somehow, we neglected to publish this from Tuesday.
Walking on a different kind of sand.
Yesterday morning Ali picked us up at the hotel around nine and drove to a boulder strewn mountain valley outside of Tafroute where the rocks were painted blue. One thing about Morocco, and certainly about the Anti-Atlas Mountains, if you’re looking for rocks, you’ve come to the right place. (If you’re a farmer, I’d look for another line of work.) For Jean Verame, the Belgian artist who had a penchant for painting rocks, Tafraout must have been paradise. After selecting a few enormous rock piles, Jean went to work on his effort to improve (destroy?) nature in 1984. Most people associate that year with Orwell’s novel. The Moroccan people in this area associate it with Jean who had already tried his hand at rock painting in the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Sinai Peninsula, and Texas where the competition to correct the landscape is intense.
So there you have it. Is it as impressive as Christo’s Colorado mountain curtain that was hung in 1972? In my estimation Christo’s drapery was more elegant, Verame’s more interactive, as was seen when we came across a mob of Germans bent on conquering the blue boulders. At the topmost rock, a young German called out for everyone to appreciate how he could balance himself on one leg like the Ekapada Shiva.
The painted rocks were an outdoor set design encouraging a performance. From where I stood, it seemed to turn adults into children, as if in the midst of forbidding monumental stone they had happened upon child-friendly playground.
Downhill switchbacks took us out the Anti Atlases. Farewell to tiny villages tucked away in the mountains, now we were cruising through the industrial flatlands to Agadir, a prominent seaport that was devastated by an earthquake in 1960. Ali swept his hand towards the city as we drove through, “Look at buildings: all is new.”
From Agadir it’s a short jaunt to Tagazhout where we’re staying for a couple of days. Our guesthouse is on the third floor of a building that has a small porch with beautiful view of the Atlantic. To check in, Ali led us through a restaurant into what I thought would be the kitchen, but turned out to be a lobby to the guesthouse. The man who checked us in, after complimenting me on my djellaba, led us out what I thought was the back door, but turned out to be the entrance which opened onto an alley that we took to go between a rug store and surfboard shop down another alley to the front door of our building where we are staying. The whole setup seemed to hint at the Moroccan love of the labyrinth.
But we’re here now and we’ve been to the beach where a camel roams with its handler offering rides. And we’ve been along the main drag dominated by the surfboard theme where a man standing on a garish sidewalk surfboard painting told Ella I looked like I was a Pakistani. And we’ve had dinner served by two different waiters, neither of whom spoke any English, who could have been twins. So we ordered the same meal twice, but fortunately they only served it once, although it took forever to appear and we were worried that each waiter was assuming the other was taking care of the order so that in the end they would cancel each other out.