Morocco page 16

We're on the road to Meknes. It's not going to be a long drive, probably less than an hour.
There's not a lot to see along this road, some old village ruins, at least I think they're ruins, they didn't look habitable even by Moroccan standards.
There's lots of bushes, scrub land and quite a few trees, a lot more greenery than what we've seen in the last few weeks.

No mountains around here though, however there are lots of rolling hills. From atop several of them you can see parts of the city, population about 750,000.
The photo to the right doesn't do justice to the real size of the city.

This region was inhabited by the Romans about two thousand years ago, and there are many ruins that was once the city of Volubilis. The bulk of these ruins are about a fifteen minute drive north of Meknes.

In the ninth century Tunisian Berbers settled the area a bit to the south and built a fortress, which in time became Meknes.

We drove around the outskirts of town looking for a camp ground, it didn't take long to find one.
We checked in, set up our site then we headed to the inner city, looking to have lunch and to find the Medina.
We found this one rather quickly. We parked near the gate, and as soon as we were out of the car some kid was on us immediately.
He wanted to be our guide into the Medina.

I was talking to Mel and Al about something so I wasn't quite sure just what the hell happened next, but Eve and this kid started having words, obviously something about money.
The kid was really pissed off at Eve, she may have tried to lowball him on the tour price. He was spouting off angrily at her in Arabic, and as he was he poked his finger in her chest; he did this twice.

Uh Oh, this little prick has stepped over the line and is now in deep fucking shit.

All of a sudden Eve's face got real red and she started flipping out on him. She started spouting off right back at him in a very loud and angry tone, all the while shaking her finger at him as in a strong scolding manner.
She told him in no uncertain terms that "if you poke me one more time, I'll break your fucking! finger off and shove it up your fucking! ass".

The kid may not have known exactly what she was saying but he understood her anger, and everyone, even if you don't know the language you know what fuck means when used in an angry tone directed at you; it meant you better be ready to fight, or fuck off.

I'm pretty sure he realized rather quickly when fighting with this white woman and her face goes almost blood red and she's yelling angry fuck shots at you, you know you've lost this battle.
He made the smart move and immediately fucked off.
Way to go Eve.

We decided to venture into the Medina on our own. This Medina was laid out differently than the ones we've seen so far.
The alleyways are quite narrow and on a bit of a downward slope. The further in you go the deeper and darker it gets.
It was absolutely unnerving, but that's what makes it so fucking exciting.

It's laid out like some kind of mutant spiders web.
Most of the main alleyways run to a single point somewhere deep in the Medina, but some of them only run part way and end at a "T", you then have to go either left or right, or maybe angular into even narrower alleyways.  But none of them seemed to be in any real organized manner.
If you didn't know exactly where you were going you could get disorientated very quickly, we decided not to go too far in, certainly not without a guide.

We checked out lots of shops; many were like small closets. Navigating the alleyways was a challenge at best because of so many people, goats, and fucking mopeds.

We decided to do some of our own cooking to reduce costs, so we bought a little one burner gas cooker, very similar to a one burner Coleman stove, good for making coffee or heating soup, etc. We also got some coffee mugs, plates, flatware and a couple of pans. We're actually going to cook whole meals on this little byrner.

When we finished at the Medina and went for a drive around the city, unhappily encountering many fucking insane mopeds. I think it was here in northern Morocco where the term 'road rage' came from.
Anyhow, Meknes is a pretty cool looking town, but the inner city streets are so narrow it makes the driving extremely difficult, even totally impossible at times in many places.

Some of the large northern cities that were being settled well over a thousand years ago, had very narrow streets, which were just laneways and not really streets. They were certainly never made to accommodate a car, that's for sure. They were made to accommodate donkey carts.
But still, there are some complete fucking idiots that will attempt to drive through, surprising, some do make it through, most don't and are stuck for mega hours...

After we got back to the campground Eve and I went to a store and got some things for dinner.
I wanted to get some of the breaded Yak hooves and grilled Peacock tongues that were on sale, and top it all off with a big jug of steamy warm camel piss,
but Eve said "no way fool".

We settled for eggs, beans, ravioli, bread, butter, wine and coffee.
We're going to cook everything on our little gas burner; it took quite awhile, but worth the wait, it was all good.

Tonight is a really cold night and we're not equipped for cold weather camping. It was too cold to sit out so we all went to bed early.

We're up early the next day. Al is making coffee on our new burner and it was pretty good, better than most of the coffee we've had in the last few weeks.

We're running out of smoke and we need to re-supply. Us guys went for a walk outside the compound fence, we didn't have to walk far.
There are always locals hanging around where the hippies stay. We were approached by a guy who had some dope to sell.
This guy only had weed, we were hoping for hash, but sometime you have to go with what's available.
It looked okay but that's certainly no indicator; but it was dirt cheap. It was a very large white envelope stuffed full, we paid the guy, took the weed and split right away.

Of course it wasn't near as good as the hash we had been smoking, but it was still okay and it'll keep us in smoke for awhile.
It's actually the shit part they throw away after the hash making process; it's referred to as kif, but it still gets you high for real cheap; and it certainly did.

Moroccans knew that Europeans and North Americans mostly smoked weed, and
they just didn’t understand why anyone would smoke leaves and buds when you could smoke hash.
We had mentioned a few times in conversation with a few people that in North America hash is very expensive and not always readily available, weed is cheaper and almost always available, and a bigger bang for the buck...... but it still ain't as good as the hash.
In Morocco even the poor can smoke hash, it’s cheaper than food, and food is ridiculously cheap.

Even though we got all our food for dirt cheap prices, Moroccans get the same food for a whole lot less than what we pay; and for Moroccans, hash is cheaper than what they pay for food.

The cost for many things in the West is much more expensive than in Morocco; just another thing about life in the west they didn't know about or quite understand.
They believed that anyone that can travel to their country for a holiday must be very rich. In Morocco, only the very rich can travel to another country; that's the only reference they have to gauge what they believe to be our level of wealth.


I had gone for a shower later in the morning and ran into a guy that noticed the Canadian flag on my jacket.
His name was Alan. He was from Ottawa and asked where I was from, I said Brantford. He said he was travelling with a guy from Brantford and we should come over to their site for some smoke and a chat.

A bit later we went over to see these guys. The guy from Brantford was John.
We smoked some joints and had a beer.

During our conversation it turned out that John's brother Joe is a friend of my brother Paul, and Joe and Paul used to hang together and drink beers at the Squires Court.
I couldn't believe it man; this was another one of those what are the odds moments, another mind blower.
It really is a small world man.

We hung out with these guys for awhile, and It was great to see other travelers from home, but now it's off to the Medina again.

When we got there we were again approached by another guy who wanted to be our guide. This guy wasn't a really young kid, he was about eighteen or twenty, and not a fucking little prick like yesterdays kid was.
We settled on a price and in we go.

He took us to many out of the way shops we would never have encountered on our own, they were quite deep in the Medina.
One of the places we saw was an old building that was once a Muslim school {madrasa} maybe a thousand years ago.
Many of the oldest buildings in this country that are still in use are well over a thousand years old, but many more of them have unfortunately been allowed to fall into ruin.

Seeing all of these old buildings was quite the buzz for us. Until we came to Morocco we had never seen anything older than a maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred years old, and they were few and far between.

All of this ancient historical architecture was just blowing my mind. It amazed me as to how some of these places could even be built with no construction equipment.
The only real construction equipment we saw were two guys with shovels and a wheelbarrow.


We went into a shop that had a wide variety of hash pipes, jewelry and other small souvenir items. In talking to the shopkeeper Mel expressed an interest in buying a bulk quantity of some of these products.

The guy invited us into the back of the shop where he had more items to see. He served us mint tea and put on some music we were familiar with to make us feel more comfortable while we looked at his products.

He and our guide stood several feet away and spoke to each other in an almost muted tone, a mix of French and whatever; strange we thought as they both speak English quite well.
Because we were within hearing distance, they may not have wanted us to hear what they were saying.
If that was the case, they had to be aware that we might think they're behavior would cause us to be somewhat suspicious of them, any reasoning person would surely think that.

As they were talking they would pause periodically and glance over at us for a few seconds then continue talking again in a muted tone.

All of a sudden I'm not liking the vibe here, not at all. Al was closer to these guys and was trying to pick up on some of what they were saying.
He told us he thought they might be setting us up for something, and maybe not in a good way but he wasn't all that sure.
So now we're all feeling a bit uncomfortable. Our gut feeling was telling us it was time to leave;  better safe than sorry.

Mel told the shopkeeper we had to go to an Exchange to get money and we would meet them back at the Medina at 6 o'clock, then maybe conduct some business.

They were both trying to get us to tell them where we were staying because they wanted to meet up with us after we we got money changed, then we could all go back to the Medina together.
These guys must have thought we were fucking idiots to think we would go along with that idea; there's not a chance in hell that we would do that.

We said "no fucking way man, we're not going to do that", and stated firmly that if they wanted to do business with us, they have to do it our way or not at all. They had no choice but to agree.
At this point all we wanted was to get away from here; the 6 o'clock meeting was now an appointment we had no intention of keeping. We all felt these guys were going to mug us once we got the cash.
Our guide brought us out of the Medina; we got into the car and back to the campground we go, safe and sound.

We cooked dinner on our shitty little burner; again it took quite awhile, but it was good, and we're home safe.

It's really cold tonight man, colder then last night. This cold shit is really harshing our buzz. Mel and Aileen were going to sleep in the car and Al is going to sleep with us in our tent.
It was a tight fit but we managed, even a bit of additional body heat would help keep us a little warmer.

In the morning it was still quite cold. The sun is coming up slowly but surely. I'm hopeful its going to start warming up soon.

We're going to leave today and head west to Rabat and Sale' on the Atlantic coast.
By the time we got all our gear together and packed in the car and paid up, it was mid morning.
We hit the road out of Meknes.

Just as we were leaving the city Mel turned onto a side road, there were several gardens that we wanted to see before we left Meknes; they were absolutely beautiful.
Many unusual plants and shrubs, pools of water with small pebbled walls built around them and stocked with small fish, some were built right into the side of hills. Everything was perfectly manicured; and there was acres of these gardens.
We walked around for quite awhile looking at everything; this was absolutely a gardeners dream.
Pictures just do not do them any justice.

It's now time to leave, we have a 160 Km drive ahead of us.

Next stop, Rabat and Sale'.