Along the Atlantic Coast

On the road from Essaouria to El Jadida

That night, petrified of anything that resembled food, Reno and I booked a meal in the Riad.  Alas, they forgot we had. We walked through the lanes of leather workers, silversmiths and carpet dealer, past the hippies selling rip off of Bob Marley, into a deserted restaurant run by a skinny, bald man who looked as if he hadn’t eaten for a year.  I wanted nothing, but needed something to eat. We sat on big carpeted cushions along the wall and considered our recent brush with death.  So we ordered a simple meal of soup and plain pasta.  Almost an hour later, some weak gruel with bread arrived … and still no other customers.  The pasta arrived, steaming, covered with cheese. But was so overcooked it fell to glue off our forks. We complained to the owner, who with an insulted, incredulous look at our impudence, snatched the almost full portions from the table and stomped into the kitchen, where we could see him shovelling it into his mouth as if he hadn’t eaten for days.   For a couple of dollars, we weren’t prepared to demand a refund, but realised that was a great way to eat for free .

Partially recovered and considerably weak of body and definitely weaker of mind, I set out to buy silver from Hakkim, whom I’d bought from during my 2011 trip.  He was easy to find. Just ask Sarah via Facebook. I love technology, sometimes.  He happened to be a hundred metres from our riad.  Sitting on big fat pillows and sipping mint tea, I found piles of old, collectible, and gorgeous “new” pendants, those that don’t have the dings and grime of old age but are beautiful pieces in their own right.  A beautiful heavy silver Jewish temporal piece, adorned with chains and coral.  Two large Yemen silver, coral and amazonite necklaces. Lots of Berber pieces, a coral necklace with Jewish silver hamsas.  Some bracelets, two Algerian kabyles that I fell in love with, and a pile of old silver beads.  We shared a tagine on top of a pile of rugs, with silver around my ankles, and silver up to my shoulders, and silver all around.  Hakkim’s “uncle” came to share the food and enjoy my spoils, and realising the new wing on his Riad had become a reality. Hakkim’s old Moroccan amber was going for ten dollars a gram, which made an amber necklace $12,000.   Silver had skyrocketed 300% since I’d last been there.  They had all gone mad  … or rich.

Reno walked around Essaouria with a berber turban, wondering why nobody made eye contact.  We added up the total, and my frail state became precarious. I’ll pay you in the morning, when we have transferred funds, I promised, needing time to think.  I loved the Algerian silver, but I knew nothing of the really expensive (almost two thousand Euros) Kabyle pieces.  I couldn’t buy these without doing a lot of homework.

I’ve visited Essaouria three times, and each time wanted to spend days there, enjoying the harbour, the wind, the wild Atlantic coast, the space and colour and laid back, old hippie atmosphere.  But again fate played its mean hand so we didn’t have that luxury. I rushed back to Hakkim to pay him after I’d removed the bracelets, a bag of beads, and the Kabyle pieces from my stash, much to his horror.  We maxed the credit card, Reno added some funds, and we set off for El Jadida, via Safi.  Almost out the souk, “uncle” rushed up to us, shouting very agitatedly that he’d left off a zero in our credit card transaction:  could we please amend this.  AAARGGH.  We did, and “uncle” gave me a heavy old silver hamsa with a rooster on it … which I immediately gifted to Reno, a reminder of the rooster that crowed the whole night I was sick, that the riad owner bought to shut up, which was immediately replaced by another rooster.

Halfway up the Atlantic coast, nursing my financial wounds, calculating how I could possibly have paid so much for so little, I realised I hadn’t bargained – at all, with Hakkim. Not a sous. Not a couscous grain.  Not a chicken leg or fish bone or dirham or dollar or euro.  Not a drop of sweat or a bitten fingernail. Not a movement of a pawn on a chessboard.  I paid what the Moroccan silver dealer, in a tiny little windy village on the Atlantic, who waits for people like me to revisit his shop, asked me.  I held in my hand what I should have had to carry on my hip. Mistake. Big, big, big mistake.  Perhaps he was in league with the preparer of fish at the Fanatik restaurant, the doctor, the pharmacist, the taxi drivers and the pasta seller.  The next dealer would suffer, trust me, with Reno the rooster to watch my back.

From Essaouria, we travelled the coastal route to Safi, where we’d originally planned to stay.  The coast is bleak and brutal, windswept to its knees, populated by donkeys, herds of goats and sheep, crumbled rubble walls, forts of prickly pears and olive groves almost as old as the land.  Crinkled men in hoary djelabbas, veiled women, exhausted mules towing wagons laden with wood walked from nowhere to nowhere.  The few towns we passed could have been movie sets for frontier towns, where the barber, the chicken killer, the lamb slaughterer and the axle forger all clustered together on the dusty road to catch any bit of trade they can.

Mud houses seemed abandoned at every turn, and half built mansions stood sentinel overlooking the crashing misty surf, waiting to be completed as holiday homes or hoping a village will move in nearby.

Brahim’s phone rang as we were negotiating overtaking a donkey cart and a flock of sheep, on a road where a ten ton truck approached.  He answered it. It rang again later and Brahim answered it behind a laden bus.  I told him if he answered his phone again while we were driving, I’d throw it out the window. He laughed.  When it rang again, Reno went off his face and we gave Brahim a tirade about decapitations, deaths, and destiny, laws in Australia, crime and punishment, and who’s the Boss.  From then on, every time it rang, Brahim glowered at the phone as if it was a mortal enemy, while trying very hard to see the name illuminated under the console.

Reno became known as Big Boss, and I became known as Prunciss.  Because a donkey is a dunkey, and a bad smell is a big smile.  As in, if you go to Safi, you will get big smile.  Oh, yay! What a friendly place … let’s go Number One.

And then the “city” of Safi, huddled on the edge of the Atlantic rocks, embarrassed at what it was doing to the landscape.  Advertised as a seaside resort with fresh breezes, quaint homes and fresh seafood, the realisation dawned quickly as chemical fumed burned our nostrils that all was not as it was touted to be. Anyone in Morocco who has any sort of questionable social history – theft, jail, loss of job, disability, emigration, statelessness – is able to work in Safi.  They get a house – of sorts –and a job, and eventually, the correct paperwork to move to Marrakesh, or one of the other big cities.  For Safi is phosphate.  And phosphate means choking poisonous pollution, cumulus clouds of chemicals that belch into the sky and vomit yellow atrocities into the sea a million litres a minute. When Brahim stopped to ask directions, he was attended by a man with a thalidomide wrist, another with double cataracts, a third with most of his facial pigment missing.  A mother limped past, carrying her blind baby.  Reno and I did our best to keep the windows closed, but Brahim needed to know the way out, so we stuffed our mouths with my pink cotton wrap, a far preferable and less epidermal irritating alternative to choking on fumes.  The air was putrid. Even the donkeys - a worse than bad lot - were dismayed at where they were. It would be a donkey’s terrible karma to be reincarnated here.  A few kilometres either side of Safi the vegetation was lush, green, verdant.  Huge palms grew abundantly, but closer to town, the trees were scrawny, limp and brown.  At the epicentre of this horror, the landscape was vegetation denuded and adorned only with the most elaborate wrought iron street lights I’ve ever seen.

Jesus, I said to Reno. I am so glad we decided to stay two nights in El Jadida, instead.  His face was as bleak as the sky, which could never be blue in this apocalyptic place.  My eyes burned, my skin itched. Reno’s mouth had vanished into the back of his head again.  We would rather pee in a coke bottle than get out of the car.

“We stop here for lunch!” beamed Brahim, turning around from the driver’s seat with excitement. “My wife’s family live here, we are meeting them in ten minutes at La Corniche.” Reno and I were dumbstruck.

So we met Brahim’s family, all waiting for us at the epicentre of this hideousness, their long beige and grey djellabas flapping in the wind as they waved excitedly to their prodigal husband, and son in law from Marrakech.   His father and mother in law, his sister in law and her two children “lived” here, and his wife and daughter had sort of followed us up from Marrakech for this auspicious lunch.

“Let’s have fisjh!” beamed Brahim. 

“Fisjh?” I squawked. 

“Yes, many people eat fish, sardines over there …” (pointing to some men grilling less than a kilometre down wind and sea from the jumbo jet sized outlet pipe of poison) …

“Is there a McDonald’s?” Reno and I croaked in unison.  “Is there a hospital for afters?”

Brahim did find us a fast food outlet, but in this place, fast food outlet would quickly take on an Essaourian meaning.  We walked deeper into town, where the phosphate powder had settled on everything.  At a restaurant with plastic covered tables and dead plants, our first course before playing Moroccan epicurean madness was a litre of warm Coca Cola.  Brahim’s family got stuck into the salads, chips, cokes, and grilled chicken like there was no tomorrow.  We picked at a piteous piece of cremated rooster, paid for the whole gang, and asked to leave as soon as we could.  Brahim bid a teary salaam Aleichem and in Shallah to his gorgeous redhaired daughter and lovely wife, and we tore out of Safi as if our life depended on it. For it did.

The landscape came alive again twenty or so kilometres from Safi; fields of barley and wheat bobbed with red poppies and blue somethings.  Miles and miles of rubble walls contained fabulous olive orchards and fruit trees bursting with blossoms.  We stopped every ten miles or so for selfies and dances in the crazy madding wind as the Atlantic carved its way up Africa.

And then, El Jadida.  Brahim found his way in, but close the riad, stopped for directions. A fabulous old three-toothed man pointed with a knobbled finger and spat his directions at Brahim, a young boy leading a donkey pointed in the other direction.  Reno lost his marbles, having boiled over from the first day in Marrakech. “Brahim!” he shouted.  “Tell Driss - your boss - to buy you a gps! Asking directions like this wastes so much time.  You can’t stop in the middle of the road to talk to strangers! It’s ridiculous. Why is your country so backward? A gps only costs a few hundred dollars! I’ll talk to Driss when we get back to Kesh.” 

Brahim went white. I went white. Then I went red. Brahim’s generous, always laughing mouth was ominously silent. We called the riad, who sent a runner to fetch us from the Portuguese gate.  Brahim was sulking. I was disappointed Reno’s resistance to Africa had increased, rather than eased. We sent Brahim off to find his nightly lodgings and checked into Riad D’Oliel, a little miracle in the mid milllenium Portuguese city of fabulous ramparts and an important port, destroyed recently in an earthquake and rebuilt by Unesco.   In our room, after a great shower, we went to a candlelit room to have the most magnificent meal in the whole of Morocco.  We opened the bottle of Vino d’savage we’d plundered from a plane trip, and ate duck pate,  a sautéed chicken with stacked vegetables, and a fabulous flambéed crème caramel for dessert.

Life was sweet.  We talked about life in the olden days, and Reno’s reminiscence of his father driving a plough behind a donkey, and the comparison now with his Queensland cousins driving tractors controlled by computers.  And desperation and sinister Safi.  “Reno.”  I began.  “In the olden days, women used to go to the well not only to get water, but to converse about childbirth, rites of passage, the best way to bake bread, typhoid treatments and wife beating. Unesco tried to put in plumbing in many parts of the third world, and many of these women rejected it because it took away their community spirit.

Brahim is doing the same thing.  He’s letting people know he’s arrived in this strange city.  He’s allowing the locals to show him it’s their territory. It’s his way of finding where to sleep and get his radiator fixed. Brahim made five friends on his way in, and some of them may see him somewhere and take him to pray.”

The crème caramel stopped halfway to Reno’s lips.  He took my hand and kissed it.  “Thankyou,” he said.

When Brahim collected us the following morning for an El Jadida hang out day, Reno apologised to Brahim.  Yes, you read right. Reno APOLOGISED.  For Reno to apologise, the earth needs to have spun off its axis a few degrees. Brahim was impressed. I smiled.   Reno also told Brahim that I had tilted the axis, or meaning to that effect.  Brahim hugged Reno and kissed my cheeks.  Three times.

Brahim became known as Number One.  And so we had a wonderful day. Brahim was on top of the world.  He parked where a new friend showed him.  He led us into the glorious, deserted, orange shadowy souk and greeted people on the way in. When his phone rang, he ignored it, as Number One was leading Big Boss and Pruncess around the souk.  I found some fabulous Talkahimt carnelian pendants, gorgeous, old and worn, in a dusty shop selling plates. The sellers’ price was ridiculous.  I used the “I don’t have money, I have to ask my husband” ploy which worked well all over the country and enabled me to evade a deal when necessary.  The price came down marginally, so I left, empty handed, and quite disappointed.

Brahim and the seller talked in Arabic/French.  The price plummeted.  The owner drove Reno back to our Riad to collect the payment, while Number One and I walked the ramparts. When Reno had returned with the seller, they’d exchanged telephone numbers and we’d been invited to stay in his plush riad with his family when/if we ever returned to EJ.  I asked Brahim what he’d said. “I told him you were a pruncess!” he laughed.  And thus it was reinforced that yes, people can make a LOT of money selling silver.

We walked the ramparts for hours, down to where the huge blue and red fishing boats were made and repaired, and watched as young boys leapt 50metres from the top of the fort into the icy water.  Brahim took us to a local restaurant, ordered our food, negotiated a non tourist price and we went back to the Riad, satiated, happy and with the world back on its axis to finish with another remarkable meal in an unexpected place.  

And onto Meknes.
Murky miserable missable Meknes.  Definitely a four hour trip to pump the tyres and have a rest stop.  Walk through the small local souk where you'd be grabbed and harassed.  Don't stay in a riad, a dusty, grimy, miserable riad with a minaret outside the window. We were stuck there for four days ... mistake big big mistake on my itinerary. I couldn't even buy silver because the one shop that sold silver was run by a man who hadn't sold a piece for five years and wanted to punish me for it.
Horrible place. We counted the seconds to leaving.  Our misery and pain was only eased by Brahim coming to fetch us for a day trip to Moulay Idriss;  great food, some rare coins bought from a seller on a carpet, the best roast chicken I've ever had in my life .. and a couple of divine hours at the Roman ruins of Volubilis.