albania

the white waves crashing over the old pier of historic Dubrovnik were left behind, the scrubby clouds scudded through the sky and i followed the road to Montenegro, surprised to find out they used the euro there, and it soon felt like spain, with lots of restaurants and hotels and apartments-to-let strung out along the coast.  i almost traversed the coast of the county in a day (thanks to a free ferry)  but in the evening found myself in the pine woods next a beach nobody loved - on account of all the waste strewn everywhere - but still found myself feeling fresh from having bathed in the waves.

the next day, slowly progressing through the wind/rain, i crossed the little road to albania, and found myself transported very far away.  waiting to cross the river, there was something about the ordered choas - people inhabiting the street space without any rules but with hand gestures and tooting of horns, where you are just likely to be on the wrong side of the road as the right, on account of all the potholes - that made me feel excited to be alive, made me feel suddenly closer to turkey than to europe (although never been to turkey) and made arise within me an incommensurable desire to be in India.
- couchsurfer mario in split had said (a little underimpressed) "all my friends are going to india.
i don't know what they are looking for - maybe to find a spiritual guru.
you have to find enlightenment within yourself".

yes, i agreed to myself afterwards, enlightenment is found inside oneself.
what is it about india, then, that pulls me?

place is important for experience-creation.

mario said many other things which i found interesting and insightful.  he said that this world (this Universe) consists entirely of energy in motion.  we behold it with our eyes and divide it into elements of different colours and forms but everything is essentially a flux of energy - a wave crashing or a bee buzzing or plants silently growing or a volcano exploding.  we breathe in air and use it to fuel our own energy activities and then exhale, everything swirls, comes in, goes out, passes through, unity throughout, all is one.

All is One.

an interesting way of conceiving of time (for the linear conception progressing linearly into eternity can be rather baffling) is to say All is One Moment, and all experiences and happenings are happening now, and all that is now will always be so.  - taken from a spiritual point of view because the physical side of things wants to divide up moments and live out its finite lifespan.   and so do not lament passing moments - all moments are One and the same.  Mario compared the mind to a field, and our thoughts and emotions to seeds.   we choose to cultivate certain seeds at certain moments and pursue certain thought patterns and habitual emotions.  all seeds (all possible thoughts, emotions) exist contemporaneously, and it is the task of the individual to cultivate his or her mind-garden in his or her chosen way.

Mario's philosophy on his couchsurfing profile was "liberate fully everyone, everywhere".  he struck me as an unusually aware individual - aware of the substantive concerns that being alive entails.

i liked it when he quoted Teilhard de Chardin to me: "you are not a human beings in search of a spiritual experience, you are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience"

we spoke of the poverty of speaking, compared to the richness of communication between spirits.  "take my dog, for example", he said. "he knows exactly when i want him to be still or come close, without speaking a word".   also take sexual attraction between two individuals, for example - something that occurs viscerally, something akin to the way two magnets behave, and which leaves words as a little commentary on the side of the unmistakable message "i am attracted to you" imparted by the spirit, and confirmed by other little messages from body gestures.  an  hour or so after meeting, i asked him if we would have communicated as much, or the experience of being together would have essentially been the same, had we not spoken any words.
he replied with a smile: "surely".
i wasn't so sure though.
our spirits constitute the essence of our beings, but they are combined with our minds, and our desire to rationally comprehend things is also an essential part of human nature.



at the albanian border i stood by my bike waiting in the queue of cars to show my passport.
at one point i turned round and looked directly into the eyes of a man in a car, him unabashedly silently curious about me and me curious about his curiosity and wondering how long such eye contact could last.  after a few seemingly long seconds it was broken and i had to look down at the pavement or up at the sky.

i hardly knew where i was - speaking a handful of little albanian words   but knew that it was a friendly, human place on account of all the happy tooting and greetings, people on the street can have hardly seen cycle-tourers because they look at me and don't stop looking smiling greeting until i have passed.  a man starts greeting/speaking to me from his motorcycle as i cycle by and soon we have stopped and he is communicating with me with his eyes and a smattering of italian that he has worked in italy for four years, and gradually his brown eyes say "i accept you" and he says, stuttering, "you    my    son".   communication is not fluid, but i know that he wants to invite me back to his house not far away, and he feels that i am his son.  he says, "mire, tears in my eyes", and shows me by wiping his eyes dry.  i don't want to seem offhand in the face of his great show of affection, but i feel that i really want to continue along the road, and it is only when he gives me three big close-up kisses to say goodbye that i smell the alcohol and it is confirmed to me (what was hitherto suspected)  that he is as drunk as a skunk...you never know when you arrive in a foreign country for the first time, who the people are.


yesterday was my first full day in albania and yielded  more genuine exchanges, like going into the shop to buy a pen and receiving a lesson (actually at my request) on key albanian phrases from the girl who spoke italian - also ostensibly to see how well the pen worked.   key albanian phrases like "kjo eshte rruga per shkoar ...?" (is this the road to...?), which has served me well today, bumping along country lanes trying to find a quiet road away from the lorries and construction vehicles and hanging dust on the main road.

images of albania for me are becoming: a haystack at the side of the road, piles and piles of litter everywhere, cockerels clucking, old men always wearing faded suits and open simple faces - not "simple" as it is sometimes used to mean "of low intelligence" but "good" and "honest", farming people, everyone in the fields hoeing or digging or wielding some agricultural implement, haystacks, cockerels.

wind says hello

"viento del sur, o lluvia de abril
quiero saber donde debo ir"

                                                    lyrics of sui genesis


(southern wind, or april rain
i want to know where i should go)





cycling a bike is similar to meditating
in that it allows living close to the centre-of-oneself,
one's  movements become mechanical, irreflexive
- also similar to taking a nap or letting one's mind wander -
the miles roll;
a headland appears, jutting into the ocean,
and recedes.
a curve ahead
you follow it, first with your eyes
then with your handlebars and bike
and the centre of yourself all the time speaks
and you listen.


i had mainly been following the main road and began to feel itchy inside because of all the cars and cars and lorries zooming past, and all the advertising boards speaking of shops and hotels and things to sell.
following the little winding coast road then - hugging the sea up close - you enter the little villages where only a group of old men are sitting in the shade in amongst decrepit old buildings sighing beside the flat expanse of water, shimmering out to some lazy blue wiggly island shapes - parcel of almighty oh-shin - lapping, a little lap - and you think "Oh modernity you have done many things for us but, my boy, you have a lot to answer for"


Split came at the right moment then, with its cafe-lined Riva full of people sitting at the cafes or walking past the cafes and the nearby Marjan penninsula, where there were pine trees in which to sleep, where there were squirrels chasing each other round the trunks or people rock-climbing in the sun, or the view at night from the flag-fluttering top over the spread of city lights.  i said: if someone had never conceived of city lights before, this would sure be beautiful, and even though they have conceived of city lights before,  it sure is beautiful.
or awaking in the morning, yet to stir, and feeling a bird come to perch on my sleeping bag - the bird maybe thinking i was a bright orange fallen log - and singing his or her songs and hopping around atop of me laying still stock-still.

are you, perchance, a romantic?

- oh, yes, feelings and emotions are very important for me


are you, mayhap, an existentialist?

- oh, yes, existence very important.


art thou, perhchace, fond of using archaic language?

- aye.



the sea had stopped sparkling
the raindrops began falling;
the sea became a steely mass of hebridean cold,
and the wind stiffened.


wind says hello
i say 'oh'
   can i go on?
   the road is long.

'no - know
that i must halt
your pro
gress'

wind and rain in duo chime
'hush, be still - only listen -
all things i wil whisper to you in time'




what else matters to me,
having my body and soul?

- loose translation of words of Juan Ramon Jimenez

("Que me importa nada
teniendo mi cuerpo y alma!")

adriatic moments

i had left ljubljuana and travelled south for an hour by train, then an hour by bike, and it was only when night was falling that i realised that i had left my tent poles with my couchsurfer friends in ljubljana. 

a tent is important because the warmth from your sleeping body is not lost to the air, but creates its own little microspace of warm air.  the difference in temperature between inside and outside the tent is appreciable.

"yes", i told myself, "those tent poles are an important part of my equiptment and i must go back for them".

i hopped on my bike in the morning and biked back to the nearest best hitchable spot, was hopping around to keep warm for a while when a big bus stopped for me.  the door slid open and i saw that the bus was full of boisterous adolescents dressed in white.  i gave my token offering of words in slovenian: "ne govorim slovensko" (i don't speak slovenian).  a seemly man said that they were going to ljubljana and ushered me in saying: "come in, don't be shy!".  i had been told that slovenians loved to drink and repeated this to a girl who walked past the seat i had taken. "croatians too!" she said.  i found out they were a group of musicians and dancers from croatia, dressed in their traditional white clothes, who had come to take part in some processions here in slovenia.  they were all in some intermediary stage between sobriety and inebriation, and were baying and howling like hounds.  i was very happy to be out of the cold, and to have got a lift.  i was asked if wanted to drink pure wine, or drink it mixed with carbonated water as they did, and elected to drink it 'straight' - a lovely subtle easy-drinking white wine from croatia.  "we are crazy!" a girl who had presented herself to me said.   i still cannot find an adequate definition for being crazy; saying that one is crazy is a contentious statement for me, so i told her "you are happy". 
"always happy!", she responded.   despite the undoubted contribution of alcohol to their mirth, i saw an essential core of warmth and friendliness in those youths.  soon an acordian player was standing in the aisle and everyone joined their voices in a rousing sea-shantyesque sing-along, with their arms around one another's shoulders, displaying faces of perfect mirth.   i asked someone what the songs were about and was told: "mostly about love, or love lost".     "or drinking"

the seemly man who led the group - jadrianco, if i can remember his name correctly - explained everything to me in a most amicable fashion.  he said that he had taken part every year in these processions when he was younger, and now he felt it was his turn to give back.  these small processions in slovenia were nothing but a warm up for the big carnival the next day in Rijeka.  this is the third biggest carnival in the world - after Rio, and some other place - and was actually the world's first interational carnival, starting 40 years ago.  at a certain point he said:  "ah, we are running short of time and are going to bypass ljubljana to perform at a procession in another village.  do you want to come with us?  we will be passing back through ljubljana in 2 or 3 hours".   and so i joined their procession, glad to have forgotton my tent poles and returned to the mirthful encounters that, occasionally, come from the decision to hitchhike.

a few hours later in ljubljana i was happy to pass through the market on my way to the couchsurfers' flat and pick up some pink figs that had been recommended to me by couchsurfer Samo.  i was glad to have met Samo and admired his beautiful abstract paintings of subtly-balanced soft colours showing circles and free-flowing lines.  he said that the circles represent the wholeness of the centre of his being, which he has only been able to settle into after learning to abandon - or at least look beyond - the vagaries of his mind.   some very pleasant moments spent in his room drinking tea and discussing - or at least pondering - the mind/body "what makes a person?" question, and watching youtube videos showing Osho - an indian who answers the question "what is the essence of a person?", by saying: not body, nor mind; awareness.
such an enthusiasm had been worked up in me for those pink figs on account of Samo's great enthusiasm for them.  it is good when enthusiasm for something is transferred from one person to another.  the very fact that i was walking the streets of ljubljana had come from brother gerry's love of walking the streets of ljubljana.  i beheld  his enthusiasm and followed suit.    i had originally planned to spend only one night in ljubljana en route to the adriatic sea, but one night at my couchsurfers amicable flat turned into three and i was able to meet with gerry on my third day, when he came to visit from graz by train.  we visited some of his well-liked bookshops, each with their own atmosphere - an admixture of their smell, their music and their peculiar combination of books - and browsing those bookshops made me extra aware of the wealth and worth of good books.  we tasted the coffehouses of ljubljana and i was put in mind of belle and sebastian lyrics for the rest of the day and days to come...we climbed up the spiral staircase of the inacuratley named 'skyscraper' to the rooftop cafe and enjoyed the panoramic view over the city, and then parted at the train station.  gerry back to graz and me south to discover that i no longer had my tent poles with me...

- - - Graz was a beautiful little rest period for me, a nice town with trams sliding along the streets, in which i sat and slowly translated with my pocket German dictionary the sign which says "Schwarzfahren erhoert den Blutdruck", and let the meaning fully sink in: "travelling without a fare raises your blood pressure" with the explanation below: "passengers without a ticket will be charged 60 euros".  the town still in the thrall of winter, mostly reading in gerry's flat, watching the snow fall, or when the weather was clear following the little valley out of town to the Mariatrost basilica and walking back through the woods on the ridge.  Mariatrost has baroque walls painted a sunny yellow, framed by countless white pillars, rising into the cold blue sky.  my eyes were made to look up, and my head must too, when i stood close. 
in graz i realised that cycling my bike was all i really want to do.  hitchhiking has an adventurous element - because you don't  know what will happen - but waiting can drag on too long, the bus is the bus, the train is a beautiful slide but the bike is a way to interact with the road in a physical way.  your thigh muscles speak to the inclines.  the air rushes past you and maybe caresses you or maybe makes you cold on the declines - - -

when i had retrieved the poles and hitched back to where i had left my bike and spend another night (a warm tent night) in the woods, i cycled to the croatian border and was told that i could not enter unless i showed them that i was in possession of several hundred euros to pay for my stay.    the nearest bancomat was 13 kilometres back down the hill, and at first i was reluctant to cover them.  it always provokes reflection in me when my will comes into contraposition with the will of another.  my will said "i would like to enter croatia", and was gainsaid and had me peddling away feeling like a crisp brown leaf blown by the winter wind - or the spring breeze; finally it had me feeling really fine, glad to have a will at all, and let it be really small - gainsaying another's will is to choose disharmony.  finally it had me thanking them for letting me into their country, thanking God for His or Her infinite benevolence, Bob Dylan's recorded voice ringing in my head: "You have given everything to me.  what can i do for you?". 

my little will says: why don't you cycle to greece?
and i say:
okay
if that is Providence's Way
if not to gainsay
what may come my way


i never really thought about meeting up with the croatian carnival paraders but it turned out that later that day, after crossing the border, and peddaling into the cold wind and finally down into the warmer car-infested streets of Rijeka, and choosing a street at random looking to slink out of the city by the quiet road, a voice rings out: "carson!" and it is jadrianco and the full 100 or so paraders waiting their turn for the annual parade of the streets.   "you timed it well", everyone says.  "this carnival is what i live for", somebody says.  the main streets are packed with paraders decked out in a variety of lavish costumes, music - if it can be termed such - blaring from trumpets or cymbals or amplifying devices, all contesting to be heard. everyone drinking and eating from a big marquee on the seafront; plastic cups and other plastic paraphernalia rolling around the streets and floating on the extraordianrily transparent waters of the adriatic sea.  it was an amicable riot. my group have me tie my bike up and store my rucksack in their van.  they have filled up their tanks normally reserved for water with 150 litres of the white wine/carbonated water admixture.   at first i wanted to avoid such carvnival shinanigans, thinking everoyone could only really share together by sharing their drunken state.  "people from scotland drink a lot", i am told.
well, there are certain individuals...


i love the adriatic moments that have commenced:

• being by the sparkling sea
• spinning along the road
• the 'swish' - or the 'wish' - of the wind blowing through the pine trees
• (also the 'broom' of vehicles, but i search for small roads when i can)
• the wind pushing me along at my back  (reminding me of the hand of my dad at my back when i was first learning to ride a bike)

i knew practically nothing about croatia before entering.  i see that it is a step away from wealthy western europe.  it is rural.   the smell of woodsmoke is in the air.  i see people out collecting wood everywhere.   i also collect wood for a campfire when darkness begins to fall; it becomes "t-shirt weather" during the day but at night the temperatures still fall and freeze water.   it is the time of year for pruning the olive trees - men are at work everywhere.   there are very little recycling facilities, making me less willing to purchase glass products.  (austria and slovenia were a little window of happy recycling)  methinks a country's environmental awareness is correlated to their wealth.  the government must be the mobilisers.  they must have satisfied their basic needs before they turn their attention to the environment.   the croatian countryside is beautiful and hilly, sometimes wooded, sometimes bare and rocky, but it is marred by waste products flytipped everywhere - building products and any assortment of old furniture and household waste.  perhaps landfill sites don't exist or perhaps they do but waste collection is not punctilious; in any case it is a picture of what our wasteful modern lives are like, strewn over the surface of the land. 

i only find rubbish in the supermarket bins. 
i am glad of this.
it has become absurdly normal to open a supermarket bin in wealthy western europe and expect to find and find lots of tasty food.   couchsurfers in slovenia told me that supermarkets exist where they stock all the food which has passed its sell-by date.  i don't know if that is the case, but there is nothing in their bins that you want to eat.

return to europe

after spending my last night in casablanca, i stayed on and spend another last night (which became my real last night).  i thought i would easily remember the house of the man who i had left my bike with.   it was only a few minutes walk from the Hussain II mosque - the largest mosque in africa somebody told me, build on a piece of land protruding into the ocean, and surrounded by crashing white waves when i first saw it.  the minaret towered with grace into the sky, and i remember it could been seen from the street where the man lived, but many streets fanned out into the city, i realised that morning.  i changed my bus departure to the next day and dedicated myself to walking the streets trying to jog my memory.   many people took an interest when i told them what i was searching for, but nobody knew who Mustafah was, the man who attended cars parked on the street and who had agreed to store my bike in his house.

Abdul worked at a little sandwich bar, and he instantly joined me on my search.  he had spent thirty years working as a fisherman on spanish boats, and spoke spanish just like a spaniard.  he wore a thick moustache, and a friendly avuncular expression which made me instantly trust him.  when we had gone along many alleys and realised that the search was futile, he told me why not spend the day sitting on a bench next to his sandwich stall.  he said that he had returned to morocco a few years ago, and set up his sandwich stall in order to still be a part of society here.  "if i didn't have any work i wouldn't have any contact with the people"  i saw that he really loved the people of the neighbourhood, giving sandwiches to people half price if they only had a few coins, giving a young boy ruffled hair and asking him to go buy some tomatoes.    i was happy to sit and observe the life on the street in casablanca, also happy to experience a hammam, where we went in the afternoon.  abdul said, "all the tiredness of your travels will disappear in the hammam", and he was right.   you move between three progressively hotter rooms, lying pressed against the hot tiles, washing, scrubbing the body all over, making an extra special effort to become extra specially clean - important for the muslims.  i told Abdul how glad i was to meet someone so full of kindness. "ah, it is not me" he said, "it is God working through me".  i was so impressed with his open-heartedness that when in the evening, walking along a street by chance, i bumped into Mustafah, a cry of recognition - ahh, who knows why i hadn't taken down his phone number - but i have got the bike back now, i decide to leave it with Abdul.  i know that it will be very useful for him getting tomatoes and getting around the streets of casablanca, and i will be happy to go by foot henceforth, letting my rolling days belong to my little morrocan soujoun.   i spend the night at Abdul's, eating a big tasty tagine made by his mother, and the next morning set off on the bus journey.

the bus seat becomes a sort of home for almost two days,  you get to know in some way the fellow passengers who all get off at service stations every few hours - they become your fellow travellers in the convoy which rolls in a lulling way all through the night along the spanish motorways, you enter a kind of sleepy haziness, never quite sleeping but never being fully awake.  i first meet Mustafah, travelling on another bus going to italy, when he passes me a bottle of whisky bought on the tax free ferry crossing.  he has fixing eyes and is replete with self-confidence; his words will be the ones listened to.  sitting on the pavement at the service stations or having a coffee inside, he tells me that we communicate using the language of the brain, but the language that the heart speaks is stronger.   i meet his eyes there and consider his words and he tells me "i am like you.  i am looking for truth"  he says that catholicism is a true way but that islam is truer.  he recites to me the ave maria in italian, and french, and english too. when i ask him why he has learnt those words, he says he will tell me at the next stop, but i never see him again.

getting off the bus in milan in the chilly early hours of the morning, i find myself a little bit bewildered, realising that the way of being in morocco and interacting with the people there has really entered me.  on my subsequent journey north to switzerland, and then into austria, it has really struck me how much individualism is prized in europe.  in one sense it is very liberating - one can do as one pleases (within limits) no one will interfere with you.       it is also isolating, no-one looks at you in the street, passing by unobserved, uncommunicating it is almost like not exising, aside from your own personal experience.

big beautiful houses in the alps.
so much personal space.
when you have everything you need, there is no need to interact with others
(in a material sense).
no-body looks at me or says hello when i walk past.

maybe it was because i was such a foreigner in morocco i attracted so much attention.
it is not the case because i saw so many others being friendly and interacting among themselves.

i remember the night i looked for a place to sleep among the eucalyptus trees on the coast before casablanca.  "ma kaynsh mushkill"  the adolescent resting against a tree tells me in arabic  (there is no problem).  i meet him a little later on the beach and i feel his presence lingering around me.  i want to be alone to light a fire and sleep peacefully, and push my bike further along the beach looking for seclusion.    and in the dying daylight i see that he has followed the tracks in the sand and catches up with me in the trees, with a torch and another friend.  later i realise is that all he wants is to invite me back to his house - in his mind that is better than the cold night, but i want to stay in the trees by the fire and he leaves me reflecting on my happiness in solitude and wanting to do things myself.  a child of europe i am.

a friendly romanian family take me along the road in the north of italy.  i find myself a little concerned by the cold and the coming night when a young italian chef picks me up and i feel like he fairly saved me, taking me over the 2,300m pass to switzerland where he works, where the snow is piled up higher than a car at the side of the road, snow everywhere,  nowhere to camp.  my italian lift giver tells me here the air here is dry and you don't realise how cold it is. it feels like minus 5 although it is minus 20.  "that is when you fall asleep and don't wake up" i receive his words with wide eyes.  he takes me further on to a town with a train station and there with only two minutes to spare i buy a ticket to innsbruck and rush onto the warm train.   the trains and the train stations are one way to find warmth.  hitchhiking leaves me jumping around the keep warm, very glad to meet the trembling old man, who asks me to guess his age and when i say "hmmm that would be difficult" (giving myself time to think), he says "sechsundachtsig" (eighty six).  i don't speak german so much but we sit and flick through my pocket dictionary waiting for the church service on sunday morning.  sleety snow  i am pretty sleepy from lack of sleep, digging away the snow for to camp in the woods.   the warmth of the fire to dry my socks and shoes and watch the smoke drifting up to the branches of the conifers silhouetted against the moon    fulfills.

a few hitches advance my progress on the road to graz, but it mainly consists of waiting, so it is the train that helps me cover the last section for the happy encounter with brother gerry.

in his warm flat of cosiness, cups of tea and colin steele.

ja gern

last night in casa

who can tell where these good feelings come from.  they seem to belong in the very air.
they are carried alongside friendly cries.  from all corners of the countryside there comes a friendly cry; bonjour, ca va; bonjour, ca va,
if not then eyes of curiosity.   that is something i will not miss about morocco - the constant attention and eyes glued on me wherever i go.    some men, dressed in fully monkish traditional robes, spin a string of regal nods, giving the whole of morocco the air of being a monestary, albeit one with motorbikes and the tooting of cars.  i have left a trail of greetings behind me,
and exchanged thousands of smiles along the way.   it feels a little like morocco is inhabited by one big family, everyone concerned about the wellbeing of everybody else; very ready to lend a helping hand.
a man at a roadside cafe selling fish tells me in french:  it is islam which requires that we all help each other.   if your neighbour comes to your door hungry, you must give him food.  the individualism of europe is arriving along with the commerce of the cities, but only little by little.
i think: the power of religion.   the positive power of religon.
islam is at the forefront of everybody's life values.  i am sketching the details of a little minaret at the side of the road when adolescents greet and pose the question: am i a muslim?  in my pocketbook arabic all i can muster is "no" with a smile, wanting to say "but i do desire good".  i don't want to be seen as an indifel in the sense of malicious rebel, turned away from the good path.  so i say "Allah akbhar" (God is great) which i perceive to be the first line of the call to prayer.  i perceive that they want me to repeat some words (this happened twice), only two of which i can understand - Mohammed and Allah.   some of these encounters have to end with me just smiling at them, some sort of sincere eye contact, the gesture of the hand placed over the heart (a gesture i quicky adopted here) and a "bessalama" (go in peace) as i cycle off.   another youth at an orange juice bar in casablanca gives me a fuller explanation.  "we humans are not here for no purpose.  God must be the creator of the universe just as there must have been someone who made your bike - even through you don't know him.   this life is like a test for us.  the prophet mohamed has given us God's rules we must abide by. it is easy to be a muslim - do good to others, this many europeans do, but you must also pray five times a day.  it is a time of peace and calm to be with God.     you can be proud to become a muslim and still be proud to belong to your country and family.  you can meet me here anytime if you want help with anything - he tells me.  he insists on paying for my orange juice.

i am writing some final words coming from my impressions of morocco and they are about God.
i am impressed by the people i have met and the things they have said. i say "i am impressed". i mean "an impression has been left on me".   these are the people of the world.  these are the people we share the planet with.   how can we get along?

late at night at a roadside internet station, and the owner comes out to see me about to pedal off and warns about the dangers out of town "il y a des clochards" he lowers his tone of voice - there are homeless people. he indicates a safe place to pitch my tent round the back and then has me inside his house for some mint tea and after a while telling me i can sleep in the room of cushions.  he poses me the question: am i religious? and i give my response about my christian upbringing, but now being made aware of the variety of spiritual responses to life and....."ah, you are finding out about other religions before deciding which one to follow.  you may become a muslim..."   and i think:  "for him the possibility of a real personal spiritual experience unattached to the prescribed ways of understanding as handed down by religious traditions is not possible"



all that peddling and rolling has put me in a real cycling frame of mind; unwilling now to be parted from my freedom machine. if i only had my two feet.....the possibility of ending the day 100km from where i started would not be mine.  i could get into a car, but the vrrroooom vrooom burning petrol i'd rather have the wind in my face.   i have been admiring all these palm trees so much, the soft sand gleaming in the moonlight at night, the banana stalls stacked high with yellow, orange carts brimming with orange, everyone riding on donkeys pulling carts in the countryside.  it is a real encounter of traditional farming way of life with cars and modernity, mobile phones and music-playing electronic devices, the cocacola signs have been here for a while, big trucks full of building materials, construction springing up in key spots along the coast.  morocco is a melangee of dirt lanes, palm trees (the symbolic palm tree) with a fringe of modernity; actually a centre of modernity in the city.  practically everybody is fully faithed muslim.   i would say somewhere around ninety out of every hundred are extermemy friendly and welcoming.   "welcome to morocco" the words ring in my ears, echoing through daily repetition.
tomorrow i am going to get on a bus and not get off till milan.  take my bike with me and pedal to keep warm on the way to visit brother gerry in austria.  a nice new chapter of europe begins and lots of warm memories of warm morocco to keep me warm in the winter still low temperatures warmth is something to seek to be warm is very warming to the soul.

actions speak alongside words

i woke up and said:  if the boy in the beach cafe wants to buy my bike for 750 dirham, i will sell it to him.   the boy said there were plenty people in the village who would be interested in my bike, but it was too early in the morning...if only you had come by last night.  i painted their menu for them, something i said i would do a few days ago when they saw me watercolouring, but everytime i passed by they were waiting for a decision to be made as to exactly how the menu would run, or they were waiting to buy some blue paint. jakke's prediction was:  you will never paint their menu for them; jon (another belgian surfer) said he would do it for them; that was five weeks ago.  

jakke had to return to belgium for a few days and sven and i decided to head to a place called paradise valley, an hour into the mountains. where jakke left us there were 45km or road. i got on my bike and waved goodbye to sven saying, "see you this evening in the centre of  immouzzer". sven was going to hitchhike. however as i continued along the road i saw that there were very few cars and none that passed contained sven.   it was hot work cycling uphill so i removed most of my clothes. there was a light drizzle when i stopped at an auberge-cafe that also sold honey.  the price of the honey was high but the man gave me a little wad of honeycomb anyway, and some bread to accompany and two oranges.   really, it is very kind of you.  he tells me he has lived all over europe - france, germany, switzerland - and i wonder if the experience of being a foreigner in an unknown country makes one more aware of hospitality shown to the stranger.  can i give you a coffee?   -no, really.  i had better keep on the road.   he says i should really put more clothes on  "at least put your shoes on. you will catch a cold"  my usual response "i am from scotland i am used to the cold" does not impress him as he insists with his eyes and then plants a big kiss on my cheek wishing me a bonvoyage.

i am sitting in a little cafe in one-street immouzzer, darkness, drizzle and now i agree pretty cold, something over a thousand metres above the sea, i walk my bike down to the big cascade which attracts visitors and sleep in the olive trees; finally the usefullness of carrying a tent proven.  the next morning no sign of sven so i let myself be pulled by my desire to be more north and begin to cycle that way.
cresting the top of a small pass to be surrounded by a gaggle of garrulous boys wanting a drink of my water which i gladly give them.    how will these boys use their energy - which they now channel into their voice volume - when they are older?   so much energy i observe.   and the energy of the garrulous girls? - they are taught to be submissive.    curiously i notice a little further on is the doorway where i asked for water a week or more ago on my way to meet jakke, and waited a while while it was fetched.   perhaps water isn't easily obtained here.

jakke said the same thing: our encounter happened very naturally.  "everything is meant to happen" was something he said half-jokingly when the van got broken into and sven's camera went missing.   sven wasn't in agreement with that.

i told jakke that i had spent two and a half hours on the internet in sidi ifni and told him about my blog entry, etc.  at a later moment he was sitting in the van saying "i'll tell you what the most important thing in life is"  with a serious twinkle in his eye "it is to show off"

so i began reflecting on the concept of showing off
the good thing about searching for truth in life is that when one seriously searches and arrives at some conclusions, one is wont to share them with one's fellow travellers and cohabitees of the planet.  if words do not do the communicating, then everything else will: little hand gestures, eyes, sighs - any kind of sound made - tuts, whistles, hums, yelps, ooooos, aaaaaas, shoulders shrugging high, gait.
the language of the body communicates.
communicates one's state of mind, one's feeling of heart, an experience, a habitual experience, an underlying attitude, a philosophy, a way of life, a vision of the world, a world-view or a way of being or seeing things, an understanding or a feeling of one's place in the wide cosmos.

the spice man said something i instantly liked in the souk of essaouira where i arrived this afternoon.  he said "la premiere chose est aimer"
"et puis, partager"

first of all to love, and then to share.
yes yes yes, i thought.

Jakke, the belgian surfer who lives in a van (an encounter parenthetical to my cycle)

it is an ongoing liaison which i have slipped into.

first i left tafroute and followed all the small roads back to the coast.   the landscape was a crazy medley of mountains and valleys.  i sometimes have to pant to reach the top of a pass, and am soon whizzing down the other side - a great feeling of excitement to be moving at such speed - the brakes life-savingly important to navigate the twists the twists.  the thorny twisted argan trees scattered most everywhere, sometimes the bright white blossom of an almond tree, beside which i rest my bike and rest my body and close my eyes and feel the warmth and hear nothing but the drone of insects.
i say: that sound, this scene... in which place am i?

i am deep in the countryside.

how do the people in the little villages make a living?  all i see them do is herd goats and sheep - lot of goats and sheep.  i slowly cycle through a village far from any other village.  i smile at the man sitting in the village store and he almost jumps to his feet, greeting me effusively.  i nod to him and cycle on.   i would like to give him trade but my bike is already loaded (heavy) with everything i need. 
man in the store of the isolated village, where can your trade come from?

i reach the larger village of tanalt at sundown.  the village is perched like a casbah on top of a minor hill surrounded by valley which drops all around, and then rises to form a ring of mountains.  i ask where i can find water and the task is assigned to two ten-year-old boys, who lead me through the streets to the well, where water is pulled up in a bucket.  they also show me where i can buy bread and oranges.  at first a little shy, they soon begin to ask me questions in french, which they are taught at school.   i tell them that i will sleep in the countryside at night.  "tu n'as pas peur?" one boy asks.  "peur de quoi?" i say, afraid of what?
the boy has to think.
"des animaux sauvages"
ah, i didn't realise there were wild animals. comment ils s'appellent?
the boy isn't so sure what they are called, but assures me they are dangerous.
i tell him i love to explore, and will watch out for the animals.
we shake hands at the edge of the village as the darkness arrives and i think:  very mature boys.   a child has to be mature here to help the family work.   i see lots of children alone on the roads transporting things or guiding donkeys.

i was happy to cycle in and cycle out of agadir - a big town full of banks and holiday appartments close to the beach.  everything is different on the coast.  i am happy to feel the sun on my skin as i roll along the coast road north, sharing it with huge campervans, each one driven by older man with his wife sitting next to him, and the older local vans, crammed full of passangers, inside or sitting on the roof or hanging on to the back.  "you want cheap room?" calls out a boy in one of the towns full of visitors who come to surf.  i roll on past each successive headland and cover many kilometres, finally sleeping under the full moon on the dry bed of a river, next to a banana plantation.
the next day i continue to roll and when i stop at a market town to buy some food, i see a guy standing in the street wearing dreadlocks and sandles, waiting for the water tank in his van to fill up.  we share some of the warm bread i have just bought and Jakke tells me how nice the beach and the bay is where he is staying.  he invites me to put my bike in his van and come back with him.  it is an hour or so back along the road i have just come along, but i am easily persuaded and realise i will be happy to take a break and do some painting.

and so the days have passed, and my bike is now gathering dust, tied to the back of the van.
we are both solitaries, with the freedom to migrate for the winter, who are glad to suddenly have company.
i pose the purpose question to jakke and straight away he says: to surf.  there is no feeling that compares to catching a big wave.  it keeps you going; it keeps you alive. 
then he thinks a bit more and says: the most important thing in life is to be yourself, and to be happy.
i think the two are one and the same.
then he says: we need love. we can't live without love.
i say:  love, yes; yes.

from the spot where his van sits overlooking the bay, we walked into small village of imsouanne each night for a bowl of soup.  the days spent looking at the waves, learning about surf theory, the thrill of catching a wave (like hitchhiking with the ocean's energy) and being pulled along, even if i am still lying on the board.  otherwise swimming in the sea, playing with the waves, collecting mussels sitting around a fire at night, making big fish tagines or roasting potatoes.  we drove back to agadir to pick up Sven, another belgian friend, and have now headed further south to sidi ifni, a small fishing town where most buildings are painted blue and white, a spanish colony since the middle ages ceded to morocco in 1969.
everyone is pretty friendly here.