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So flying from Rabat to Paris, I'm back in the "international style" of travel. The Charles de Gaulle airport is great architecture, but it's hard to get from terminal to terminal and when your plane is delayed, well, sleeping on the floor of an airport has the same feel regardless of architect's vision.

Of the images of Morocco, the ones that stick in my head are the abrupt contrasts between the traditional and the modern: the burka clad women riding their mopeds as aggressively as any teenager in Italy, the young guys surfing on the Rabat beach under the high walls of the kasbah, the modern trains rolling through fields of wheat being harvested by hand, the broad boulevards named after the king's grandfather which end at the gates to the old walled city.... I left without a sense of how these opposites fit together and, yet, in some way they does. Perhaps the contrast is just in my mind. This westerner who does not understand el Magrib, the "far west" that Morocco represented to the Arab world of North Aftica, this place of Berbers, Arabs, the French and the Spanish, the African and the European...this middle earth.

On my last night in Marrakesh, I paid admittance to one of the terraces overlooking the Jemma el Fna...that great plaza filled with vendors, story tellers, tourists, musicians, food stalls and sellers of herbs and medicines. I found myself standing next to an American woman, living in Germany, who was in Morocco as part of a tour group. As we talked, I shot some video of the scene unfolding beneath us...as it does every night...a scene populated by Moroccans, doing what they have done for many, many years at this northern terminus of the Sahara caravans that once moved ivory, slaves, salt across the desert.

Surfs up in Rabat

Am back in Rabat, flying on Air France tomorrow back to Paris and then to the Colorado Mountains. The beach below the ramparts of the kasbah is home to restaurants, games of soccer, and surf clubs...the current monarch being a founding member of the Rabat Beach Surf Club. The ocean is cold. Morning fogs form but usually burn off by noon. There is a serious need for wet suits. The surfers keep within two long sets of huge stone breakwaters that stretch out into the ocean, protecting the river and the cities, Rabat on one side and Sale on the other, from the ocean waves.


In some ways like the surfers I have just been skimming the waves here in Morocco, riding the surface impressions, not getting very much beyond the immediate sights and sounds. Atheletically, the main sport, principally found in Marrakesh, was in crossing city streets...learning to just go ahead across the street and not hesitating. One evening I followed the lead of two guys as they crossed right through the middle of a huge roundabout...cars, trucks, mopeds swirling about us...the vehicles do not go round the circle as much as draw more or less direct lines through it...we just kept on walking. On safely reaching the other side, I had the impression I was finally able to figure out a little of the psychology of living here. And, at the same time, I was still alive. Great trip.

Jamma El Fna

A great human configuration takes place each night in this plaza. The plaza lies close by the great minaret of the Almohads, completed in the year 1175. It is a place for snake charmers, musicians, acrobats, hustlers, beggers, story tellers, sellers of herbs and medicines...who come to be surrounded by groups formed from the thousands of Moroccans who find this as a kind of ultimate street art. Some have seen this as the place where the sub Sahara tribes and their goods met those from the north, from Spain and Europe, from the Atlas Mountains whose snows are in the distance. And now all these places and peoples are joined by the European tourists who find this a key part of their vacation package.
But what I have noticed as the thousands converge each night is that the tourists are either on the terraces of the restaurants that surround the plaza or down eating in the hundreds of tents that serve up lamb, chicken, sheep heads, snails, oranges, soups, nuts, tajines, couscous and serve them on long tables, the staff calling out to you in French. Spanish, English to sit down and eat by the hundreds. As if Times Square were converted each evening into a vast foodie emporium where all the world sat down and ate together.

Jardin Majorelle

Today I spent in the New City, full of cafes, cars, new construction..."are you interested in a condo in Marrakesh, monsieur?"...and people and tourists going about their lives. Among the visual icons of the city are the gardens bought, restored, and then donated to it by Yves St. Laurant, the French designer and his partner Pierre Berge. The gardens were first begun by Jacques Majorelle, a French artist who lived for many years in Marrakesh in the last century.


The gardens represent a kind of high concept French and Moroccan design interaction in the choice and placement of trees, plants, walkways, gezebos, fountains. The plants are rare and spectacular examples of palms, cactus, bougainvillea, bamboo, water lillies, the plants of palace gardens. But it is really in the design and interaction with cobalt blue pavilions that the experience of walking through the garden comes together. And imposes its own high toned tranquility. Whose pleasure was increased by the hour or two I spent in the cafe within the gardens, talking with some young German tourists escaping from winter and wet spring in Dusseldorf.

So there is this whole high end design scene, in gardens, in home decor, in architecture, in Marrakesh that seems far from the mountain village I stayed in last week but which is connected in the designs of pottery and simple house types. And perhaps in some way connected to the rush of traffic in the streets just beyond the high garden walls. But I did not see the connections as I tried to stay out of the way of careening taxis and wayward mopeds.

Marrakesh

And then there is this huge city, this destination vacation land, this Orlando of the northern fringe of the Sahara. The train station, its scale, openness, terraces, shops and sleek lines is a marvel. In itself, worth the trip. And, then, unexpected for me, the high snow covered peaks of the Atlas mountains that frame the city. Quite like the high Front Range strikes above the Denver skyline. I look again to make sure I am in the right place, continent, and after getting several sets of directions arrive at the hotel.

So Marrakesh has its traditions, its past as an imperial city...from which the Almoravids and Almohads ruled north to Spain and south to Niger, holding together rich trade routes in cloth, slaves, jewels...but it also has its present incarnation as the destination of huge tour buses or package tours. European families with children and strollers and cameras crowd the souks during the day. But the sun is bright, the air is dry...if somewhat full of pollution from cars and mopeds...and the spirit is one of a holiday town.

Toward Marrakesh

A train leaves Tangier promptly at 8:00 and travels south along the Atlantic coast, making me feel I should just get off and watch the waves for a few days. But my ticket says Marrakesh, so I stay in the compartment with my fellow travellers, a government official and a woman returning from a few years in Spain. We stop in Casablanca to switch trains which takes a while to figure out. I have noticed that when you ask people a question like "Cest la voie pour le train a Marrakesh?" and they say "Oui" because they are waiting too, they will check to make sure when the train arrives that you get on. Looking out for the wayfaring stranger.

From Casablanca, the land gets more open. Winter wheat ripens in large fields...I never see a fence between holdings. But I was told earlier that everyone knows where the boundaries are. I see no evidence of farm mechanization, only solitary individuals, mostly women, working in the fields or watching flocks of sheep or goats. The land gets still dryer and the few villages that appear take the form of small walled compounds, everything facing inward, only the thick mud and stone walls facing the world. The train speeds on. The service cart comes around coffee and sandwiches. Kids play in the train corridor. The land gets drier. I am struck by the seeming lack of connection between the train on which I ride and the world I few ever so fleetingly.

On the beach

Funny how you start out the day thinking one thing would happen and, then, after checking into a bare bones hotel for 16 dollars a night here in Tangiers, after a ride in the mountains, and getting to the train station to buy a ticket to Marrakesh for the morning, and not getting a cab, I started to walk back and, then, there was the Mediteranean and this wide wide beach and while not being Miami, it did have all of the attributes of a beach town with the huge ferries coming in from Spain dropping off their pale passengers who will scatter to beach towns, more Miami like, further east along the coast.

In the Rif

Rif rhymes with kif, the local name for marijuana, which is the ,ain traditional crop here so there is this sense that some varient of John Denver is singing about getting high. But I spent last night on one of these farms in an isolated part of the mountains. The government has recently forbidden its cultivation...so production has simply moved further East. But this was a farm stay arranged by a non profit group trying to bring additional resources into these rural areas. So we looked at the agriculture, the small pottery business run by the woman of the house, did some hiking, and had by far the best food I have had thus far in Maroc.

This morning we hiked out about three hours, eventually coming out at a Sunday souk. The souk is held appropriately in what is now a town called Souk El Har or Sunday Souk. It is located on the local highway right at the dividing line between what had been French and Spanish controlled parts of the country. We checked out the scene and then crowded into a collective taxi for the ride back to Chaouen. The town is positively crowded with Spanish tourists here for the Samana Santa...kind of like a reconquista this time with tourist pesos instead of troops.

Hammam

The hammam in Chaychaouen is just around the corner from the main square in front of the old kasbah. It is open to men in the morning and evening and in the afternoon in the afternoon. The hammam is like a communal sauna except wet but not quite a steam room since the water comes from a tap in the wall where it has been heated in an underground furnace burning the wood from olive trees. You get an empty bucket and bowl to pour the water over you and basically everyone sits around in their underwear and is cleansed.

I have decided to spend tomorrow in a rural village, a program organized through a nonprofit under a grant from a university in Barcelona. I am enjoying taking it one day at a time, leaving things open to see what develops as the day unfolds but still having a general idea of where I want to go. I was thinking of maybe just staying here in the north and checking out local sights and history, but I have decided to take the train to Marrakesh for my last long visit in the country.

Chafchaouen

So this is a small village, a small blue village, a beutiful Andalusian blue village. Andalusia was and is Morocco as well as Spain. A vegetable market is going on at the Bab Souk...the Market Gate...down the street; women from the Berber villages up the mountainside bringing in cilantro, carrots, legumes, potatoes, oranges for sale. The most imortant local crop is kif, smuggled in great quantity to Spain a few miles and an European Union away, across the narrow strait of Gibralter.



Am staying at another riad, a small inn designed with an interior court, terraces overlooking the village, and Moroccan design in terms of crafts, architecture, narrow stairways, and lots of light. This part of Morocco was controlled by Spain...which still maintains several small ports along the coast, ten miles or so from here...so there is a lot of Spanish spoken which I easily mix into my French, but no one seems to mind. In the first countyard of the riad are a set of tiles in Spanish and Arabic. A old Spanish tile reads "Dale limonsa mujer no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granda" "Give him alms madam there is nothing in life more painful than to be a blind man in Grenada." The same holds true for this blue village on the other side of the strait.

On another road

Left Fez feeling the need for a more tranquil setting...after all I do live in a small town. So after being told by the driver of a petit taxi...the small taxis that can only drive in the city...that there was no way to get from there to here...I had him drop me at the bus station. I had thought I could get a grand taxi...they go between cities and towns when they fill up with enough passangers, usually seven in a small sedan...but I was wrong. Turns out I would have had to change in several towns on the way.




I was two hours early for the bus, so I had another couple cups of coffee with milk and studied my French. The trip to Chafchaouen took about four hours through countryside that was at first rolling hills but which grew increasingly verticle and the road led through narrow gorges through clouds and light rain, higher and colder, until we rounded a bend and there was the town across yet another valley.