Excerpted from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey:
7:48 a.m., Saturday Nov. 20, Casablanca: I’d have never believed we’d have left on time. At 7:40 there wasn’t a train in sight along quai deux. At 7:45 we were underway from Casablanca Gare de Voyageurs, right on time, on the express to Marrakesh.
Gare de Voyageurs was dark but not foreboding at 7 a.m., friendly and do-able, with a short queue for billets and hot café available. Pictures of the new, young King Mohammad hadn’t yet replaced his father in the magasin.
At least at first, we were alone in our premiere classe compartment for six, the sun playing cat and mouse with clouds in a tropical-style rain, big drops but cool, a torrent that looked to occur only here just onshore. The low eastern sun made the clouds in the western sky foreboding blue.
Premiere classe cost 100 dirhams, ten bucks, for the three hour ride into Marrakech, and the Sheraton Casablanca wanted seven dollars per LaBatts. We drank two and a half round trips on the Marrakech Express in an hour last night.
*****
Royal Air Maroc’s 747 had delivered us right on time, six hours forty minutes flying time from New York Kennedy to Casablanca Mohammed V International. A twenty dollar grande taxi would surely be the most expensive in Morocco but it was a long ride, more than 45 minutes, at first through the Oulad Salah Zone Industrielle and alternately, fallow brown land. Just after dawn, with the sun so low, the fair weather clouds were lit orange from below in a definite November chill.
Horse-drawn buggy drivers in distinctive Moroccan pointy-top hooded djelaba robes and pedestrians alike stamped their feet and blew into their hands. Scooters and funny French transports. Kids with backpacks surprised us on their way to school on Friday, the Muslim holy day (they go a half day).
People stood in ones or twos on the roadside, it seemed like at random, and since we saw no buses or bus stop signs, we couldn’t tell why. Most of the women wore head cover. Given that you see people standing absently at the roadside all across the developing world we didn’t take their loitering as indolence - it just looked that way.
Perfectly Florida-flat. The road in from the airport was a long, straight tarmac highway, well paved, divided except at work sections, where crews prepared for the day in tents. It wasn’t clear if they’d slept there, like we saw them do in Bhutan.
All was quiet. There was space, and no rush. This was the overarching impression throughout the week. Space. Room. Except in the medinas, no crowding.
Some fields were planted with a new winter crop, still low to the ground and baby green. I wondered if the winter crop might not be the better crop of the year since temperatures this time of year aren’t so blistering hot.
(Now, the next morning, aboard the express train, it took over half an hour to retrace the road out to the airport. After a time, low, whitewashed apartment blocks popped up here and there, and flapping fleets of sea birds played through the sky.)
At a turnoff, a sign read “Rabat, 99 km.”
In the best tradition of the Mediterranean, Latin and developing worlds, as soon as they could gather a critical mass of just enough cars, everyone began to not mind the lanes and to blast their horns.
But somehow it wasn’t all that busy, still.
Once in Casablanca proper, just for self-respect, our cabbie had several half-inch near misses, and one notable eighth-inch one. Taxis grandes and petites, from Mercedes to ancient Peugeots plied the streets, and if you have working traveler’s French, it’s easy to get from anyplace in town to any other with the agreeable cabbies and seldom pay more than two bucks (he wrote, drinking a $4.50 Coke from the Sheraton minibar).
We found a tight little compact Casablanca that showed little evidence of what we assumed would be a teeming 3-1/2 million people. There’s a compact little center, consisting of the stately, palm-lined Rue Alger, the United Nations Plaza near the entrance to the medina, and a few radial avenues, among them Avenue Houphouet-Boigny, after the first president of Cote d’Ivoire.
My first impression was that here we had a country closer to Paris than Dakar, but clearly on the way to Dakar. From our hotel room, a view of rooftops, laundry on the line, a thousand satellite dishes and if you looked just right, the shoreline.
*****
The express train to Marrakech did a straight line shot inland for more than an hour but before two hours had passed we saw dramatic hills with mules leading plows in silhouette along the tops of ridges. The ONCF train was “climatisée,” but the air conditioning wasn’t on and you couldn’t open the windows. I wanted a cup of café and although we saw a cart go by, I couldn’t find the guy.
Still it was quiet and comfortable and that was good because we thought then that we’d take an overnight ride to Fes and then we had five or six hours (we thought it was) to Tangier also still to come.
Midway to Marrakech the hills stood deep red and bare sometimes, planted with trees other times, and while the rain had stopped, the sky was a solid cast of gray.
The coffee guy arrived. An hour and a half to go. The mountains went and came back. So did the clouds, teasing us now and again with bright sun. We’d left Casablanca in jackets against the rain at dawn. There was no rain now but the herders still wore their pointy-headed djalabas. Sheep and goats grazed and sometimes you’d see a goat on its back legs feeding from a tree. Boys waved at the train.
- to be continued.
Photos from EarthPhotos.com. See more photos in the Morocco Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
