A Crew of Jew

The Road To Mauritania. Some people like to wake up and attack the day; my decidedly more languid approach involves feebly poking at it with a stick. My stomach has been feeling kind of queasy of late; a not uncommon condition for me, due to what one might describe as an intolerant, or rather, racist stomach. The digestables we commonly refer to as food or "essential nutrients" just don't particularly agree with me. Whole grains herald an uncomfortable distension, legumes presage the most unpleasant of pains, and a sampling of dairy tends to induce small villages to flee in terror. In short, I often don't feel particularly well. This worried me a bit as we were about to board our transport, a bathroomless bus that would take us on our 27 hour journey to Dahkla, the final port city in Morocco.


The road to Mauritania is a long and difficult one. Over 500 kilometers of desert stretches south across the Western Sahara to the Mauritanian border. It is barren, cracked, and dry; a sandy skin that no industrial strength moisturizing cream can cure. Since the ride was so long, and the bathroom so nonexistent, I feared a repeat of an earlier disaster. This time I vowed to drink as little water as possible, to slowly dehydrate, to make myself into the equivalent of human beef jerky. This is not the best of ideas. As we headed south, the greenery of Morocco slowly started to disappear. The desert here is not the sandy dune seas of, well, Dune, but rather, the limitless expanse of scrub-brush flatland in Tremors. Both movies have monster worms which erupt from the ground and devour people like pork rinds, but I am sorry to report that I didn't see any. Still, the desert is mysterious. South of Agadir we drove past groves of small, leafy, trees no more than twice the height of a man. There, amongst the shimmering leaves, alighting atop the narrow branches, precariously balanced, like some exotic fruit, stood, unbelievably, incomprehensibly, a dozen or so live goats. We passed many of these trees, so heavily laden with goats as to make one wonder if the trees hadn't popped straight out from the ground fully formed, instantly lifting surprised herds into the sky. Tis true. To you wretched rogues and doubting dullards who question the validity of such an audacious claim, who believe my tales to be embellished or exaggerated, I say get bent, the Magical Goat Trees of Morocco exist. Though one has to wonder what happens come Fall, when, presumably, the fully ripened goats fall from their perch onto the hard desert floor. There are very few hospitals in this part of the world and I suspect they have precious little time for twisted horns and sprained udders.



As it turned out, the bus ride was easy. We glided along the coast with reclining seats and plenty of leg room, we made frequent stops for food, and I had managed to dehydrate myself to the point of delirium. Before we knew it we were in Dahkla. On the edge of nowhere, between the endless desert and the expansive sea, this large port town was incredibly quiet. The roads were lifeless, the buildings weather-beaten, and it had an eerily abandoned feel. We ambled about, this way and that, until we accidentally - and I stress the accidentally part - wandered onto a military air field. I took us a while to figure out why the men near the small wooden shack in the distance were avidly waving their arms and blowing on a loud whistle. Unfortunately we had walked quite a ways since stepping over the knee-high pile of rocks that apparently constituted their "security perimeter". We had already turned around, but we were still fifty yards from the barrier when the uniformed soldiers in the six-wheel convoy truck came roaring down the street at us. Somehow we managed to cross back over just before they intercepted us. God knows what would have happened if we were still inside but - since there was a bit of a language barrier - the soldier in charge pantomimed getting gunned down with the type of two-handed, mounted machine gun that Arnold Schwarzenegger will likely to use on his constituency we he loses the next election.



That evening, an even more unlikely event transpired - we met three young, pot-smoking, American Jews. Well, one was British, but that makes my preceding triplicate sentence structure more complicated. These young men lived together in a kibbutz in Israel and were also travelling through Mauritania. We decided the cheapest way to go was together so we could split the fair. We arranged for a ride - which is story enough for another whole tale - and in the morning got transported a short distance to a security checkpoint. There were an incredible amount of security stops on this trip, so much so that I debated stapling my Passport directly to my forehead. At the security checkpoint we transferred to another vehicle - a large dilapidated van. Our valiant steed was a sight: rust throughout; the side windows gone, covered in plywood; the interior inlaid with the same thin, oft splintered wood, behind which lay a perplexing layer of Styrofoam; a heavy sliding door which would tend to unlatch itself in the middle of the bumpy ride. If this wasn't enough, the spacious rear - on the floor of which we were seated - was stuffed with jugs, heavy sacks, boxes, and other transportables that forced the five of us towards the front, against a two-by-two hole in the plywood that allowed us to peer into the cab. None of this mattered however, since the car was jacked up, the front passenger-side tire no where to be found. We waited an eternity to a spare to arrive, along with five others, which were loaded in the back, one per passenger, like some sort of desert life-preserver. I can honestly say I think I now have a good idea of what it's like to be smuggled from Mexico, sans the delicious supply of tortilla chips. The ride was tough: it was cramped, dark, and dusty; it took incredibly long, with frequent police checks for illegal sand transport; and we were literally the last car to cross the Moroccan border, the police closing it immediately behind us. It was a great adventure.