June 16th: Marrakech

On June 16th 1977 I was in Marrakech.  It was hot, it was the beginning of the European holiday season, and I was beginning to find that although Marrakech seemed more open than Fes it was no easier to access.

The Djemaa El Fna was the centre of activity and there were even one or two spots where you could sit at the edge and watch the action albeit at a distance: acrobats, story-tellers, sooth-sayers, magicians, musicians, snake charmers, a strange act with pigeons I could never follow.  None of this had anything to do with the tourism industry, it was purely Moroccan.  Some fancy cafes overlooked the square on the first floor.  Behind the square were the souks, attractive and possible to find your way around, and the streets of the old town, alleyways that you knew would lead to houses beautiful on the inside only, sudden glimpses into courtyards full of goods being stored or traded.  I wrote this in my notebook in the square one day trying to sum my experience up: 

Hot midday in Djemaa El Fna, for yoghurt in the hustlers' cafe, everything really quiet, no entertainers in this section now; the souvenir sellers under parasols on the ground, the boutiques open as always, some hustlers look hungry but they know me now, leave me alone.  Not even many beggars now, kids hanging around, older men walking singly, and tourists.

Picturesque it is, Marrakech, the world of the Medina, the clothes of the Berber women and their independent smiles, the men sitting in the shade of a wall with their djellabahs pulled around them and their pipes.  Hard, dry country.  And interesting it remains.  The closed in, intense way of life turns tourists into an outcast caste.  To be treated as a tourist always, that is hard, to be an object of derision for teenagers, to be treated as a friend only for the money, to be pestered and hustled at every step.

Marrakech Medina: My picture

A city of pink washed walls, fortified, standing on the edge of the desert, like the meeting point of mountain and Sahara culture, a huge square as the centre of entertainment and all the life of the city, the focus of it all, a paradise for eccentrics and hustlers.  Seven blind beggars and a lady from the Club Med in a see-through saffron djellabah, who strolls across the square as all eyes follow her.  A snake charmer and a mixed-up boy with four golden teeth.  Beyond  are rich souks and dusty living blocks, the Mellah, the Kasbah, the different districts around the gates, I've had happy times wandering in these areas, finding my way through the labyrinths. A peaceful afternoon in a French garden, a drive to a watery valley in the mountains.  I sat this morning in the animal market watching the camels, men practising trying out a donkey, seeing if they want to buy, putting a horse through its paces.  Hours of sitting in this cafe or another.  Talking, sitting, watching.  Crowds of people passing, sometimes as dense as I've seen anywhere, India included, sometimes escaping the heat of the sun, bikes and mopeds, pushing, pushing, airless, the heat pushing these people into the hard surface of the Djemaa El Fna.

And some weeks later, returning to the city from the south and west:

Djemma El Fna:  My picture

Having an evening theiere with dates at the cafe by the date stalls.  There's a little clothes market going on, of the impromptu  kind I've seen all over Morocco, but they must have fixed days of the sort I don't know.  Mostly men selling clothes exclusively for men, they don't look like the poorest people either.  I can see smart Berber clothes and some of the slick kids, they have motos or bicycles and a briefcase or suitcase laid across the handlebars to hold the jeans or trousers or djellabahs or track-suit bottoms.  Now I've seen a woman selling a djellabah, she's with a guy perhaps they're regulars.  The tourist season is at its height which means the square is very busy, particularly the food stalls and the clothes booths and all the kids and beggars and touts and vendors, all the people who live off the vitality of the square.

Animal Market in Marrakech:  My picture

The hotel I stayed in was near the square; an old house down a brown anonymous alley, the ground floor tiled in blue and green and white.  You could go up to the roof and look over the city across other roofs where the local people also came up to hang out their washing or to relax or to look out over the roofs.  But the hotel, like most of the cheap ones, also had its resident hustlers.  I remember one here, who liked to be called Le Chef, in his twenties, partly educated.  We played cards and talked.  As I got to know him I asked him why he hustled, and he gradually explained; he resented the foreigners for their money, for their opportunities, and he was very happy to take anything away from them that he could, feeling no guilt for that.

Paul Bowles describes Djemaa El Fna in an essay published recently in Travels.  Elias Canetti's The Voices of Marrakesh is also good, especially at the animal market.  Both predate my visit.
 

Workshop in Medina:  My picture

Marrakech Medina:  My Picture

June 12th: La Paz

On June 12th 1976 I was in La Paz. 

This was the day of the festival de Nuestro Senor del Gran Poder, which is probably La Paz's greatest festival.  I was downtown early and saw all the people waiting.  Later I found a spot near the Plaza Lima where the atmosphere was expectant and everyone was throwing confetti around.  The festival was largely a parade, endless groups of people in costume or in their best ponchos and suits or dresses, with musical bands from time to time.  The first group was led by a huge Indian giant who kept a serious demeanour.  Each group did a little dance, all essentially the same and then moved on.  The first paraders were fascinating, but in the end it became too much the same and I fought my way through the crowds to leave.  The fiesta seemed to go on for days:  anywhere in the Indian town you might come across a little group marching round, especially in the area of the Gran Poder church.

In La Paz the Indian town was the place to be, the area above Calle Murillo.  Market stalls were out every day lining the streets selling everyday items, guarded by their cholo owners.  There was one street that sold drinks, fruit juices mainly, carrot or banana and so on, and at night they did api, the flavoured corn drink found all over the country which makes the cold evenings easier to take.  At the foot of this area, near the San Francisco Church, was the area selling magical items, such as llama foetuses.  If you spent your time along Avenida Buenos Aires you seemed to be in some huge perpetual market, from before daybreak up until nearly midnight.  You'd forget the more modern city a few blocks away down the slope.  In the middle of all this was the Alojamiento Buenos Aires, just off the Avenida, which was one of the more characterful cheap hotels I've stayed in.  There were rooms off long balconies above a courtyard used for storing market goods.  One side of the courtyard was for Indians and one for foreigners, and the two sides didn't mix; the foreigners' rooms were marginally better presented and a lot cleaner than the Indians' ones, and there were even one or two rooms overlooking the street with windows.

There are plenty of YouTube videos showing recent Gran Poder parades, such as this and this.

La Paz Market Area in 2009:  Picture by Szymon Kochanski, CC

Gran Poder Parade, 2007:  Picture by BrianWoychuk, CC

June 12th: New York City

On June 12th 1975 I was in New York City. 

I flew into Kennedy in the rain, on a British Airways flight from London.  I had arranged to stay with friends of a friend on the Upper West Side.  I stood in line outside the airport trying to get on the crowded buses going downtown.  I did something against etiquette, perhaps moving my pack, and the driver told me "I don't do your job, why don't you let me do mine?"   The bus put me down outside Grand Central Station and I stood in the early evening light trying to flag down a yellow cab.  Many were empty but they paid no attention to me with my pack, though they stopped for others.  This, I thought, was the time to tackle the subway, even though I'd been travelling for twelve hours.  I got out at Broadway and 96th and was amazed at all the colourful characters hanging out on the street.  I was made welcome in the apartment and ate and drank and talked long into the night.

The next day, still spaced out from the flight, I walked through Central Park where I looked at the blue jays and the cops cruising.  I made my way down to Washington Square, where people talked to you like you actually existed, so different from stony London.  I ran into someone who had been on my flight.  I took a meal at Horne and Hardart.  In the following days I walked a lot, and saw some sights, Grant's Tomb, The Natural History Museum, The Staten Island Ferry.  I went to lots of art with my hostess who was an artist, in SoHo and at the museums.  I went with my hosts round Brooklyn and ate clams and steamers and mussels with beer around Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan Beach.  We went to visit friends in huge loft apartments and drove around the city streets which were in a deadly state of repair.  I saw Altman's Nashville in its opening week (it didn't open in London until September).  We went to a black middle-class jazz bar in mid-town.  I felt like I was in the centre of everything, everybody was interested in anything and everything, and they even listened to what I had to say as I listened to them.

In my mind this was to be the beginning of a grand journey.  I'd had difficulty filling in the forms on the flight because they asked about where I was going and which flight I was going to take back to the UK.  But I wasn't going to use my return ticket.  I was going to hitchhike across to California and I was going to go to Cuzco and La Paz which sounded so high and far away when I read my Latin American Handbook (my only preparation), and most of the bus journeys appeared to take twenty-four hours.

By Central Park, 1976:  Picture by Paul W, CC

June 2nd: Coroico in Northern Bolivia

On June 2nd 1976 I was in Coroico in Bolivia.  Coroico is a little town to the northeast of La Paz; it lies in a deep valley towards the jungle at much lower altitude than the capital and so was a popular holiday spot for people from La Paz.

I found Coroico a good place for walking.  The countryside was warm and peaceful, both tropical and alpine.  On this day I walked out towards a hill I'd seen on the horizon but it wasn't easy to access so contented myself with walking round the villages.  I recorded this in my notebook:

I've come to a little village, the one more or less on the pass, a collection of houses with little plots, rectangular adobe places with little light and bolted doors, a larger two-storey building with windows and piles of bottles inside, a little school with a demonstrative teacher.  Yards and the road itself full of drying coffee.  Coffee and mandarins and bananas and oranges.  Insects galore and humming-birds, martins and buzzards flying over.  A large house across the valley, two storeys, red roof, outbuildings and probably a garden, down below more or less in the jungle.  Cleared patches on the hills opposite with terraces cut for agriculture.  And beyond virgin hills, bush and pasture stretching up into the clouds.  A group of kids goes by, 3 boys and 3 girls with milk and coke bottles, shyly saying "buenos tardes."

I was directed back to Coroico by a group of black children sitting outside the village.  I saw a number of black people in the area, the women wearing the same sort of clothes that mestizo women wore.

Another good walk was up the hill directly behind the town.  You walked up a great steep street with uneven cobbles, a gutter in the middle and carpenters shops, and then you were on the trails.  It was a steep, sweaty scramble to the top.  I recorded this in my notebook:

Can see for miles, green mountains rising in folds and white tops on the La Paz side, one fine peak with snow over to the right of the La Cumbre area.  Roads twisting around the hillsides, and the different villages situated in different valleys, all far beneath me now.  The river curling right down at the bottom, one bit where it goes through various stony channels.  Hills away on the other side are barer but you cannot see so well because of the vegetation up here.  Smoke rising from the hills to the immediate right from where there is bare grass.  Can see the little chapel above Coroico very small now and the shapes of the cows in the pastures nearby.  And all between is the green of the shrubs, with lighter patches where the cover breaks.  Beautiful flowers, the universal purple flowered bushy big leaved plants which turn red, yellow bushes, smaller red and white flowers, all sorts of ferns.

Mainly insects is the noise now, of all sizes, an occasional humming-bird.  Below there are the big bees in black and yellow, deep purple martins hunting them.  And humming-birds galore.   Lower flies a red winged sparrow-hawk and lower still the vultures.  The wind is changing carrying the smoke my way, fewer noises now from below, occasional dogs or kids from the school, today's trucks and buses from La Paz.

Behind me the summit, a little altar with bottles and candles under a shelter, cairns all over, rotting orange-peel.  A mauve butterfly fluttering past.  The village to the right with big irregular space between two lines of brown houses.  Further down a flight of little parrots with red in their tails.

The culture of Bolivia's Afro-Bolivians has become better known over the years.  Michael Jacobs has a relevant section in his travel book Andes.  It seems they are descendants from slaves at the mines at Potosi, who fled to these Yungas valleys and have stayed there.

Coroico in 2008:  Picture by Kristin Miranda, CC

Coroico in 2004:  Picture by Scott Henderson, CC

May 28th: Bayeux

On May 28th 1972 I was in Bayeux in France.

I remember thinking as we drove off the ferry in Cherbourg that there probably were not that many others who were planning such a long journey - to be going to India.  It seemed a very big moment, an ordinary ferry, the 12.30 from Southampton.

This was not really the first night of the journey.  We started off by driving north to Durness in the far north of Scotland where we had friends.  We wanted to test the Land-Rover and the camping gear before leaving the UK.  We actually spent the first night pitching the tent free somewhere near Keilder Forest, on a branch of the North Tyne.  But crossing the channel was the big moment.

We spent that night on the Camping Municipal outside Bayeux.  It was just a convenient (and cheap) place to stay the night.  We had covered about 86 miles that day from a campsite above Southampton, plus the Channel crossing.  We wandered a bit more the next day, shopping in Putanges for lunch which we took at a green and sunny spot off a tiny road by the River Orne.  That night we camped in a free site by a canal outside Chartres.  We didn't see the Tapestry in Bayeux but we did visit the cathedral in Chartres.  The pattern was set for cheap living, simple camping, self-cooked meals, minor roads.

It would be another three months before we reached Asia.

View Bayeux in a larger map

May 24th: Fes

On May 24th 1977 I was in Fes, the ancient city of Morocco.

I stayed in a little hotel just inside the Medina at a point before the road started to descend more steeply.  There was a stork's nest on the roof and there was always the noise of clattering beaks when the birds returned from feeding.  From the window I could catch a glimpse of the road: women going shopping, old men from the country on business, ponies, donkeys taking goods in or out or building materials or coca-coca bottles, the men who drove the animals, "Balek, Balek" they called.  I even saw a cow being taken down.  The sounds were of Moroccan pop music and busy voices.  It was a modern world, part of the attraction being that it was without cars.

The first evening I recorded some initial impressions:  

The Tannery:  My picture

I headed down into the Medina and got beautifully wandering there, avoiding tourist shops, very smart here, and the touts and pickup kids.  I went way out to the other side then back to the centre, glancing in mosques, much prayer, holiness and chanting going on, saw a few artisans, particularly the metal workers, one lot of dyers.  Stood on a little bridge over the foul river away from the hassle, watched a freak couple getting some metal-beating done, then managed to return without making a mistake.  Some very fine shops, you can see some traditional crafts being made to modern Moroccan tastes as opposed to tourist tastes, mirrors and brocades for women's clothes stand out in my mind, also the large cauldrons they make.  And it's a real city, so much available here.  I remember one shop full of pickles,  nothing else, the shops much more specialist.  It's also huge.  I had a quick look in the Kasbah, different style Arab shops.  On the journey here, one nice country market in new buildings.  Lots of donkeys in an arena, ponies being shod and having their nails chiselled; people coming and going on donkeys, riding with both legs on the left.  Ovens outside the houses, women working bending over.

The Medina was a difficult place for an outsider.  There was nowhere for instance where you could sit and watch what was going on, not for any length of time or in an interesting place.  I remained a spectator, walking through, trying to avoid undesirables or causing offence.  Others too seemed to be doing the same.  Just to walk down the hill attracted a small army of hustlers; to avoid them I had to protect myself and so protected myself from everything else.  Yet the Medina, Old Fes, was the primary attraction, the huge area growing organically from the middle ages, without cars, but rich and modern in many ways, the commercial heart of the country.

Later as I got to know the city a little better I tried to record with a bit more immediacy:

I am in almost the only cafe I know of in the centre, having expensive orange juice in dull surroundings.  But resting enough to see more souks before climbing the hill back up.

Fes Medina;  My picture

The Medina was swarming with tourists this morning, more than I've seen before , but it wasn't as busy as I've seen it before.  I spent a while sitting in the tannery, and got stung for a dirham, then wandered through the residential districts across the river, still not attractive from the outside, but different, quiet, unfrequented, and out into the car area with donkeys strolling past the cars in the parking lot, people selling mint, it felt Morocco.  Men sitting against a wall, selling eggs and ducklings.  An area or souk for second-hand radios and so on, and some dealers pocketing money.  In the central area, there had been an assignment of second-hand clothes arrived - the passion for Western clothes and goods is overriding - and that was in the area of jewellers and fancy clothes.  I saw a new lot of shoes arriving, and leather wallets and that was a time for major excitement.  Some of the better bits of the medina are those long roads under bamboo shading  where they sell mainly food, meat, milk, everyday things.  And the fine souks in the centre, brocade, shoes, cloth, blankets, gold and silver, candles, brightly coloured thread, pottery.  Some strange spices, people hunched up in the street over a piece of cloth with strange smelling things on it. 

Covered Souk in Fes Medina:  My picture

Not much that is very exotic.  It's the country people who wear the strange clothes and they're not around in Fes very much.  Yesterday I saw in the supper restaurant a young girl of 13 or 14, kohled eyes and colourful mirror-work clothes, reds and yellows, an older woman also brightly dressed in red cloth with blue and white patterns, a short-haired man in a roughish djellabah, and a strong man who was doing the ordering, he didn't eat but controlled it all, white turban and dark djellabah.  Dancers or some such trade or performers? 

Square in Fes Medina:  My picture

May 21st: Chaouen in Morocco

On May 21st 1977 I was in Chaouen in the Rif mountains of Morocco.

Chaouen was a small country town, an easy place to stay in, with a handful of hotels to satisfy the trickle of tourists passing through.  I used it to get used to Morocco at a good pace after the hustlers of Tetouan.  I began to know my way around the bazaars, to be recognised by some people.   There was a square as a kind of town centre, some restaurants and some fairly traditional cafes in upstairs rooms, where Moroccan men could sit around, sipping mint tea and puffing their soupçis of kif.  This evening I sat in the square and recorded:

Chaouen:  My picture

The last little piece of warmth of the day, the sun only lights up the walls of the Kasbah and the minarets of the mosque opposite me.  I can see inside the front door, you go up a flight of stairs or a ramp, then there is a blue and white screen with a chandelier above to keep out the infidels, it's quite an attractive building though the architecture is simple, with an octagonal brick minaret tower, loud-speakers and a Moroccan star hanging at the top.  It is evening stroll time, few country people around now, one lady with a child on her back, in white robes and tight veil, vertical striped skirt beneath.  Old men in fine djellabahs, sitting and drinking mint tea, one man with white turban and pointed beard beneath round face has a hand gesture for everything he says.  Teenage girls in female djellabahs, one appears to be a pregnant bride, with fine brocade, tight veil and heavy kohl.

Earlier in the day I'd been out of town.  As it was a country town there were trails out into the hills.  I wrote in my notebook:

Have taken the trail out beyond the spring, gone over the first pass so that I'm now sitting above the first village large enough for a mosque.  I'm in the open sun as there's little shade until you're in the village.  The air is full of the buzzing of insects, the cicadas, and some crested larks singing.  A few voices from the green of the village.  The village is spread about a green depression, trees and fields, tin roofs over mud walls, some of them painted white.  A Spanish looking building nearer me with red-tiled roof and the stone turreted minaret of the mosque.  A child with some sheep passed.  Way down below the river valley with the road to Ouezzane and layers of rolling Rif way to the south-east.  Behind me the harsher forbidding mountains, grey stone capped with dark green pines, above the wheat fields cut into the stony scrub.

I liked these walks out:  following those hard stony trails, a great feeling of age and continuity in the relationship of town and country.  Country people trudging in on the trails, forcing ponies or donkeys along the steep paths, ploughing their stony fields with oxen or by hand.  Collecting the mint, cutting the wood on the mountain-tops, watching their sheep and goats.  Little oases of green, villages among fig-trees and irrigated fields, olive groves.  I liked the wildlife, the spring flowers, the lizards, the flycatchers in the orchards.  I liked the wall of mountains on one side, with buildings by caves and a huge flock of ravens flying around the ridge.

Market in Chaouen:  My picture

Chaouen - 2008, Picture by Belimbing, CC

Chaouen in 2007:  Picture by Gaby, CC