Friends of Morocco Moroccan-American Friendship tour Nov 3-10, 2001
Morocco Moment:  After the Tragedy, Warm Greetings and Few Tourists

By Tamsin Todd
Special to The Washington Post  Sunday, October 7, 2001; Page E01

Cancel your vacation, say our families, our colleagues. Go to Paris, go to Italy; save Morocco for . . . a better time. It's the morning of Sept. 13, 2001, less than 48 hours after the terrorist attacks, and commentators and politicians with their talk of retaliation are pointing to the Middle East. Morocco isn't far away; it wraps itself around the northwest edge of Africa, bordering Algeria to the east, Europe to the north, one finger of land reaching up to Spain.

We examine the updated travel warnings on the State Department and U.K. Foreign Office Web sites. They don't mention Morocco. We talk to the U.S. and British embassies in Rabat. There's no special warning for travelers in Morocco. "Morocco is very safe, very friendly, just as usual -- please come to us," says the British Embassy liaison.

And so we negotiate with our families. We'll bring a shortwave radio. We'll check in by phone every day. We'll stick to the cities. We'll go to a beach resort instead of driving south, across the High Atlas Mountains through Berber country to the desert near the Algerian border. We'll stay safe.

Braced for the worst, we fling ourselves into Marrakech with its clay red walls and helter-skelter streets. Like everyone else, we end up in Djemaa El Fna, the large public space where snake charmers, storytellers, henna tattooists, child boxers and transvestite dancers vie for your attention. It's a Moroccan version of Times Square, filled with Marrakechis and tourists, men and women, jammed against one another. Morocco is famous for hassle at the best of times ("It's good that you're traveling with a man, to protect you," a journalist friend and Morocco expert told me), but there's little bother here -- just the usual jostling, the urban buzz.

The plane from London to Marrakech was scantily filled, but we see plenty of tourists once there -- at first. Mass tourism is well developed in Morocco, and there are tour buses everywhere, many French but also Italian, German, even Japanese. (France was the colonial power in Morocco from 1912 to 1956; French is still widely spoken and is the main commercial language.) The tourists, in their bikini tops, tank tops and tight-tight shorts, are easy to recognize. The local styles of dress are modest: Men are always in long trousers, women in caftans over their home or office clothes, sometimes with head scarves, elbows and knees covered. Swimming in our hotel pool, the Marrakechi women wear long-sleeved shirts and loose trousers. Western tourists stand out.

In our room, we watch TV compulsively on French and Spanish channels. We don't want to go to the beach resorts with the bus hordes. We wait a few days; nothing new happens. We go south.

Immediately there are differences. Local dress turns more conservative, with most women wearing veils, although few wear full face covering. Driving, I attract attention. Groups of young men and boys by the side of the road jeer at me (there are children everywhere -- 40 percent of Morocco's population is under 15). But schoolgirls smile, wave, point, cheer, and I feel like Lara Croft, Superwoman. The rental car has no air conditioning, so I drive in a T-shirt, but as we approach towns I pull on a long-sleeved linen jacket.

There are roadblocks. At major junctions coming into and out of Er Rachidia, Rich and other towns a hundred or so miles from the Algerian border, we see police cars and policemen with pistols on their belts leaning into vans and taxis. We slow down, but as soon as they can see our faces they wave us on tiredly. It's the only time we don't get extra attention.

And then it gets quieter. We stop in Ouarzazate, a resort town at the mouth of the Sahara with an unlikely whiff of Western celebrity about it. Close by is the spectacular casbah at Ait Benhaddou, a UNESCO site that served as the backdrop to "Lawrence of Arabia" and parts of "Gladiator." Ouarzazate is packed with comfortable hotels to accommodate film crews and visitors; they're now empty.

Just outside of town, Atlas Film Studios provides wide desert backdrops and production outsourcing to Hollywood. You can tour the sets built for "Asterix & Obelix 2," Timothy Dalton's "Cleopatra" and "Kundun," among others. Our guide, who tells us he played a slave in "Gladiator," is full of industry gossip -- Jean Claude Van Damme and Mel Gibson have both come to town recently. But now the sets sit empty, facing the desert, the tourists not coming.

Down the road at Skoura, we're warmly welcomed at the Casbah Ben Moro, a restored Spanish-owned casbah-hotel in the middle of a large, lush palmery. The orchard in the middle of stark desert landscape is stunning -- palms of all different heights and colors with golden tops, growing dates, figs and other fruit. Business is slow, and we pay less than $25 a night for the top room with a panoramic view of the palmery and the Atlas Mountains. The food is good, the decor elegant. It's very silent at night in the casbah and the stars are bright. It's as if we have Morocco to ourselves.

We wander through the palmery along dry river beds to the expansive Amerhidl casbah (fortress), which is featured on the back of the 50-dirham note. Mohammed, a tall man in flowing garments, gives us a brisk tour: the vine-filled central riad (or courtyard), the ramparts, the guards' room, the women's room, the kitchens. With his white robe fluttering in the wind, he barks orders at his retainers in the courtyard below. In eloquent French, he rants against Western tourists who can't see beyond their guidebooks, who don't observe local customs. He tells us he's lived in the Amerhidl all his life, that he's a direct descendant of the family that built it. "I have a passion, I have given my life to restore it." After fresh mint tea, we slip a donation toward the restoration project into the guest book of the now less grumpy Mohammed.

Mohammed's sales techniques are more sophisticated than most. The souks (open-air marketplaces) are full of very skilled negotiators who draw you into shops with offers, not letting you go until the deal is closed. They'll swear that the quality of their products is superior, that costs don't allow further reduction, or -- this is a new one -- that recent events are keeping tourists away so they can't afford to lower prices. This one's hard to argue against: We can see the empty hotels.

One way to avoid hassle is to hire an official guide. In the mid-1990s, the government implemented laws under which unofficial guides are fined and imprisoned. It has had an effect. Over two weeks, we are rarely bothered. In Fez, an official guide shows us the labyrinthine medieval medina, or old quarter. We ask questions about Fez today, but he sticks closely to the medieval. We learn that Fez was one of the most important religious cities in the Islamic world, after Mecca and Medina. It is still central to Morocco's religious life, and our guide is careful to officially assure us that Christians, Jews and Muslims all live here happily, side by side.

As we wind down toward the Kairouine mosque, we pass country donkeys carrying sheepskins to the tanneries, butchers weighing live chickens on huge scales, wood carvers. Fine medieval colleges, incredibly patterned with carved stucco and intricate tiling, punctuate the city. Our hotel, the Palais Jamai, sits on one of the fort-studded hills that surround the city. It usually sleeps hundreds, but now it's nearly empty.

The manager admits that the events in the United States have affected his business; he looks worried. He treats his 20 guests to pre-dinner drinks, reassuringly smiling at everyone in the cavernous restaurant. Again, we benefit from the lack of visitors: We're given a room with a panoramic view of the city. From the balcony, we can look down over the hotel pool and gardens to the medina, minarets rising from its flat rooftops. At prayer hour, the haunting and ancient call to prayer comes from a thousand minarets.

Everywhere, morning and night, we listen to the radio, clutching at fragments of news. A headline in a French-language Casablanca newspaper dismisses a local religious leader who has spoken out in support of the Taliban. On a train, a fellow passenger -- a local, wearing smart Western dress, tweedy jacket and khaki trousers -- is reading the French news weekly Le Point. Its cover is inflammatory -- an Arabic face imposed on the flaming towers, with the headline, "Les Fous d'Allah" ("Allah's Fanatics") -- but he shares the magazine with us readily.

In the Todra Gorge, there's no radio reception. The Atlas Mountains are gorge-pierced, and Todra, on the south side of the range, is the best -- and the narrowest. A golden-topped palmery runs between its narrow river-cut walls, and you can drive well into the mouth and spend the night in a hotel there. It's raining when we arrive. On a restaurant terrace, locals are watching the rain, talking, moving their hands. We don't understand Arabic; we hear the words "Desert Storm." News comes on the radio. The proprietor translates for us: A spokesman for some country or other (we don't catch which one) has said the United States has itself to blame by not having tight security procedures. Is he being critical? Is he agreeing? We keep our faces neutral; wonder what will happen if more dramatic events occur.

In the rain, we walk through the Berber village below the gorge. Women in long black lace, unveiled, haul huge loads of brushwood and grass for the donkeys. Children play. A local landlord chats to us in accented but fluent French. He worked for 40 years in the Marseilles docks. He says it hasn't rained here for many months. He tells us it's the first day of the month in the Islamic calendar and shows us a calendar matching Muslim dates to Western ones.

As we start walking back uphill toward the hotel, between the tall gorge walls, there's a noise behind us, a car screeching up the mountain road, right at us. We jump; the car stops. There are three men. The one wearing a pale blue polo shirt jumps out. "Get in the car." We turn, moving fast toward the hotel; it's just a few minutes uphill. But the men are urgent. "There's no time. Get in the car." They push me, then both of us, into the car, and move away, back downhill.

We drive for less than a minute, though it seems longer. Then they let us out, on raised ground, outside the restaurant. We get out. People are looking up between the gorge walls, where we just were. There's a sound. We see a wall of water, a yard or more high, rushing loudly down the dry riverbed we have just driven down. It would have taken us with it, certainly.

Then it's all a party. The Berber men in the restaurant make tea, play drums, and the water keeps rushing past the village. A stout policeman with an Omar Sharif mustache arrives and counts people, taking names and phone numbers, calling the hotels. Four Lebanese women are also waiting to get back to the hotel in the gorge. They talk animatedly in Arabic with the local men.

Later in the night, when the waters are lower, they offer us a ride back in their four-wheel-drive vehicle. We plow uphill through the still-churning waters to the almost empty hotel in the dark gorge, where the staff greets us with cheers and warm food.

Tamsin Todd, a London-based freelance writer, is editor in chief of technology products at Amazon.co.uk.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

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