Three Moroccos

Afriquia Gas Station, Ouled Marwane – Larache, Morocco

If the only thing you did was bike around Lake Harriet your view of Minneapolis would be pretty skewed. Great city. Amazing parks. Huge houses. Active people everywhere. No, to make a fair assessment you would need to spin through north Minneapolis and south Minneapolis, you would have to hit Minnehaha Falls, downtown, and Northeast. And even then it’s just hard for someone who hasn’t lived there a long time to really “get” the city.

So it is with traveling in foreign countries. For sure you can get a feel for things. But it’s just a feel. And, really, just for the parts of the countries that you have actually been in.

Based on our riding so far, it seems like there are at least three Moroccos. 

There’s the tourist Morocco – with camels and desert tours and medinas. Definitely nice, but, depending upon where you are, can be more expensive, and is definitely a pretty curated version of Morocco reality. 

There’s ordinary Morocco, which would include more rural areas and places like Casablanca. In our experience, ordinary Morocco seems to be populated with really kind, generous people, who are gregarious and fun. 

So far, we have loved ordinary Morocco.

And then there are the places like we witnessed riding today. Looks like some pretty severe poverty. 

We biked through towns with garbage everywhere. Two in succession. In the first, there was what should be a nice forest across the road from the town. But the nice forest is horrible because the ground in the woods is just covered in garbage. Stuff everywhere. 

In the second, the garbage was spread all over a field across the street from the main buildings of the town. It was like Slum Dog Millionaire. Kids were playing in heaps of refuse. Animals were grazing. Families were foraging for plants to eat. Both towns smelled something awful – that horrible sour-y smell of rotting garbage. 

Biking through areas like this is rough. People seem desperate. The kids – so nice and fun yesterday – were still boisterous – but far more aggressive. Grabbing the bikes and gear. Asking for money. And seeming a bit angry or resentful maybe. 

Hard to say what causes one area to be happy and positive, and another, just down the road, to be sad and depressing. But in this case I do have a theory . . . Yesterday we seemed to be biking through an area with lots of small landholdings. Everyone seemed to have their own little farm to cultivate. For instance, Jaleel – the Trump guy who offered us food and water as we rode by – seemed to have his own place. 

Today we rode through an area where there seemed to be vast factory-farm type set-ups. Huge fields – like really huge – planted in mangos, or beans, or potatoes, or whatever. We saw people out picking potatoes (is picking the right term? Diana says harvesting) and putting them in crates. And then, once filled, the potatoes would be carted away by huge semi-trailers. 

It looked like a scene from a Steinbeck novel or something. Except that I don’t think these are migrants – they are just downtrodden Moroccans. There were big vans and pickups that looked like they were used to transport the “pickers” from one field to the next. 

This all makes sense I guess, because we read that after Morocco threw out the French, the king made giant land grants of the most fertile land to a few well-connected families. I think I read that there were like fifteen such families that ended up controlling most of the good tillable land in the country. 

My guess is that these garbage strewn towns are where the field hands for these big factory farms live. They are probably paid peanuts. The reality is that, as I understand it, the wages in general are low in Morocco. 

Look at the gas station we camped at last night. There were two security guards, several people in the kitchen, and someone cleaning the bathrooms – and they all worked all night, despite very few customers. I’m not sure what they did, but when wages are low I guess it doesn’t matter . . . 

Anyway, my sense is that these field workers really don’t make much. This trickles down to the kids having nothing and to a town where people just dump there garbage wherever…

Probably time for the king or the sultan or whoever to address this issue. Maybe he should take a bike tour through his own country. He might learn something. So much is wonderful in Morocco – but there are parts – like much of the area that we rode through today – that are really hurting.

Okay, despite the tough towns that we biked through, we had a nice ride today. Started out this morning with dense fog. Our sense is that there is probably a lot of fog around here all the time – with the cool of the ocean hitting the warmth of the land. Kind of nice to have a break from the sun . . .

Nothing too eventful on the ride, really. Some more aggressive kids. A whole bunch of donkey cart traffic – which never gets old, by the way.

And a stop at one of the numerous roadside coffee stands along the way. I don’t think I’ve mentioned these yet – but they are kind of fun. Basically, people build fancy espresso type machines into the rear of their vehicles. They just pull up to a spot, open the tailgate, and start selling coffee. The guy we purchased from today even had a solar panel built onto the top of his station wagon – presumably to power the coffee machine. 

These coffee guys get me to something that I’ve been brewing on myself. Mexico, Nicaragua, most of Costa Rica and Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru . . . They all grow world renowned coffee. But try to get a good cup of coffee in these countries. Not going to happen. Nope. They give you a cup of hot water and a greasy old jar of Nescafé; you mix it yourself. 

What gives? 

Then you come to Morocco – a place that I don’t think even grows any coffee – and they have fancy coffee making machines built into the backs of half the cars. 

Yes, you say, but Latin America is so poor – they can’t afford good coffee . . . Hmm. Economically, Morocco is in the same basic zip code as Colombia and Ecuador – and countries like Panama, Chile and Argentina are way ahead of Morocco. 

I hate to say it, but sometimes it kind of feels like some of these Latin American countries have kind of given up. Just accept things as they are. Where in a country like Morocco they seem to be striving for more – and along with that comes a desire for good things – like, for example, good coffee . . .

Okay, enough on that . . . I don’t even drink coffee . . .

Last thing – this town we’re in – Larache. Fun city. Old Roman ruins down by the ocean – overlooking the delta of the Loukkos River.

Another Medina. A bunch of big park areas as we rode into town – all of them clean and orderly, with families out picnicking on Sunday afternoon. And lots of energy and charm. 

We head to Tangier tomorrow. Supposed to be some serious wind – so we’ll see how that goes. And then the next day we take the ferry to Spain. Will be good to have a day off of cycling. I think we’re both getting a little tired because we’ve been going good pretty good since Marakkech . . .