Word Of Mouse

We were up bright and early the next day, intending to make it as far as possible back towards Gibraltar. Down at the bus station at half past eight, not much was going on. By half nine however, two buses had arrived, one of which I ascertained was going to Fnideq, near the Spanish border. Ah, but we needed to buy a ticket first, I was assured by an elderly man near the bus. Having no reason to disbelieve him, despite the fact that we had usually been able to buy our tickets once on board, I went into the bus station in search of someone from whom to buy a ticket. Inside was a large and ragged queue of increasingly frustrated Moroccans, shouting at a harrassed-looking man in an office. I could not work out what the problem was, but decided I had better join the queue. People kept pushing in front of me, waving bank notes at the man and yelling at him, and he would wave his arms in the air hopelessly and yell back. After ten difficult and incomprehensible minutes, during which I made little progress towards the front of the queue, I gave up and went back outside.

By now the bus was full to bursting, and our chances of getting on it looked slim, when suddenly a man in a yellow fleece appeared, took eighty dirhams off us, scrawled something on a bit of paper and bingo we had our tickets. We got on board just as the driver was revving his engines prior to departure. A problem then made itself apparent: there were too many people on board, and the conductor went up and down the aisle shouting. Two people who had no tickets were discovered and summarily evicted from the bus, but their seats were immediately taken by other people. We ended up having to sit on the floor at the back of the bus, over the engine. Being virtually immune to travel sickness, I swapped places with Ali so she could sit higher up on the step and be able to see out of the windows, with myself between her knees.

The bus set off and laboured up the first hill. My view was restricted to two rows of knees of the other passengers, stretching all the way forward to the front of the bus, where someone was sitting on a stool beside the driver. Past his head the scenery flowed, first one way then the other, as we negotiated the hairpin bends. I started to wonder whether this was going to be the first time in a very long time that the dreaded travel sickness would choose to attack, and shut my eyes. Ali, meanwhile, despite having an increasingly hot backside from her location right above the engine, had managed to befriend the couple in one of the seats beside her, who were holding a small baby with a broken leg. I tried out a couple of phrases from our phrasebook- without much success. The baby smacked Ali with its broken leg (which was encased in a weighty plaster cast).

Eventually two people got off, and we were able to acquire a seat of our own. After two and a half hours we were in Tetaoan. It was here that a depressing incident occurred. A man waved at us and indicated that if we wanted to go to Fnideq, we should have to change buses. I was puzzled, since the front of our bus bore a word in Arabic that I had been able to convince myself said Fnideq, but we decided to believe him. We disembarked with all our baggage, and he showed us a bus next door. We got on.

He then came up the aisle of the bus to where we were sitting, and explained that we should have to pay one hundred and fifty dirham (about ten pounds) as some kind of border fee that would be returned to us at the other end of the journey, and that every one else had paid. I resisted, being fairly sure that this was some kind of scam, but he became increasingly angry, shouting that if we did not pay we should be forced to leave the bus. Another passenger appeared and backed up his story, saying "Oui, c'est lui le responsable". (It is impossible to identify who is a responsable and who is not, as no one wears any kind of uniform).

I do not know why I eventually decided to pay. Every rational impulse should have told me that it was a scam: I knew after all that the bus was not going to cross the border, and nowhere in the guide was there mention of any such fee. Yet we have a natural inclination to believe people, especially those who appear to be in a position of knowledge and authority, and especially if this authority appears to have been independently confirmed, and so many things about life in a country like Morocco can appear confusing anyway. And so like the most stupid naive tourist, I paid up, in a mixture of our last dirham notes and our small number of left over euros.

He took the money, and our tickets, left the bus, and of course that was the last we saw of him. We quickly realized we had been stitched up like kippers, but that was little consolation especially as the real ticket inspector appeared once the bus had set off, and worked his way down the aisle towards us. I dug frantically in the wallet, but we had almost no money left. Once he reached us, all I could do was explain what had happened. "Vous le promettez?", he said, holding his lower eyelid down with one finger. "Oui, oui", I said, apologetically. He believed us, and there was no further trouble. We were depressed, angry and shaken. The sum of money we had lost was trivial (in our terms), but I felt furious with myself. Ali was livid at the thought that while Morocco was full of decent hardworking people fighting to make a living, or begging on the streets for a few dirham here and there, this bastard had cynically and calmly spun us a cock and bull story and walked off with what in Moroccan terms was a substantial wad of cash.

We tried to put this behind us, as we approached the border. A short taxi ride took us to the border itself. Five minutes later, we were in Ceuta, Spain, in the small Spanish enclave on the African mainland: a virtual mirror image of Gibraltar, the other Pillar of Hercules, now clearly visible across the other side of the Straits. I got to thinking about borders, and how mysterious they are: about how the possession of the right piece of paper renders them trivial, a mere fleeting inconvenience in the journey. And about how for others not so fortunate, the same border represents a seemingly uncrossable divide, both physical and metaphorical, between poverty and affluence, between have and have-not, between having a future to look forward to and having little or no future.