Morocco, Pg 16

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Meknes

We’re on the road to Meknes. It’s not going to be a long drive, probably less than an hour.
There’s not a lot to see along this road, some old village ruins, at least I think they’re ruins; they didn’t even look habitable by Moroccan standards.
There’s lots of bushes, scrub land and a few trees, a hell of a lot more greenery than what we’ve seen in the last few of weeks.
No mountains around here though, however there are lots of rolling hills. From atop several of them you can see parts the city; population about 750,000.

Arriving in Meknes, an older section of the city

This region was inhabited by the Romans more than two thousand years ago, and all that remains from that time are some ruins that was once the city of Volubilis. The ruins are about a fifteen mile drive north of Meknes.
In the ninth century Tunisian Berbers settled the area a bit to the south and built a fortress, which in time became Meknes.

We drove around the outskirts of town looking for a campground, it didn’t take long to find one. We checked in, set up our site then we headed to the inner city looking to have lunch and to find the Medina. We found this one rather quickly.
We parked near the gate, and as soon as we were out of the car some kid was on us immediately.
He wanted to be our guide into the Medina.

I was talking to Mel and Al about something and wasn’t expecting what was about to happen. Eve and this kid were having words, it was obviously something about money.
This kid was pissed off at Eve. She probably tried to low-ball him on the tour price.
He was spouting off angrily at her in Arabic, and as he was he poked his finger in her chest; he did this twice…

Uh oh, this stupid little fucker has stepped over the line, and is now going to find himself in a huge pile of angry white woman shit.

I have to say something here about Eve. She’s not a stranger to swearing, or the use of foul language; but it’s not her normal behavior. Generally she has to be quite pissed off to use that kind of language. She does have her moments that are outside of her normal behavior; and today, in about three seconds we’re going to see one of those moments unfold.

All of a sudden Eve’s face got real red and she started flipping out on him. She started spouting off right back at him, and in a very loud and angry tone, all the while shaking her finger at him in a strong scolding manner; which was now drawing attention from everyone within earshot.

She told him in no uncertain terms that, “if you poke me one more time, you fucking little shit, I’ll break that finger off your hand and shove it up your fucking! ass!”.

The kid may not have understood exactly what she was saying but he understood her anger, and everyone, even if you don’t know the language you still know what fuck means when used in an angry tone directed straight in your face, you better be ready to fight or fuck off.
I’m pretty sure he realized rather quickly that when fighting with this white woman and her face goes almost blood red and she’s yelling angry fuck shots at you, you know you’ve lost this battle.
He made the smart move and immediately, fucked off.

Holt shit…Way to go Eve.

Crumbling defensive wall in old Meknes.
Fans lining up to buy concert tickets to see
Pink Floyd LOL

We decided to venture into the Medina on our own. This Medina was laid out differently than the ones we’ve been in so far.
The alleyways are quite narrow and on a bit of a slight downward slope. The further in you go the deeper and darker it gets.
It was a bit unnerving, but that added more to the mystique and excitement of where we were.

It’s laid out like some kind of mutated spiders web.
The primary alleyways for the most part run to a single point somewhere deep within the Medina, however, some of them only run part way in and end at a “T”, you then have to go either left or right, or maybe an angular direction into even narrower alleyways. But on the whole none of them seemed to be in any real organized manner; at least not from our perspective.
If you didn’t know exactly where you were going you could get disoriented very quickly, we decided not to venture too far in, certainly not without a guide.

We checked out lots of shops, many were like small closets. Navigating the alleyways was a challenge at best because of so many people, goats, and fucking mopeds.
Us guys were even approached by locals, offering to buy the clothes we were wearing; our Levi jeans and jackets, as well as our Rebox and Addias shoes.
The popular brands available in Europe and North America were not available in Morocco accept through black market connections, or from someone currently wearing them.

We decided to do some of our own cooking to reduce costs so we bought a little one byrner gas cooker, very similar to a one burner Coleman stove, good for making coffee or heating soup, etc. We also got some coffee mugs, plates, flatware and a couple of pans.
We’re actually going to cook entire meals on this little…byrner.

We left the Medina and went for a drive around the city, unhappily encountering many fucking! insane mopeds. I think it was here in northern Morocco where the term ‘road rage’ came from.
Anyhow, Meknes is a pretty cool looking town, but the inner city streets are so narrow it makes the driving extremely difficult, even impossible at times in many areas.

The large northern cities that were being settled well over a thousand plus years ago, had very narrow streets, which were just laneways and not streets. They were certainly never made to accommodate a car.
They were made to accommodate small carts being pulled by goats and donkeys.
But still, there are some complete fucking idiots that will attempt to drive through, surprising, some do make it through, most don’t and are stuck for mega hours…

After we got back to the campground Eve and I went to a store and got some things for dinner.
I wanted to get some of the breaded Yak hooves and grilled Peacock tongues that were on sale, and top it all off with some huge chunks of bread and a big jug of steamy warm camel piss,
but Eve said “no way fool”.
We settled for eggs, beans, ravioli, bread, butter, wine and coffee.

We’re going to cook everything on our little gas byrner; it took quite awhile, but worth the wait, it was good.

A bit of the new construction, built right into a bit of the old

Tonight is a really cold night and we’re not equipped for cold weather camping. It was too cold to sit out so we all went to bed early.

We’re up early the next day.
Al is making coffee on our new byrner, it was pretty good, better than most of the coffee we’ve had in the last few weeks.

We’re running out of smoke and need to re-supply.
Us guys went for a walk outside the compound fence, we didn’t have to walk far. There’s always some locals hanging around where the hippies stay.
We were approached by a guy who had some dope to sell.
This guy had weed, we were hoping for hash; but sometime you have to go with what’s available.
It looked okay but that’s certainly no indicator; but it was dirt cheap. It was a very large square white envelope stuffed full, we paid the guy, took the weed and split right away.

Of course it wasn’t as good as the hash we had been smoking, but it was still okay and it’ll keep us in smoke for awhile.
It’s actually the part they discard after the hash making process.
In its plant stage it’s referred to as kif. Even after what is taken for the hash process, the remaining bud material still gets you high for real cheap; and it certainly did.

Moroccans knew that Europeans and North Americans smoked weed for the most part, and just couldn’t understand why anyone would smoke leaves and buds when you could smoke hash.
We had mentioned a few times that in North America hash is very expensive, and not always readily available, weed is cheaper and almost always available, and a bigger bang for the buck….. but it still ain’t as good as the hash.

In Morocco, even the poor can smoke hash. It’s cheaper than food, and food is ridiculously cheap.

Even though we got our food for dirt cheap prices, Moroccans get the same food for less than what we pay; and for Moroccans, hash is cheaper for them than what they pay for food.

The cost for many things in the West is much more expensive than in Morocco; just another thing about life in the west they didn’t quite understand why.
Their belief is that anyone who can afford to travel to their country for a holiday must be very rich.
In Morocco, only the very rich can travel to another country; that’s the only measure they have to gauge what they believe to be our level of wealth.

So, no matter how not rich most of us are, in their minds we are all very rich.

…and a bit of the very old construction.
this is all that remains of the Roman city of Volubilis, a 15 mile drive north of Meknes, once home to about twenty thousand Romans, who, for the most part farmed several large olive groves.
After the city was abandoned, Volubilis was stripped of most of its stone and marble material and used in the ongoing construction of Meknes

I had gone for a shower later in the morning and ran into a guy that noticed the Canadian flag on my jacket.
His name was Alan. He was from Ottawa and asked where I was from, I said Brantford.
He said he was travelling with a guy from Brantford and we should come over to their site for some smoke and a chat.
A bit later we all went over to their campsite.
The guy from Brantford was John. We all had a bit of a smoke fest and a few beers.

During our conversation it turned out that John’s brother Joe is a friend of my brother Paul, and they used to drink beers together at the Squires Court.
I couldn’t believe it man; this was another one of those weird Twilight Zone moments; another mind blower. For such a large planet, it really is a small world.
We hung out with these guys for a while, it was great to run into other travelers from home that you have some kind of a connection to, even if is a bit indirect.
But now it’s off to the Medina again.

When we got there we were again approached by another guy who wanted to be our guide. This guy wasn’t a really young kid, he was about eighteen or twenty, and not a fucking little prick like yesterdays kid was.
We settled on a price and in we go.

He took us to many out of the way shops we would never have encountered on our own, some were quite deep in the Medina.
One of the places we saw was an old building that was once a Muslim school {madrasa} maybe a thousand years ago.

Many of the older buildings in this country that are still in use are over a thousand years old, but many others have unfortunately been allowed to fall into ruin.
Seeing all of these old buildings was quite the buzz for us. Until we came to Morocco we had never seen anything older than a 150, maybe 200 years old, and they were very few and far between.

All of this ancient historical architecture was just blowing my mind. It amazed me as to how some of these places could even be built with little or no construction equipment.
The only real construction equipment that we saw anywhere in Morocco were two guys with shovels and a wheelbarrow.

We went into a shop that had a wide variety of hash pipes, jewelry and other small souvenir items. In talking to the shopkeeper Mel expressed interest in buying a bulk quantity of some products.
The guy invited us into the back of the shop where he had more products.
He served us mint tea and put on some music that we were familiar with to make us feel more comfortable while we looked over his inventory.

He and our guide stood several feet away and spoke to each other in a somewhat whispered tone, speaking a mix of French and whatever; strange we thought as they both speak English quite well.
Because we were within hearing distance they may not have wanted us to hear what they were talking about.

If that was the case, they had to be aware that we might think there behavior would cause us to be somewhat suspicious of them, any reasoning person would surely think that.
As they were talking they would pause periodically and glance over at us for a few seconds, then continue talking again in a whispered tone.

All of a sudden I’m not liking the vibe here, not at all. Al was closer to these guys and was trying to pick up on some of what they were saying.
He told us he thought they might be setting us up for something, and maybe not in a good way but he wasn’t really all that sure.
Al’s assessment of the situation was good enough for us to make the hard call;
our gut feeling was telling us to get the hell out of here,
better safe than sorry.

Mel told the shopkeeper we had to go to an Exchange to get money and we would meet them back at the Medina at 6 o’clock, then maybe we could conduct some business.

They were both trying to get us to tell them where we were staying because they wanted to meet up with us after we we got money changed, then we could all go back to the Medina together.
These guys must have thought we were fucking idiots to think we would go along with that idea; there’s not a chance in hell that we would do that.

Mel said “no fucking way man, we’re not going to do that”, and stated firmly that if they wanted to do business with him, they have to do it his way or not at all. They had no choice but to agree.
At this point all we wanted was to get away from here; the 6 o’clock meeting was now an appointment we had no intention of keeping. We all felt these guys were going to mug us once we got the cash.
Our guide brought us out of the Medina, we waited until he left. We were concerned if we left before he did he may follow us to our camp. Into the car and back to the campground we go, safe and sound.
Fuck those guys.

…but it’s all going to be okay now…
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We cooked dinner on our awesome little byrner, again it took quite awhile, but it was good; and we’re home safe.

It’s really cold tonight, colder then last night.
This cold shit is really harshing our buzz, man. Mel and Aileen were going to sleep in the car and Al is going to sleep in the tent with us.
It was a tight fit but we managed, even a bit of additional body heat would help keep us a little warmer.

In the morning it was still quite cold. The sun is coming up slowly but surely. I’m hopeful its going to start warming up soon.
We’re going to leave today and head west to Rabat and Sale’ on the Atlantic coast.
By the time we got all our gear together and packed in the car and paid up, it was mid morning.
We hit the road out of Meknes.

Just as we were leaving town Mel turned onto a side road where there were several gardens that we wanted to see, they were absolutely beautiful.
Many unusual plants and shrubs, ponds built with mega thousands of pebbles and stocked with small fish, some were built right into the side of hills. Everything was perfectly manicured; and there were several acres of these gardens

We walked around for quite awhile looking at everything. This place for sure was absolutely a gardeners dream. Pictures just do not do them any justice.

The pics above are a few of the gardens we stopped to see before we left Meknes

It’s now time to leave, we have a 160 Km drive ahead of us.
Next stop, Rabat and Sale’.

Page #16

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