One month in Morocco: Part One (Purgatory)

May 7th to June 2nd, 2009

It seems that our narrative has fallen behind. In case you were curious we’re still on the road, with just a few more weeks to go but, oh, the stories we have to tell you! One month in Morocco (part two ahead) and then we jetted off to Egypt and back in between visits to see family in London. And now, just to make sure you’re positively green with envy, we have indeed found ourselves a sailboat. So you’ll have to forgive me, but we’ve spent the last few nights anchoring in sandy little turquoise bays by some islands off the Cote D’Azur; I’ve just been so busy swimming and snorkeling and exploring and reading that I haven’t found time to get back to this blasted, overdue blog!

Back to our story.

Morocco was a big change for us – a change we’d been breathlessly anticipating – but nothing could have prepared us for the sheer bliss we felt in our first few days there. Nothing we did escaped comparison to our earlier travels, and any troubles or hassles our guidebooks warned us about seemed insignificant in light of what we were increasingly coming to see as the gauntlet we’d survived in sub-Saharan Africa. Although we reminded ourselves often that we were still in a strange city in a foreign land, we couldn’t help relaxing as we relished even the simple pleasure of a slow, meandering walk down the street.

Adding to our excitement was the delight of discovering that the Moroccan travel of our imaginations was possible in the real world and moreover was accessible to us. For a time, each place we stayed outdid the last in both its fairytale qualities and amazing deals. The tiled halls of our hostel in Casablanca were followed by an outrageously inexpensive room in a converted mansion in the seaside town of El Jadida. In Essaouira we stayed in the picturesque Medina, winding through narrow lanes packed with shops selling colourful cloths and shiny trinkets to find our hotel in a lovely little two-storey building centred around a fig tree growing in a small, open courtyard. At the time of our arrival in the early afternoon we could spy another guest through his open door playing Spanish guitar on the other side of some leafy boughs. In Marrakech we stayed in the walled Medina once again where, from one of so many narrow, nameless lanes, our hotel opened out into a tall, bright courtyard, four storeys high, with colourfully tiled walls and a sunny rooftop café.

The weather, too, was heavenly. A week or so into our stay at the EDYM farm, I’d shoved my only sweatshirt to the absolute bottom of my bag unable to comprehend why I’d even packed it. However, as we spent our first week in Morocco working our way along the Atlantic Coast we were thrilled to dress for the day in sweatshirts and long pants (jeans, which hadn’t seen the light of day since Canada), probably in direct contradiction to most of the other travelers who’d ventured South in hopes of sun. That we were in the company of so many other travelers too was a big change, and we reveled in what we imagined to be the relative anonymity afforded by that company.

Far be it for us to make it too easy on ourselves, though. It could have been many things: the stress and exhaustion from constant travel; the long bus rides and sleepless nights in intense heat; the drastic change in climate after stepping off the plane in Morocco; the poor diet that had seen each of us lose at least 25 lbs (you thought maybe we were exaggerating, right?). Whatever it was, by our second night we were sick, and for 19 days both Sam and I suffered with what we contend to be the worst head cold of our lives.

That we were bitterly disappointed by our sickness is not surprising. We had so looked forward to the vacation we felt we’d earned that we had more than a little trouble letting ourselves be sick and recover, and certainly this contributed to our sad state lasting so long. Our resulting approach to travel was, in retrospect, a bit of a comedy. Some days we mustered our energy and our tissues and braved the towns, only to walk too far and burn our chaffed noses in the sun. Other days we gave up entirely and hunkered down in our rooms, moaning into our pillows about the injustice of it all, only to go out again as soon as we felt even a tiny bit better.

Eventually we relented, as much as we could, and decided that we’d just have to stay in Morocco long enough to get better and see some of the country as well. As a result we probably got an interesting perspective on some of the towns we visited, staying much longer than a tour company might prescribe, and becoming a little more familiar with the guy who sold us water and cream cheese sandwiches in between naps, and going for “the usual” at the internet café.

That we stayed long enough in some places to tire of some really spectacular sights is perhaps not as deserving of pride. During our first few days in Marrakech, I wrote home about the heartbreak of squinting my watery eyes and ducking my stuffed-up head past the Djemaa el-Fna, a huge open market square where musicians, storytellers, artists, and acrobats from all over the country come to perform and ply their trade. Nine days on, however, I found myself increasingly noticing the lack of melody and rhythm displayed by the costumed men on drums and pipes, and Sam and I had given our illness the inauspicious title of “The Curse of the Djemaa el-Fna”.

Another interesting side effect of being sick was the short, unplanned tour of the Moroccan medical system we got as a result. This was my treat, of course, as with Sam’s and my polar opposite approaches to sickness and recovery I am the one to err decidedly on the side of go-tell-someone-and-get-them-to-give-you-something-to-fix-it-fast. I tried pharmacy drugs, felt a bit better, gave the rest to Sam, and then plummeted into misery once again. I went to see a nice doctor who spoke very little English, and I mimed my various symptoms and general misery before he prescribed a list of drugs that I only vaguely understood the purpose of. Upon returning from the pharmacy once again I played that game we enjoy at Christmastime, in the hazy afterglow of a turkey feast, whereupon you try to read the French side of the riddles and jokes from your bilingual Christmas cracker, except that this time there’s no English version and instead of a punchline it’s the vital warnings and possible side effects of the powerful drugs you’re about to ingest. (“In the case of prolonged treatment, never stop brutally your treatment but follow the recommendations of your medicine for the diminution of doses. This medication must never be taken if you have experienced … something.” Ha! Ha!)

In actual fact I was able to understand enough to realize that I was allergic to the prescribed antibiotic, and so in Fes we visited another doctor. He spoke more English (and I more French) and was very kind but nevertheless ruthlessly shoved some kind of pliers up nose, rubbed goo on my belly, and roughly pushed me into a dark, full-body-sized machine where – with my face and chest squished against some kind of x-ray pad – I mustered a chortle and said, “Yup, this’ll make the blog.” Deeming the antibiotics unnecessary and diagnosing my symptoms as at least partially due to allergies, he prescribed antihistamines (to the pharmacy again) as well as some of the things I was already taking. On this new regimen, I finally started to feel better. Without all the accompanying drama, Sam had slowly been recovering as well, and about 20 days into our Moroccan travels we began to feel like ourselves again.