More of that to come, including how one can eat their way entirely through Florence, tales of the Former Mormon but always Marvelous Max Freeman, and how, if one is going to fall in love with a madly attractive 6”4 Chilean, they best do it in Barcelona because frankly, everything and everyone is better when done in Spanish.
But for now, I want to talk about Morocco.
After carving out a small piece of my heart (whose topography has grown evermore mountainous with similar incisions made in similarly seductive cities – its landscape now is a testament to both the maps I have filled in and the ones I have yet to carve) and hiding it well amongst the winding streets of Barcelona’s Barrio Gotic, I followed Mars reluctantly to BCN’s El Prat for our scheduled flight to Malaga.
Away I went from the city of dreams, the city of love and the city where I had, for three brief days at least, allowed myself to dwell on what it might be like to casually ride a bicycle there every day, eating ruby red apples and concocting long winded Spanish sentences with all the tat-a-tat rapidity of a spitfire.
No matter. There are always more adventures to be had.
From Malaga, we traveled by bus to La Linea where we planned to spend the next day exploring the enclave of British owned Gibralter. La Linea itself was uninspiring as was the entirety of Gibralter beneath its famed Rock Of. I ask you, isn’t it just like the British to hold onto something that, for all intents and purposes, should no longer belong to them and then further desecrate whatever natural beauty it had by infiltrating the place with BHS chains, Top Shop and Miss Selfridge? And let us not forget the pasty-yet-sunburned British tourists, clamouring over themselves to avoid foreign food of any kind whatsoever in their determined search for slop like egg and chips ordered in their native tongue – a prize for anyone who can guess where that little nod to 1980s pop culture came from….
So we scampered around the top of the rock for some time, tentatively avoiding the apes who have made its old fortress walls their personal playground. Regardless of what waited below in Gibralter proper, it was indeed an impressive sight. To the right spread out the bottom-most part of Spain; the our left, Africa glimmered on the horizon.
And it was to Africa we were headed next.
Unfortunately, our ferry was two hours late and we missed the last train to Marrakech. This did not sit well with Mars who, and I know she’ll read this so….hi!, is somewhat of a more nervous traveler than myself. While I like to go with the flow, roll with the punches, see where the wind takes me and any number of other obnoxious clichés designed to denote easiness (or perhaps aimlessness), Mars prefers to have a plan she’s able to stick to. Hence, an unscheduled overnight stay in Tangier threw her for somewhat of a loop.
It didn’t help that while I was upstairs scoping out the cleanliness of our exorbitantly priced hotel room, Mars was busy shitting her pants (her words) in the taxi outside while three young scamps began some fisticuffs next to her window.
“Why didn’t you lock the door?” I asked, somewhat sensibly I thought.
“They would have heard it! It would have been a direct provocation!” she exclaimed.
“Mars dear,” I soothed. “You’ve had a terrible fright. But I would guess that the likelihood of you being pulled into their little fracas was rather slim. Next time, lock the door or run inside.”
Which, of course, is exactly what I had done when I’d come out of the hotel and seen all the fuss. Ha! I guess that makes me a Slytherin…
(As an aside, I re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows en route to Marrakech. Man, that Rowling is a fracking GENIUS.)
Needless to say, faced with all this cultural uncertainty (on her part) and after a particularly heated debate with the taxi driver over why exactly ten euros was a ridiculous fee for a three minute ride (me I’m afraid), Mars’ mood did not improve throughout the 10 hour train trip to Marrakech. As a surprisingly luscious carpet of green rolled past us, I remained hidden behind a book so as not to say or do the wrong thing – that is to say, so as not to demonstrate my at times (most times, probably) remarkable insensitivity to the valid feelings of others.
More haggling greeted us at Marrakech Train Station. Aziz, a local carpet seller and great admirer of Australia, had informed me on the train that we were not to pay more than 25 dirham for a cab ride to the Medina. “If they try to charge you more, you tell them YOU KNOW MOROCCO and you WON’T pay it! Then tomorrow, you come to my shop and have cous cous with us for lunch, yes?”
I answered as best I could in Arabic, having learnt the essential phrases the night before. My father, a great traveler particularly throughout the Middle East, once told me that the only essential things one needed as a tourist are
a) a passport;
b) a willingness to try the local food (and, consequently, a strong constitution Just In Case); and
c) at least a smattering of the language and the pith and vigour with which to use it.
And, if you’ll permit me a moment to brag, I’ve always been rather good at the last one. Accents, dialects, retention….it’s kind of my thing - though, to be fair, I employ rather too much time impersonating old ladies from Yorkshire is probably necessary.
But I digress.
After haggling our way into a clean, comfort and cheap (the all important trifecta) hotel with a marvelous rooftop terrace view over the Medina, Mars and I ventured out into the hustle and bustle of a Typical Night Out At The Souk….and promptly were swindled by two highly organized and no doubt well trained con artists peddling their henna tattoos.
“You like?” one said to me, who has sadly always looked to recreate the indelible excitement of my Middle Eastern school fete days. “Here, sit! Sit! I make for you, one hand, 250 dirham! Is good for you! Very lucky, very good for the sex, you get good sex and health from this!”
And before I could say boo to a blind mouse, she’d pulled my arm in and started trailing long lines of ink up and down its length.
“You take for other hand?” her partner in crime asked, grabbing my left hand and leaving me basically helpless. “Is extra lucky for you, with the sex!” I wondered what it was about me especially that screamed needs help in the sack department. But perhaps it’s just that I’m white, and everyone knows that we’re all whores… *ponders *
“Wait! Wait!” I tried to say. “How much is this?!”
“For both, 400 dirham, and we throw in a free foot!”
Ignoring for a moment the relative absurdity of that last bit, I tried to tell them that 400 was far too expensive.
“Is not!” they both exclaimed, wounded, as if I’d taken their henna pens, stabbed them in the heart and expelled all the black ink throughout its core. “Is best price! Cheap! 400, okay, you pay 400.”
They continued to decorate my hands while I tried to think quickly on how to escape such an exorbitant fee. 400 dirhams is roughly 37 euros, which is roughly AUS$74. I mean….seriously. In fracking Morocco. The land of henna and cheap things.
COME ON!!
But then they rounded on Mars.
Uh oh, I thought. This is about to get a whole lot worse.
“I don’t want it!” she yelled, furiously trying to pull her hand back as our self appointed Sex Guru struggled equally as furiously to pull her in.
“Is okay! For you is free! Gift!”
“No!” Mars yelled. “No!” I noted, almost absentmindedly, that she was failing to use the one piece of Arabic she considered the most important, and had spent the previous night practicing - bad manee. “Don’t touch me. Leave me alone.” So it’s true, I thought, We really do lose our heads in a crisis.
The assault on Mars did not go well, to put it mildly. Within a few minutes of her receiving the unwanted tattoo, she smudged it while trying to retrieve the few hundred dirham stuffed down my bra (gone, now, to finance the snake juice and eye-of-newt no doubt high on the shopping list of the Medina Henna Witches) leaving a stained splodge of ink across the back of her hand. Needless to say, we hadn’t eaten yet after ten hours on the train. She was NOT going to take this well.
Her fury was only compounded by the refusal of the MHW to accept my (to them) paltry offering of 300 dirham (AUS$60!!), all that my underwear was able to yield.
“No! You pay 400! We make for you, is very lucky! YOU PAY NOW!”
“But you just did it without my consent! How could I agree?! I have only 300, so that’s all you get!”
Mars, I could tell, was on the verge of punching one or both of them and ACTUALLY ramming their henna pens into the dark abyss where their hearts ought to be. I wondered briefly if there was a third one missing in action. Perhaps I had encountered the Fates?
But once they realized I wasn’t going to give them any more than I already had, they let us go, muttering under their breaths – possibly retracting the lucky sex charm they had placed within the pattern and dooming me to a lifetime of self love and lonlin….oh. wait. SIGH.
Mars was livid. Back at the hotel, she scrubbed and scrubbed until she could scrub no more but the stain refused to fade beyond a pale noir. “Out! damn spot!” she cried, while the three (minus one) witches cackled beyond. In vain, I tried to placate her but she, like the stain, would not budge. Her hand, she declared, was RUINED.
And if you cannot get past this, so, I thought ruefully, is our holiday.
It didn’t help that our immediate venture back out into the markets brought forth all manner of culturally challenges for my dear Mars. While I agree it’s disconcerting to be stared at and grabbed (non sexually, I should clarify) by touts wanting to sell you their food and/or wares, it seems to me part and parcel of visiting a poor country with an overwhelming reliance upon more fortunate western travelers for their livelihood. One must develop a thick skin or they’ll forever be hiding in hotel rooms, too afraid to face the throng of people determined to get something out of them.
More unsettling I think is the way in which your white skin marks you as a target for either sexual advances or harassment. During our little walk, I was convinced that the Witches Two and given me some kind of special Whore Henna pattern, so intent were the stares from passers by and calls of ‘Hey baby!’ But this was quickly dispelled when one
Tangentially, I have noticed the different way I feel about male attention here as compared to the previous markings on my map. I’ve questioned myself about it all day, but I don’t think it’s an unconscious racial prejudice. It’s simply that, to me, there seemed to be a level of innocent cheekiness in the ‘Ciao bella!’s and ‘Hola bonita!’s that greeted me in Italy and Barcelona. Sure, the odd one or two were leery, but mostly it all seemed in good fun – just a general kind of appreciation I suppose. (And indeed, it’s hard for a woman not to feel more attractive in these countries considering how pathetically absent the concept of wooing or even cheeky flirtation seems to be amongst most Australian men.)
But maybe there is a prejudice of sorts at work – my cultural understanding is that the Arabic world sees Western women as racier than their Middle Eastern counterparts. One can’t help but hear little traces of this when yelled at in the street, or gawked at by half a dozen men, or told to keep bending over when tying one’s shoelace because they ‘like the view’. I dunno....it occurs to me that that’s actually the kind of thing I expect from Australian men. Which is depressing to say the least.
Anyhoo.
So I finish the day in Marrakech tapping away here while spiderwebs of black henna trace their way up my hands. They will act as a constant reminder (at least for the next month) of the wileyness of women, the questionable sanity of consenting to be branded with symbols you don’t understand, and the occasional foolishness of Western travelers who labour under the delusion that their bullshit detector is as old and worn as the hills.
In short, namely myself.
But I’ve learnt my lesson, yessiree.
Tomorrow I’ll wake Mars with a gentle nudge and deliver her down to the breakfast table where we shall feast on Moroccan delights. Then it’s off to see Aziz for lunch and hopefully convince him to act as our local escort through the harangue of a souk whose sole purpose where we’re concerned seems to be in radically inflating its prices.
Because dammit, where else but in Morocco can I obstinately refuse to pay anything more than $15 for a beautifully handcrafted leather bag in the most brilliant of sea greens?
Chance of Mars killing someone before the week is out: Fair to Good.
"If you’ll permit me a moment to brag, I’ve always been rather good at the last one. Accents, dialects, retention…it’s kind of my thing"
ReplyDeleteSeriously -- much like vodka -- is there anything you can't do? Your adventures sound both amazing and terrifying all wrapped up in a bag of unnvering :)
Jay
Wow, I'm sur eif they gave you a 'lucky' tattoo then they can't really take it back? It sounds like you're having an incredible time! If it makes you (or Mars) feel better I got myself hennaed once and it was gone in a day or two, without too much scrubbing!
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