Morocco page 6

Agadir:

Well, we're on the road again. It's 6:30 in the evening. We have a 240 Km ride in this rickety old piece of shit bus. And just like the train it's going to make a number of stops out in the middle of nowhere before we get to Agadir.
Some stops to let people on and off, some stops for pee and poop as there's no toilet on the bus.

The bus was pretty full, a few small groups like us, some individuals, couples, families with kids, all but a dozen or so were Moroccan.
Hell, there may even been a few small farm animals along for the ride, but I just don't remember for sure.

In 1975 there's was no planes or trains to Agadir, so if you didn't have a car, bicycle, moped or a rideable livestock and you didn't want to walk, this is how you traveled.

On the bus ride we met an Australian guy named Ron. He was traveling around the world by himself, kinda weird I thought. Not really the sort of trip a person takes alone.
He seemed to be a decent kinda guy so we invited him to hang with us for the time he would be in Agadir.
So for the next few days we would be a party of six.

He had been traveling for several months through southeast Asia, India, Pakistan and a few other countries.
He had lived in mountain caves with holy-men for extended periods smoking ceremonial dope, which he said enabled him to experience the benefits of longer periods of meditation. But after a few months of living with Holy men in caves he had pretty much maxed out the meditation thing and now has made his way to Morocco to smoke some recreational dope; after Morocco his next destinations are Europe and North America.

..now back to the bus ride...
We're now well out of the city, all we're seeing along the way are small groups of adobe brick dwellings way off the road. The terrain was beginning to change. The immediate area was mostly flat hard pack, and sandy, lots of patches of low to medium vegetation; just basic scrub land.
Off to the east were the High Atlas Mountains, and south are the High Atlas foothills; which is where the road to Agadir is taking us.

By now the bus has already made a few stops. I don't know how much time has passed since we left Marrakesh, but we're now losing light and night was moving in quite fast. Just as it got dark the bus pulled over to make a piss stop.

There were a few outhouses you could use if you were brave enough; personally I would never use one of them no matter what I had to do, or how bad I had too go.
They're probably home to several desert vermin: snakes, lizards, scorpions, spiders, other peoples ass crabs, and a variety of other critters.
No way would I go in there and expose my junk to that.

As with all guys we can piss anywhere, women however prefer a bit more privacy, so for them it's behind a bush or use one of the outhouses.
....the choice here was clearly a no-brainer....
I don't recall anyone using an outhouse, not even any of the locals.

This was about a 15 minute stop which gave us an opportunity to check out the night sky. With no artificial external light sources we were able to see more stars than we had ever seen before.

The sky was so illuminated by them there seemed to be limited black sky. The bands of the milky way were so full of stars that it looked like someone had painted gigantic solid stripes of light across a large section of the remaining sky.
No industry, no pollution, no smog, just clear sky, billions of stars and clean fresh air, it was awesome.

Breaktime is over, we're on the move again.
It's quite late now, the bus is still travelling the main road through the High Atlas foothills. It's extremely dark and we can't see a thing. I'm hoping we'll soon get to Agadir. We're all getting very uncomfortable from being on the bus for so long.

It's midnight, we've been on the bus for five and a half hours, but we're finally pulling into the Agadir station, its about fucking time.
We're all quite tired, but we still have the chore of finding a place to crash out for the night.

There were several smaller hotels in the immediate area. They were either too expensive or full.
We did find one a little further down the road that had a couple of rooms available. We took them, three to a room.

The old adage is that the further out of the mainstream you go the price for accommodation gets cheaper, but there's no guarantee that they'll be critter free. There's always going to be critters everywhere in this area; the city is being built on desert sand, it's the desert region, so you have to expect there'll be critters no matter how much you pay for a room.
At this point we didn't care, we just needed to lay down and sleep.

When we pulled the bed covers back there were several little creepy crawlers that went scurrying off the bed in all directions. Sure didn't like seeing that, but wasn't the least bit surprised either.

As we're pretty stiff and sore from the long ride on the "piece of shit bus", we just wanted a bed to sleep on, and now that we don't have to share it with all the creepy crawlers, we can have the bed all to ourselves...but first...
We pulled the sheets off, flipped the mattress and put our sleeping bags on the bed, at least we knew they were bug free.
Fortunately both rooms had a double and single bed, so no three to a bed.
I don't think we even took the time to go for something to eat, we were just too tired,

......and we're also out of smoke, we'll have to remedy that real soon.


In the morning we went to a cafe' for breakfast and talked about what to do now that we're here.
We decided we needed to find a campground first. It's mid February but the weather is warm and perfect for camping, and a lot cheaper than hotels. We finished eating and headed back out to the street.

We walked around for a little while and found a park area with several trees, not a lot of them around these parts. We took a little break as it was getting quite warm.
I took a walk through the tree line and over a wee bit of a sandy rise and there was the Atlantic Ocean, clear blue water, soft warm sandy beach, it was absolutely beautiful.

Just a short distance down the road we found a campground. It had everything we needed, lots of trees, however they were only at one end of the campground, but not at our end. It also had showers, toilets, washing facilities, swimming pool, a store/ bar/ restaurant.
Oh yeah man, this place is going to be perfect for us.

We checked in and were showed where we could pitch out tents. It was at the west end of the compound where all the hippie tent campers were sent. It was in a mostly open area with very few trees.
The ground was mostly sand but with a good amount of dirt in the mix to give the tent pegs something to anchor into.
After we got our tents set up we took a walk around the compound. This was a pretty big camping park man, but it wasn't just for tent camping though.

At the east and south end of the park there was a variety of many shade type trees and small lawns. This is the area where the wealthy Europeans with their Volvo's, Mercedes, BMW's and Air Stream trailers would stay.
All of us hippie types got to camp in the bee infested olive trees where there was little or no grass.
But we didn't care about that, this was cheap living and that's all we cared about; also if there was anything we wanted we could get it at the bar 50 ft. away, for us this was absolutely perfect.

We all went down to the beach for a while to check things out. This was such a beautiful spot. It was easy to understand why so many people would want to come here. The beach was massive and stretched for what seemed like miles, the sand was soft and warm. The waves would roll in and deposit thousands of tiny shells along the shoreline.
We could see the new port facility still partially under construction at the base of the mount where the Kasbah once stood.
The mount is high enough that you can see it from anywhere in the immediate area.

Factoid:
Prior to 1960 the original Agadir was at the top of the mount within the walls of the Kasbah.
As the region had rapidly become a popular tourist spot for many Europeans, the Moroccan government and some private enterprise companies began to build an Agadir city extension at sea level, as well as a major rebuild of the port facility.

I think this construction began during the early 1950's.
Then in Feb. 1960 a major earthquake hit the area. The old city within the Kasbah walls, which was well over a thousand years old was completely destroyed.

As a result of the earthquake almost 15,000 people died, which was about half of the regional population.
The death and destruction in the newer part of the city and port area was considerably less than on the mount, but still quite extensive.

So now, there is no old city or medina, pretty much everything within the Kazbah walls had been reduced to total ruin.
Now there is only a group of small shops and diners, some small hotels and a bit private residential, our campground and a fish market, all at sea level. Absolutely nothing at the time we were in Agadir was more than 15 years old.

At the bottom of this page there are two videos. The first one is a three and a half minute video of the destruction at the time of the earthquake, the second video is about four minutes of how the city looked in 2005, after 45 years of major reconstruction and city expansion.

Now a couple more things about the campground. As well as having everything we would need, it also had a 3 meter high concrete wall built around the entire compound.
Protruding from the top of the wall were large and small shards of sharp broken glass cemented into it. This was to deter any locals from trying to get in.

As everyone was a tourist living in tents and trailers, there would be lots of valued items that could be easily stolen.
Although there were already good security elements, the broken glass was an added measure of security.
The average Moroccans are not allowed into the compound, accept for a few that worked there, and probably well paid to minimize temptation.

Page #6

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1960 earthquake tragady