Marrakech

Our bearings are now southerly. After brief forays through the capital city, Rabat, and the clamorous ancient capital,  Fes, we venture  below Casablanca for the first time; Marrakech-bound. It is a seemingly arbitrary milestone but one we celebrated on the train with plump olives, sweet dates and a few swigs of Nectar Manguine (Produit Marocain). Much awaits us but the knowledge that every lurch and flurry brings us closer to home is the best kind of morale.

We met a man in Rabat. Witnessing his general demeanour and overhearing absurd utterances made me certain he was some form of Kafka incarnate. Idling his time away on the shores of the Med, his body in Africa, his mind somewhere closer to Paris.

McAlpine:"Our journey south may take as long as 9 months."

Kafka:"Ah, like a kind of rebirth."

McAlpine:"kind of."

Kafka:"Where from?"

McAlpine:"Afrique du Sud"

Kafka:"Ah, So you and us both, not in Africa"

Crossing the Med is obviously the extent of his wanderings. How wrong he is, I thought. Morocco's wealth divide is better understood as wealth divisions. rich and poor know no delineations here. The idea of a wealthy part of town demarcated by a certain deteriorating road or security perimeter simply does not exist. One can be eating luxurious nougat in the mediaeval medina, propped against the Palais Royal, while robed outcasts scuttle past reciting rubbish and the infirm sit, blind and mute, waiting for the end or for God or maybe some small change. Feral cats play out their lives under the meat and fish stalls - their fate decided by the slip of a butcher's knife or a sardine forgotten on the ground and across the track the newest satellite dishes and lithium batteries can be found 'for all occasions.' Apart from my own camera, it seems.

The chaotic cluster of the city precincts extends to the senses. Smells and sounds repel and coax, offend and delight, on a whim. Constantly forging through this lineal sentience reduces one to the fundamentals. Emotions are snatched by the sounds and the smells and one’s spirit peaks and troughs with the surrounds. Such craziness has made us hungry and thirsty. A sip of sweet mint tea is fast becoming a debauch.

Things are different here. The benefit of the doubt should go to Kafka. Culturally… well we all know about culture. It throws up some good food, interesting music and generally impedes human progress. Why impose an idea of Africa on an arbitrary land mass severed from Gondwanaland some time ago. Morocco never got the African blueprint – good for them.  And as I write,  through the smudged perspex, far away, the anti-Atlas peeps on the horizon. Distant bastions guarding and flouting their weary winter-clad giant, Jebel Deltouk, who confirms nor denies anything. Yet, carried on the desert zephyrs, through the ancient mosques, through colourful, wailing humanity and above commuters who, with murmurs and tinny cellphone music, respond to the drone of the train, I hear the giant’ whispers: “you forgot we’re on the ancient land.”