April 1, 2000

Just barely made it out of the house...what with the landlord knocking on the front door, I am in the basement sweeping up the dead mouse, trying to explain away all the leftover garbage and sweating it out that he doesn't say anything about the walls. We got out, caught the supershuttle and flew to New York. Now hanging out in NY, trying to say our last goodbyes to friends and got our last bit of film at B&H. It still hasn't burned into our minds that we will be landing in Casablanca in a few days in the middle of the night fishing around for a room and a cup of mint tea.

ESSAOUIRA,MOROCCO

April 16, 2000

We made the 24 hour flight from SF-NY-LONDON/GATWICK-SEVILLA-CASABLANCA landed in Casa and got the last train out to Gare de Voyaguers at around 11:30pm, swamped by taxi drivers at the train gate,it was crazy but found a place next to the Casablanca medina called Hotel du Centre, not bad except for all th cockroaches the first night! spent the first 2 days in Casa admiring all the decaying French Art Deco buildings, getting used to the Moroccan traffic and visited the exqusit Hassan II Mosque. We then caught the Local bus down the coast (350km)to Essaouria, which is a small fishing village on the Atlantic coast that lays claim to be one of the main windsurfing places in the world. Mostly getting lost in the Medina (old maze part of the towns), and hoping to fend off the dealers (as the Lonely Planet books say ove and over) and definately the kids throwing waterballons around us, we have excellent sandwhiches omlettes, Harira (local lentil soupe) cafe casse et du the a la minte. Today we took a camel ride out to Diabet and the ruins of a Portugues castle that Jimi Hendhx used to hang out at, we met a guy out there who said he used to hang with him!! yeah well anyway the place was incredible, half sunken in the sand and covered in barnacles and surrouned by a family of wild dogs. Tommorrow we are off to Marrakech and the frenzy that awaits one there. hopefully we can get the next journal entry up sooner..., still trying to get a handle on these French keyboards!

MARAKECH,MOROCCO

April 21, 2000

Marrakech is a city of chokingly small,twisting medina alleyways,reeking of drying meats,spices,leather and blaring the latest Arabic poptunes all to a steady rhythm of scooters,taxis,large groups of schoolkids and teenage boys. This is defiently a fast-paced place as you can sit back,sip a cafe casse and watch all the tourists getting off of the buses and the touts and buskers warm up for another night of medevil fire-eating smokey haze debauchery in the Place-De-Jemma, Which is sort of like the old heart of the city where all the action takes place. Davi and I found a rather cell-like room in the Medina about 20 feet from the action. This room will be remembered for the piped in Arabic music radio that only recieved one station, playing the Kings message to the people every 15 minutes. We had a great view from the rooftop where all you could see was this phase-shifting musical fog!...quite a sight as you looked out into the tent covered markets, snake charmers, water-sellers and Berber acrobats, selling anything from dates to bloody sheepsheads, to haria soup to the latest bootleged Milli Vanilli tapes, All while listening to non-stop drumming amid a blaring Muezzin call-to-pray over the desert heat laden sun.

MEKNES, MOROCCO

April 24, 2000

After 5 nights in Marrakech we ended up taking the morning train up to Meknes bypassing Fes as we wanted a much quieter place to hang for a few days before heading up to the Rif Mountains. Meknes was one of the orginal imperial capitols of Morocco and has several fine old tombs and the like to explore. The medina was much more mellow and quite fun to get lost in!! I found a cool set of Moroccan Dif Drums in one of these ,. shops hidden back there. Outside of Meknes, about 30 km, we took a day trip out to Voubilis and Moulay Indriss. Voubilis was an ancient Roman city that is being evacuated and has some remarkable mosaic tile work still intact, we met up with another American couple, Bob and Lois who split the taxi out there and later we headed up to Moulay Indriss, which is a pilgrimage site for Moroccans. We ended up being "guided" by this young kid who took us passed all his favorite hidden corners, where his friends were waiting for us. We met this one guy up there who tried to sell us some "Holy Cookies" that we could leave at the shrine....not bad except that they were stale.

CHEFCHAUOEN, MOROCCO

April 26, 2000

High up into the Rif mountains we took a fascinating bus ride after just barely making the bus out of Meknes (we got out of the cab at the Meknes bus station where immediatly about 10 guys were surrounding us trying to find out where we're headed. The bus was starting to move.our backpacks were thrown below, we jumpe on, trying to figure who we pay and who we have to tip!) Anyway it was quite an entrance as we just made it, bought our ticket on the bus and settled back to the rough mountain scenery, all while listening to chickens trying to get out of these burlap bags tied to the roof and to cranked up Berber drumming and the creepiest cool vocals I've heard yet. At the Chefchauoen bus station we met a man named Abdel, who was very friendly and chatted with us in English about life in Chefchaouen and his hotel. Abdel, ran the local "Hotel Bonsai" which he was very persistant in us staying at. after awhile the taxi showed up and we decided to give it a shot. We went up ther but no one was around and it seemed kind of deserted but pretty. Our first night in Chefchauoen we met this other guy who wanted us to head over to his "kiffarm" 4km away, who said he had a friend in "Boston". I told him we were set and it took some pretty fast James Bond moves to lose him. On our last day we needed to send the drums that I had bought in Meknes back to California. It took us half to day to find a box, (cardboard is hard to get) pack it and bring it to the post-office, where they starting laughing as we brought in this box with "Tide" written in Arabic on the side. the postmaster starting mumbling something about "clinton-clinton" and promptly sold us one of their boxes which would get it through custom and out of the mountains in one piece.