100 and 89.

This midwinter resurrection takes place in the Valley. Los Angeles, California, where I have been living for months. In two days I fly home.

Until last week I lived in the office. Sometimes with colleagues – a rapper, an entrepreneur, a militantly disciplined former serviceman, an occasional photographer…the list goes on.

Then the CEO’s mother moved in. I fled the one bedroom apartment in Central Hollywood, where strange, fragmented, half-broken characters from across the States rolled in and out without much warning. While there, I became so convinced that I, as the only permanent fixture, was starring in a secret reality show I had someone check the place for cameras in my second fortnight. That episode-to-episode article retrospective will roll out in time.

The exotic, chaotic adventures that have punctuated this trip are first-class novel material. For now though, I am escaping the claustrophobic mania that goes with being boxed behind bars from dawn till dusk.  Live-work spaces are not the one.

 

 

 

100 and 85.

Mornings in Alabama begin with ritual insect murder: ants in the kitchen, cockroaches in the sitting room, cereal box infestations and window ledge lizard-catching. Then there is the waiting. This is our belated weekend; we worked through Saturday and Sunday, the end of our seven day roadtrip through Alabama, Georgia, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia and back. I celebrated turning 23 in four states. We wait until mid-afternoon to be remembered and collected; driven for wine and groceries and back again, to wait until the next day.

I am working for Time Warner, the world’s largest entertainment company, through Murphy Media, the firm contracted for the book we write and research on these trips. From crab-encrusted fried chicken with the aptly-named Tennessee Momma ‘Big Fatty’ to Millie’s, the dark Friday night Richmond drinking joint where I was trapped in a fridge and given a personal city-tour by the owner in a BMW, we are binge-eating our way across the South, adventure by adventure.

We live in a cottage on the woodland estate of a former Goldman Sachs CEO. It is a dog lover’s sordid fantasy; statues, cushions, photographs, calendars, and wax monuments to the cocker spaniel, adorn every surface. This house is a monument to the shaggiest breeds of the panting, wild-eyed and easy to please; fortunate, because we too are transforming into this unfamiliar species, as we worship ever-more at the altar of the Deep South deep fryer. Dangerous.

100 and 84.

I have a blank criminal record; two degrees from top three universities; am in the States on an Oxford scholarship; I have a social security card to work legally in this country for fuck’s sake! Yet, here I am, again: the airport holding pen for blacks, Latinos, Muslims and mixed race me. I attended this country’s second oldest university, two years ago, but am barred from direct entry by the capital Confederacy. Welcome to the Land of the Free.

100 and 63.

We returned to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem this morning, for our final night in Israel. Late yesterday we drove to a forest beyond the Arab Quarter. There we cut down trees and built a bonfire beside a cave that was formerly a medieval burial site. The stone is still shaped to the bodies it once held.

Leaving, we were chased and stopped by the police. And on the brink of arrest, it was only when our driver produced an American passport that we were able to leave.

There is nothing revolutionary about commenting on the discrimination faced by the Arab community in the Israeli capital. Yet, having spent several days with Palestinians in the city and in the West Bank, passing checkpoints and refugee camps, mountaintop settlements and bands of marching teenage IDF soldiers. Nights and days listening to stories of families separated by The Wall, bloody military shootings of young escapees, Jerusalem taxes without Jerusalem services for those trapped on the side it is still illegal for Israeli citizens to cross into, I think perhaps my politics changed on this trip.

100 and 62.

I spent last night floating in the Dead Sea until six am, and today on the West Bank. But before I write about those, I have a badly written story of abject horror and disaster from Israel to share.

Two nights ago my sister called our father to let him know I was dead. It was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and the state shuts down for it. Every shop, every restaurant, every bar and every road is forcibly closed. Importantly for this story, there is no public transport and no taxi service. If you get stranded, there is no way back.

We had rented two bicycles: a 1980s Raleigh Chopper and a mountain bike. Our plan, after a day on the Tel Aviv coast, was to have a short evening sightseeing tour through the centre before returning to our hostel for dinner. But of course, nothing ever goes to plan.

At first it was exciting. With no traffic, the motorway becomes a playground for the city trikes, bikes, wheelchairs and pedestrians. We biked from Jaffa along the boardwalk, into central Tel Aviv, then, around roundabouts and over flyovers, onto the highway for miles, past synagogues, minarets, schools, parklands, crowds of hysterical children on stabilisers. Two hours in we stopped for a snack on a pavement. So far, so wholesome. What I didn’t realise when we started the journey back, was that I had left my phone there.

I thought I was leading us back to Jaffa. In fact, I was leading us the wrong way. Somewhere, not too far in, my sister lost sight of me. Using maps, she tracked her return journey and realised I was en route to disappearance. When she called me an agitated Israeli man picked up. She was not to know that he had found my phone, and assumed I was dead.

Meanwhile I continued to ride, oblivious. It was only a couple of hours later when I reached Netanya, a city twenty-eight miles from our hostel, that I noticed I was alone and no longer in Tel Aviv. It was at this point that I got a flat tyre and found myself stranded phoneless, mapless, lost and with no choice but to cycle back down the motorway. It is a hard task to describe cycling a sixty-mile roundtrip after several hours on a bike, half of it uphill, through darkness, parched with no water in Middle Eastern heat, with a dead tyre and no idea which direction you are travelling in. To cut a long story short, I am never going anywhere without a map ever again. 

100 and 55.

Employment brings me back to London. Now on the bus again, from Chechafouen to Tetouan to Tangier airport. The most mystical of names for the simplest of valleys: goats, a waterfall, bush, tree, road – bordered by the craters and creases of the hot mountainside.

Yesterday we decorated ourselves in henna and climbed up hills, reaching the abandoned Mosque in the early afternoon; from its steps, Chechafouen the solitary dash of colour in view. Every building and every tree trunk in the town is rinsed blue. Where walls have been sun-bleached white, women in headscarves and overalls repaint them from industrial buckets of blue paint. It is as charming as it is monochrome. Two evenings ago we were taken for midnight mint tea, on the riverbank, by a local seeking a Western wife and visa. We declined his kind offer.

I am now writing from the second bus, three hours from departure. It is full of people and the choking stink of hot, hungry, Ramadan breath. The windows don’t open. This must be the sweatiest bus in North Africa.

On our fourth day in Morocco we took a group taxi for two hours. Three of us, and four strangers, squashed into a three-seater. Too long trapped in a vehicle beside a tactile pervert with a single rotten tooth.

There is honey smeared across my forehead. At breakfast in the blue square this morning, a waiter spooned it onto my face with no warning. Afterwards he explained that it will clear up my skin. We shall see.

100 and 54.

One of us was in the shower last night, the other two on our mattresses on the Chefchaouen roof terrace. Suddenly a fleet of rabid mice, manic and wild-eyed, invaded the brick pen we have been sleeping in. Went to rest in our backpacks and belongings.

 

We have now moved room. 

100 and 53.

Last night I lay naked in an underground cave being oiled and scrubbed by an enormous naked woman. It was my first trip to a Hammam.

 

100 and 52.

I am writing from a bus in the Rif mountains. This is a parched landscape of dust yellow, wilted green and universal thirst; where Qur’anic law has presently ended all eating, drinking, smoking and procreating before nightfall. No one can eat, but every street is a fruit market. No one can drink, but everywhere children are selling juice.

Yesterday we took a taxi for two hours, to a mountain village regionally known for its lake and forest monkeys. We found neither. Instead, I befriended a shaman and accepted his invitation to break the evening fast as his guest. Being led to a curtained room, up stairs. Inside three red-eyed men smoking hashish lying across dirty blankets and sleeping bags with piles of bread they were waiting to eat lining one wall.

We have just arrived in Chefchaouen, the Northwestern blue mountain city. After no food and no water for twenty-four hours it is time to break our fast.

100 and 39.

I am staying in an Arabic school in Beirut and last night I DJ’ed Lebanon’s biggest Thursday night out, in a club where the roof opens to the sky at dawn.