Jeff and I Endeavor to Climb a Mountain, Fail, Still Feel Good About It

I’m going to start titling some of my blog posts like the chapters in a Lars Van Trier movie so people think something awful is about to happen. Then, when it doesn’t, they will be happy. Good plan.

Jbel [Arabic for Mountain] Toubkal is the highest peak in Northern Africa. I heard about it shortly after my arrival in Morocco and resolved to take a stab at climbing it. Plans were finalized when my friend Jeff announced his own enthusiasm for tackling the excursion while planning his visit. Jeff is a guy I know from back home. He hunts ducks with binary explosives and an assault rifle. Good guy to have on a mountain, I figured.

The bus from Marrakesch to Imlil – the trailhead for the hike up Jbel Toubkal – collects its passengers from a dusty street corner adjacent a cemetery. On some days. But not on the one when we were going. We stood for about two hours, kicking rocks into the road and telling dirty stories about third-world hostels until finally surrendering ourselves to one of the taxi drivers who had been beeping at us at 4-minute intervals since we began our wait.

“Two people 300 dirham,” The taxi driver said.
“For both of us?”
“For each of you.”
“50 dirham for both of us,” I countered.
“60 dirham each.”
“Fine.”

The High Atlas range rises from the expansive plains of central Morocco like a mist-shrouded cliff face at the edge of an ocean [Pretty flowery description, no? Please take my usual avoidance of such effeminate language as proof of sincerity here]. ‘Intimidated’ is a gross understatement when applied to a pair of relatively inexperienced climbers approaching the range from over a hundred kilometres in the carcass of what was once a respectable Mercedes sedan. We saw the foothills first, and what looked like a low layer of cloud cover above them. The clouds, of course, were not. They were mountains.

Alternating gasps of dumbstruck awe and defeatedly muttered obscenity would be the soundtrack of the expedition. There is no portion of the trek that is not so epic in its beauty that one can help but to remark on it. And there is not one stretch of trail so relentlessly steep as to not implore you to turn back. (We would later find that, despite climbing the wrong mountain, we ascended, and subsequently descended, over 6,000 vertical feet of stone and ice over the course of 16 hours).

The hike is completed in 4 stages:

• Ascent from Imlil to the refuge (situated in an alpine valley below the summit) [6 hours]
• Ascent from the refuge to the summit [4 hours]
• Descent to refuge [2 hours]
• Descent to Imlil [4 hours]

Our first day on the trail was dedicated entirely to the venture from the Berber enclave of Imlil to the mountain’s isolated stone refuge. The route, whose beauty I mentioned earlier but really can’t overstate (see: pictures), proceeds upward from the village through a series of valleys and canyons, braced on either side between jagged Atlas cliffs. An expansive pebble riverbed just outside the first village is the last reminder of what even ground is meant to feel like. Thenceforth, each stride brings a knee to an acute angle somewhere near the waist and the air begins to thin.

There are three more clusters of Berber homes along the way – the last of which is perched over a series of glacier-blue waterfalls and haloed with whitened peaks. Pretty. After you stop seeing other humans, snow starts to splash across the trail and the pace begins to slow. This is about 4½ hours in.

The refuge, visible at the end of the last long ravine for a full hour before you reach it, is one of the loveliest sights of the trek – for only the promise of a bed and hot water. All ice and snow for the last hour. More cursing, heavier breath, elevated heart rates; cardiovascular systems struggling to keep check on the diminishing supply of oxygen.

To our surprise, the windows of the refuge were sweating with condensation when we arrived. 30 to 40 people were already present – their noise and bodyheat almost oppressive as we entered. The numbers were somewhat surprising, as we had only seen two other hikers heading in the direction of the refuge that day. It became apparent, however, that most of them had been staying at the refuge for several days – hiking up the mountain with skis each morning (and possibly again in the afternoon), and sliding back down. They were almost exclusively from Nordic countries – blonde superhumans who would wander up the mountain sideways, skis strapped to their feet and then fling themselves off cliffs to ski back down. We didn’t really talk to anyone. Mountain folk are strange.

Confusion and misadventure began at 5:00 the next morning following my soundest night of sleep in recent memory. After breakfast, I stood in front of the large hanging map near the front door of the refuge. “Where the hell are we?” I shouted to Jeff.

“By the mountain.”

I cocked my head sideways. It didn’t help.

We set out around 6:00, trudging determinedly up the kind of icefield Dolph Lundgren would drive a snowmobile across before launching it into a helicopter.

Crack, I heard from behind me. I spun just in time to see Jeff disappear from view and the split of a deep crevasse racing toward me. I leapt to the side, burying my dual-wielded ice axes into an ice-covered cliff face. A blackened descent into frozen nothingness had opened where I stood. Jeff was nowhere to be seen. “Help me,” I heard faintly as I pulled myself up the cliff. “Be right there, buddy!” I said as I tied a length or parachute cord around my torso and drew the .45 from my pack. Yetis had been sighted in the area.

Nothing from the previous paragraph happened. Just making sure everyone is paying attention.


So we continued up the valley from the refuge. And I’ll just cut to the chase here: We climbed the wrong mountain. Jbel Toubkal is situated in a range of other very big rocks. We chose the wrong rock.

Upon returning, I was asked by my girlfriend, bless her heart, “why didn’t you guys just go up the biggest one?” A reasonable-sounding, but misinformed question. If you were to ask a person standing in Brooklyn to look across the water and point out the tallest building in Manhattan, they would be able to do so easily. If that same person, however, were placed in an alleyway between two apartment buildings in the Lower East Side; that same task would be considerably more difficult.

Another friend of mine asked another equally reasonable sounding question. “Why didn’t you guys get a guide? They’re like $10 for the day.” Reasonable sounding but, again, misinformed. To have hired a guide would have required a degree of humility and respect for nature’s indifference to our survival that, quite frankly, neither Jeff or I possess. So a guide was out.

“But if you had hired a guide, you would have climbed the right mountain.”
“If Christopher Columbus had hired a guide, he would never have discovered America.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“You don’t make sense.” And that was the end of that.

So, by the middle of the second day, at the highest elevation we would reach, we came to the end of the road. At 13,000 feet, the ends of roads are dramatically demarcated with sheer, hundred-foot drop-offs. “Shit,” we both said, looking over the side. We sat and ate at the top of our little mountain for a while and watched the Mountain Vikings hopping along the cliffs on their skis like goats, jabbering to each other in their bobbly languages.

Regardless of the failure, I think the trip was a success. It was one of the most physically challenging things I’ve done in my life, and the payoffs (there were so many of them along the way) made the whole thing immensely rewarding. I plan to return as soon as I get another two day weekend. So expect another post like this in the future with more gloating and fewer tangents meant to distract you from what an idiot I am.

First Culture Shock

Morocco has a strong lounging/loitering culture. I had a hard time walking through the city at night when I first arrived because groups of young men tended to gather in alleyways and doorsteps, generally away from the harsh illumination of streetlights. In the West, there is no licit reason why a group of young men would want to wait for hours in the dark with no female company. It’s pretty much a certainty that those guys would be doing some sort of drug that a redneck cooked with ammonia and lye or were waiting to knife the next passerby. In Morocco, it’s just how guys spend the evening.

This trend carries throughout the day. In the mornings and early afternoon, the same groups of men will sit in cafes. Chairs are often linked together so that armrests overlap and all of them face into the street. The effect is that outdoor cafes take on the feeling of audience boxes. Wherever you walk in Casablanca, a gallery of men is on hand to observe. In the evenings, men tend to shuffle around a bit – wandering en masse from the cafes to the alleys. This all may sound like exaggeration, but it is not. Groups of men, seemingly doing nothing, were the first to induce culture shock when I arrived in Morocco.

Having packs of dudes staring at you is disconcerting, but there was something more... Seeing only men on the streets – innumerable, aimless bands of them – implied that women had somehow gone missing. I remember walking through a park on my second week here when it struck me, “where the hell are all the women?” It is something that has bothered me for a long time – a mystery that I only began to unravel on my recent vacation around the south.

You lose continuity when you fly between two points. It’s like the connective tissue between two cities are their airports, a few hours of your time and a bad in-flight meal. If you can help it, it’s almost always more informative to traverse the space between two places overland. Even if there’s not a whole lot between them, you’ll know it firsthand. Seeing the sites between population hubs here in Morocco was particularly rewarding. The first thing a traveler will notice is how spectacularly rugged and beautiful this country is. It’s easy to forget you live in North Africa – the setting for a range of dramas; from ‘The Sheltering Sky’, to Eisenhower and Rommel’s armored deathmatch – if you live in palm-shaded Casablanca. But the next thing you notice is where all the woman are. They’re working.

There are still cafes in the rural areas between cities – all full of lecherous stares and the thinly veiled homoeroticism of the all-dude clientele. But there’s also agricultural land – full of women. They work the stony ground with picks, carry water, drive cattle, herd sheep.

This is not an unfair generalization drawn by just a few isolated findings. This is consistent and absolute; thousands of kilometres worth of observation in every area of the country. Women work. Men lounge. In the cities, they simply work more invisibly; in homes, kitchens, offices.

I’m not certain why this trend exists, but one can only assume that it is grounded in the religious and ethnic make-up of the country. It certainly has nothing to do with poverty (people are far poorer, and much more egalitarian with the work distribution, in SE Asia and the rest of Africa). If you look at countries that would obviously be on a further extreme of the religion/ethnicity spectrum (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait), you see institutionalization of the trend. I have strong opinions about the former of the two factors that those of you who know me well have probably heard, but it would be tricky for me to get into them on a public forum while I’m still living in this country.

Suffice to say, the division of genders remains my greatest problem with this culture and the most concrete reason why I will never be fully at home in a country like this. Hopefully it will change, though. Saudi Arabia’s high court recently ruled that the laws mandating the separation of unrelated men and women had to be reassessed because they had been based mostly in tribalism, and not the Koran. The marginalization of half a country’s intelligence, ingenuity and labor is a lot to bear for the sake of tradition.

Some Photos Posted

Back in Casablanca. Nice to be in my own bed again.

Here are two albums I just uploaded to Facebook. Excuse the artsy stuff -- I'm still in kid-in-a-candystore mode with my new camera. You should be able to look through these without having (or without singing into) a Facebook account. Comments and such enabled once you've signed in.

Imperial Cities: Meknes, Fes, Marrakesh
Sahara: Merzouga and the Algerian border

Baby Jesus Would Approve

Another short one, and probably the last before I get back to Casa...

The little Sahara excursion was awesome, and the three days spent there seem way too short.

In Sidi Ifni now - formerly Spanish colonial town way down south on the coast. The money I've alloted myself is running a little low (the riad in Fez sort of broke the bank), so I'll probably be another 3 or 4 days in this area before heading back to Casa.

Always an element of suck to doing the holidays solo, but I would feel ridiculous complaining about it. My Christmas plans: Surfing, Legzira Plage (pictured), seafood tagine, bootleg alcohol with French tourists. Win.

Hope everyone has a good Christmas. Pictures/write-ups/obscenity when I get back to Casa.

In Fez, Still Alive

Four days into the trip now and we're comfortably settling into Fez. We've covered Meknes already. It was a little break-neck, but the weather sucked and pretty much everything that's awesome about Meknes is more awesome in Fez.

The touts in Fez are probably the most aggressive and unrelenting of any that I've seen anywhere. Bangkok has nothing on the imperial cities. Knowing that a myriad of souvenirs (not to mention any sort of drug or illicit service imaginable) is at our disposal at "very special price for you" is comforting, but the saturation of advertisement can be annoying. One 'faux-guide' waited for us outside our riad for three hours before I finally told him off. Two restaurant touts got into a shouting match over us last night - bidding each other's set menu price down from 80dh to 40. "He will give you yesterday's food" the loser shouted at us.

The less-than-endearing form of capitalism practiced here is due entirely to the tourist activity inside the walls of the medina. And tourists are drawn here for good reason. The beauty of the city more than compensates for the hassle and it's really good to be here. It's easy to lose track of why one is drawn to Morocco if you're living in Casablanca. No such danger here.

Pictures and more information to follow. I can see the walls of the city from inside this cybercafe, so I feel ridiculous sitting here.

Ifrane, maybe Azrou, maybe Errachidia, and Merzouga next on the itinerary.

Meticulous Preparation

Besides mapping out the previously posted rough itinerary for my upcoming (tomorrow) trip around the Southern half of Morocco, I have taken the following measures to ensure a smooth journey:

1. Downloaded the second season of Breaking Bad to watch tonight so I wouldn't go out and spend all my trip money on alcohol.
   
2. Took a bag of clothes to the lady who washes them for me. I need the pair of jeans I wore most of last week.
   
3. Skimmed my roommate's Lonely Planet book on Morocco. Also Spain, because I love Spain.
   
4. Figured out a way to tell my maid (who speaks no English or French) that we'd be gone for a little while.
   
5. Thought long and hard today at work about what I would throw into my backpack to keep me going for three weeks.
   
6. Looked at train schedules. Well... looking, present tense.

Things my roommate (who is "just going to follow you, dude") is going to wish I had done:

1. Booked hotel rooms
   
2. Booked transportation
   
3. Research, of any kind
   

This is going to be awesome.

Cannibalism

How's that for an eye-catcher? How awesome would it be if this all-of-a-sudden started to be a blog about eating people? That would get a lot of hits. Then I could be famous like that hooker who wrote a blog. Movie deal! Apparently they eat albinos in Tanzania (or something?).

Anyway, this isn't about eating people, it's about music. There was a French girl who crashed at the apartment for a couple of nights a few weeks back and I took all the music off of her external hard drive. And I have since been consuming the music. Thus, "Cannibalism". I don't know - whatever. To be perfectly clear, music is probably the #2 or 3 thing that I miss about the United States. At this point, I'd listen to a Black Eyed Peas remix of a newborn's death rattle if it meant I could go to a decent concert afterward. The things I'd do for a trip to a really good record store are not suitable for a website attached to my real name.

But for all the Casablanca music scene lacks, I've still managed to expand my horizons by looking to other expatirates. Particularily French ones. I don't know why, but the United States is essentially a world music ghetto. Given my rather extreme jingoism, the fact that I had never heard of the following two albums before leaving the protective embrace of CONUS is an embarassing admission. I suppose the argument could be made that such an enormous amount of good music is created in the Anglo world that any additions would contribute diminishing or negligible returns on the margin - the same argument for why so few Americans have passports. But that's pretty retarded. There is no good excuse. Not given how goddamn amazing these two are:

Amadou & Mariam - Welcome to Mali
Serge Gainsbourg - Histoire de Melody Nelson

How's that for a long-winded alternative to the 'What I'm Listening To:' section on Myspace?

If this all sounds very disjointed, then it is a fair representation of where my brain is this week. Have to work until Saturday, but then I'm getting the hell out of dodge. Three weeks all around the southern half of the country. Saharan Frontier, Anti-Atlas, Southern Coast. Could not possibly be more excited.

Eid al-Adha

Disclaimer: There are pictures of dead sheep heads and guys with knives below the body of this post. If you don’t want to see that, don’t scroll too far ahead.

I spent another (it’s happened two or three other times) Thanksgiving away from home this year. When I went to school in New Zealand, I rarely missed it because the southern hemisphere’s summer break fell almost exactly overtop our winter holidays. It meant that I rarely got a tan, but at least I was home for the important stuff.

Happily, I was not without the holiday spirit altogether. In Islamic countries, Eid al-Adha is celebrated right around the same time as Thanksgiving. It’s the day when practitioners of the Islamic faith celebrate the willingness of Ibrahim (Abraham) to murder his son. Happily, Old Testament God was all like, “psyche!” and Abraham only had to kill a sheep, so that’s the practice followed here. So, most families – or nearly every one that can afford the 2,000dh ($260) animal – will buy a sheep and kill it with a knife (exsanguination), distribute the meat amongst themselves and to the less fortunate, eat it, and cook the animal’s head on fire pits in the street. (I am still unclear as to the practical or religious motivation behind burning the head).

So I was awakened on Saturday morning (noon), not only by the usual mind-splintering hangover (buying alcohol during religious holidays is an entirely different story, probably for a less public forum), but by the smell of burning fur - the aroma wafting through my window from the large open grill on the sidewalk below. I heard my roommate retching.

I had managed to remain unconscious for the general massacre itself. Most sheep are sliced and wrung out early in the morning, so my day was filled with the aftermath. I took a shower (something that would be repeated twice more that day) and threw on some sandals. Immediately after leaving my apartment building, I had to hop over a small estuary of gore that had puddled near the curb. I regretted having chosen the sandals. I spent the next few hours wandering the streets with my roommate, snapping pictures with my new camera.

Once the general revulsion and niggling voice of some undefined moral qualm had been quieted in my mind, I really enjoyed myself. The city was a whole different place. Automobile and pedestrian traffic was infrequent, every shop was shuttered and gray smoke rose from open flame as far down every street as you could see. Most of the head-roasting stands were manned by the more entrepreneurial local kids. Fresh heads were thrown onto the fires at intervals as cars or passersby stopped and dropped off their trophy-filled garbage bags. Presumably they came by later to pick up the remains because no money changed hands at the drop. Older kids drove donkey carts full of the still-blood-wet hides. The precise economics of it all still eludes me.

The scene – at first bizarre and macabre – started to take on the feel of a community block party. The kids from each stall would wander back and forth, socializing and talking shop – happily waving their hatchets and poles of rebar and occasionally shuffling the blackened heads around with their feet like soccer balls. So even without the safe hominess of a proper Thanksgiving, I had a good food-related weekend - complete with a strengthened sense of community.












Click for higher resolution (if you're into that sort of thing).

Shopping

I've spent some time over the last few days camera shopping at the local flea markets (early Christmas present - thanks family!). The markets are arranged like any number of similar enterprises in a developing country. Separate stalls, usually roughly specialized to offer products of one type: Consumer electronics in one, DVDs in another, clothes and shoes in another. There's wasn't really any foresight given to the layout of the market as a whole, so you're left to kind of wander from one aisle to the next, looking for the next camera stall. (Though to be fair, there might be a Vegas-esque element of 'let the customer get lost as hell and take their time getting out' to it).

If you ask to try one of the cameras, the proprietor will helpfully pop in a battery and memory card so you can snap off a couple of test shots. If you're buying used, it's nice to be able to test the exact camera you'll be buying. Some of the older pictures on the memory cards are a little odd though. If you scroll back far enough - past the crappy test shots of the adjacent pants merchant - most of the pictures are of smiling light-skinned families standing in front of The Prado or out on safari in Saharan Africa.

Maybe there's a separate classical art and zebra section of the market that I missed.

Anyway, more pictures forthcoming I hope.

Guest Author

As many of you know, I am spectacularly lazy. If it comes right down to doing something, and there exists the possibility of not doing it and going back to bed, I will gravitate toward the latter. So in that spirit, I'm giving post privileges for this blog to my roommate, Anthony. I'll keep posting, and so will he; thus creating an illusion of much higher productivity. And then: Profit.

I'll need to figure out a way to sort of differentiate our posts in the subject line, but for the most part his will be about his feelings, knitting, and pie recipes, while mine will continue to center around toilet humor.

What it's all about...

So I've got a little over three weeks off, starting in December and running a little past New Years. It's not a lot of time, especially given how much of this area I want to see, but it's enough to do a little reconnaissance. Three weeks really isn’t the sort of timeframe I’d want for a trip of this size – I won’t be able to fall in love with little villages along the way and put my feet up for a day or two – but it will be enough to give my brain a lay of the land.

Most of my interest lies in the south of the country. Less European influence, better nature and fewer tourists make that a pretty easy call. So I’m working on a circuit (having to double back on the same route is such a waste) that will hit the highlights and give me an idea of the places I should go back to and spend extra time.

Here’s what I’m working with so far. Looking at it makes me deliriously happy – almost to the point of giggling:



View Morocco: Southern Loop '09 in a larger map

Click to blow it up.

My roommate, Anthony is probably coming along. Anyone else for a little vacation?

More Random Things

• There is an Iraqi guy who lives in our apartment building. He only comes and goes at night, doesn't speak with anyone, and has stained glass pictures of the Koran hanging over all of his windows. He has a cute nickname: Al Qaeda.
  
  
• Everything is closed from 2pm until 5pm here. Ostensibly for prayer. This is annoying because that is the exact time that I often want to buy things. If I were that pious at my job, I would also be fired.
  
  
• A standard first date in Morocco is to take the girl out for ice cream. It makes her feel like you care, but it makes me feel like a pedophile.
  
  
• Morocco has been under the control of France, Spain and Germany at different points in time over the past 100 years. There is an Independance Day for each. No work!
  
  
• It's a good idea to host parties at your apartment. People bring lots and lots of food, and then you have stuff to eat for the rest of the week.
  
  
• People cannot parallel park here. If they are by themselves, they'll just keep going back and forth, bumping the cars ahead of and behind them, until they are satisfied with how close they are to the curb. Usually, there are special parking attendants who work on almost every street whose entire job it is to help people parallel park.
  
  
• Retail CDs and DVDs do not exist in Morocco. Piracy has taken over almost 100% of the market share.
  
  
• Tourists keep telling me not to drink the tap water, but I do. Fine so far.
  
  
• There's a holiday coming up where families all over the country will sacrifice a sheep, give 1/3 of it away to the poor, and eat the rest. I am very much looking forward to this holiday because sheep are delicious. Also, people buy the sheep a few days to a week ahead of time, so there will be random sheep tied up in parking garages and front yards.
  
  
• Morocco protected it's currency during the global credit crisis (my income in Dirhams has improved by almost 15% against the dollar since I first signed my contract 7 months ago) through a series of brutally protective trade policies. You essentially cannot export Dirhams - foreigners cannot wire money home, or transfer funds to foreign bank accounts. And goods essentially cannot be imported for individual consumption. You can order things off of Ebay and Amazon, but you have to use a credit card you got in a different country and the government will charge an addition 40% duty when it arrives. All of this means that I am making more money than I thought I would, but it is kind of hard to pay my student loans.
  
  
• There are three dialects of Berber. Two of them are as distinct as "French and Japanese" according to a colleague of mine. Between those, French, Spanish and Arabic, there are 6 native spoken languages here.
  
  
• Moroccan DJs fight dirty. My friend Anthony punched my other friend Younes in the stomach, so Younes got a spray deodorant and a lighter and shot Anthony in the face with fire.