9th June 1999 0105hrs, Dark. Wednesday.
We ate at the Djemaa El Fna and it was so cheap (around £5.60) for six people that I paid – after cashing a £50 cheque today, I think a bit of luxury may have to be endured to rid ourselves our 1000+ dirhams!
I haggled a really dodgy looking character (severely scarred neck and face) who owned a jewellery place in a souk down from 600 to 40 dirhams for a nice purple stone necklace for Jemma. I think he would have accepted less but I started too high at 15dh..Zzzzzzzz...
Later that morning we packed up and left the Youth Hostel in Marrakech.
We were off to climb us a mountain.
The trains went no further; we were abandoning the rails and moving onto the road. The city's coach station was a veritable fortress - it was surrounded on all sides by hungry-looking taxi drivers. As we approached they rushed to us from their uniform large cream Mercedes.
"Agadir? Agadir! Agadir!" they cried.
Agadir was a popular tourist resort on the coast...about an hour and a half's flat out drive away. Here was where we had another straight-faced problem. The way to deal with the taxi drivers was to walk through them simply saying "No no no no no no no", which whilst lacking in finesse, got the point across. Unfortunately, in order to be understood, we had to walk through this pack of opportunistic drivers going, "La la la la la la la la la la la."
Which makes you feel damned silly, let me tell you.
We battled in, where in the comparative concrete coolness of the station huge groups of people sat around on the floor with enormous amounts of baggage.
We bought tickets and found our way to the coach.
Well, bus.
Er, thing.
It looked as though it had been sandblasted. Dented and scratched bare metal shone in all sorts of unexpected places on the bodywork. We hunkered our bags onto the bus and made our way to the back, were Madalin, Heidi, Gemma and myself were grouped together. We sat, nervous and more than a bit excited as the bus filled up with other people, Moroccan mostly, heading into the Atlas Mountains.
One of the bus company employees came up to us and said that we had to put our bags on the roof. We were terribly English about it, and apologised profusely, before he said that we had to pay him a baggage supplement. All of a sudden we got the by now familiar sinking feeling of someone nearby thinking that we had money that they wanted to get their hands on. It was incredibly difficult - I mean, we did have enough money to pay this guy his 'supplement', but after the restaurant with the switch-price menus, having five or ten dirhams added to our prices across the board pretty much everywhere but the Youth Hostel purely because we were Europeans, it was now about the principle. That and the fact that the guy was really pushy. I hate that.
The 'supplement' was 20dh. - the price of the ticket again - for all four of us.
We said that we would go back to the ticket office to pay it.
No. You pay now, to me.
If there is a supplement we will pay at the office.
I made to walk to the office, and our bags got packed with everyone else's on the roof of the bus, and the guy jumped down and gave us a withering look.
We got back to our seats.
Marrakech was left quickly behind. The bus sped along a cambered road which shot towards the mountains on the horizon in a straight line through scrubland with occasional dark green plants and clumps of bushes amidst a mass of sand-coloured soil. The sun was high in the sky and the heat was powerful, but the windows of the bus were open and a strong breeze buffeted around inside amongst the seats. The girls played cards, but I was stuck to the window, looking at the grey shapes on the horizon which seemed immovable, impossibly distant. A herder thrashing at bushes with a stick by the side of the road looked up as his goats grazed around him.
All of a sudden, as though the hills had leapt out at us, we were climbing. And how. We went from speeding across the plains to yawning out, achingly close to the edge, around tight turns on a road cut into the side of a gorge inside of ten minutes, I swear. The heart-in-your-mouth feeling we got from looking out over a sheer drop as the back tyres raised dust from the rubble which bordered the tarmac..died away eventually, even though my stomach tended to tighten of it's own accord when the bus began another corner.
After a long series of nailbiting bends, the road faded into a short straight and we came to a halt at a small town - Asni. We tumbled off the bus and wandered round to the back of the bus, where people were having their bags thrown down off the roof. Our 'supplement' friend was doing the honours.
He refused to throw us down our bags until Heidi made a big show of asking a passing local where the police station was.
We wandered with a few others from the bus to a man standing in a white djellabah, leaning up against a big open-backed 4x4.
The rails stopped at Marrakech, and the tarmac finished in Asni for those heading for Imlil, Toubkal's base camp. We bundled into the back of the truck.
We wound our way along gravel and rough stone tracks on the side of a long valley, which was lush with trees and streams against bare, ginger-coloured stone. After an hour of being rattled around in the back of the truck, we arrived in Imlil.
The village centre was a small flat bare stone and gravel square, which had a steep drop on one side. The other was made up by the low painted brick building which was the French climbers and walker's refuge - the Club Alpin Francais. The walls inside were covered with intricate maps of the surrounding mountains, there was a fireplace and a small, rusted stove, and a few musty thin hardback books dotted around. The place was completely empty when we arrived. There just wasn't anyone there. At all.
The rest of the village seemed to flow up around the square no matter how steep the slope was - the buildings were of compressed earth and rubble, founded on large rough stones jammed into small crevices in the rock of the hillside.
Even here, in the High Atlas Mountains, four hours out of Marrakech, on buildings built from pisé on bare rock, satellite dishes adorned a few rooves.
I was confused. I didn't have satellite TV in England. I still don't.
There's more to what happened that evening in Imlil, but because of it, my travelling self five years ago had plenty of time to write all about it in a couple of days' time.
All about it.
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