The man across from me is puking into a plastic bag. The woman behind me is throwing up, as is the baby on her shoulder. We’re on a bus from Marrakech to Ourzazate, winding through the curves of the High Atlas Mountains. A glance out of the windows confirms that we’re riding the edges of steep drops straight down with nothing to bounce off until hitting the valley floor far down below. But the reason these people are throwing up is that half an hour before, we stopped at a run-down row of dusty cafes and dirty grills, where they proceeded to chow down on kebabs and keftas carved from the fly-covered carcasses of lambs hanging on hooks over charcoal grills. No wonder a few winding curves have brought them to their knees.
I’ve left Marrakech for the Berber lands south of Ourzazate, the last semblance of a real town until the empty desert dunes and the land-mined Algerian border. Tourist Morocco is an Orientalist fantasy right out of Edward W. Said: gaudily decorated riads, snake charmers, souks full of fly-carpeted sweets and overpriced souvenirs, and lots of poverty-struck souls acting the Other for British and French tourists. It’s so exotic! I hear over and over while pushing through the souks and into the Djemaa el Fna, and compared to Croydon or Neuilly-sur-Seine, I suppose it is. But the food sucks, the locals and the tourists are plentiful and annoying, and why anyone would buy those overpriced crap leather purses is beyond me.
After another hour, the sour smell of sick starts to dissipate, and we descend into the desert valley below. It’s a harsh landscape, brown hills and scattered rocks with an occasional patch of green or a few trees. There is no water. There are no other tourists on the bus. Those who do come this way don’t ride buses but rent SUVs and head into the desert for a day or two of dune bashing.
Ourzazate turns out to be a small but pleasant Kasbah style town of angular hills, palm trees, and patches of greenery. Dozens of petite taxis, mainly run-down and rusting orange Peugeots, shared by three people, grind their way through the streets, stopping every few seconds to pick up another passenger. It costs 5 dirhams to go from one end of town to the other. There are modest 50 dirham a night hotels at this end of town, so I hop in a taxi to the other end of town and check into the 5 Star Kenzi resort hotel for a brief reconnect with all the benefits of Western civilization, including en suite bathroom with hot water shower. I simply cannot understand the idealization of the third world; must be a 20s thing.
