not a bad thing at all

entering morocco from spain is like walking out of your front door into the street.

it is obvious that i am not from morocco and  this creates a lot of attention for me.   

a parade of eyes follows my progress down the street.    voices call out

"hola tio, que pasa?"  ( spanish equvalent of  "hey man, what's up?")

and want to find out where i am from and where i am going.

being in an unfamiliar country and not knowing anybody, it is so natural to want to accept another's words as genuine, especially when their words are helpful and friendly words.      but Mustafah's advice was well given: it is important to know that are people in the world who chose to behave positively badly, and to regard until-recently-unknown-others with a certain wariness.

upon arrival in tetouan, i spent a while looking around for a cheap second hand bike, soon attracting a retinue of attentive helpers,  who guided me around the narrow market streets of the old medina, opening up garages crammed with bikes and other paraphernalia;  after a lengthy search it was i who decided to renounce the task in light of my stinginess; but then came the request for a little money for their help but i dont want so much to give them money and the friendly attentiveness is destroyed (how to inquire "where can i buy a bike?" without ending up causing offence?) and then merely meandering alone through the medina and a man is making polite conversation and "would i like to buy hashish?" and "well even so, could you spare me 20  dirham so i can buy some?" and he will not stop following me and pleading with me, so i decide to leave the city and head up the hill into the pine trees.   there there are children throwing rocks at me and i am glad when i am far above the city; looking over the twinkling lights and sleeping by a fire.

the next day the rain comes and that is when i decide to move into the abandoned building.   collecting water and buying bread i get to know the twisting streets of the concrete neighbourhood built upon the steep outskirts and from the people there start coming the warnings. "where are you going?  it is dangerous up there."   i am happy to say hello when said  hello to but to otherwise remain a distant berucksacked figure.  one day i descended to use the internet and the man there said that i had been seen coming from high up and that i shouldn't return there; very insistent in showing me the direction of the city centre.  but i found another way to wind back up the streets and there is an old woman who prevents my passage with her body and makes as if to slit her thoat to indicate the dangers that await me.  i try another route and a man coming out his door calls to me and explains in spanish that those woods are only frequented by bandits and drug mafia; even the police avoid being there, sleep in the city centre if you want, but if you havent been robbed yet then you will be tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then the next day.

i realise that it would be best to leave that place. i must return however for my tent and sleeping bag and it is with certain trepidation that i follow the path through the pines, hitherto so peaceful in my eyes, now converted into a place of danger and suspence.       :geographies of the mind.

so with renewed gladness at simply being alive and healthy, i am glad to take the bus to chefchaouene, a smaller, nice looking village in the mountains.  tetouan is a dangerous place people say. a man on the bus says that even he attracts attention there, coming from the mountains; and was robbed once.

    

how to know how to be in a place, and avoid the dangerous parts, when one has only just arrived?

:by only frequenting places sanctioned by the passage of other tourists, and by seeking somewhere like a hostal to spend the night,  i answer myself.

now i am in chefchaouene, watching the rain fall heavily heavily, listening to the rolls of thunder and thinking a hostal would not be a bad thing at all.

     

mustafah's warning

in the spanish colony of ceuta i was considering spending my last few euros on a bottle of wine (would have been my last taste of alcohol for a while) when i changed my mind and gave them instead to a man standing alone on a street corner. 

he indicated to me the directions to the moroccan border and then said he would come with me for the short walk.  he said he had fifteen days off work and had nothing else to do.
he told me that i should be careful in morocco; that not everyone is a good person.  that, in fact, most people are bad.
this perturbed me.
i said i thought most people were good, or at least had the potential to be good.
this he agreed with, but he reaffirmed that most people chose not to be good.
i said that people have only one true experience of life - their own - and that perhaps when considering the life experience of other people, they take the example of their own life and project it on to others.   for example perhaps some good people (being naive) think that everyone else in the world is also good. and that some bad people, going by their own experience of themselves, believe that everyone else is bad.
mustafah (i learned his name was) said that that may be the case, but the fact is that there are bad people in the world and that you had to chose who to be with very carefully.  he said that i shouldn't even trust him.

we walked along in silence for a while

i said that i mostly enjoyed being by myself but that i was also very interested in meeting other people and discovering their way of looking at the world.
- all very well - said mustafah - but you have to be careful with who you spend your time.

after another long pause mustafah stopped and said that he was also a solitary person.
he gave me a long, unflinching, indecifirable contact of eyes and said that he had learned to be alone during his 22 years in prison.
imediately i wanted to ask him how he now regarded those 22 years but instead i asked whether he was in the cell alone and what contact he had with other inmates and he spoke about prison routines and ended up talking about other things.

i asked him if he liked reading and was glad to give him a spanish book which i had aquired and was looking for an opportunity to give to someone. he was grateful.
from his pocket he fished out a necklace made with a shell and gave it to me.
we were at the border and it was full of bustle. an officious behaving man came up and got me organised with my passport out and filling out the form.  then he asked for 10 euros in order to receive the border stamp.  i looked reluctantly to mustafah and asked if he could give back one of the euros i had so recently given him. the other man was very insistent that i give even more - at least 5 euros - he said; but i decided to go up to the border point myself and see myself through.
- a case in point - said mustafah.    it doesnt cost anything to cross the border.  - be careful of others- he warned me once again - always view other people with suspicion.  only trust in yourself and your own shadow.  as we shook hands and parted he repeated these words as if they were the most important message he had to pass on.

the cheese from santos lugares

i have just left seville and taken a walk through the santos lugares of the mountains before descending to algeciras on the coast.   now i am soon to cross to morocco and am having to keep an eye on my rucksack in this port city internet station.  i am straining my ears to make any sense of the arabic voices i hear - unrecognisible from the careful recitation of my teach-yourself-arabic notes while following a mountain path

i love that place in the mountains.

one night i decided to sleep on a meadow higher up, where there were no trees and the starscape was wider.

soon after waking the next day i met two mushroom-pickers and told them about my star gazing.
the older one said:   ahh you can almost touch the stars from up here

first of all i thought that he was referring to elevation of that meadow - a few hundred metres closer to the stars i suppose.
then i thought that he might have also been referring to the sensation of elation of being in such a place.

it was quite a remote place.  maybe only a 45 minute run from the village of Benaocaz , but when it was raining you had to run down a slippery muddy path
it was the muddy path that made it feel cut off.

for a few days it rained quite a lot
there were also gusty winds and i thought:  winter is also coming to andalusia.
sometimes i feel wary of the advances of modernity
but those nights all i could do was marvel at the plastic sheet which was tied up over the moorish ruins
flapping frenetically, occassionally flecking my warm abode with cold droplets of rain
but generally as warm and as comfortable as larry by the fire,
reading books by torchlight, marvelling.
i grew to love those plastic sheets

(personal comfort over and above concerns about the vast and offensive hydrocarbon industry, i note)


i marvelled at the battery-operated torchlight too.
one night the fog was very thick.  the torch batteries were running very low.
i thought:  by now i should know these parts well enough to find my way. 
it was not so.  i crouched down to bring the torch closer in order to see if the smudges in the mud were cattles hoofs or genuine human shoe prints.  there was a lot of crouching and shuffling along dead end stone walls, feeling quite lost.
very glad that night to stumble across the water fountain and know exactly the route back to my home in the stones among the trees.

andrea came up from seville almost every weekend with his flatmate maribel. also bringing wine and one time his guitar and always bringing me back to his flat in seville for a jolly good scrub (essential when one is in the city, more specifically among the people of the city) and for to change library books. mil gracias andrea

one night we left the nazari bar in benaocaz when the barman called after me..
and held out a thick polar fleece to me


what a good thing to do
- to give warmth to someone who is cold
or to give food to someone who is hungry.



first i thought: i don't need such a garment - every item's worth must be weighed carefully before accepting it in a rucksack.

but the barman insisted and i accepted thinking: what will i do with such a polar fleece?

in time it has proven its usefullness,
especially the night i arrived back at the encampment after a few days in seville and found my sleeping bag very wet, an almighty cold had descended that night and i became very appreciative of the friendly polar fleece gesture.


one day i descended from the mountain and met shephard Cristoban- actaully an estate worker who was herding sheep at that moment.  he seemed surprised by my wandering in such a way (without even a mobile phone) and when i said: each person chooses their own path to follow through life, he replied that many people have work commitments and family responsibilities.  i wanted to respond and underline the importance of every person's free and resplendent will in the decisions they make, but i saw that he was partly right.
i said: i would love to taste the cheese that comes from the goats around santos lugares and he invited me to pass by his house one day for a tasting.

trip to la Sierra de Castril

5 hours from seville, the cars began to slip on the icy track.

headtorches on, a couple of hours walk up the icy valley, we camped by a ruin.
a muted gathering, everyone got into their sleeping bag early
it was too cold to look up at the cold stars
instead i huddled close to the smokey fire
normally the smoke of a fire is to be avoided
but that night the smoke was equated with warm air
and i smoked myself for quite a while
before getting into my sleeping bag.

the next day we climbed high to the top of the valley
covered in snow
and descended to a place where two huge rocks leaned together
looking like they might give protection.
we collected wood.
andrea and i played chess.
after dark we cooked up a large wok of bubbling beans.

next day, with many things wet from the rain, we found a large cave
whose floor was covered in goat droppings, but it was commodiously large.
we decided to stay and dry things.

andrea had prepared a coffee
and when he went to sit down
- Crack!    the hollow sound resounded throughout the cave.
andrea became small and crouched, holding his head
we looked on worried
eventually he looked up and said:  you don't make a sound when it really hurts.

the wound was two centimetres long
and we decided to all go back to the car.

awesome places

i said to andrea: "perhaps God is the name we give to the immense joy and goodness of being alive"

he replied (with words to the effect) that "God has rather been seen by a lot of people over the course of history as the Great Hope in which all wrongs will be righted at the end of this sorrowful life on earth"

Yes - i surmised - everyone does see the world through their own eyes.


there is a whisper in the wind which becomes a vibrating whooosh! and i lift my eyes to see the suspended body of a Griffon vulture, only a few metres above me and already gliding towards the other side of the valley.

contact with rock - scrambling up elegantly sculpted (eroded) limestone towers.  they feels smooth and cool to the touch of my hands


i spoke to an old man in the village and found out that Santos Lugares - the place where i have been staying these past weeks - was an old moorish settlement dating from the moorish occupation of andalusia. 
it was lived in a long time ago - said the old man - much further back than i can remember.   it made me wonder if it was the moors who gave the place its name - santos lugares (holy places) - and why they might have done so.   it made me think: what makes a place holy?   does the holiness of a place reside in the mind of the beholder?
i think to regard a place as holy is to behave with reverence towards it, to be aware of its immense specialness and that there is a vast spirit astir which overwhelms you and causes you to say: wow  

perhaps if the planet earth in its entirety were considered a holy place...everyone would tread more lightly.  

Report on this part of the Sierra

The Griffon vultures spent the morning wheeling in circles next to the cliff.

It clouded over around midday and a sweater and wooly hat were donned in order to maintain an average body temperature of 37°.

In the evening the clouds were suffused with a rosy colour.  After that it got dark.

Used up the last of the pasta, accompanied simply by garlic and olive oil.

All in all, it was a pretty good day.