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.
astrangerinyourmidst 