Morocco Bound
By Mike Gerrard
‘Genuine antique,’ the shopkeeper in the Marrakech souk reassures us. We examine the two-inch high metal statuette of a circus strongman, standing on a podium and holding a set of weights over his head. ‘Genuine Berber,’ we are told. My friend turns the item upside down to reveal, underneath…. a pencil-sharpener.
A day in Marrakech was merely a bonus, as we’d gone out to explore Morocco on two feet, four feet, two wheels and four wheels, from the snowline of the Atlas Mountains to a sandstorm in the Sahara. Our guide Abdelhak – a real genuine Berber – sighs with relief as we leave the noise of Marrakech behind and head for the mountains. ‘I am from a village in the Rif Mountains in the north of Morocco,’ he tells us, ‘and prefer to be out in the mountains, not in the city.’
Soon we can see why as the jagged white tops of the Atlas Mountains come into view and we drive up along a fertile valley, past orchards of cherry and walnut trees, and through the village of Asni. The Lonely Planet guidebook describes Asni in the kind of phrase you might expect to see in a century-old Baedeker guide: ‘a minor den of iniquity’. I rather fancy staying in a minor den of iniquity, but soon we are in the next major village, Imlil, where we leave the minibus, stuff our bags into the back of a Peugeot car about the size of a large bread-bin while we set off on foot for the 45-minute climb to Aremd, our Berber village home for the next two days.
We are welcomed by Omar Id Mansour, owner of the Chez Omar Id Mansour guesthouse, perched at the top of the village and with magnificent views over the valley, even if your first few minutes there are spent staring at the ground and panting to get your breath back. Revival comes in the form of wild mint tea and a plate of walnuts, merely an appetiser before our lunch.
Lunch is the first of many huge tajines, the Moroccan stew steamed in a ceramic dish with a pyramid lid on the top, and unbelievably delicious – potatoes, carrots, peas, beans and, in the middle, chunks of tender lamb. We scoop it down – or most of it, at least – with round yellow Berber bread, each piece roughly the size of a truck’s hubcap.
As we finish we hear the sound of the imam calling from the mosque at the far side of Aremd, his voice filling the valley. The sounds mingle with a flock of choughs who zoom through the deep blue sky with their peculiar bombing flight, where they tuck in their wings and drop like a falcon, seemingly just for the fun of it. Through binoculars I can just make out the shapes of goats on the far side of the valley, which Abdelhak has spotted with his own falcon-like eyes. ‘At about five or six o’clock,’ he tells us, ‘you might see foxes coming down from the hills, looking for chickens or lambs.’
A walk through the village with Abdelhak makes stuttering progress, as he leaps down the steep and very rough streets with great athleticism, and we rush to keep up, but every few minutes he stops to greet villagers, all of whom seem to be old friends. This is partly because Abdelhak works for a Moroccan tour company called Tizi-Randonnées, which helps fund charitable projects in this and other Berber villages, and the locals appreciate it: fresh water from fountains, an electricity supply.
‘We also helped to refurbish the school,’ he tells us, ‘because the walls had fallen down.’ A torrential summer flood poured down this valley in August 1995, hurling huge rocks with it and washing away not merely school walls but whole buildings and killing several hundred people. In an open space as we walk towards the river, the village boys are playing football. They go wild when Abdelhak throws them a new tennis ball that he has brought from Marrakech.
We call in to see the village bull, which has also been bought to help the Aremd finances. It cost 20,000 dirham, and is hired out to other villages and farmers in the area. ‘They had another bull before,’ Abdelhak tells us, ‘but it died from overwork.’
I nearly died myself, sadly not for the same reason but through trying to keep up with Abdelhak’s pace as he led us along the valley, climbing up towards the snow line, to Sidi Chamarouch, an igloo-like whitewashed shrine to a holy man.
We pass weird apparitions on the way, close encounters of the bizarre kind: extra-terrestrial beings clumping down the track towards us, skiers in their full gear, with boots like lumps of moon rock and outfits in colours not normally seen outside of a sweetshop window. They race along, ski pole in each hand, and you feel you want to tell them the snow is higher up, and besides, they forgot to put their skis on. But they are only stubble-faced Germans and Italians, macho men coming down from hiking around Mount Toubkal, at 4167m the highest point in North Africa. Skiers be warned, there are no ski lifts and we try to fathom the pleasure of hauling yourself up to the ski slopes, skiing down in a few minutes, then having to climb all the way back up for another go. It only confirms my belief that too much exercise destroys the brain cells.
We move on from Aremd after a magical memorable night of home-made music, when a group of villagers turn up at our guesthouse clutching drums of animal skin, like large tambourines, which they warm by the fire till the pitch is just right. Four girls sit along one wall, and endless rounds of call-and-reply songs fill the tiny dining room, the girls occasionally trilling in that ululating African fashion, and when they dance they shake their shoulders rapidly, and have the good grace not to laugh when we fail to emulate them. A skinny man with a roguish grin leads the singing, introducing each song with a little narration in Berber, which no-one will translate for us but which has the girls covering their faces and giggling.
We dance a weaving dance, stopping from time to time to try to vibrate our shoulders, crouching down and jumping back up, almost braining ourselves on the low ceiling. I start to wish I hadn’t had so much of the lamb couscous for supper, though the soup made from vegetables, saffron, coriander, parsley and mixed spices was worth the discomfort. Eventually the villagers take pity on us, and we relax with a verbena tea, while the roguish singer laughs as he leaves, tapping his chest and uttering the only words of English he has said all night: ‘Bob Marley!’
Our next bit of adventure is on two wheels, after we drive through the Col du Tichka, the main route from Marrakech to Ourzazate, and pick up mountain bikes for an afternoon that we’re promised is ‘downhill almost all the way’. Which it is, almost, and we race by orchards, past donkeys seemingly carrying haystacks, and wave back at the Berber children who we assume are yelling cheery greetings but are probably calling out the Berber word for ‘Wally!’
‘Yalla!’ is one of the few Arabic words I know, and I’m pleased to find that Moroccan camels understand it just as well as Egyptian camels: ‘Let’s go!’ At Zagora we set off on three camels, walking first through the town’s suburbs, overtaken at one point by a man carrying two sheep on his moped. Live ones, that is, but not alive for long as we’re a few days away from the Islamic feast of Aid El Kebir. This celebrates Abraham’s willingness to obey the command of God and sacrifice his son, Isaac, which is bad news for the sheep as they get to play the sacrificial role, except that God doesn’t step in and stop it at the last minute.
We plod on through palm groves and past bamboo plantations, looking down from the lofty height of a camel onto men trotting by on donkeys so small that the men’s feet almost trail on the ground. We reach the desert proper, for Zagora – just a few miles from the Algerian border – stands on the edge of the Sahara, and nearby are dunes that ought to have Omar Sharif riding over them in a heat haze. We have the heat, but the rather less attractive sight of three pale Brits with pink peeling noses.
We sip tea and tuck into a minty salad in the shade of some palm trees, and in the afternoon head further into the heat and across the rock and sand, with the aim of spending the night in a Berber tent. But as we cross some dunes and emerge onto a vast flat plane, with a cluster of black tents visible in the far distance, the wind blows up. We pull the headscarves over our faces, to avoid adding a sandblast effect to our burning noses.
The wind whistles around us, and we can scarcely see Abdelhak walking hunched over a few feet in front of the camels as the air turns to sand all around. The camels seem unperturbed. It takes us an hour or so to reach the tents, which are billowing in the wind, their floors covered with a series of mini-dunes. We try to wash sand from our mouths, our ears, our eyes, and wonder how the Berbers manage without a ready source of wet-wipes. We all decide that we are not Lawrence of Arabia after all, and when the van miraculously turns up with our luggage, we wimp out and head back to Zagora. A hot shower never felt so good.
A famous sign in Zagora points towards the desert with the information that Timbuktu is 52 days that-a-way. We head in the opposite direction, as Marrakech is one day this-a-way, and there we’ll have our encounter with Mohammed Trotter and his genuine antique Berber pencil-sharpener. It is all the more remarkable when you realise that Berber is an oral language. I wish I’d bought it now.