(These are my telegraphic impressions, let no one expect a detailed and faithful account of the trip. They are only personal impressions and therefore subjective, more or less).
The Great Adventure of the desert begins with the queues at the port, there you meet those who will be fellow adventurers and you start drooling with pure envy when you see what monsters of mechanics some lucky ones handle, who will show you their smoking snorkels in the dunes, when they pass like exhalations by your side, while you wait for a saving sling to pull your car and take you out of the beautiful sands, always changing in shape, colour, shades, which attract and seduce like Homeric sirens…
If you are lucky, and you gave the size data, Territori 4×4 will give you the traditional red shirt, or another color, along with the precious stickers – of careful Berber design – that will give you the category of expert in the desert when you are seen at the traffic lights, back to your town or city. They also give us the tickets of the ship on which you will rarely see your name written.
“It doesn’t matter,” the Territori people tell you, so calm that you get uneasy, but even if you don’t believe it, it turns out that yes, it doesn’t matter. Another relativity of the desert (but let’s see, we haven’t reached the desert…! already, but it doesn’t matter). When you pass the customs controls- they make you feel like an inexperienced smuggler who is going to be caught in safe resignation- you continue in line, you try to make sure that no clever person gets in front of you- mission impossible- they assault you from the left, from the right and sometimes even from below (you are going to tell the mother to one and you see the shirt embroidered with the “Territori 4×4” and you think: Fuck he’s a colleague of the group, we’re going to get along. And you let him pass, smiling coldly, yes.
Finally you see the ship’s gangway in the distance and, meter by meter, you approach it. When you go up, the chambers lead you with shouts unintelligible to those who do not master at least 12 of the 56 linguistic variations of Arabic. Once the car is parked, we go up to the highest deck, and politely push each other, or not, to achieve a good point from which to take dozens of photographs with which we will punish, on the way back, our unconditional friends. Or we arrange the video camera in short shots and endless sequences of the moorings, the norays or the chimney of the huge catamaran that will take us in a flash to the other side of the Spanish Strait of Gibraltar.
Half an hour later, we followed the orders of one who was passing by commanding a lot – in Arabic – and we crowded like sardines on the narrow stairs to go down to the cellar. Let’s see where I left the car! The queue doesn’t move for an endless time—relatively endless—then everything goes very fast, I even find my car, which is strange. Once settled, with all the papers that they are going to ask for at hand, the belts tight and impatient to set foot on African soil, the essential beginning of the Great Adventure of the Sahara… We really discover the meaning of the relativity of time. Getting off the boat is difficult, I am not saying that it is impossible, but it is difficult. You may even have the misfortune – or the misfortune – that the surrounding vehicles start their engines, remain stationary for 45 minutes and do not turn them off until they leave the boat. The atmosphere is unbreathable and the minutes, quarters of an hour, half hours… they pass slowly in the sensual darkness of the winery. Darkness plagued by red dots from the situation lights of the dozens of vehicles that suggest the appearance of a, as it is.
But everything arrives and, finally, in the distance, you make out a little light. It is the light that enters through the distant exit of the ship. You still don’t see palm trees, or desert, you don’t see anything, but you sense that the cobalt blue sky of Tangier is waiting there.
Nor should we throw the bells in the air, getting off the boat is a long-awaited goal, an unpostponable demand but… We are left with the stormy queues in which Moroccan customs officials will study the documents that they will be demanding from us. We won’t know if we’re talking to a soldier, a gendarme or one from the secret. Each one wears a type of uniform, some only half of the uniform. One asks for the vehicle’s papers and passports, takes them away (will I see them again?, we wonder), another examines them on a kind of stretcher table, placed near the folding barrier and, another very short one who must command a lot, bangs the papers on the hood of a car: mine retains the trace of administrative activity, he beat the stamp with great energy, and it was not made of rubber, but of bronze.
In less than two hours we passed customs, after answering no, that we do not have GPS, or radio station (despite the GPS support on the windshield and the fixing foot of the station’s antenna on the hood) they believe us at face value, they “know” that we are not lying. In fact, they observe without a hint of amazement how, a few meters away, we proceed to mount the antennas, which we did not have.
We left the port, eager to begin – we had already begun – the Great Adventure. First traffic lights: traffic jam, reckless driving, magical crossing of pedestrians, bicycles, chickens and some Muezzin before the prayer that blesses us, or curses us, namely, for being infidel foreigners: We get lost. Where is the all-knowing guide who will take us safely to the hotel? Where are the colleagues who will make up our inseparable group?
Clara, my long-time co-pilot, begins to use the GPS of miracles but does not take us out of the city. We go around and around, we read the signs and indicators, in Arabic and, finally, we find a road that will take us to paradise, to the hotel of many stars where we can rest, shower, have dinner… prepare for the next day. Continue the adventure!
The Zaqui Hotel in Meknes welcomes us comfortably on the first night, too bad that the program did not allow a short visit to the imperial city, called “City of a Hundred Minarets”, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO but… the great adventure is: DESERT. No tourist posh, that’s another way of traveling.
The next day, the groups organized on the boat – by criteria of affinity, experience and horses (there are 4×4 untreatable, from I don’t know how many horses are like pre-Olympic demigods) – we left for the desert, the millenary sands, the most fantastic sunrises and sunsets that one can contemplate.
Exultant, happy, full of expectations and eager to test how far our expertise goes, and the capacity of our 4x4s without tricking on the oceans of red sands that await us. As we move away from the North of the country, how curious, people begin to be friendlier, more polite… and poorer. The landscape also changes, the greenery of the crops, and the gardens of the luxurious mansions near the big cities, are becoming scarcer, the dryness, the aridity of the vicinity of the desert begins to show us its face, that mythical place where you cannot live (we mistakenly believe) and to which we all want to return infected by an addiction with no known treatment.
We sniff the air looking for the sand, we want to leave the asphalt, start rolling on paths and tracks, jump on our indefatigable and “unbreakable” shock absorbers. The radio doesn’t stop, we ask Joan Miquel- the kind guide- to take us off the asphalt, we want to go, we want to sink in the sand, show what we can do with our stock cars but with GPS and radio…, well, and with those mysterious waypoints that the devil, and Clara, will know what they are for and how they are interpreted. The dust surrounds us like a halo of mystery, while Arabic music plays on the radio, we listen to it with the same attention as to the Caballé, interpreting the Nibelungs in the Lyceum of everyone, including those from outside.
We contemplate the foothills of the Atlas, a mythical Saharan mountain that in some areas shows an extensive layer of snow, and near Midelt we stop to photograph the monkey-clowns (they make monkeys to provoke the sympathy of the onlookers and get some food). It is also a delight to contemplate the beautiful Arabian horses, harnessed with hand-embossed leather saddles, brightly colored gualdrapas and silver trim. The riders snail looking for admiration, a smile and… the donation of tourists, who have come to the cedar forest whose shade and freshness we are grateful for.
We ride parallel to the Gran Palmeral del Ziz and its impressive canyons, with one eye on the track and the other on the contrast. The greenery dulled by the dust and surrounding dryness. We continue devouring kilometers, looking from one side of the road to the other trying to capture so much beauty, photographing with our eyes a changing landscape that goes from the lunar ash to the strong granite of its mountains, to the small oases, pieces of greenery that are increasingly scarce.
At noon, when the sun is hot at its zenith – it is foolish to look for a non-existent shade – we leave the route and descend towards a lake in the Erfoud area. There we coincided with two or three groups from Territori who have also sought the proximity of water to eat. Near the water, the cars recover from the effort, the engines cool down and we mount an unstable sun protection with a piece of canvas and the famous duct tape – which comes off again and again – while we eat frugally with the appetite of someone who has earned it. After lunch the famous Rocío coffee that, I don’t know the cause but it makes me sleepy (maybe it’s the effect of the droplets of something we added).
At sunset we arrived at Le Touareg (Merzouga), an oasis of many stars – it seemed so to me – where we met for two days at home. Friendly people made sure that everything worked as in a hotel of the highest category, including a pool with transparent waters.
The next day it is time for theory – as in the military – the Grand Master Lluis Rosa prepares us to assault the dunes. Tips and explanations given by the pool. And, in the afternoon, we form a queue to enter the dunes, apply the theoretical knowledge of the morning and approach the base of the Great Dune. More than four of us were scared, imagining what the big one would be like after crossing one of a zillion meters before arriving. The guide, Deb Ali Ben al Karib (or something like that), would despair every time one of us got stuck in the sand and look at the tires.
-Jab ibm dehaar shareiggg! (less pressure, in Christian)- he shouted, putting his fingernail in the valve to let the air out. And he was right, you can’t go up and down dunes with more than a kilo of pressure. It never ceases to amaze me that these traditional camel breeders (actually dromedaries), are able to drive and repair any type of vehicle better than us, no matter the make and model. They are amazing with a 4×4 in their hands. To discover yourself.
And we arrive at the Great Dune. And there we were a crowd, dozens of powerful vehicles and seasoned drivers… everyone looking up calculating how far we would go, but no one decided to be the first until Sergi, from the Territori team, got into the car, started like Alonso chasing Hamilton and climbed, and climbed, until we could hardly see him, converted by the distance into a tiny scalextric car, already next to the top. It marked the highest height of the day, two palms from the edge of the Great Dune. Then it was a party, some of us tried more than a dozen times, with little success, but we climbed high and, above all, no one got stuck.
It was a party, a non-alcoholic drunkenness, of sand. An unforgettable afternoon that ended with the return, at sunset, through a pass between the dunes with a 25 percent rise in altitude and, after crowning, we had to let ourselves practically plummet during about two hundred meters of ramp (without exaggeration) that made us feel the vertigo of a parachute jump but without it. A roller coaster, the best party finale after the assault on the Great Dune.
We leave the Le Touareg oasis with regret and look for the Forbidden Route. This was a hard, endless day. We crossed areas of powdery sand where we all stayed, except for those who know how not to stay, who were many. We managed to get out by changing route several times and, finally, after eating in a lonely Kshar next to the track, we resumed the march with a sandstorm starting that, in a few minutes, enveloped us. There was no visible route, no rolling to follow, not even the warnings or fog lights of the car in front were visible more than two meters away. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and it became dark. It was an unforgettable experience of driving in extreme conditions. Joan Miquel, our guide, knew how to put up with the shouts on the radio asking to slow down, we would not have arrived that night at the hotel (Zagora) if we had slowed down. As Territori’s program said, it was an authentic stage of the Paris-Dakar.
The next day we did the Palm Grove Route and the Grand Canyon of Draa. An adventure on wheels for breathtaking views, dizzying climbs and spooky descents. And all this on a path the narrow width of a vehicle, on dry and hard clay, if wet it would be impassable, sections of loose stone and others directly on the rock of the mountain.
And always, throughout the trip, on the sides of the road, path, or gorge: boys and girls between one and twelve years old, also adults but younger. Standing, enduring the heat and cold, the dust of the desert and the dust raised by the vehicles. They greet with their hands dirty from years waiting smilingly for a gift, a pen, a notebook, a T-shirt, a cap, some food… or just a gesture of greeting that they return smiling, even if nothing is given to them. Enduring the sun, the cold, and the distance, for miles around you do not see a single house, cabin or shade where you can take refuge, even in the storm they remain by the path greeting, waiting… How sorry it is not to have a full car!
Then, the return. The return to the North, greener, richer. With less courteous and less affectionate people. Return to the boat and Tarifa with its three seas, welcomes us again. An unforgettable journey, landscapes indescribable in their beauty and a forced and forced coexistence that brings out the best and the worst of each one. Great friendships, solidarity and unconditional support from some and, on the contrary, from others. Morocco… you have to come back, from time to time!
Diego & Clara.
Torrrent (Valencia) (10/04/08
