Our Stay in Todra was blessed by a brilliant combination of rest and recreation. Good simple food and a room or roof to relax on was a salve to the constant driving we seem to have done. Our scrambling and hiking up the steep sided gorge behind the Hotel Yasmina provided ample excitement and the occasional jolt of adrenaline as we tried to follow the sinuous tracks that the local goats and shepherds followed.
Having left the craggy heights of the Rif mountains, we now headed toward the ancient city of Fes, home to one of the most intact medieval medinas in the world. Our route took us through undulating farmland and scattered villages, underlining the value of agriculture here. At the beginning of the modern era, the Roman city of Volubilis had been the centre of the Imperial bread basket in North Africa and still fulfilled much of that role today, as the landscape became more alive with tractors and people. Large, clanking trailers were crammed with farm workers being ferried to and from local markets with produce and livestock jammed in underneath or between scarf-wrapped, dust-blown families.
One year a bunch of us, family and friends, decided that a proper overwinter expedition to the sun was just what we needed. On a previous trip to Morocco some of us had spent a few weeks in France with friends in Lot-et-Garonne, picking plums off the ground for the funds to last us over the coming months. A day’s work on the minimum wage, we calculated, could last each of us almost a week in Morocco. So plums it was, that time, bringing us plenty of stings from wasps burrowed into the fallen fruit and an agonising period at the day’s end when we tried to straighten our backs. The plums were destined to become gastronomic treats as the famed ‘Pruneaux d’Agen’ but we never wanted to see a plum again !
As the caption always read in the children’s comics puzzle page I used to love, I’m a great one for connections. Searching a page of scattered pinheads for patterns drove me crazy but the lure of the (never-won) prize was of less importance than the discovery of hidden forms. It’s hardly surprising that his has spilled over into a lifetime of travel, and I wonder how widely this affliction or condition is felt. Perhaps it’s a form of synaesthesia, where a person can hear a word that overwhelms them with colour, or may be able to see the wind passing.
The BBC recently broadcast a series of one or two hour films on #slowtravel, one was a canal journey, another a reindeer sleigh trip in north Norway and another entitled ‘The Country Bus’ featuring a local bus journey through the narrow lanes and wide landscapes of the Yorkshire Dales. They recalled a time not long past when travel wasn’t really about timetables, or at times, even specific destinations ! The early forerunners of modern adventure travel almost all operated on the basis that the traveller was not guaranteed to get to, or to see all the sights along the way, but they would do their best to attain a final objective. Thus, London to Kathmandu, Cairo to Cape Town became ‘routes’ followed by a steady stream of buses, converted trucks filled with hopeful wayfarers happy just to take things as they came.
I saw an ad in The Guardian saying “Tour guide / driver wanted urgently.” This was like a nugget to an Alaska goldpanner.
Collecting STUFF. We all do it in some way or another but collecting passport stamps as a pursuit in itself, rather than incidentals that just happen from time to time always veers a bit close to braggadocio for me. Nevertheless just as train and car number plates fascinate some people, so do passport stamps. It takes all sorts ! (I have to admit my own peccadillo is collecting CAA airport significator codes – LHR, DEL, MCW etc).
Podcast version here
