Spain with Jane

My transit from Morocco to Valencia was a blur. Sandwiched between a couple weeks of travel with old pals and a couple weeks of travel with the cool new Scottish girlfriend, this little gap of time didn’t make a deep impression on me.

From the ferry docks at Tarifa, I took a shuttle to Algeciras, another port down just down the coast from Gibraltar. I got a decent haircut in a shopping mall from a woman who spoke no English, took a Blablacar to Granada, took a nap because I didn’t feel great, ate a big plate of patatas bravas, busked a bit, and spent the night in a hostel. In the morning I took another Blablacar to Valencia. The drivers were nice and the rides were smooth, but my tummy was a bit off – no appetite, low energy, mild fever chills. I spent the night in Valencia just resting (and writing this blog post, just to show you how far behind I’ve gotten in my blogging), hoping my head and stomach would feel better soon. It was like my body had been carrying on solely from the residual energy of my friends, and once I was on my own again, the exhaustion caught up to me in a rush. But all I really had to do was ride in cars and take care of myself, so the timing could have been much worse.

By now you’ve gathered that I’m content to keep my budget low. I had raised the leisure bar a bit while traveling with Andrew, Madison, and Drew, since reliable lodgings and good foods count for more when you’re sharing them with friends. For the new phase of the trip I was staying on that level – low budget, but not hobo budget. Jane had planned out a rough itinerary, booking impressively cheap hotels and AirBnBs ahead of time, while I booked the inexpensive flight we would take from Barcelona to Northeast Italy after a few days in Spain. While I was in Morocco, she was in Ibiza with friends, the first phase of her first holiday in a year. Now she was ready to recover from her exhausting party holiday, so it was all the more meaningful that she was willing to backpack and ride trains with me for two weeks. She’s done the whole backpack/hostel thing in Europe already, and she really doesn’t have to pinch pence, so for her to rough it in deference to my budget shows that she really likes me a lot.

 

Jane Armour took this picture

We had a very happy reunion in front of our goofy little Valencian hotel. She was worn out and I was feeling sick, so we didn’t push ourselves too hard to explore Valencia. When I felt up to it, I showed Jane the main attractions downtown, and in the evening we hung out in Ruzafa, the up-and-coming cool neighborhood south of the city center, and had some really nice tapas and drinks before my aching tummy sent us home for an early night. The next day we ended up in the same area and got some more snacks (dried mango and kiwi from a big food market, sangria and tapas in Ruzafa) before meeting our Blablacar driver to go to Barcelona.

 

Barcelona is one of Jane’s favorite places in the whole world. With its unique mix of Mediterranean leisure and multicultural excitement, old city and modern revival, the city is full of surprises. Every winding alley leads to something cool. When I was here with Andrew, Drew, and Madison, we were just getting into the swing of our trip and didn’t quite get the best out of Barcelona. But now it was Jane’s turn to play tour guide.

I’d already seen a lot of the major sites, so we were able to skip some of the essential tourist stuff this time and just have fun. Sometimes I feel like my summaries of Spain are just “sangria and tapas” over and over, so I won’t go into the culinary details, but coming back to the city with a cool girl lent a new warmth and thrill to the lifestyle. But I was still feeling sick – nothing dramatic, just regular bouts of discomfort and frustration – so we were never able to stay out for too long or get too comfortable. So while Barcelona has endeared it to me, I still feel like my best visit to the city is yet to come.

In my last post on Barcelona I wrote about the amazing cathedral we visited, La Sagrada Familia, a modern architectural model. This time we visited the old Gothic cathedral, The Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia, another place that’s very special to Jane. It’s been thoroughly eclipsed in fame by La Sagrada Familia, and as a result, it’s remarkably free of crowds. It’s tucked away in a densely built part of the old city. There’s still a plaza out front like you’d expect, but compared to the other one, there’s just not a lot to see from the outside. But you should go in anyway.

On the inside it’s not breathtaking in the usual way, but special in its own. There’s a dark chapel that reminded me of the one at Montserrat, with glittering statues and black woodwork and so many candles, shrouded in silence. But even better is the atrium just outside, walled in but open to the sky, where trees grow and garden greenery enshrouds plaques and statues, and ducks splash around in a babbling fountain, marching and quacking like they own the place, which they really seem to. This is a softspoken cathedral, one where you can stand for hours listening to the ducks chatting and watching sunlight dapple through the leaves. It’s a cathedral where you can sense the abiding presence of the divine without it being hammered into you by imposing artistic statements or marred by the weight of the Catholic church’s checkered past.

That evening we took a bus up to Tibidabo, where a small mountaintop amusement park overlooks the city. They have some roller coasters and bumper cars and stuff, and, in typical Spanish fashion, it shares space on the mountaintop with a small cathedral, topped with a humongous statue of Jesus coming in for a hug. We rode the Ferris wheel and got an even better view of the city, its broad tapestry of yellow lights stitching their way into the horizon, ending abruptly at the swallowing, black void of the sea.

 

Jane Armour also took this photo. And the next one.

 

 

 My budget and the late hour kept us from riding all the rides, but we made sure to hop onto the big carousel before we left. I think that’s the biggest smile I’ve seen on Jane’s face to date.

 

It hardly seemed like any time at all before we were in the airport and I was arguing with the Vueling Airlines employees who wanted to make me check my banjo, in its soft case, as baggage, where it would surely be obliterated, even though the airline who sold me the tickets had a policy allowing instruments like mine to stay in the cabin. It was very tense, and mild language barriers didn’t help, but we got through it, and soon Jane and I were flying over the glittering Mediterranean to Italy.

Marrakesh, North Africa

We left Essaouira on a sunny afternoon – after leaving the Mediterranean coast, I don’t think we saw a single cloud in Morocco – and embarked on the three-hour drive to Marrakesh. On the outskirts of the town, where the buildings thinned out but people were still everywhere, we saw a young Moroccan dude standing by the roadside, waving his index finger at oncoming cars. Hitchwiki‘s page on Morocco had prepared me for this – Moroccans hitchhike using their index finger instead of their thumbs. We made the decision in seconds, and Andrew pulled over to pick the hitchhiker up.

His name was Faical. He was a college-age dude from Marrakesh who spoke passable enough English to explain that he had casually hitched to Essaouira for the weekend and was heading back home. We happily took him in, and for the next three hours we had a friendly Moroccan to make conversation with. Faical was as curious about us as we were about him, but the language barrier made progress slow, sometimes painstaking. At times he would seem to understand us perfectly, responding coherently and thoughtfully, but then we’d say something to his utter bewilderment, or he would say something in clear yet nonsensical English, so matter-of-factly that I felt like my grasp of the language must be slipping. But we were all having fun.

We dropped Faical off at his neighborhood on the northwestern outskirts of Marrakesh, where instead of having suburbs or farmland around it, the city just tapers off into barren desert. This was our first trek away from the ocean, and indeed, Marrakesh seems to make no sense. Apparently a river feeds it, but we never saw the thing, so it just felt totally absurd that such a dense, sprawling city could exist in such a miserably hot place. It was late afternoon when we started nearing the city center, and the heat was sweltering.

We had been warned about Marrakesh. Just as Tangiers was a place to take care, where naive tourists were seen as easy pickings for all kinds of shady entrepreneurs, Casablanca and Marrakesh were popular with tourists and densely packed, notorious for petty crime and bad deals. Marcus, who had lived in Rabat and traveled all around Morocco about seven years ago, had said it was annoying but not particularly unsafe, but I’d also heard my mom’s review of the country – she and my dad traveled in Morocco in the seventies and had to cut their trip short because the begging and hassling were so exhausting to them. And Marrakesh that phenomenon’s infamous epicenter.

As in Essaouira, we had used our AirBnB app to book rooms in cross-promoting hostels, and as in Essaouira, we realized only when all promising roads led to dead ends that our hostel was in the medina and we would have to walk. This time it wasn’t dramatically walled in, but everything was pedestrian only. Andrew was a hero to us all, valiantly maneuvering the Kangoo through frustratingly pedestrian-only roads and roundabouts, but to no avail. Eventually a Moroccan dude on a bike pulled up to us and asked if we needed help. We explained that we were looking for someplace to park so we could walk into the city center. He told us to follow him and immediately pedalled off in the other direction.

Andrew sprang to life. Imagine the theme from Diddy Kong Racing playing as Andrew gunned the engine after this blazing fast cyclist, always disappearing around a corner as we swerved around cars and carts and hapless pedestrians in an exhilarating and utterly pointless display of Andrew’s stunning reflexes, honed by thousands of hours of slack-jawed video gaming as if his whole adolescence was a training ground for this exact moment. Maybe it was. It was really quite impressive how Andrew managed to keep our guide in his sights without killing anyone or destroying any property, even as one block turned into two and we realized this guy was taking us halfway across the city at this breakneck pace. We all took turns trying to persuade Andrew to slow down so as not to cause an international incident, but he could not be dissuaded. Someday he’ll have told every grandchild he knows about the time when he lived out one of those “chase the NPC” video game missions in real life and aced it on his first try. “What were video games?” the cyborg grandchildren will telepath to him. He will smile condescendingly.

It was a bit of a buzzkill when, upon finally pulling into a parking area, our guide demanded money, then frowned at what we gave him and demanded more. If he wanted us to feel indebted to him, he should have done the negotiating beforehand rather than masquerading as a friendly passerby. Maybe that was some super American/western thinking on our part, or maybe we were just standing our ground, but we didn’t like feeling swindled.

Upon exiting the car we immediately felt sweaty and parched; the heat in Marrakesh was on another level entirely from Spain and the Moroccan coast. We followed our maps toward the hostel and found ourselves crossing the big central square, Jemaa el-Fnaa. It was like something out of a story. The square itself was vast and packed with people; you could never see far in front of you through the crowd. So you would slip through in your general direction of travel until something distracted you.

There were a lot of the usual Moroccan diversions we’d seen elsewhere – juice bars, restaurants with pushy hosts, vendors of crafts of all types – and a whole menagerie of spectacles we had not yet seen. There was music everywhere, from Berber stuff like we’d heard in Essaouira to all sorts of African drumlines to snake charmers playing their reedy flutes. Entrepreneurs showed off their chained monkeys for tourists; I felt a bit guilty even acknowledging them, knowing that the only reason I hadn’t seen something like this before was that my culture has made up its mind that that stuff is unethical (with the exception of circuses). The big takeaway was that Marrakesh isn’t just the big Moroccan city. We’d seen those. This was something else. Marrakesh is a North African capital, a cultural hub, a place where everything interesting or marketable from the whole region comes together to shake its feathers for the tourists. That’s why, even though Marrakesh is hot and loud and intense and a little more dangerous, I still remember it fondly. A traveller really gets a lot of spectacle for their buck. The best of North Africa is there on full, raucous display.

We were almost through the thick of the crowd when we thought we saw a pair of preteen boys fistfighting with a crowd around them. We didn’t stay to watch, but we all exchanged incredulous looks. Jemma el-Fnaa was another world.

We turned onto a busy market street, then onto a slightly less busy market street, then into a deserted alley, where our hostel was supposed to be. We had somehow found two conflicting names and part of an address, but none of it was helpful, as only half the doors on the alley had numbers or words at all, and none of them had the number or name we were looking for. We doubled back, then tripled back, growing more and more concerned, splitting up into pairs and quadrupling back. But eventually someone must have knocked on an unmarked door and gotten lucky, because soon our host was ushering us into the hostel.

It was a really cool place. There was an open-air square in the center of the building, with a first-floor lounge, a couple floors of balconies and rooms, and a rooftop terrace with comfy furniture and a little kitchen. The rooms were clean and cheap, at somewhere between 10 and 20 euros per guest. Our host, a young, hip-looking Moroccan named H’Mmad who seemed to live there, explained that he was just starting the enterprise, and he was doing everything he could just get the word out about it. He was a generous host, giving us maps and tea (it’s a Moroccan thing to pour the tea from as high up as possible) and talking with us awhile on the rooftop, which had a serious Agrabah vibe.

Faical had offered to show us around in the evening, so after a quick rest we headed back into the square to meet him. On the way we stopped to take a closer look at the boyfighting ring. It was exactly what we’d feared. I don’t want to assume those two boys boxing without gloves were helpless victims – maybe the whole thing could be viewed as an admirable display of capitalist entrepreneurship – but I know these things can get dark, so I assumed the worst. Madison takes good pictures, and he seized his opportunity, sneaking his camera up surreptitiously for a quick shot of the spectacle. He wasn’t sneaky enough. The older boy who passes the hat and collects the tips (bets?) for the fighting ring was on him in a second, not letting him leave without paying for the picture he took. He reluctantly coughed up a few dirham, and we walked on in the sobering reality that we’d just financially contributed to the boyfighting ring.

We met Faical by the police station on the side of the square. The first place he took us was a little street sandwich place where you can get what amounts to a Moroccan sloppy Joe (delicious) for barely $1 USD. We felt like kings. Without a clear agenda for our exploits, we let Faical take us wherever he thought was cool. We ended up south of the square in the Kasbah area after a longer-than-expected walk – the language barrier with Faical was still difficult – drinking delicious smoothies and listening to Bob Marley while Faical told us about his life as a nursing student. The area was cool. Alcohol isn’t impossible to find in Morocco, but it’s definitely not ubiquitous, and nightlife is very different when alcohol isn’t at the center of it. People still go out to smoke and dance to music and eat, and the clubs we walked by had all that, but the feeling was different. Andrew was a lot more curious about them than the rest of us, and in retrospect I wish I’d overcome my travel fatigue a little more and latched onto his nighttime enthusiasm. We headed back to our hostel before Faical was quite done with his night, thoroughly worn out after exploring both Essaouira and Marrakesh in one day.

Our host cooked us breakfast for a few extra dirham, and it was delicious and copious. We shot the breeze with him and his friend before heading out to meet Faical one last time on our way out of town. He had offered to take us to a hammam, a kind of traditional Moroccan bathhouse. We didn’t really know what to expect, but it was a chance to do a particularly Moroccan thing with a true Moroccan, so we were all in. It took us half the morning to decipher Faical’s cryptic texts and figure out where he was trying to meet us, so we were a little frustrated when we finally met up – we had to drive back to Tangiers that afternoon to get me and Madison back to Spain the next morning.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, and I’m not sure how what we experienced differs from whatever extravagant hammam tourists without local hitchhiking guides end up at. It was dirt cheap, for one thing, out on the edge of the city, with only the most local dudes inside. Here’s the concept, to the best of my knowledge: Morocco is hot. Bathing in cool water is somehow not the obvious solution to the problem of the heat. Instead, you walk into a tiled, skylit sauna where the floor itself sears your little baby feet, and fill up several buckets with absolutely scalding water. Then you have a seat on the floor and dump that water all over yourself. There are some nice spa elements, as you use little pads to exfoliate your whole body (Faical had said we should wear nothing, but everyone was in their swim shorts, to our chaste Western relief. I guess that’s what he meant). Then we rinsed off and repeated. There was a little soapy stage, and at one point we each let Faical twist us around on the ground and yank on our limbs and give us a brief little back massage with his feet – a vulnerable and strangely squishy experience that made perfect sense in the context of what was going on.

We kept expecting the next step to be the cool-water rinse-down phase, as we were sweating like dogs and not really feeling clean or refreshed at all, but it never came. At the end, you just dry off and put your clothes on. I guess the idea is that, like a rough massage/limb-popping, the relief comes from the fact that when you leave the hammam, you aren’t suffering anymore. The heat outside is the refreshing cool stage. I’m not sure any of us would be enthused to do it again, but it kind of made sense, in a bizarre way.

Madison had to catch a flight out of Madrid, and I was going to meet Jane in Valencia for a couple weeks of romping around Spain and Italy together, so that hammam was really the last hurrah for the two of us. Andrew would take us all back to Tangiers and drop off the Kangoo, and then he and Drew would spend a few more days exploring the country by other means before ferrying back to Europe themselves. We blitzed through a Moroccan grocery store to restock on snacks and water. I wanted a plum, so I tried to buy one, but the cashier wouldn’t ring it up and just gave it back to me. I guess he was giving it to me for free. I took it and he didn’t stop me, so he must have been. But I have no idea why. Ever cryptic with his passable but not fluent English, Faical’s only explanation was, “You’re not in America anymore.”

The drive back to Tangiers was hot and long and tolerable. We listened to music out of the one hissily working speaker and played our usual word games to pass the time. Our AirBnB in Tangier was truly the worst, mixing problems we’d seen in other Moroccan AirBnBs (unreachable host, eventually being let in by some acquaintance of the host, a severe lack of toilet paper) with new problems (no wifi, a terribly moldy bathroom), and our dinner was just the wrong balance of price and quality – high and low, respectively. Andrew, bedraggled from days of driving, went off on his own personal odyssey to find alcohol while we ate. He came back as we were finishing, even more haggard and disappointed than before. No luck. Madison and I said goodbye to Drew and Andrew the next morning and rode the ferry in tired silence, watching Africa disappear into the misty horizon.

 

Essaouira, Morocco’s Best

To get from Rabat to Essaouira by car, you drive parallel to the Atlantic coast for five to six hours – closer to six if you miss a turn bypassing Casablanca (we’d mostly heard it was terrible). The highway north of Casablanca is long and straight and well maintained, but once you’re south of it, the roads get narrower and dustier, and steady car traffic is replaced more and more with weird, cobbled-together vehicles and donkey-driven carts. The road slows down to pass directly through small villages thick with sun-darkened, robed Moroccans carrying wares and supplies between stalls and carts and small shops. For such remote places, there are lots of people out and about in these little bustling community centers. I saw far more donkeys in a couple days than I have in my entire life, shepherds running flocks of sheep along the side of the road like after-school cross-country practice.

In the long, empty spaces between the villages, we’d sometimes see Moroccans so isolated it defied our reasoning – men staring at cows, young children just sitting and staring into the hazy emptiness. What did these people do all day?

We arrived in Essaouira at dusk. Low buildings buzzing with animals and pedestrians rose up to the high stone wall that encircled the medina. Lurching slowly through the swarming streets, we realized we would have to park outside and enter the medina by foot to get to our hostel. We finally dealt with the car and entered a tiny, dark archway that led us into a quiet, dimly lit street. I’ve written about narrow, winding roads before, but the backstreets of Essaouira took it to another level, cramped and mysterious, painted with the night’s shadows.

The proprietor of the hostel greeted us, a scraggly guy whose smile was missing some teeth. He gave us a map and pointed us toward some good food, and expressed some interest in jamming when he saw my banjo. We never got around to that, but an hour later we were having delicious chicken tagine and couscous and drinking mint tea in a quiet restaurant. We explored the medina some more afterwards but didn’t stay out too late. Driving six hours wears you out.

In the morning we went out for breakfast, finding a little cafe that did tea and coffee and crepes and a full Moroccan breakfast, which has lots of bready things and also tea and olives. But the highlight of the morning was a busking street band that came by and played a song for the cafe’s outdoor patrons. There were maybe six of them. The music was driven by a primitive, fretless, picked banjo-like instrument and a one-string bowed instrument, both looking handmade and precarious. Half of the players played percussion, hand drummers and the obvious MVP, a guy playing a little metal disc, mounted on top of his head, with drumsticks. The song was fast and loud, complex polyrhythms supporting call and response vocals and aggressive bowed melodies. We were happy to tip them when they finished, and the one banjo-like thing, communicating mostly with hand gestures, inquired about my instrument  – I had brought the banjo with me, just in case. I pulled it out of its case and we played a few notes back and forth, to the evident delight of him and the whole band.

Madison took this picture

There was a lot to see and do in Essaioura – surely things that were also in Rabat, but more accessible here. Essaioura felt much more relaxed than Rabat or Tangiers. There were tourists, sure, European and even American, but much less of Rabat’s pulsing urban intensity. Everything was walkable and cheap, and the crowds were manageable. We spent most of the day exploring. We found the beach almost by accident, climbing up some ersatz steps into a ragged gap in the city wall, covered in trash and smelling of all kinds of gross, to find a spacious, beautiful shoreline covered in shells and birds. Kids played behind us, throwing rocks at each other, while we waded in the waves, stepping out on an old, eroding stone pier to look back at the walled city behind us.

On the other side of town was the harbor. You’ll smell it before you see it, a powerful stink of fresh fish guts and decomposition. Young laughing boys jumped off a bridge into the water while older men gutted fish in huge piles, all the while being swarmed by hundreds of seagulls at once. I’d never seen so many, and they were frenzied, filling the air with the sounds of their shrieks and beating wings as their bloody beaks dropped bits of fish into the roiling water below. We walked past that spectacle, past grounded ships of all ages and colors and states of decay, to where active fishing vessels floated busily, filling every inch of visible water. Fishmongers monged fish everywhere, and between their stalls fishers trimmed and folded their nets and busied themselves with whatever else fishermen do at midday.

A low wall extended into the ocean at an oblique angle to the shore, dividing sea from harbor, cushioned somehow from the brunt of the violent waves by a long pile of big stone jack-shaped things. Drew and Andrew and Madison climbed out on them while I played banjo, gathering a small audience of Moroccon teens for a couple songs.

Then we headed back to the docks and had a fishy lunch. A restaurant was built into the sea wall, and chefs were cooking metal racks loaded with tiny fish on a smoky outdoor grill and serving them right there. Andrew bartered the owner down to a price of maybe 150 dirham for three of us to have a big salad and three racks of seafood. It was great meal – fresh as could be, shrimp large and small, with some meatier type of fish served whole. We left a huge pile of bones and scales and eyes and shells in our wake.

That day in Essaouira was my favorite part of our Moroccan road trip. In an otherwise thrilling, strange country, Essaouira was especially beautiful, particularly friendly, and not as stifling or overwhelming as some other places. It was like a little oasis. As different as the culture and lifestyles in Morocco may be, in Essaouira, with a couple days of acclimation behind us and the tension of big-city tourist-scamming reduced, we felt free to relax and enjoy the warmth of a beautiful seaside town glowing with life. I’d like to come back and eat all the food again, maybe go out on a boat, definitely jam with those musicians.

Into Morocco; Morning in Rabat

A bus took us from Seville to Tarifa, the port town on Spain’s southernmost tip. The ferry across the strait of Gibraltar was a little less cushy than the ones I took in the UK, but pretty much the same. We dozed and listened to things in our headphones, or did some more last-minute research while we still had European cell service. We had made an online reservation to pick up a rental car in Tangiers and drive it around Morocco, and Andrew was worried. The internet said that the Avis car rental place was in a specific commercial area of Tangiers, but there was no address anywhere, and our phones weren’t able to call Moroccan numbers. Andrew’s exasperation peaked when the customer service person at Avis’ US headquarters confirmed our reservation but was just as perplexed as Andrew about its location – even Avis didn’t know where this Avis was.

Most Moroccans speak French or Arabic, with Berber mixed in in more rural places, but in a busy town like Tangiers, everyone whose profession involves squeezing money out of tourists speaks fluent English, and they’re good at what they do. We had been warned about this. Taxi drivers swarmed us as we searched the docks for an ATM to get some Moroccan Dirham (about 10 Dirham to 1 US dollar), and we struggled to not seem confused or desperate as we desperately asked if any of them knew where the Avis at the Tangier Free Zone was. Drew was giddy with excitement to haggle, so he and Andrew took charge of the negotiations. We really were desperate – it was getting late, and if we didn’t make it there and get our car, we’d have to stay in this crummy town overnight and miss a day of travel.

A taxi driver offered to take us to the car rental for 100 Dirham, half of what the first had offered us. We figured out later that that still wasn’t a great price, but it was worth it to us. We crammed into the old sedan as he lurched and swerved down a wide, thickly congested thoroughfare with chaotic roundabouts and a very loose concept of lanes. We were in bumper-to-bumper traffic about half the time, during which every driver, ours included, honked constantly, uselessly, as if the jam could be cleared by pure spite.

Our driver stopped just inside of the commercial area, at a Hotel Ibis. He kept repeating “Ibis” back to us when we said “Avis.” We weren’t convinced that he couldn’t tell the difference. But Drew disappeared up the road, and he came back with good news a minute later. I still have no idea what fluke of physics allowed it, but somehow he’d caught a glimpse of the small Avis sign in the distance on our way in, through intervening trees and buildings. An hour later we were all packed up in our dated Renault Kangoo (not the car we’d reserved), ready to hit the road to Rabat.

Initially anxious to drive in Morocco’s chaos, Andrew’s confidence recovered quickly. Highway driving is about the same wherever you go, and Andrew found a perverse rush in navigating the city streets. It was like a video game, cars swerving and honking as they flowed between lanes like water. At one point we passed a long, high wall with heavily armed soldiers posted in pairs every hundred feet or so. It wasn’t clear what they were guarding, but seeing assault weapons out in the open like that was surreal. A couple times the road crossed through military checkpoints, where armed soldiers stopped cars under the crisp red and green Moroccan flag and slowly waved them through. We held our breath even though we had nothing to hide.

We got into Rabat after dark. We had expected Madison’s phone to be able to roam there, but it wasn’t connecting, so our only tools with which to find our AirBnB host were my offline map app and some old texts. Our host had told us at the last minute that he would be traveling, leaving his friend to meet us, but we weren’t able to make contact with either at first. We parked at a McDonald’s, where Drew and Andrew stayed to use their wifi while Madison and I looked for the apartment. The correct street was dimly lit and empty, buildings numbered only occasionally. Taking our best guess, we entered an unlabeled apartment building behind a kebab restaurant. There were no lights in the spiral stairwell, so we used our phones as flashlights and climbed the five or six floors until we found an apartment with the correct number. No response.

We regrouped at the McDonald’s, messaged the host’s friend again, and finally heard from him. He met us on the street minutes later, a young artist dude with a beard and long dreadlocks. Madison and I actually had found the correct place, but he had been out. Turns out there were buttons to turn on the stairwell lights everywhere, we had just missed them. Now, in the middle of the stairwell, we could see the most rickety, clattering -elevator I’d ever been in. It was a lot of fun – Drew and I rode up with our host and carried all the bags while Madison and Andrew tried to figure out how to park on the streets. They later reported having a long exchange with a parking attendant who spoke no English or Spanish, reaching an impasse until random pedestrians stepped in to translate for both parties. We heaved some big sighs when the Kangoo was parked and we were finally in our flat.

Rabat was pretty cool, and I recommend it. We didn’t have a lot of time to hang around, but we liked what we saw. It had more character and more life than Tangiers, which had felt pretty grim, and it had much less of that city’s tourist predation. Our host recommended us a really nice Middle Eastern restaurant where we had some amazing food (and mint-lime smoothie things) for less than we’d paid for our cheapest meal in Spain. We loved it so much that we came back the next day for lunch.

In the morning we explored the medina, the vast central market within the walled old town. It was a wild mess of sensory overload. Narrow stone aisles wound a sloppy grid through the place, packed to capacity with stalls and modest industry. Some streets hawked nothing but jewelry and clothes, handmade or factory spun or thrift, Eastern and Western. Dozens of others brimmed with food stalls selling exotic fruits, fresh loaves of bread, meats cooking on smoky, delicious grills, and stinking, bleeding piles of fish fresh from the Atlantic. Behind the stalls, tailors and barbers and all kinds of other craftspeople worked their trades in dark rooms. Stray dogs and cats were everywhere, wretched looking, tucked under carts and stalls, curled up in nooks and windows. The whole medina was their bathroom.

On the far side of the medina we ran into our host (technically our host’s friend), who invited us to see his studio. He works in a little artisanal commune on the medina’s outskirts, tucked away in a tiny room packed with his projects, listening to The Doors and focusing on his craft. Sketching with pencil and following with brightly colored paints, he paints and polishes traditional Arabic designs in vivid color and impossibly fine detail on handcrafted wooden pieces, all by hand. We were genuinely impressed by his pieces.They aren’t that expensive to buy, but getting a little wooden chair or mirror frame across the Atlantic multiplies the price many times over.

Beyond the medina and a thin ring of old walls and buildings with Arabic spires and pointed arches lay a vast graveyard, and immediately behind it the Atlantic ocean. It was a broad, strange view – thousands of pale gravestones, hemmed in by short walls, all strewn with garbage and broken glass, and then the beautiful beach, dots of people swimming and sunning in the distance. Standing above it all in the bright sun, with the rush of the medina behind us, it all felt utterly foreign – beach, cemetery and market, familiar concepts, but unspooled before us in ways we’d never seen before. Rabat was not the strangest or most beautiful place we would go in Morocco, but after Tangiers, which we were too busy and defensive to really notice or appreciate, Rabat was our first real taste of this bizarre, exhilarating country. We were sweaty, thirsty, and totally awestruck.