The phone is ringing. I open my eyes and take in the penetrating blow of sunlight at eight o’clock in the morning. I fumble through the folds in the damp sheets, searching for my morning wake-up call.
It’s Andrew. “Are you awake?” I answer in the affirmative, trying to mask the grogginess from the effects of a late-night bout with the interweb [internet].
“Get over here. I’m eating your breakfast.”
I boil water. Wash my face. I can not find my bathing suit. Maybe the guy who does my laundry skimmed it from my previous load? Why would he want my bathing suit? Then again, I can not find either of the two. Bathing suits must go for a high price on the Moroccan street.
My thoughts drift to my last beach experience, and my attempts at explaining the phenomenon of girls dressed in skinny jeans, tight shirts, hijabs, and djellabas, bathing in the waters of Sable d’Or. Young girls stripping down to their lingerie, choosing to keep their clothes dry. Boys gawking from a distance. Approaching, only to be rejected--time to get some new material.
I finally find what I am looking for lodged in an errant pile of clean, folded clothes mangled in the mess of my sleeping bag--won’t need that anytime soon.
I pack a bag, filling it with only the essentials: sunscreen, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a multi-colored beach towel, and an Electric City frisbee disc. I will need something heftier than my standard beach bag--plastic, borrowed from Marjane.
Over a breakfast spread of figs, strawberries, croissants, and Andrew’s syrup creation, Andrew and I discuss logistics.
“El-Jadida might be a decent spot,” Andrew suggests. “Then again,” he contradicts himself, “Lonely Planet is like an inkblot test. You’ll always find what you are looking for, until you get wherever it is you are going.”
El-Jadida. Sounds positively charming. Quaint even. And since Jaci and Caroline are taking the car to Essaouira, we should hit a town on the map normally out of Rabat-proper and the bus of the people, complete with glue huffers and the restless Moroccan youth bound for the Temara plage.
We navigate the city route, Andrew reluctantly handling the map. Caroline masterfully maneuvers the neglected Dacia. Broken glass. A Mercedes SUV careens into the guard rail. We have little warning. “Gun it,” shouts Andrew, as we squeeze by the eighteen-wheeler to our right. We take a collective breath.
Thankfully the air-conditioner works. It is unbearably hot and humid since the shurgi, the hot desert wind from the Sahara, blew in last night. As we cruise the coast, Radio 2M provides us with the soundtrack to our adventure.
Rabat. Temara. Mohammedia. Casablanca. What are we thinking? Jadida, you better be worth this trip. And the uncertain return by train, grand taxi, bus, or foot (worst case scenario).
We casually observe our surroundings. A stretch of beach, vacant and decaying hotels, villas under construction, snack shops promising fresh fish, and a crumbling bastion of Portuguese history--Mazagan. A little too quiet.
Andrew and I stroll through the lazy streets. Moroccan crafts. Andrew stops to marvel at a blue rug. We find our way to the ramparts and peer over the edge of the fortifications. Green algae covers the entrance to the old Portuguese port. Fishing vessels crowd the waters below. Nets, piled on the docks, waiting for the freedom of open water. Larger boats, some rusting from years of neglect. Shipwrights slowly piece together others.
El-Jadida, or Mazagan, as the Portuguese called it, reeks of history. Canons rust from defensive positions. The walls of the Church of the Assumption crumble. The Jewish synagogue, abandoned. The rampart bastions, a convenient space to relieve oneself. Andrew and I step out of one of the bastions, Bastion de St Sebastian, having consulted the map, we carefully climb down a series of steps, avoiding cracks and feces. Obviously someone has missed the mark. Or couldn’t wait. A line has formed. We round the corner, a young, shirtless boy dirtied with the fine brown sand, enters the the lookout.
We wait at the locked door to the Citerne Portugaise, an underground water reservoir once fed by a series of gutters. The Portuguese created a network of these channels. We pay the ten dirhams to enter. An old, weary Moroccan guides us down a series of steps into darkness. My eyes strain. It is difficult to focus at first in the black. A dank, moist smell rises as we descend. I notice a series of arched columns, supporting the ceiling above. Bricks line the floor and the wall. From the center, a single shaft of bright white light illuminates the cavernous chamber. Quiet. An inch of water collects on the floor in some places of the cistern, once filled to the brim. Green algae collects on the floor around the light. A sharp contrast of colors--black, green, white.
We make our way to the beach, having seen the neglected UNESCO World Heritage site, including the pentagon shaped minaret of the mosque. We cross the road, which has replaced the tepid moat that once surrounded this island fortress. We find a decent snack shop just off the beach offering fresh fish. We order too much. Calamari, shrimp, fish, friend, and salad. Our hands are a mess with grease and salt as we dissect the carrion, carefully removing the hair-like bones from the meat. Andrew dismembers the shrimp and seasons it with lime.
“Want an eyeball?” I offer.
“Corona would be nice.”
Our appetites satiated, we move to the beach, crowded and dirty. We pass a small carnival on the corniche, complete with a ferris wheel. Ghostly abandoned buildings, once hotels, dot the coast. Puccini, a swank lounge with a stocked bar, detains us. Held prisoner, we suffer through air-conditioning, a round of Heinekens (the Flag Special is warm), and the soulful licks of Eric Clapton.
Without the requisite time, we depart and find a spot of cleaner, coarser, whiter sand down the coast, just outside the Ibis Moussafir. The overcast sky darkens. It’s 5:30, but it feels as if the sun is about to set.
I awake from a brief nap. Andrew is talking. He is comparing a mouse to the universe, trying to illustrate the comparative size of a neutrino. He is reading Christopher Potter’s You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe.
It’s time to go. None the tanner, we pack our bags and find a taxi that take us to the train station far outside town. Thankful we didn’t try to walk (in the wrong direction), we pay our driver fifteen dirhams. And we wait.
The sky darkens. The smell of rain, and then a brief drizzle. We talk about the digital age. About our respective blogs. String theory. I peer into my open book. The Joads are readying their Hudson Super-Six for California. They have just slaughtered their swine for salty sustenance on their travels.
Swine Flu, or Influenze A (H1N1), has finally reached Morocco. A Canadian introduced it on a flight from Montreal to Fes. Apparently the thermal imaging cameras I observed at the airports failed to detect the three or four degree variation of the body’s core temperature indicating a fever. Nevermind the presense of H1N1.
Andrew’s mouth is wide open. “Did you know that...?” No. I never knew a neutron star was that dense.
The train to Rabat is three hours.
Liz, Stephanie, Vivek, and I climb into the Jordanian equivalent of the Moroccan grand taxi. French is rarely spoken here. We circumnavigate the traffic circles of Jordan, and finally reach a snaking road, hugging the cliffs outside of Amman, to the King Hussein Bridge border crossing. This way, there are no police, our driver informs us.
The pretty girl with blond hair tied back into a bun. I notice a pair of silver earrings. She cracks a smile, breaking the confused tension I have created. She thrives off of this stuff. Dressed in tight fitting fatigues, pants pulled low. A sidearm. Rifle. I smile back. Maybe I smile too much. I am actually enjoying this.
