Morocco page 11

A new day, up early, 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 sand and dirt with several small sand dunes here and there.
We passed through several small villages, maybe even stopping at one or two. 130 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 and fifty or more, 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 driving along we came across a fairly large oasis. Nestled down among the palms 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 was waving his arms. When he got up to the car he began putting his hands on it, feeling it in several spots; I guess he didn't get to see that many cars.
He came right up to us and started to jabber at us 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 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 recent past had been primarily a small fishing community.

Noteworthy: At the time we were there; development was beginning to occur that would in time tie directly into elements of Morocco's tourist trade.

This area is frequented by hippie types 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.

So let me fill you in a bit about the cheap accommodations.
Some were just caves dug into the hillside.  They were dirty filthy disgusting shit holes. .
and I mean caves in the literal sense.

Others were rundown rotting whitewashed shacks, some had doors, some didn't, some had floors, some didn't; 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, "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 to ceiling drawings.
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.

Eve and I took a long walk on 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 fresh that it seemed to have an almost cleansing feel as you breathed it in. The waves would roll in and deposit millions 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 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 have very well have been Double Zero.
We spent the afternoon just hanging out with Fred, smoking bowls of hash, exploring the beach area; yup, it's been a really good day.
But now it's time to start heading back to Agadir.

We were all really high when we started back.
Along the road in spots were these narrow beaten paths that go off into the deeper desert regions.
Mel pipes up and says, "lets take a drive on one". 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 chance you may never be heard from again. We didn't go.

Along the way back we see a kid, he's maybe 8 or 10 years old, 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 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.
Imagine being swallowed by the earth and living underground like fucking moles, how bizarre.

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 in possession of a 15 gram chunk.

The cops were about a hundred yards past us when all of a sudden they made a u-turn and they're coming after us.
In a state of stoned desperation we stashed the chunk down in the back seat, 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.

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, way over six feet tall. Mel is six feet tall and these cops were at least four to six 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 police, which made the situation even more scary.
There skin colour was so black it had a bluish hue to it.
These guys were more like central African than Moroccan, and they looked mean as hell.
We were all feeling completely intimidated.

The cops aren't speaking English so Al is going to be doing a bit of interpreting.
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... given the amount of hash we smoked that day.... we probably 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. He said "no," and stated "license".

Mel said 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 and said "license".

This is where Al comes in. As best as he could, using a few words and phrases from a couple of European languages, he conveyed to the cop that this was an international drivers license issued in Canada.
The cop looked at it again for a few seconds, and I'm supposing that because everything else was in order, except our state of mind of course, he said "okay".

The other cop takes a few steps toward the car, stops, then points to the back seat, at which point we're all shitting ourselves now.
We thought, 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.

This is where something in my head went for a bit of a shit. Surfacing from some dark corner of my brain, from a place that I never even knew existed, some weird thoughts were crossing my mind.
Being so high, and having a strong drive for self preservation, one of those weird thoughts was, ...if we get the chance, 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.

He pointed to the back seat and raised three fingers, then pointing to the front seat he raised two fingers, 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 the profuse sweating and panic that I was experiencing, the weird fucked up thoughts I was having, and it was all because of three in the front seat.
Are you fucking kidding?
Holy shit man, that was just too fucked up.

But given how bad 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.
Then they got on their bikes and drove off westward toward the setting sun.

This has been so fucking bizarre man; it was kinda like a scene in the cartoons we all watched when we were kids.....
...oh yeah, this was really primo Hash.

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.

For me, this whole incident was like seeing it happen to us, but like we were watching it happen to us in a movie, and not in our own current reality...... man I must have been really high.......holy fucking-WOW man.

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...

Page #11

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