tangier

the taxi into tangier was thirty or forty minutes. we passed wonderful beaches and hills. teenagers collecting on the side of the road to get rides home. vans with espresso setups out the back selling roadside coffees. small towns with people hanging out gazing at the roads. goats and horses. the water was so blue. the hills greener than i expected. by the time i got out of the taxi i already had the number of four moroccans who insisted i take theirs in case i came to their towns and needed help or simply wanted to meet up. i spent most of the ride talking to a man named fawzy who immigrated to morocco years ago. originally from palestine his family had ended up in egypt. fawzy gave me a bottle of water and a little candy, both that he bought from a little vender on the walk to the taxi. halfway through the ride he shook my hand and said, “welcome to morocco. you will love it. it is the best country.”

there’s a quote in a john green book about how someone fell in love the way they fell asleep. gradually and then at once. this is not at all how my adoration for morocco happened. i skipped the gradual phase.

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chefchaouen

at 11:22am on my last day in tangier i’m sitting in a bougie restaurant briefly after a failed attempt to mail some clothes home so i could quit carrying them and pick up some more moroccan ones but the wifi didn’t work which sucked because i really needed to figure out where and how i’m going where i’m going. at 11:47 in a new cafe i had a lemon ginger juice looking at bus and train times. hotel options.

an integral piece of the strategy that has worked well these last few months is listening to suggestions from people who seem worthy of listening to. a couple of these said don’t miss chefchaouen. by 6:02 i’m almost there. on the bus i got a front row view of why morocco is known for mountains. big fuckers. also goats on the roadsides. and cows. don’t see many pigs in these parts. saw a ten year old with a backpack hiking up a hillside not near a road.

i ditched my pack at the hostel and quickly tried to find where i could make sunset. resting in the rif mountain range right on a hillside it is easy to accomplish some elevation quickly by exiting the old city uphill on a trail to a mosque just off the edge of town. i saw the sunset crowds and decided to stop short to sit alone. chefchaouen is the blue city, known for the traditional medina buildings painted and kept a pristine blue. a local told me the reason for the color was to curb the intensity of traditional white buildings on the eyes, since the sun is almost always out.

a more picturesque place in all of the world you will not find next to chefchaouen. not that i’ve seen them all. i just can’t imagine it being the case one is better. the sun got to the other side of the hill and the blues got deeper. stronger. slowly street and houselights blinked on. i tried to catch them. an impossible task.

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shukran: morocco before home

getting there

it’s 8:08am in malaga, spain and i just booked the hostel for tangier, morocco for tonight. i don’t yet have a bus ticket to agaciras which is a couple hours away where i need to go to find a ferry to tangier. these things will buff out. walking out the door. vaya con dios.

it’s 9:30am in malaga sitting at the bus station after a nice walk here from the hostel. the city is asleep. i missed the 8:20 bus so i got a ticket for the 11. will get me to algeciras at 12:45. now time to pick a ferry. 2:30 gives me a little buffer on arrival and a chance to get some lunch. a short walk. gaining an hour by going to morroco means the ferry arrives around 3 or 4. i’ll find a bus from there into tangier. vaya con dios.

10:03 in a little, slow cafe close to the bus station. i find a corner with an outlet so i can juice my phone a bit and have a cafe negro. tonight will be 43 different beds in 69 nights of travel.

cafe is nearly packed by 10:34.

at 11:29 on the bus i was adding photos to a medium piece about eastern europe and when i glanced up and out the window it took me a solid five seconds to remember where the hell i was.

at 1:17 in ageciras i had 3.95 in euros in coin change left in my pocket and i asked a couple women sitting alone in a cafe if there was any small amount of food i could get. what i was thinking was a chunk of bread and some fruit or something. the owner told me to sit down. her friend joked that i was short on money. i joked about a very small portion. owner said nonsense. sit down. then brought me a big bowl of chicken with olives and french fries.

at 2:34 i am on the armas ferry filling out my entry form for morocco. it is curious what it means if they would for some reason deny me. i have thought this a handful of times these last few months while in those spaces between countries. i’ve been stamped out of the EU. do i just ride the ferry back?

i already feel the two weeks i have is not enough time for morocco. the end of the trip. a deadline approaching. everything was so open ended a couple months ago. i am looking forward to my home. but still, this feeling is ominous.

4:16 local time off the ferry. they stamped the passport on the boat without much thought.

4:36 i’m in a collective taxi to town. took a pro tip from a couple moroccans that if i walked outside the port — didn’t take the taxis lined up inside — there are collectives for 3 euros. the taxis inside are 30.

getting there.

i’ve known where tangier was on the map for quite a long time because of that one dylan line, “if you see her say helloooo / she might be in tangieerrr”. at some point in my teens i googled it, and i wondered why the hell she might be living there. as years went by i learned why. tangier was a hotspot for hippies and counterculture americans of the mid-20th century. paul bowles famously made it his home for decades. ginsberg and kerouac spent significant time. in my 20’s i had quite a burroughs run and discovered that he wrote naked lunch while living there.

something about cheap hashish, budget travel, and tolerance of homosexuality makes it all make sense.

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i was unsurprisingly oblivious that there is a longstanding diplomatic connection between the united states and morocco. perhaps this was on a day i was not so awake in a social studies class. morocco recognized the united states as a country early, in 1777. in large part because the king wanted a trade agreement so much so that he captured an american ship and said he’d hold it until terms were agreed to. terms that the americans hadn’t quite gotten to on account of being busy fighting the british. friendship by means of force. sometimes you make your friends drink fernet on a school night. i get it.

the peace treaty signed between the two countries in 1786 is the longest unbroken treaty relationship in united states history. in 1821 sultan moulay souleiman gifted a building in tangier to the united states which served as a diplomatic post for 140 years and is now a quite cool museum highlighting various diplomatic and cultural ties. perhaps the coolest room is a closet hidden in the upstairs where information was transmitted to dc and london from allied spies working throughout north africa during world war ii.

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it’s a muslim but tolerant country. practically this means if you want alcohol you can find it and nobody will judge you but it’s not going to be everywhere. on my last night in tangier i found a bar with seven seats total, in the whole room, and two tv’s. three dudes (one of them the bartender) having a 6/10 impassioned conversation. i asked for a stork beer bottle and he gave me one along with a little bit of potato salad and some olives. i like this part of mediterranean culture. the part that gives you free snacks with your beer.

i understood nothing of the conversation. i did not volunteer participation, but i felt accepted. these are my people. a 10 oz stork a 10 oz speciale a 12 oz casablance 2 marquise cigarettes. learn thank you in the local language (shukran) know when to nod your head and how to not overstay your welcome. there on the bar stool with my potato salad and some cold bottles i know the beats, even if i can’t understand the words. fifteen years of sitting in these rooms have ingrained a sense of the rhythms. i will chalk it up to a lack of being photogenic that two fellas look angry in the picture i took. just seconds before they told me it was ok to take one and gave me a cheery good bye.

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i had spent some time in the tangier tea cafes where all the grown men hang out, staring at the street. there is no beer or women. your dopamine must come from tea or espresso. these factors hammer home that the presence of women makes things better. a cafe full of dudes has been curated to be a cafe full of dudes, and this shows. it lacks grace. they must have remarkable volume sales going to keep that building upright with one dollar cups of tea. it helps they don’t need to do any accounting for decorations.

i found a couple more spots that were cool enough. the last one even had women. also genuinely funny signs on the wall. i can get down with some kitschy shit like that sometimes. i had probably expected tangier to feel weirder, what with the beat writer connection and all. probably i lacked the skill to get to that layer. or it’s gone. i’ve been dozens of places i’ve been told i was decades too late and i believed it every goddamn time.

the world is happening all around you and all you can do at best is register a change. // “The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times…When I watch blue sheep, I must watch blue sheep, not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present, for this present — even while I think of it- is gone.” the snow leopard, peter matthiessen

a kid asked me to buy a snack from his tray and when i ask him how much he just said “money”. his ambiguous strategy paid dividends. i gave five dirhams. a while later i heard him sell a couple sweets for a dirham each. that’s a penny.

right when the skyline was on fire and the blues were bursting the evening call to prayer rang out. from the hillside the acoustics coming up from town were intense. i probably use the word beautiful too fucking much. if i were able to limit it, i would choose to throw it out in moments like this. save the power of it.

when i heard the call to prayer as the sun set i knew i would extend to stay in this night another town so i could see it again. this is a luxury i knew was losing its legs. knowing there’s a handful of places i’d like to see before a flight that’s coming abruptly. likely a couple of those will be begging me to stick around too, and that won’t be an option.

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