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.