Word Of Mouse

Word of Mouse is back, almost, after a short break (during which we had visions of the entire content of this log of our trip having disappeared into the electronic ether). We still cannot post pictures of our time in the desert at Erg Chebbi, but at least we can describe what happened to us between La Maison du Chameau and now, sitting back here in Gibraltar.

La Maison du Chameau was a welcome respite from the madness of Marrakech, but all good things must come to an end. We stayed a night in the coastal town of Essaouira, known among other things for being the location of Orson Welles' film version of Shakespeare's Othello and a very picturesque little town in its own right with dramatic ramparts, crashing waves and a small harbour jammed to bursting with little fishing boats and wheeling gulls.

We left Essaouira to return for a day to Marrakech on our way eastwards. Ali was not feeling very well, suffering from a nasty cold and a dose of dodgy guts, so we took a hotel room here for another night. It was a horrible room when I went to have a look, very dirty, but cleaning was obviously in progress so we decided to give them the benefit of the doubt, take it and beat a retreat to the terraces overlooking the central square of Djemaa el Fna while the cleaners worked their magic. From there we had a fantastic vantage point over the square and could observe all manner of vehicles and people going about their business. The most impressive to me were those we dubbed the "egg-men"; these evidently had the contract for delivering eggs to all the restaurants surrounding the square, and made their deliveries by moped. Behind each rider's seat were two swaying stacks of egg-trays, each tray of thirty eggs, and a further huge stack of trays was positioned between the rider's legs balanced on the central footwell of the moped and reaching to his waist. We never saw one of these people stop his moped, so I don't know how they did it. If that had been me I would have immediately created the world's biggest omlette the first time I applied the brakes.

After a pleasant hour of people-watching we returned to our hotel to drop our bags in the room. Opening the door, Ali let out a squeak of astonishment: our room and bed was now occupied by some member of the hotel staff taking the opportunity for a smoke and forty winks. The manager came and evicted him (with a rather guilty expression) but the damage was done and the room smelled strongly of smoke, a smell that never entirely disappeared given the rather still and damp air pervading the lower part of the courtyard outside our window. We saw the dawn light appear with relief at the thought that never again in our lives would we have to stay in this room or this filthy hotel again, ever.

We bought ourselves some water from a stall at the edge of the square and walked round to the bus station to catch a bus to Ouarzazate, the first in a chain of buses that would transport us to our goal, the desert sand-dunes at Erg Chebbi. The bus was a proper local bus- we were almost the only Westerners on board, with the exception of a German couple a few rows behind us. After half an hour of waiting, during which the bus got increasingly hot and numerous and various individuals took their turns to come down the aisle begging (including a man with no arms but just short arm stumps, a mad woman and a religious man with armfuls of cassette tapes of the Koran), we finally eased our way out into the traffic. The bus conductor hung on the outside of the bus- it appeared to be a matter of pride for him to allow the bus to pick up as much speed as possible while running alongside before jumping onto the bottom step of the open door halfway down the bus, and he had many occasions to demonstrate this skill.

About five minutes after leaving Marrakech bus station however, and having made maybe two hundred yards down the road, progress was interrupted by a loud bang followed by a hissing sound. The conductor hung out of the door to see what the matter was, the bus stopped suddenly beside the road, people got off and much discussion ensued. I assumed it was a burst tyre (we recognized the sound from our own experiences on Bramble).

Time passed. The sun shone. The bus got hotter. The Germans gave up and left. More time passed. I got out to see what was going on- the crew of the bus were gathered round the back, prodding in a desultory way at bits of the cooling system with screwdrivers, but there appeared to be no immediate prospect of departure. I left them to it and got back on. I should mention that in solidarity with the Muslim passengers around us we had decided that while on board buses it would be very bad manners to drink or eat anything while those around us could not, so we sat and clutched our heads, now aching from the onset of dehydration, and watched the donkey carts and mopeds overtaking us as we sat motionless. Our fellow passengers sat quietly, philosophically accepting the will of Allah and trying to sleep away the remaining hours until evening.

Eventually, after about an hour and a half, Allah relented, the bus engine was started and off we went again. A breeze mercifully blew through the bus and cleared out the burning air.

The road to Ouarzazate from Marrakech is spectacular. It winds up switchback roads, round hairpin bends and up the side of vertiginous mountain faces on its way up over the southern tail end of the High Atlas mountain ranges. It was very fortunate that we were not drinking anything, we found, since the buses during Ramadan make no stops for toilet breaks. For a further five hours we wound our way round these hairpin bends, first swooping one way to the right, then back again to the left, then back again to the right- you get the picture. I stopped looking down every time we overtook some slower vehicle on a narrow piece of road- the sight was too alarming. One idiot in a four wheel drive overtook our bus on a perilous stretch, rousing some of the somnolent passengers on that side of the bus to a flurry of indignant Arabic. People started being sick, making the dry retching heaves of those who have not eaten anything in twelve hours. Ali blocked her ears, hummed to herself and tried to imagine sitting with her back to an oak tree (the proverbial remedy for sea-sickness).

Finally we pulled into Ouarzazate and climbed off and went in search of a hotel. It took a while, and for a while we were convinced we were heading back into the desert instead of towards the centre of town, as was actually the case. However we made it and invested the huge (for Morocco) sum of four hundred and fifty dirhams (about thirty pounds) in a comfortable hotel room with meals: a vast improvement from the previous night's accommodation!

We returned to the bus station to buy onward tickets for the next day, and were efficiently scammed into paying thirty dirham over the odds for them: no matter how alert one tries to be mentally, it seems to be virtually impossible to guard against it. I thought about what had happened all the way back into to town and vowed to try and be more on my guard next time.