Travel with Indigo

Leaving Marrakech, I traveled up and through the high passes of the High Atlas Mountains, their pinnacles dappled in snow, on my way to the unpronounceable town of Ouarzazate. The entire drive was another scenic wonderland of remote villages, ancient strategically sited kasbahs, flocks of sheep and goats grazing in the most precarious places and much else. For most of the way, a narrow river flowed at the bottom of the high, steep-sided chasms along which I was driving and into which I wished not to plummet. It joins others draining the escarpment and together they form the Draa into whose valley I would soon be driving on my way to the far desert.

About the very last building you would expect to find in the eastern Moroccan interior at the edge of a vast desert is a Hollywood-style movie studio, but that is just what I found there. Not just one, but two. Atlas Film Studios, enclosed by high ramparts and covering 322,000 square feet of desert, is guarded at its spectacular gates by two gigantic pseudo-Egyptian sphinxes from which you quickly conclude that behind these gates there could be nothing other than a film studio. Across town is the Andromeda Italian Film Studios of similar size. I was just astonished to find that these are the town’s principal employers and have produced hundreds of films over the years, including some notable in the US market, like Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator, Cleopatra and The Man Who Would Be King. I had unknowingly stumbled upon Africa’s Hollywood.

As if to press home the point, the public spaces in my hotel, where all the film crews are housed during shootings, were decorated with props and set pieces from various films produced in the past by these studios. There was, for example, the throne of Ramses II from The Ten Commandments and another throne, this one from Cleopatra. Promotional posters advertising various films from the 60s and 70s cluttered the walls.

Ouarzazate  is also home to one of the world’s finest Kasbahs, a fortified citadel and palace for the area’s tribal chieftain. This one, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is quite large by customary standards and has outer walls and colossal entry gates intricately decorated in wonderful geometric patterns found only in Morocco.

I took a day trip by car into the eastern Moroccan desert, passing through the towns of Agdz, Zagora, Tamegroute and Tagounite, wishing to see the monumental sand dunes of Ch’Gaga and a Tuareg encampment. (Right away you can see that the Berber language and English diction are not on friendly terms.) Along the way, I passed through ostentatious topography such as I have rarely seen before. In sequence, I came upon low hills, rolling plains, haphazard fields of enormous volcanic boulders, vast divots deeply scoured in the earth by ancient rivers and scabrous mountains. The entire panorama before me looked as if here the earth’s surface had been turned inside out. It is this arresting scenery that explains the two film studios and, indeed, as I drove along I passed a working film crew set up at an especially appealing site.

At each of the towns were ksars, the iconic village fortifications of the area, all of them ancient but still in use today. Built of pise´, their enclosing walls and entry gates are inscribed by village artisans in intricate geometric patterns and are popular with today’s tourists, not including me. From the prolific fortifications in Morocco, you would conclude correctly that in the old days–actually not all that long ago– the area was full of marauding bandits eager to confiscate the hard gotten gains of farmers and craftsmen, and even the farmers and craftsmen themselves, who could be sold as slaves. Tribal warfare was rife then, held in check now by the state.

As the road wound its way into ever higher mountains, all devoid of even a hint of organic growth except a few planted date palms, I came upon a most sobering accident scene. A large, flatbed truck loaded with couscous (what else?) had plunged from the road over a cliff—there was of course no guard rail– and down a very steep mountainside. Luckily, if that’s the word here, the remains of the vehicle and its cargo, though scattered widely, had stopped before free falling over the vertical cliff of a river gorge at least a thousand feet farther below.  As I arrived a team of laborers with obvious disregard for their safety were at work hauling the badly scattered couscous sacks up the treacherous slope covered in talus. The driver was killed and his body, thoughtfully, had been hauled out before the couscous. From that point onward, I drove more carefully.

Soon the road descended from the desiccated mountains into the Draa Valley and followed alongside the river’s course passing through ancient villages and their equally ancient adjoining ksars. Stopping at a few of these and passing slowly through others, I was able to gain a sense of village life.

Women, vibrantly adorned and balancing earthen jars or scraggly swathes of river reeds on their head, were more numerous than the donkeys with whom they seem to compete as bearers of burden. Men chopped palm fronds and reeds, occupied roadside vendor stands or laid about in indolent slouches. Ill-nourished donkeys pulling primitive carts loaded with palm fronds ambled along on the road’s shoulders, and frolicsome kids sat astride haggard donkeys whacking them with sticks in a fruitless attempt to encourage more speed.

Here and there roadside vendors hawked freshly picked dates. It was the season for these, so I stopped and bought a bunch, tasted one and threw the rest away. Although a major part of the Moroccan diet, these dates were so cloyingly sweet that they are almost certainly a contributor to the rotted dentition that affects the entire countryside.

But for the roadway and its passing vehicles, and a few modern hand-held implements like the machete, life here is much as it was a thousand years ago. Its desultory pace follows the seasons and produces no discernible improvement in the villagers’ lives year by year.  Summers are blisteringly hot, up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and there is precious little electrical power so, save in a few stores for tourists, there is no air conditioning. Few people can afford cars or trucks so, despite having to cover considerable distances, they walk. Roadways are lined with walkers, donkey carts and donkey riders though, oddly, I saw few bicycles.

The Draa River, without which these villages could not survive, flows swiftly through multiple channels as it passes out of the High Atlas Mountains, joins with other rivers and gathers volume, but at its easternmost extremity it slowly weakens then simply ceases to exist, an ignominious end for an important waterway. At its terminus, the last of the precious water has all finally evaporated or leeched into the desert soil sapping its life giving power and leaving all beyond an arid, trackless wasteland. It was this wasteland that I now wished to see and drove on in that direction.

While roaming aimlessly around the town of Zagora, I was approached by a man on foot asking if I was lost, the same come on used by Golub in Taroudant. He spoke excellent English, almost without accent, was about 40 years old and was friendly enough but had about him the avaricious air of a man in search of an easy payday. I was reluctant to engage him as my guide but his English skills were so compelling that I did so against the wishes of an inner voice that urged caution, a voice I have often ignored to my later regret.

Omar climbed in my car and together we headed south out into the desert. Along the way, he explained the local culture, the function of ksars, the role of Islam in the villages and much more. We first visited the encampment of a small band of Tuaregs just at the edge of the desert, where Omar introduced me to the group’s leader, one Mohammed, a diminutive, smiling fellow draped in the radiant blue cloth favored by the Tuareg everywhere. They had pitched their four black, thick camel hair tents in the open desert floor several miles from any permanent structures, five miles from the nearest village and at least 30 yards from each other. From this arrangement, it was easy to see, the impulse to congregate is not part of their culture. Although there was a small copse of palms nearby offering modest shade, they avoided it.

Tuaregs are an ancient, Berber nomadic people who populate, although in the sparest sense of that term, the Saharan interior of North Africa. When they need supplies, they trek into the nearest village with money earned from whatever source is available to them, buy what they need and return to their isolation. It is civilization they shun, preferring instead the solitary life of the idle wanderer in a harsh land where few others live. They are also astoundingly lazy. When I asked how they spend their days, Mohamed just smiled and said breezily, “We do nothing”, which from my brief observation is about right, especially the men.

Both Omar and Mohamed insisted that I climb aboard one of the clan’s camels couched nearby and go for a brief ride around some dunes, for a slight fee of course. Not wishing to give offense, I went along feeling the whole time like a kid at the pony rides. But, as I thought about it, no matter how foolish I appeared, how many times does a guy like me get to ride a Tuareg camel in the Moroccan desert? If you’re wondering, camel riding is ponderously slow and wobbly. You’d prefer a horse or better yet a dirt bike.

Apart from gently fleecing tourists like me, the Tuareg earn money by collecting from the desert and selling bones and teeth that once belonged to an impressive assortment of critters, like pre-historic dinosaurs, raptors and sharks, which once populated the Sahara in teeming numbers. There is an energetic market in these, both for the authentic version and, for the unsuspecting buyer, the fabricated knock offs. It’s quite astounding to imagine that the vast infertile emptiness of the Sahara was once a very long time ago a dense, lush jungle seething with creatures. If you had not realized it before now, this alone makes the currently in vogue eco-loopy word “sustainable” all the more farcical. Nothing on Earth ever has been sustainable in any meaningful sense of the term and calling it that won’t make it so.

We still were not at the end of the paved road as deep into the desert as it was possible to go without a four-wheel drive vehicle. That was at the village of M’Hamid at the edge of the great sand dunes of Ch’Gaga (not related as far as I know to Lady Gaga). When I asked Omar and Mohamed about going there, both promptly said that it’s forbidden. The road is closed off at a military checkpoint where I would be turned back. The village, it seems, is the site of a French Foreign Legion outpost there to stem incursions by Islamist elements in nearby Algeria who wish a lot of no good upon the insufficiently devout and Western friendly Moroccans and the Western tourists they harbor. Disappointed, I got back in the car with Omar and headed for the village of Tamegroute, where we would have lunch.

There I met and dined with the proprietor of Jnane-Dar Diafa restaurant and inn, a Swiss woman named Doris Paulus. In a sustained eruption of youthful folly, she had come to the area some thirty years ago with her then boyfriend to start the business. They split, he ran off but she stayed on in that relentlessly dutiful way that seems to characterize the Swiss. Now all those years later here I sit in the desert under a camel hair tent dining with her and Omar and hearing her tale, doing my best to feign interest.

After an extended lunch, Omar and I drove back to his village of Zagora, where he invited me to join him, his father and uncle for tea in the shop they own together. In keeping with tradition, they and their families live in the several floors above the shop and own the building that houses it all, built by their hands. He introduced me to the father and uncle, who, like Omar, insisted on smiling broadly thus exposing blackened badlands where once, many years ago, teeth had stood. The shop’s inventory consisted mostly of Moroccan tourist schlock of the sort I had seen all over Marrakech.

As the three of us sat down around the tiny gas burner on which the teapot sat, I began to feel like an innocent mouse in a strange backyard surrounded by cats. Here, though, the cats were largely toothless. Foolishly, I had poked around in the shop and began to handle as if interested an especially handsome silver-handled dagger and matching scabbard and a walking stick fashioned from camel bone, both handmade by Tuareg tribesmen, or so I was assured. It was then that the bargaining began.

I won’t burden you with the tedious process by which we finally agreed on a price I was willing to pay for a modest addition to my collection of junk from around the world. But I can say that a few days later I learned that the items I bought–which I at the time regarded as particularly fine, rare and handsome–were mass produced, of poor quality cleverly disguised, and could be had for a small fraction of what I paid. As I was departing and we were saying our goodbyes, Omar’s young son tried to collect a fee for “watching” my car. These guys were good.

After spending the night at my hotel in Hollywood, I left the next day to drive through more magnificent scenery the several hundred miles back to Indigo. One day I’d like to return to Morocco. After spending a week or so in Marrakech, I would rent a four-wheel drive vehicle and head off into the mountains and desert allowing several weeks to see it all. Because it was about a hundred miles away, I didn’t get to see the justly famous dunes of Erg Chebbi nor any of the panoramic topography around them. Next time, I would. There is a good reason for those two film studios being where they are, and it’s the scenery. Few places in the world offer such a variety of stunning vistas, warped and twisted landscapes and villages a thousand years old whose people go about life as they always have. Morocco goes onto my list of the best places I have ever visited and one to which I will return soon.

Next stops, Tenerife in the Canary Islands and Cape Town, South Africa.