Salat

I start walking up the valley, towards the high Atlas. One high peaks dominates the sky at the end of the valley.

I have rarely been so unprepared in my life, but this is mostly intentional.

I've chosen a tiny road I saw on google maps, extending back into the mountains from Amizmiz, dotted with Berber villages. My bag has some bread and water and two meager, short blankets.

I hike for miles, above green terraced farmland cut into the steep valley walls, every step a move towards a completely unknown destination. There certainly isn't a hostel down here. Piles of rock houses sit in a rhythm along the road, sheep and goats scattered across the hills, and a vibrant quietness I haven't heard since the silence of Connemara, Ireland. This valley is unbelievably beautiful -- bus tours would cart folks in from all over the world if they knew.

Old men kiss their hands before they shake mine. Children look in shock, run to gather friends, and peer out of windows and doorways with practiced calls of "Bonjour!" A teenage boy gets my american phone number after i buy a candy bar in the tiny store he works at. Conversations stop in the streets as I amble past, and I feel the eyes on me wherever I go. I don't speak any English nor see a white person for four days.

Where am I going? I guess it's the end of the road. I just want to see it. Where will I sleep? People motion me further along the path, someone speaks of a hotel. It turns out to be something more of a home-stay -- but my adopted family invite me to tea and meals, and rural life moves in it's slow rhythms.

This is one of the greatest adventures of my life.

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I am panting. Hard. The valley floor of yesterday looks thousands of feet below me. Kick-step. Breath. Kick-step. Breath. Is this seriously altitude? How the heck am I here at all?

I am trying so hard. Was not expecting this. Hardly even considered even trying to climb this thing until last night, really. This is harder than Mt Adams. Ballpark of Whitney. The eagerness of the chossy start gave way long ago to the calculated, pained, snowy endurance. Kick-step. Breath. Kick-step. Breath. This work magically lessens the divide between you and yourself.

I look up. The sun is too low. You idiot. It's late. I push harder through a section of ice and rock and gain the summit ridge, into easier snow, and now I am on the summit, the usual shock that it's somehow over after hours and hours of labor. There's no more "up", so I stare sideways in all directions over the high Atlas mountains.

Perhaps no one has been up here before. I feel remote, I feel first in the unknown. I can't imagine that's true, but I name it anyways. Salat Peak. It's Arabic for prayer. I see my effort as a kind of prayer, something quite personal as the whole valley Berber crowd regards my reported act with a general apathy.

I pray to have the wisdom to love myself, and the patience to love others.

 I am normally conceited to the point of requiring something I'd think a little more complex, something more elegant and high-minded to justify my attention -- but this is what comes out of me thousands of feet above the valley, staring into myself amidst all the straining effort.

On the way down I experience the most perfect silence as my body relaxes, and the light turns gold on the opposite ridge. I feel like I should be able to fly down to Fatima and the family in that tiny village at the bottom. Breath. My mind clears for once.

Salat.

Sunscreen?

So, Moroccans don't use sunscreen. Thus, it is absurdly expensive absolutely everywhere, even the far dirty corners of the makeshift marketplace of Ourir. Ourir is taghazout's poor cousin everyone travels to because it has a bank, and that's about it. But here I found myself on the sunscreen hunt.

"Do you have sunscreen?"

"Bumstreen?"

"Er, no, uh, une creme pour le solei?"

I am handed olive oil by a Moroccan who looks about my age. We give it a few more tries, and I walk away from their tent full of kitchen supplies and random odds and ends even more exasperated by the hunt. I try to surf about 4 or 5 hours a day, and it's doing a serious number on my face.

A huge, dusty gust of wind blows over the tent I just left. I run back to help set it back up, and I eventually found myself invited back, huddled in a grubby van with the crew that runs the shop. A huge pot of meat and veggies and potatoes sat before us, which we attacked with bread for utensil.  They think the English word for potato is hilarious, and i don't absorb a second of the Arabic they teach me.

In two hours eating lunch and helping out at the shop with my new gang, I learn more about Moroccan life than one would in three weeks in a taghazout surf school. They share, only sometimes in words I understand, the frustration of their poverty, their desire just to work anywhere, especially in America, and the happy kinship they shared every day running the sunscreen-less market stall. The call to prayer pulls a few of them to mats on the other side of the van, and I get Hassan's address and phone number to play some football if I'm around next week.

I don't think adventure is so much a physical experience as a physic experience. Sometimes shopping for sunscreen beats more classically adventurous-labeled activities like climbing and surfing. I think part of being an adventurous soul is just knowing when it's hit you, and learning to open up to it.

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Imssoune. Tiny town north of Taghazoute, south of Essouira.

Muhammad goes on lots of walks. After knowing him for 4 days, I realize he has absolutely nothing to do 90% of the time. He works in two restaurants in town, but hardly anyone is ever there in the low season as it is. We always shake hands and talk for a bit, then part until I see him on his next round in the tiny fishing village. Slowly walking. I don't want to say it's despairing, but there's a certain ennui to it that makes me feel sorry for him.

The Bay becomes my least favorite surf spot. Ever. You have to make the jump off the tide pools, then scratch around for mushed 6 to 8ft peaks that bob around without form or predictability in the ambiguous waters just outside the harbor.  The constant currant tears you back, waaaaay back to the beach. You cannot win. You get a few shots if you're lucky at a peak, before the current takes you all turns dark and evil rears it's ugly head and...

Ok so it's not that bad. But after 4 days, I was hit by the revelation that with a car I was royally screwed to find waves unless I went back to Taghazout. Everything else is too spread out. Thus, I am living in the woods in my board bag, layered up in clothes each night in a beautiful little canyon 20 minutes walk from down town.

The stars are oriented differently in Morocco. hadn't really noticed that before.

And Now in the South...

Hey! Hey, you! Bonjour! Mon ami! Heellloooo!"

Stop. Stop it. For pete's sake, dear god, stop.

I kept me eyes set in the coldest, most bored possible way and stared straight ahead.

I am not going to your spice shop. Or shoes or couscous or dyed cloth or music or art or pottery, nor your "uncle's" shop just around the corner.

Even though, I know I'm white and western and probably make monthly in Alaska the annual median income here.

These are the winding souks of Marrakech, an endless maze of stalls and shops where everything imaginable is for sale. I was passed several times by boys pulling carts loaded with snails. The militant Berbers who work them have pulling and swindling visitors down to a science, and I was at times literally pulled in shops before I could jerk my hand away. it's a romantically foreign scene, full of colors and smells and dust and noise, squeezed into narrow passageways in the heart of the city.

Wandering them was my life for three days, as I lived on the roof of a nearby hostel for €5 a night (50 Durham). It was a hectic international group of Germans, Brits, americans, swedes, Romanians, and Spaniards, all crammed together in what I now affectionately call the hostel situation. Personal space is sacrificed in the glorious name of sociality, and the result is usually remarkable people to spend time with. To list the hostelers I have befriended over stories lived and told is too big a task to try.

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""Paddle! Paaaaaaaadddddle!"

Eva got moving and popped to her feet. "Wooo!" Success.

That's all you need at this stage. I wasn't worried about getting anything more myself in the one ft beachbreak at Panorama Point. The crowds of westerners lounging on the beach and up in their RVs watched on, as a few of us rode the whitewash on epoxy longboards. The hot Moroccan sun beat down on our necks, as a late afternoon breeze cooled our faces and chopped the water.

Morocco is to Europe as Mexico is to the US. A warm, southern place to hide from winter's greyness. And apparently, my planned basecamp of Taghazout is at the center of attention. Germans and French and Brits come to stay for weeks at a time in classy apartment rentals, and suffers come from all over the world for Anchor Point. Slater surfed it some time last year, a heaving and dangerous right-hander that spills onto some nasty rocks if you bail in the first 10 feet. There are nice restaurants and wifi cafes, and an unbelievable number of camper vans passing through.

"Camel?" asked a kid towing a literal camel as I sloshes out of the water.

"No, no thanks." I replied, secretly desperate as I was for a picture with a surfboard on a camel. It'll have to wait.

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Now it's my turn to paddle. Hard. I make the drop, and my new favorite board slows in a section of mush. The wave reaches the inside, and all of a sudden jacks up vertically. Looking down the line, I can see the top feather, teetering, thinking about it... It mystically pitches over my head, and my eyes grow wide before filling with salt water.