Morocco. One of the most vibrant, culturally thick, surprising and spicy countries I have ever visited. The first time I went to Morocco I was part of a little crew of the most galactic, super star, clown, majestic sorcerers this world has ever seen. A band of effin’ weirdos traversing the world together, causing brows to raise everywhere we went.
There was Shrine, a wild and eccentric artist with a handle bar mustache, tattoos all over his body and an affinity for collecting trash. Dream Rockwell with her wild mane of hair, bombshell physique, and affinity for collecting dead animals. And last but not least, Rajiv, one of the wildest looking men you have ever seen. With the body of a gladiator, the facial features of a wild panther, and a collector of grass in his wild unkempt hair. Funny thing about Rajiv is that he is probably the most gently guy I know, but people would constantly cower away in fear wherever he went. Begging him to spare them, and not fight because they were peaceful men. Poor guy, he’s got the biggest heart, but people were just so frightened about his intense features and assumed he was there to wreak havoc on their feeble bodies, when really, he was just walking down the street. He handled it all with a smile though, as he always does. And then there was me.
Well after a somewhat disastrous show performance that we had in Portugal, the four of us decided to cut down south to do some exploring in Morocco. None of us had been, but we all had the burning desire to go. So we rented a car, and headed down south to this mysterious land.
Once we departed from Spain, crossed the channel and docked at Tangier, Morocco, we had one small problem. We couldn’t bring our rental car with us into the country. We had to leave it at the dock, and pay a fine. Not wanting to do that, and feeling sketchy about leaving the car there, we thought we could outsmart them. First we sent the ladies in, to talk to the officers...didn’t work. Then we sent the men in to bro it out...that didn’t work. So then we thought we’d bribe them with cookies and charm. Still didn’t work. We even offered cash which is usually the universal doorway to getting what you want. But that still didn’t work. So we decided to wait. We worked these guys for far too long and weren’t getting anywhere. But maybe we could fool this next shift of workers. So we waited. Finally the first shift of workers left and the second shift came in. I don’t really remember what we were thinking at the time, but apparently we had some grand delusions of a plan that was going to dupe them all. But no, we failed yet again. We finally admitted defeat, parked the car and walked across the border.
With no real plans on where to go, and no guide book, we asked an officer where to go.
“Oh you must go to Chefchaouen. There are lot’s of drugs there.” Um, ok. That’s kind of unnerving to have a government official tell you to go to a certain place because of the drugs. So we decide to ask another local who said exactly the opposite. “Don’t go to Chefchaouen because there are lots of drugs there.” Soooo you’re saying ther are drugs in this town. Ok. Well I wasn’t really interested in ending up in some sketched out town, with a whole bunch of effed up hasbins, trying to sell us drugs. So let’s definitely NOT go there.
Still not convinced of a particular destination however, we head to the bus station to take a look at our options. Due to the morning’s border debacle, by the time we reached the bus station, all of the buses had left. All but one that is. Destination? Chefchaouen. Of course.
With the border town being nothing but a dusty mound of dirt, we decided to give in to our fate and buy tickets to the last bus out of there. As we sat there waiting in line for the bus to Chefchaouen, a police officer passed by us and merely said, “Chefchaouen? Lots of drugs there.” He gave us a long hard look and started nodding. Why hell was he nodding? Was he affirming the drugs? Was he judging us, as if to say, “I know what you plan on doing there, and I’m gonna get you” or was he merely just saying “Party on Wayne?” Either way, it disturbed me and the legend of Chefchaouen had grown to be some dark tale of Pleasure Island where men turn to donkeys and the only way to escape is through the mouth of a whale.
We hoped on the bus, and instantly things have turned exciting. The bus itself is an old school bus with cracked pleather seats in dusty teal. The seats are crammed with children, mothers, and some of the most weathered faces I have ever seen on this planet. There are religious types walking down the aisle, praying over us, as other old ladies fight their way through the aisles trying to sell us pastries and bagged nuts. There are swarms of men yelling at you from the windows outside, holding their bags of newspaper coned snacks. In the chaos of it all, it somehow seemed to be working like clockwork. There was a distinct rhythm to it all, and everyone knew exactly how to fall in line. Everyone but us of course.
We travel outside of the city and far into the mountains for several hours until finally, we arrive late into the night. I look out the window and immediately think, “Is this it? Where’s the town?” We had stopped on a steep incline of a hill, under a single street lamp, with no bus station around, not to mention even a single bench. Is this really it? Where’s the town?
I quickly look around, and the bus lights have come up and everyone is standing up, bustling to grab their stuff. Wait, seriously? This is it. I don’t understand. Where is everyone going? The town is dark and I don’t see any houses or business close by. With no tour book and it being fairly late, I started to worry about our possibilities of finding a hotel.
One by one, we exit the bus and as I turn the corner to descend down the stairs, I see a man standing on the other side of the glass doors staring directly into me with these intense hallow, dark eyes. I was immediately put on edge. He was a tall, ghastly looking fellow. Dark, gaunt cheeks, blackened teeth, and jet black hair. He looked like a walking shadow, barely holding on to life. The man resembled Scar from the Lion King for goodness sake. There was something about him that terrified me and I immediately did not trust him. As soon as I stepped off the bus, I was open game, and there he came darting directly toward me as I quickly ran to find my pack.
Well thankfully, I had my band of galactic, super star, majestic sorcerer, clowns and the key superstar of the moment, is our gladiator, Rajiv. Rajiv makes me feel safe. So as I approach Rajiv, Scar jumps in and cuts to the chase. Asks us where we’re staying. I quickly tell him that we have a hotel and that we’re going there now. By this point we have all picked up our stuff and started walking. But with no hotel, or even a cluster of buildings in near site, I have no idea in what direction to start walking. I began to watch the crowd like a hawk, observing where the majority of people were walking. Surely they would be walking to a central part of town, and we would be in the company of others. So without having any clue on where we were going, we all decided to climb up this hill and figure it out. Which would have been easy, had we not had Scar here, circling us like prey, insisting on knowing if we have a hotel and where it is.
Again, I lie and say that we’ve got it all figured out, and that our hotel is just ahead. But Scar does not take this answer lightly. He starts talking about his cousin’s hotel and how they have cheap rooms...oh, I see, this game. The recruit foreigners to your family’s hotel and get a cut of the profits game. In some way I was relieved to know what he was after. At least he didn’t want to rape or rob us, but I was still annoyed and a bit afraid that I still couldn’t shake him off.
He starts to follow us on our hike through the hills until we finally find a hotel. Thank god. We check it out, seems reasonable, and there’s room. Sweet. Except for the fact that I still don’t trust this guy, he frightens me to the core and now this guy knows what hotel we’re staying at.
Well somehow during that hike, as I’m actively staying 10 steps ahead of the troupe to get away from that guy, and to forge ahead to find shelter, Rajiv and him started talking in broken French. Something about a farm just outside of town and how he wants us to visit it and meet his family. Rajiv is enamored by this idea and clearly isn’t as freaked out as Dream and I were. All I wanted to do was ditch the guy, put my shit in a room, lock my door, and go to bed. Scar implores that we check out his family’s hotel a few more times before we finally leave him at the door and walk up to our rooms.
After dumping off our stuff, and washing up a bit, we decided that we still weren’t sleepy and that we’d like to look for the town to see if we could find food. As soon as we stepped out of the hotel, I was relieved that there was no Scar to be found and that maybe he had gone home for the night.
We walked a few more blocks up the hill and suddenly a gorgeous little mountain village appeared, with beautifully warm Moroccan lamps lighting a small boulevard of shops and restaurants. The vivid colors were so inviting with warm candles flickering everywhere, revealing the details of the Moorish architecture and the colorful tapestries. And the best part....stuff was still open! What a miracle! We instantly find ourselves a cozy and inviting looking restaurant with a hand painted sign, wicker seats, and a low table for us to sit around. Mint teas for all and some tagine please.
Well not a minute had gone by, when mid conversation, I look over and Scar is sitting at a table a mere 2’ away. WTF? How did he get there? I didn’t see him walk in. And is he really sitting at the only shadowed table at the restaurant? Come on. That’s ridiculous! That’s some movie shit, with the villain lurking in the dark, ready to pounce on his prey. How the fuck did he know where we were and how did he arrive so swiftly? Well I pretended not to notice and watched him, watching us like a hawk, shamelessly devouring our every word as he openly rolled him self a joint. Finally he inserts himself into the conversation, talking to Rajiv first. Talking to him about the farm again, and how he insists that we come to his farm tomorrow. They are speaking in French and I am dieing to know, the exact context of this conversation, so that I could sharply analyze every inflection and judge for myself what was really going on. But I couldn’t, so I had Rajiv to rely on.
We try to ignore him and have a peaceful dinner, but his attention is focused directly on us. He is sitting right at the edge of our circle, not quite in, but not far enough away to be considered in his own circle, with his body fully pitched in toward the center. He was pushing the literal boundary and didn’t leave until we did.
As soon as we stood up, there he was again, following us, talking about his farm.
What is it with this guy and his farm?! What’s really going on here? What kind of farm? What’s so damn important about this farm that he’d want us to see it?
I’m overcome with skepticism, as Rajiv and Shrine continue their casual conversation with this guy. With no promises made, we finally left the little town to go to bed that night.
The next morning was magic. I was having a soul-gasm seeing the tiny town in the daylight. Looking out our window, you could really see how high up we were in the mountains, tucked far away from the next major town. The streets were painted in this glorious ultra violet blue paint that bled up into the walls of the surrounding homes. Everything was ultra violet blue. It looked like an emptied out pool built for Shamu, but on a village scale! You couldn’t see any separation between the streets, the homes and the sky. It was all blue. There were beautiful red doors, with little old ladies in hooded gowns selling you apples. Church bells were ringing, and men were pushing around big wooden carts full of merchandise.
I had walked into town with the group for some breakfast. As I sat there, in near tears, staring at a clothes line waft in the wind, backdropped by all of this surreal blueness, I am startled into reality once I realize that Scar is back. Are you kidding me? This guy again? What the fuck does he want? He implores us, yet again, to come to this farm.
By this point, I have to know what is up. As the boys are speaking to him in broken French, I ask, what kind of farm is it? Does it have chickens and cows? Is there a vegetable garden? What are we going to do on this farm? Drink fresh milk and play with the kids? I just don’t understand. Rajiv reports back, that yes, his family farm does indeed have chickens and cows and such. He also inserts that he is quite interested in checking it out. With Dream on her own adventure, and Shrine, now interested in seeing this farm, I reluctantly agreed to go with them.
We finish up our breakfast and start to follow Scar to his farm. We cruise through the tiny alley’s of the mountain village and before I know it, it has become very clear that we are walking out of town and are now hiking on a small dirt path into the open mountains of Morocco.
The first red flag raises immediately as I follow the boys out of town. We hike further and further into the mountains, maintaining casual conversation and all the while wondering, when is this guy going to rob us or rape us? As we walk through the hills, we pass by an anonymous graveyard. There must have been about 20 head stones up and not a single one of them had any engravings on them. Completely blank slates, with a new hole that had been freshly dug. Anonymous graveyard in the middle of nowhere...not foreboding at all. Totally normal.
We continue to walk and the further in we get, the more aware I am that I have lost all of my escape routes. We are too far for anyone to hear us if we yell, if I tried to run back, I would not be able to make it back on my own, and even if I did know my way, it would be an incredibly long way to run back. At this point, I actually had a strange peace come over me. I knew that my options were gone and in some ways, the lack of choice can provide a false sense of peace. It is what it is, and you’re going to do what you’re going to do. That’s it. Simple.
After a good 30 minute hike into the mountains, we finally arrive at his “farm.” Quotation marks because all we arrived at, was a single concrete shack in the middle of the mountain. Oh boy, here we go. He wants us to enter the concrete shack. So this is where he’s going to hack us to death? :Sigh: Ok. I might as well check out the place and get my kicks in, before life as we know it is over.
We enter the concrete shack and meet his brother, who doesn’t look much healthier than our friend Scar. Inside the shack it is dark and dusty, and there are piles of what seems to be hay or brush, wrapped in bags, and piled all the way up to the ceiling.
Rajiv, Shrine and I immediately sit down and play it cool. Now I can’t be certain what was going on in their minds, but the whole situation was very obviously peculiar.
I let Rajiv continue being translator and sit there, looking casually cool and charming. Exuding the idea of smarts and confidence, as if to say, you can’t scare me.
After a few minutes of them talking, I can see that the energy has shifted and something intense was being discussed. Rajiv immediately looked down, pulled out his notepad, and began to ignore Scar. Scar is looking at his brother, clenching his knuckles and shaking his head.
Me: “Rajiv, what the hell is going on?”
Rajiv: “Ahhhh...they want us to buy some weed and I told them very nicely that we weren’t interested. That we just wanted to see their farm.”
Me: “Well they’re obviously not cool with that answer.”
Rajiv: *Shrugs and continues to draw*
Scar, having shown signs of being one persistent little mofo, wasn’t about to stop now. He started to become very upset about the situation and started yelling at us. Angry that he had done all of this work to get us there. The language barrier between the men start to intensify the situation even more, and I start to wonder if this is when we finally get murdered.
Now this next part, I can’t really remember how we figured it out, but we eventually discover that they don’t speak very good French, but they do speak Spanish fluently. Perfect. French I can’t do, but me and Spanish get along mighty fine. I begin to pull out the charm reserves and start speaking to them with the most calming and motherly voice possible. I finally feel like I can do something to aid this situation.
Sure enough, after a few minutes things start to settle. I start to feel good about the fact that if they were going to kill us, they would have by now, but we are still here. Rajiv tries to make best of the situation and begins to show them his drawings. They sit there amused, but not entirely amused. They still had their operation to consider and weren’t entirely convinced that we would get away that easily.
Finally they reveal their stock. Turns out the piles of hay that lined the inside of the entire cottage were all bushels of marijuana. In an effort to impress us, they remove all the plastic lining and insist that we take a picture. I refuse, I didn’t want to have to pay for that picture later.
Then they show us their hash operation. Taking bushels of weed, laying it over a cheese cloth, that’s tied on top of a plastic basin. Placing another piece of plastic on top of the the bushels, Brother Scar starts to bang on his weed drum, allowing the crystals to sift through the cheese cloth fall in the basin below. By this point my charm meter is up full scale and I am ooh-ing and ahh-ing this situation. Really making him feel like the man. Showing my genuine excitement and interest in this whole ordeal. Starting to feel a bit saucy by this point, I ask to bang on the weed drum. With everyone loosening up, we start singing and dancing as we sat in this mangy den, banging on this drum.
Finally it comes time to see the collection. We peer in to find a happy little mound of brown crystals sitting at the bottom. Hooray! Today I’m making hash in a drug den with my two sketched out friends ma! Definitely something to write home about.
Brother Scar is beaming with pride and is insisting that we take pictures again. I am so weirded out by this. Does he want money for these pictures? By this time though, he had asked enough times that I finally gave in and started taking pictures. Turns out, he’s just so excited about his operation, that the idea of documentation truly excites him. He shows us how to press and bake the crystals to make that sticky tootsie role hash that we’re familiar with, and to tell you the truth, I was loving it! The whole thing. I could have interned there.
After a while we get the inside scoop on the whole operation. Turns out these guys are one of the biggest distributors of hash into Spain. Guys will come in to their shack and mule up to 50 caramelos at a time. A caramelo is a balloon filled with loose hash, that’s about as big as a golf ball. The details of muling that many caramelos kind of boggles my mind. Can you imagine swallowing 50 golf balls and then pushing them out like a sea turtle giving birth? And have you ever smoked hash in Spain? How do you feel about that now?
Well we stayed there for a bit longer, chatting it up with them about the whole operation, and by the end of it, I swear that their faces got brighter in the process. The shadow seemed to lift a bit, and Scar actually seemed like a nice guy. Sketchy and annoying, but I could see the goodness in him.
No one died that day. That made it a great day.
And Gah! I just tried to find all the photos from this adventure to post on here, and have just now discovered that they have all been lost in a technological space trap! Ugh! I hate technology sometimes.
that story was crazy! wow!
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