Morocco page 8

Got up early to start a new day. Noticed that Amon's tent was gone. Amon had left the building; he's off to the next community to sell his "double zero" happy cough.

Went for another shower this morning; I'm loving these regular showers man. Going for breakfast now.
I think Eve and Aileen were going to do some more laundry. While the girls were busy, us guys went for a walk down to the beach.

We were just strolling along, very few people around. We noticed a couple of guys a fair distance away walking toward us, they didn't look like locals.
When they got close enough to see their faces, Mel and Al's faces lit right up.
Can you believe it, these guys were from Brantford; no shit.
One guy was Bruce, but I don't remember the other guys name.

These guys were all high school buddies, they all went to Pauline Johnson together, I couldn't believe it man. Hell, you travel 6000 miles away to a North African country, the last thing you expect to see are friends from high school; this was a fucking mind blower.

We all hung out for quite awhile talking about where we had all been and what we had seen.
Bruce was a volunteer coach for kids football back home, and through the course of conversation with him we came to the realization that he was Chris' football coach, and I believe he was Ron's coach as well.

This all seemed to be too unbelievable man, {this is the stuff of Twilight Zone} what are the odds of this kind of thing ever happening? I was completely blown away, we all were.
We all chatted and laughed for quite awhile about how far out and bizarre this encounter was; but now everyone has to get going.
We shook hands and "see ya later man"; and we all went on our way.
I could hardly wait to tell Eve.

The girls were finished the laundry when we got back to the camp so we all went back to the beach to spend the afternoon. It was hot and about 80F.
The waves were huge and really noisy. We had a killer day, lots of fun, also got a sunburn.
Once we had all the fun we could handle for the day, we all left the beach and went back to camp and hit the bar.

It was air conditioned and the beer was cold; we hung out there for quite awhile.
I had maybe three beers over a couple of hours, but I was getting way too good a buzz for these few beers, I felt drunk, really! on just a few beers?
I looked at the alcohol content on the label, 12%, no wonder I felt drunk, even their vinegar has 6% alcohol.
Got some food into me and went back to the tent for some sleep. Hope I don't have a headache in the morning.

It's morning, no headache, but I'll have to be careful with the beers from now on.

We've been in Agadir for almost a week now. The beach and bar have been great but we needed something new. We decided to rent a car for three or four days, so its off to the rental agency we go.

In Marrakesh we didn't really need a car to see or do things, we were living in the middle of everything to do.
Here in Agadir, in 1975, not a big town; and very limited as to what we were able to do for entertainment.
There was the beach, the bar, a small commercial and residential area, several small hotels, the Kasbah mount, and a fish market, but that was about it.

Now we're going to have wheels, we can go wherever we want, and there's a lot we want to see and do.
We rented a Renault 4, this is a little car, but with a bit of a squeeze it was just big enough for us and our gear.
Where to go first. It was decided we would drive south to Tiznit, a small walled town about 80 km away.

After a few miles down the main road the terrain began to change, it had begun to take on more of a desert look, very little greenery, lots of sand dunes and hot.
There were quite a few small family communities way off of the road, each consisting of just a few dwellings.
This seemed to be the beginning of where urban development has almost come to a complete halt.

We could see Tiznit off in the distance, it was completely closed in behind a ten foot high defensive wall, with just a few out buildings several hundred feet away.
We drove through what was once a gated archway into the town. Very cool looking town but not so very old [1880].
Went to the Medina, checked out some of the stalls and shops looking for small souvenirs. Hung out for awhile, had a bite to eat, smoked a bit of hash, than decided to take off and drive east toward the Anti Atlas mountains.

And now for another historical fact. This is about the people who live in the Anti Atlas range.
First off, the communities in this range have had the least amount of development of any kind in the entire country.

During our tour through the country we encountered communities in some areas where life has changed very little in the last five hundred to a thousand years.

The higher up the mountains we went, the more primitive the ways became.
For some mountain dwellers, to own a steel wheelbarrow and a steel blade shovel would make you the envy of your community.

More than 90% of the inhabitants are Chleuh Berbers [Berber is a 3000 year old Roman word loosely meaning barbarian]
This branch of Berbers is said to have the purist of the Berber blood lines, and have purposely kept it that way for well over a thousand years by rarely intermixing with other tribal factions.
They're very communal and friendly.

Okay, we're on our way to the mountains. There are several little communes dotting the landscape; we can see the mountains although they're 100 km away.

As we drove into the foothills we came into a town called Tafraout. Not a big town but larger than most of the communities in the general area.

Quite a large number of tourists come to this town. As it is a small town and the area didn't seem to be suitable for any kind of real farming other than a few areas for small gardens, there didn't seem to be many ways for the locals to make money, so they rely largely on the tourist trade, as a result the prices for goods in the Medina are a little high ..... not unlike us.

We continued further up into the hills. The communities were now much smaller, more like family communes.
We stopped at a few just to have a look around. It was easy to see that a lot of things were quite different up here in the hills,

For example: you don't go walking in the little grassy areas, particularly in the evening, that's where a lot of the local men go to have a shit, just like dogs.
Out on the streets, which is just hard packed dirt, it was not uncommon to see a man hike up his djellaba a little and squat down and piss, it would trickle away and absorb into the ground, and no one gives it a second thought, this was perfectly normal behavior.

As we drove along the road we would see women in their long robes, carrying baskets of whatever on their heads, when they saw us coming they would pull their veils over their faces and their hands up into their sleeves.

Although we had seen many women in Casablanca and Marrakesh wearing face veils [niqabs] this is the first time since coming to Morocco that we have encountered socially undeveloped communities to this degree, it all seemed like very strange behavior to us.
However, looking at the behavior picture from their side of the coin, we were in fact the strange behavior in this picture.

Up to this point, all things considered, the main road has not been too bad, it was somewhat paved, very coarse pavement, but paved never the less.

We decided to go further, out of the foothills and into the mountains we go. The road turned into more of a hard pack caravan trail and much narrower and a bit hazardous; this was a result of absolutely no infrastructure advancement.

We are now well out of the traditional tourist area. The further into the mountains we went the more treacherous the road became.
At times it would wind around out onto the face of a mountain, which would expose you to the view of a valley, which would be just one of many that we would see.

This valley is going to be my first real valley experience. As we were going through the turn I could feel the excitement rising within me. I can't believe how huge this valley is.
I'm absolutely thrilled.

It could have been a couple of miles long and maybe a mile wide, it was impossible to accurately judge distance because of it's immense size.
It was also a few hundred feet almost straight down, then rolling out into the valley below, which was another couple of hundred feet down.
At the very least and by any standard, this valley would be considered gigantic.

We could see four, maybe five very small settlements dotted throughout the lush green valley below, which also had a stream flowing through it.
It looked just like a landscape painting anyone might have hanging on their living room wall, it was breathtaking and absolutely beautiful.

I can't even really begin to tell you from a real visual perspective just how vast this valley was. From our vantage point, and being so high above it, you only had to turn your head several degrees to see it all.
It was so beautiful, so magnificent and awe inspiring; I forced my eyes open as wide as I possibly could to take it all in.
I had never seen anything so majestic that it had the power to move me as much as it did, I was so thrilled beyond belief that it made the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stand.

I was experiencing a feeling I had never felt before. I believed at that moment I was having a very spiritual experience, a very powerful emotional moment, a sense of feeling there was something so much greater than ourselves, a scale so grand it was absolutely beyond what I could have imagined. What I was feeling was so real and genuine, yet at the same time seemed almost unbelievable.

This experience impacted me so much, that to this day it's almost as powerful within me as it was that day. All I have to do is close my eyes and think about it and I'm there; and even forty years later thoughts of it can still make my neck hair stand; that's how much it impacted me.

This experience has given me an incredibly wonderful "remember when" point in my life that can never be forgotten; it's always with me, and I'll always be grateful for that.

Page #8

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