating bugs and shit to stay alive.
Scary fucking thought man.....yeah, and again Joe, also quite dramatic

We pulled the car over and got out. The cops come over to us and they're eye balling us up and down.
These cops were really big men, well over six feet tall. Mel is close to six feet tall and these cops were at least four or five inches taller than him.
These were not your typical local cops.

Their uniforms were all black with shiny black helmets and shiny black motorcycles. These were the King's personal security police, which made the situation even more scary.
Their skin was so dark it had a bluish hue to it. {can I say that in today's completely fucked up politically correct world}
I think these guys were central African, not Moroccan, and they had a real mean look to them as well.
We were all feeling completely intimidated.

The cops aren't speaking English so Al is going to be doing a bit of interpreting when needed.
One of the cops indicated he wanted to see papers for the car, our passports, and Mel's drivers license.
Mel wasn't carrying anything on him except a bit of cash.
So Al goes to the car and got the rental papers from the glove box.
Eve got all the passports out of her bag, and Aileen pulls Mel's wallet out of her purse and took out his license.

All this paperwork was handed to Mel, who in turn handed it all to the cop.
The cops are looking at us like we were out of our fucking minds... and given the amount of hash we smoked that day.... we most certainly were.

They looked at the rental agreement for the car and checked the passports then handed them back.
Mel's license was the old style doubled folded paper type with no photo. The cop is looking at it with some confusion, then said "no" and stated "license".

Mel indicated this was his license and kinda shrugged his shoulders.
The cop reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a document and proceeded to unfold it.
It was about a four or five page document with an 8x10 photo of his face on one of the pages, he held this document out for us to see it clearly and said "license".

This is where Al comes in. As best as he could, using a few words and phrases from what I think was French or Spanish, he conveyed to the cop that this was an international drivers license issued in Canada.
The cop looked at it again, pondering over it for a few seconds, and I suppose that because everything else was in order, except our state of mind of course, he said "okay".

The other cop now takes a few steps toward the car, stops, then points to the back seat, at which point we're all shitting ourselves now.
Everyone's thought was, we're fucked now man. He's going to search the car and find the Hash and we're going to spend the rest of our lives in prison.

...so much negativity, but not just from me, we were all feeling the same way.

At this point something in my head went for a complete shit. Reaching out to me from some dark corner of my brain, from a place that I never even knew existed, some weird thoughts were beginning to surface, and it was scaring me a bit. I didn’t know where these thoughts were coming from, I didn't believe they could possibly be coming from me; but they most certainly were.

Being as high as I was, and having a very strong drive for self preservation,
and maybe a bit of flair for the dramatic, one of my weird fucked up thoughts was....
if they find the hash and we get the chance to, we just might have to kill these cops; because there's no fucking way I'm ever going to prison and eat bugs and shit for the rest of my life.
And I'm pretty sure that in a Moroccan prison, the rest of my life would be quite short at best.
I'm feeling the sweat happening now man, fucking big time.

As he was pointing to the back seat he raised three fingers, then pointing to the front seat he raised two fingers, obviously indicating the number of people you can have in each seat.
We did have three in the front and two in the back when they drove past us.
And this was the only reason they chased us down.

What the fuck!
All this freaking out, the stress and panic that we were experiencing, the weird fucked up thoughts I was having, and it was all because of three in the front seat.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Holy shit man, this was just too fucked up.

But given how badly this whole scene could have unfolded, and what could have happened to us, I decided I was okay with how it turned out.

We breathed a sigh of relief and said "yes sir, okay, three in the back and two in the front".
They were satisfied that we understood.
They nodded and smiled, got on their bikes and drove off westward toward the setting sun.

Holy shit! did this really fucking happen?

This episode has been so totally bizarre man; it was kinda like a scene in the cartoons we all watched when we were kids..... You know what I mean, funny as hell but completely and totally unrealistic by any measure, something that would never, or could never happen in real life... But it did.

We just stood there for a few minutes in disbelief of what had just happened, but so grateful that we're not going to rot forever in some fucking Moroccan jail.

To me, this whole incident was like seeing it happen to us, but more like we were watching it in a movie that wasn't really connected to our current reality, but in actual fact the movie was our current reality; I don't know if that even makes any sense.
Man I must have been really fucking high.
Oh yeah man, this certainly is really primo Hash.

We rearranged what gear we brought with us so as to fit two in the front and three in the back. We piled into the car and drove back toward Agadir laughing our asses off all the way. But looking back, this episode could have had very devastating consequences.

...but it's all going to be okay now...

Luckily and happy, but mostly grateful, we've made it back to Agadir, another wild and exciting day that we've made it through.
Hunger is really kicking in now, so it's off to the bar for a late dinner and a beer, and to re-hash {absolutely pun intended} the events of the day.

After some much needed food and drink, the day has come to and end. We're really tired now, so it's back to the tent to crash out for the night .
Good night all.....

Page #11

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