TAMRI AND TAFAYA
We had
been enjoying the Tamri-Imswoune area for about two weeks, relaxing into our
routines of exploring the cliffs and the plateau above, meeting the
Berbers,finding good surf beaches, nights around the fire outside or
tucked in our tiny cell, drawing, making God’s Eyes, playing music.
Inspired by the Moroccan designs I’d absorbed in Marrakesh and the new skills
I'd learned from watching the women in the soukh I taught myself to weave
beads, making bracelets and necklets.
I also
started embroidering my indigo cotton tabard with elaborate colorful geometric
patterns inlaid with beads. Tom worked on his Dieu et
Humanité
raves. We felt safe, happy.
It was
coming on to spring and warmer weather. More tourists arrived. I
began to feel uncomfortable with so many nosy strangers suddenly appearing,
poking their heads into our little cell, taking my surfing beach space.
Wandering the paths I had wandered alone so often.
But one
day a French family arrived. Teachers from Marrakesh. They said we
were famous, and that’s why so many people were visiting. The news had
spread along the grapevines. Jean et Jeanne Bisset and their beautiful
children, the younger girls Arielle, Marianne, Magoli and the older boy,
Nicholas, were such a nice open friendly family I just fell in love with them
all. Jean was the most handsome man I'd ever encountered. Cool and
smooth, clever and intellectual with it. I fell under his spell. These people
were another level. Pure class.None of the defensive patronizing snotty
bullshit I experienced with most of the other French tourists. They had
been in Morocco for years. They were acclimatized. They knew the
ways to integrate and be accepted. They were such intelligent people,
urbane, cultured, sophisticated. Always telling me interesting facts
about Morocco, teaching me French, inspiring me to return to my old
joie de vivre; showing by example how to live well and not be influenced by
others. They seemed to sense my personal search for Truth, but didn’t patronize
me, they nurtured me, were protective of me.
The Bissets
came for a weekend and said they would be back in a few weeks on their way to a
fortnight’s holiday in the Sahara, traveling down as far as Spanish Morocco. I
did not hesitate when they asked us along on the trip. It was to be an
expedition of a few cars, and a few friends. We explained we were
basically penniless and forced to beg, but they insisted, they would love our
company and could stretch the cooking pot to accommodate us, happy just to have
us along. Well that was wonderful to me. I hadn’t ever felt so wanted
before !
I let all
my straight-laced inhibitions about being a leech and a burden on others fall
away and Tom reinforced this by telling me all the stories of his previous
troubadour existence in which the artist/poet/musician is supported by a royal
court or a rich patron just for being an entertaining and inspiring
person. I hadn’t looked at myself in such a light before, but it made
being a beggar a little more respectable. The idea of going into the
desert with good fellow travelers overrode all other reservations.
Early in
April the Bissets returned, with another Frenchman, Phillipe Beaumont, a
writer, and his friend Bill, a Canadian hitchhiker with long hair and a
beard, but not a hippy, more of a student. We were in two
cars, the Bisset’s monstrous old Chevy tank and Beaumont’s Citroen 2CV.
Nicholas traveled in the 2CV with Beaumont because he was learning to drive,
while the rest of us squashed into the Yank tank. Bill, Tom and I were
mostly stoned and locked in our world of English language at first. But
the kif ran out on the third day and we became more integrated as a
group. I decided I would only speak French, no matter how hard the
struggle to comprehend. After all I only had three years of
secondary school French badly remembered from thirteen years before. And
so I learned to speak and think in French. But with a Moroccan accent I
found out, much later in France, where it was considered somewhat declassé, something
that amused me, as all snob values usually do.
From
Imswoune we traveled to Tiznit, Goulamine (Goulmim) and on to Tan Tan, taking
three days, stopping and camping by the roadside. Investigating
interesting towns and villages briefly, but not getting out of the cars as
everyone was keen to get to the ocean and the real desert. After Tan Tan
the road went west to the coast, then running south parallel to the Atlantic
which was mostly in sight all the way to Tafaya. The first dune had us
all out of the car and there we stayed, camping the night.
Diary
entry. 14.4.68 Dimanche.
From the
first dune our real expedition began. We arrived at it just on sunset and
it was everybody out and a race to be first to the top. What is it about sand dunes ? We all ran up the steep sand, Bill full of wonder, Tom, the
children and I in high spirits, playful. Jean, Jeanne and Beaumont
followed, unable to quite make the pace of youth. From the top we took in
the dusk colors, the pink reflections on the salt lakes, while the guys and
the kids rolled over and over to the bottom again. The moon was only
half, but still its’ light was like day, reflecting onto the regularity of
sculpted dunes billowing into the distance and over the horizon to the south, our
way ahead for the next day. That night I couldn’t sleep and left the camp
to wander up the dune and sing aloud into the night, soft sad calming
songs.
Next day
we woke to a wind which quickly increased from a whisper to a shriek, filling
our food and eyes. The dunes had plumes of sand flying off the
ridges. It was very satisfying. Authentic Sahara, I thought.
We all tied turbans around our head Berber fashion and I was pleased for my
desert clothes, the loose, long caftan and burnous. The road went past a small
salt lake and into sand drifts and the cars became stuck time and again.
Eventually we decided to wait for a convoy following us to finish the journey
to Tafaya. But after an hour’s wait, during which time we talked to a jeep
driver coming from the south, we moved on again, pushing and walking through
the worst parts.
We came
to a very large salt lake surrounded by big dunes and up onto another plateau
to some shells of buildings built by the Italians during the war, but now no
more than free standing roofless walls, half swallowed by the encroaching
dunes. We returned to the salt lake where Nicholas, who was driving the
2CV, took it in his head to drive out onto the hard crust, but the car fell
through out near the center, thick black mud oozing up past the axles. We
all felt such despair that we would never get it out that Marianne started
crying for us all. But eventually, with everyone pushing we backed it out
the way it went in, splattering mud and salt over us all, except Nicholas
of course, who thought it all trés amusant.
While we
were involved in that the convoy of cars and jeeps which we had hoped to
accompany us through the dunes passed by without offering to help, although our
predicament was obvious. It was an Italian geographical magazine survey
caravan with very hep-looking people and two teenage boys in flared
velvet-inset blue jeans. Later, both coming in and coming back from
Tafaya, we passed them again held up with mechanical problems, the pretty boys
stripped to the waist, their designer jeans and pale city bodies smeared
black with grease.
After we
extricated the Citroen we drove back up to the building shells on the plateau
and made camp. The Bissets decided not to risk the cars any further, but
still determined to get as far as Tafaya, on the border of Spanish Morocco, a
fabled Barbary seaport of considerable antiquity. So it was decided to wait
where we were for another convoy. Next day was spent just hanging out, me
writing and drawing with the kids, mainly keeping out of the wind.Jeanne, Jean and Beaumont wandered off to a nearby wadi and came back with
prehistoric flints. My mind turned back in time to when this had all been
an environment supporting wildlife and hunters and gatherers. I wished I
had known more about why it was now a desert. What lay under all
that sand ? Ancient civilizations ? Atlantis ? A truck
turned up about four in the afternoon and Jean and Beaumont negotiated a ride
for us all to and from Tafaya for 100 durhams.
This
truck was part of a five truck convoy. We were the only Europeans.
A blue woman sat in the passenger seat of the truck I was in. We were in
the back on sacks of I don’t know what. We set off into the late
afternoon, Tom perched high and cheery playing his drums. Many many times
we stopped, ensabled, (stuck in the sand). At one stop we saw a long string of
rocks along the shoreline and Jean said it was supposed to be the fossilized
backbone of the whale that swallowed Jonah. They did look like enormous
vertebrae.
Eventually,
at sunset, we pulled up for prayers. I was amazed to see the blue woman
had a tiny new-born baby wrapped under her burnoose. It hadn’t made a sound and
looked to me as if it would weigh only three pounds. Maybe she had just given
birth on the road. The truck crew made a fire and cooked tajin and mint tea, which was
delicious. Tom and a Berber truckie played flutes while we sipped the hot
tea as the last light faded. Later, jerking and bumping into the freezing
night we watched the changing patterns of wind-driven clouds and moonshine
reflected on the ocean ever at our right hand. It came in to rain and
eventually we stopped and we all piled out and slept under the trucks for
shelter. I woke in the bitterly cold dawn, before everyone as usual, and
wandered up a dune to watch the sunrise over the dunes and the light on the
ocean, feeling sad and lonely. Tom had thrown a paranoid jealous
fit in the night, accusing me of making it with Bill. I’d snuggled in close to
Bill for warmth as the night got colder in the back of the lurching truck. Tom
tried to get between us, I made him cuddle my back, while I tried to get warm
on Bill’s. In his rage he had taken my books and photos of Klea and
thrown them into the windy night. I managed to find some of my notebooks,
but lost drawings and the photos of Klea. With them went another part of
my broken heart, like a shard of the shattered mirror, leaving me colder,
emptier, lonelier, benumbed.
Again off
over the bumpy road, becoming bogged, ensabled, repeatedly, for twenty more kilometers and reached Tafaya mid-morning.
Tafaya
confirmed my mind’s eye imaginings of what a Barbary Coast Saharan seaport
would be, a leaner, ghost-town version of Essaouira - a scattering of faceless
pill-box buildings, half-buried in the sand, at the approaches, then a low
white town like an encrustation on the shoreline. Spanish tiled roofs
and the typical Moroccan geometric blue-tiled walls.
The truck
pulled into the central suq, deserted except for a drooping mule tethered to a post, and we
unloaded ourselves and the baggage, very happy to have at last stopped the
lurching, bumping ride. The relentless wind made sightseeing uncomfortable so
we found a café, seemingly the only one open in the town, with a sunny
protected courtyard and relaxed, discussing the strangeness of it all.
The town seemed deserted. The wind had driven everyone in behind
shuttered windows and closed doors. The truck drivers came to tell us
they would be starting back before sunset and the Bissets, anxious about the
stranded cars, undefended on a road of ill-repute, made arrangements to have us
all on the road again with the convoy. So we had a mere five hours to
experience this remote (to me) outpost on the desert coast of Spanish Morocco
in a gale that blew relentlessly, making it all less than
enjoyable.
The
children, the guys and I wrapped ourselves in blankets and burnouses against
the knife-like searing sand on the wind which was now a shrieking gale and took
off for the harbor, but it seemed to be nothing more than a wave-lashed
breakwater.
Out on a sandbank amidst the foaming wash of breakers the
roofless windowless shell of an abandoned prison building set the atmosphere of
general dereliction and hopelessness of human striving at the interface of
desert and ocean. As the image shows, it is still there, some 50 years later. What must internment there have been like?
The bones of several shipwrecks protruding from the surf
reinforcing the general dreary view. Desolation summed it up for me.
Looking
back at the sealed town surrounded by desert and blasted by the sand-laden gale
there seemed little point in doing anything except sit in the sheltered sunny courtyard
of the café. It was all very disappointing after the long journey to get
here. I would have liked to explore further, maybe staying a week
to really get the feel of the place, but you can’t argue with the desert
wind. Returning we found Jean and Jeanne had ordered a good lunch for
us all. They had a way of restoring spirits with food. With bellies
full of bean soup, omelette, khobs and mint tea we relaxed away the afternoon dozing in the sun
on our baggage.
Jean spoke of the write aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who wrote The Little Prince, one of my favorite books then, as now.
Comte de Saint-Exupéry was stationed in Tafaya in the late twenties and wrote the little book based on his experiences after crashing his plane in the Libyan desert some years earlier.
 |
Image by Yaraslov Blanter
|
These days there is a little monument to him in Tafaya, seen above,
but it is nearly always swallowed up in the relentless shifting sands.
Around sunset the noise of revving trucks overtopped the shrieking wind
and it was time to go back to the torture of the gut-lurching sand track. So
much for Tafaya.
 |
| Saharan dunes stretching endlessly to east behind Tafaya |
The
journey back was quite an adventure. The same scenario of getting stuck
in the sand every few miles, except on the third stop we realised we were being
pursued. By the army ! Apparently we had chosen a smuggler’s convoy
! It was quite hair-raising, they would catch up and be in sight,
firing rifles, with bullets whizzing past altogether too close, while we were
digging frantically to get the trucks out onto the next bit of clear road
Then the army would get bogged and we would roar off and out of sight, while
they dug themselves out. This went on all day and half the night.
The night drive was especially dramatic. The pursuing headlights coming so
close, bullets whizzing past & smacking to truck sides, then receding to
blip, gone, just darkness & dust, as they got stuck & we forged
on. And on. We didn’t stop and make camp needless to say and were quickly
dropped off at the cars without any lingering fond farewells. We made
camp in double-quick time, hoping to appear as if we had been there all night
and not to have to confront the army. Less than half an hour later they
sped past, seeming not to notice us, to our considerable relief. Later we
found out this road was notorious for running contraband from the Canary
islands, just offshore.
We all
slept late the next day. The wind had subsided at last and we were in
very happy space. We’d had high adventure, with an unexpected Adrenalin
lurch as a finale and everyone’s spirits were up. All survived unhurt, the
relief of it! We took two days to return to Goulamine via Tan Tan,
stopping at nearly every wadi to explore the canyons, finding lots of
prehistoric arrow-heads and flints. Jean and Jeanne, being teachers, knew
a lot about the area and, although I wasn’t fully understanding them, I was
being inspired, although I didn’t know it then, to the later studies in
prehistory and human evolution I undertook as a major for my degree.
I must
say something here about Jeanne Bisset. Every day while we were on the
road she made us great meals. We were ten in number, quite a few mouths
to cater for. But every lunch was a feast. Usually she made an
enormous communal platter of salade nicoise, greens, hard-boiled eggs, boiled potatoes,
canned tuna, olives, cucumbers, carrots, apples, nuts, which we enjoyed with
Arab bread and mint tea. Breakfast was always coffee and hot rolls and
dinner a pasta or tajin. I don’t particularly recall large amounts of
food taking up space in the vehicles, but we certainly all ate very well.
Not only that, but with real French chic she always looked elegant, cool
and stylish, taking it all in her stride, and still managing to enjoy life
despite the onerous chores of camp cook. She also managed to mostly
eliminate washing up, except for cups, as we all ate from one big bowl,
Arab-style.
Diary.
Goulamine.
April 12, 1968. Today I felt I understood every word and spoke easily
back in French to Jean, Beaumont, and Magali outside the camel suq - the first
time really that I have been able to truly receive their vibrations. We
sang a song of farewell together, the leaving behind of the desert, a song of
thanks and praise. We were moving in a different pattern after this, cars
going in different directions. I realized that my previous ignorance and
incomprehension was a lack of will to understand through fear of making a fool
of myself. Ego defenses which fueled my paranoia, causing unhappiness in
me, probably baffling them as they would have received evasive or weird answers
to their friendly conversation attempts.
Return to
Imswoune. April 13. Many cars here. Families with station wagons
(how did they get down those “roads” ?) which disgorge jerry cans, fold-up
furniture, air mattresses, sleeping bags and gas stoves. Pale and ugly
women in thick makeup - clown-like men in quaint hats. The Bisset’s
travel like this too, but how different Jean et Jeanne are, so proud,
intelligent, beautiful, not like these revolting gangsters and their
wives. They are probably innocent government people, but I’m
repulsed. An arrogant snotty child, Francoise, 10 years old, speaks French, Arab, Spanish,
Italian all perfectly (so she tells me), but who parrots stupid phrases of her
mother. They live in a big house in Casablanca, she tells me, with over
twenty servants. She has three personal servants of her own. They
have brought four with them. The child is pure, innocent, but soon those
words she parrots will bend and break her and she will be one of them.
The
fishermen are busy running everyone’s lives... always aji, blati, shooya,
allez, venez. I am tired of them pushing me about and in future will move
only if I think their reasons are very good. A Spanish woman told
me of murders by bandits - an English couple at Tamri; a sixty-five year old
French woman walking her dog on the beach at
Mogador, where we walked the donkey.
I listened sickly to her fear and paranoia and watched her openly despise and
put down Moroccans in front of her “Fatima” whose negroid face showed a mixture
of hate, evasion, eager agreement and despair. I thought of the many
times I had walked alone in Morocco, sometimes paranoid, but for reasons of my
grief sickness. Always I felt safe, amongst friends, because of my
nationality of classlessness, no servants, no race barriers. Where we are
all brothers and sisters, where the boss is as good as you are after work
finishes, but before that everyone hates the boss. I thought of walking
narrow back lanes in Goulamine with Tom to score a nice packet of kif for five durhams in a
crazy teahouse scene where they turned us on. He was paranoid as hell,
but I felt safe.
-end Diary entry.
Our
retreat had become infested. The long days of uninterrupted solitude were
over. Maya, untethered while we were away, had become renegade and eaten
crops up on the plateau. Our hosts were not amused. We sold him for about
a quarter of what we paid for him. We wanted to give him away, but that
was socially unacceptable apparently. We felt our hosts had been so
generous and kind to us, and he had after all caused them financial loss, that
it was the best we could do to pay them back, but they wouldn’t accept him for
free. I watched him being led away to the old life of drudgery he came
from, wishing I had some magic carpet to transport him to a happy life of
freedom in Australia. I gave the money to Tom and he bought kif
with it. I helped him smoke it, but with a sense of powerlessness and
inequity. I really didn’t have a handle on life’s realities at all.
But I was determined to live in my dream in which freedom was for everyone and
everyone was good and kind at heart. A bubble built to burst.
The Bissets
were finally returning to Marrakesh and asked us to go back with them.
I
saw the adventure here was over. So back to Marrakesh we went.
Reculer poru mieux sortir.
Gathering ourselves together for the next stage of our journey,
wherever it might lead us.
an effect created by the slatted awnings over the lanes. 
I loved going through his stone artifacts collections and letting my hands
and fingers absorb their inherent intelligence. He also had terra cotta and
bronze statuary from ancient cultures. 
plaster
slabs of cave art with bisons and hunters. Rice paper copies of Chinese and
Tibetan and Sanskrit sutra texts. Buddha thangkas..And so much more.
It was an Ali Baba's cave for me. Sometimes at siesta I
would just curl up on his couch with one of his books and fall asleep, my head
full of visions of Stonehenge, Çatal Hüyük;, Harappa, Olmecs.
I discovered the ideas of Mircea Eliade. Axis mundi. I wanted to find some evidence of Atlantis. Real tangible hard evidence. But apart from unproven myths associated with some ruins in Morocco on the north coast, and the explosion of Santorini, it seems it was just that. A myth. I still liked toying with the idea of it. 
Among the Sanskrit teachings I came across the concept of kalpas, eons of time in which we grew, flourished, decayed and died, to return on the next turn of the Big Wheel. 
sails full of the winds of Karma, Eliade & the I Ching in our
baskets, we set off from Fez on a course out of Africa and across Europe;
passing through many countries, cultures and adventures as we homed in on this
crazy mirage destination; the central axis for all future
orientation? 
sails full of the winds of Karma, Eliade & the I Ching in our
baskets, we set off from Fez on a course out of Africa and across Europe;
passing through many countries, cultures and adventures as we homed in on this
crazy mirage destination; the central axis for all future
orientation? 
