Travel with Indigo

In few places is the power of Hollywood to impress images into our minds more apparent than here, and nowhere are those images so false. I had seen the movie enough times to have a clear picture of the place, its low, white stucco structures, dusty streets and a sleek nightclub called Rick’s Café, and those are the expectations I took with me as we left Seville and headed south. When we arrived offshore, I was astonished to see a city of four million inhabitants living on trashy streets amidst grim high-rise buildings of moldy concrete. So much for Hollywood images. Driving around the city and its seaside suburbs—with a driver named Abdul, no less– brought little relief.

The city has its notable features, though. It has the world’s third largest mosque, which holds 20,000 supplicants inside and another 80,000 on its expansive veranda, standing magnificently on the ocean shore. Given the propensity of Middle East and North African tyrants to outdo each other in the grandiosity of their Grand Mosques, these figures are surely inflated. Its single minaret is the world’s tallest at 650 feet, or so it is claimed. There is also a faux-Rick’s Café with a piano bar called “As Time Goes By.”

Tied to a commercial wharf in its enormous port waiting for a violent storm to pass and with nothing better to do, I went one night to a traditional tagine dinner and floorshow. For those who don’t know–like me before this visit–tagine is a method of cooking in a clay pot the results of which are hardly distinguishable from lamb stew except for the couscous. The show included various singers and dancers all of whom insisted on employing Arabic music, which to the Western ear sounds like unmelodic, off-key yodels rendered in one of the lesser known dialects of the Congo basin. Even the gentlest of it is irritating at best. Casablanca, I soon concluded, is a city easily stricken from the traveler’s list of places to visit.

Once the storm passed and the sea returned to its customary condition, we set out eager to get away. While en route, we learned that the storm we had waited out sank five sailboats and on one of these, a 90-foot catamaran, resulted in two fatalities. The catamaran’s captain chose to ignore the severe storm warning so that he might reach Tenerife in the Canary Islands in time to make a prearranged flight.

Winds blow in the ocean off North Africa with uncommon strength for days on end causing dangerous seas. This, after all, is the spawning ground for the hurricanes that inhabitants of the Caribbean and Florida know all too well. For that captain to ignore a storm warning in this treacherous area for such a trivial reason was a foolish mistake, but one frequently made. I have made the same error of judgment myself, but got away with it I am pleased to say. Our Captain Steve is far too cautious and professional ever to get us into such a disaster.