Hitchhikes For Life; Confronts Death: Catalogue of Surreal Experiences/Morocco

Gorges du Dades to Boumalne du Dades

Setting off on a backpacking trip to strange warm lands in the middle of a New England winter already put me in a state of suspended animation from the moment I landed in Casablanca: I felt like I went around in a fog for the first few months of my trip, until I got severely ill in India and then kind of woke up to the reality that this was my life, everything I needed on my back, and even that superfluous.
But still things happened that while not triggering a strong emotional response at the time, were just so bizarre, and in some cases, like this one, haunting.
I had gotten into a shared taxi with 4 other men, going from the a tiny town of Boumalne du Dades to Tineghir...after hitchhiking out of the Dades Gorge ( never before and never since have I hitchhiked)...to literally flee a psychotic innkeeper in the Dades Gorge.

Tineghir was just kind of a desert way station where I got a bus to Er Rachidia and then back over the Atlas Mts. to Fes. The shared taxi ride was a few hours over this very hardscrabble, flat landscape.




Hardscrabble Landscape, Beyond Boumalne du Dades

I don't remember seeing any thing really, no houses tents or kasbahs though supposedly the road from Er Rachidia to Ouarzazate is now dubbed "The Highway of a Thousand Kasbahs."
As you can imagine, a shared taxi with 4 strangers, all men made me slightly anxious, but really I think the feeling was mutual. They were just men going about their business and were not particularly thrilled that I was squeezed in amongst them.

So we're driving along in complete silence no one says anything, no small talk, no radio playing just, quiet and scrabble rocks all round like a large brown ocean...When one of the men next to me leans forward across me and whispers to the driver, something not French of course so I don't understand.

But the car stops.

And then goes into reverse back down the road.

And I'm like,  Shit!

This seemed too easy with no one talking to me. Now I am going to get raped and left for dead in this barren patch. Car stops. Men get out. I'm not sure what to do. Do I get out too? They all start walking into the rocky desert. So I get out and driver is like oh no you don't, get back in the car. And so I just look out and then I see her.

She was just lying there: a Berber shepherdess in the desert. Maybe 40. Maybe my age, 25, who lived a short hard life. Either way definitely dead. All alone, no animals around her even.
Someone's daughter, someone's mother, someone's wife, Sister? Who knows? That woman has always stayed with me, lying there with her black scarf covering her head and her long skirt and her hand kind of raised up in defeat.

The men get back in the car and I'm like what??? Really? We're just gonna leave her there? Not that I would have wanted her on my lap, which was the only place available, my shit and their shit having packed the trunk. But it felt wrong.

Another 20 minutes ahead a police check point appears like a mirage. But it was a real police checkpoint with well armed guards and tiny little guardhouse. The driver must have told them about the woman as a police car shortly left back where we came from, and then we too were on our way to Tinehgir.

Technically, I was in Egypt, in the Egyptian Museum 20 years ago today (March 13, 1995), and this will be the final Morocco post.