We had our first experience on hills, something that would become one of the many banes of our donkey-riding existence. They were small hills, but we realized quickly that we all couldn’t ride on the cart when going up a hill, and especially not while going down hill.
At one point, on a downhill, Susan and I realized that the male donkey, whom we had named Rough and Ready, was having a lot of trouble with the asphalt and the weight. As these were donkeys from the country, they had metal shoes on their feet, which caused them to constantly slip on the downhills. We tried to support the cart, but then found that the lift on the cart, caused the donkey’s harness to come loose and slip forward. We stopped the cart and tried to figure out what to do. The weight was almost on Rough and Ready’s neck, and his feet were slipping. Jonathan had wandered a hundred yards in front of us, and we yelled for his help. When he got there, he tried to undo the whole setup, but when we tried to lift the cart off, it didn’t go. We lifted harder, then Jonathan realized that we had forgotten the belly strap. It was putting a significant dent in Rough and Ready’s stomach, and we quickly put the cart down again. We calmed down, and figured it out. If we all supported the cart at the right angle, and zigzag down the hill, we would make it. This was a simple problem that we figured out easily, but the puzzles of donkey travel would only get more difficult after this.
After making only five kilometers, we traveled a few hundred yards off the road and found a great spot, hidden between two hills, and next to the only tree in the area. For some reason this was the night that we first had to deal with bugs. We saw the ticks first. Then I killed a spider, which caused a big argument between Susan and I. And finally, after putting out the fire, the mosquitoes came. We never expected them in the desert, but here we were. It would be our last night sleeping without tents for a while.
We tried our best to get an early start, but still only got on the road at ten. We had to deal with more hills than the day before, and we were had to walk quite a bit. Rough and Ready and Shuwya Shuwya, Arabic for slowly slowly, split the 20 kilometers that we traveled that day.
We came to the tiny village of Rastarf at sunset, and filled our water jugs at the well. Our total water storage consisted of about 100 liters in large jugs, plus about ten liters in plastic water bottles. The donkeys each drank up to ten liters per day, depending on how hard they worked and how hot it was. We each used about seven liters per day between cooking and drinking. Although it fluctuated, water was our heaviest item, followed by the 100 kilograms of donkey food.
We were lucky to manage to get on the road the next day by 9:00, as we needed all the daylight we could get. Early in the day, a vehicle stopped in front of our cart, and two men in suits got out. They started asking us questions about where we were going, and where we were coming from, and eventually asked for our passports. We then asked for their identification, which showed that one of them was some sort of law enforcement official who had some sort of responsibility to Plage Blanche, where we were going. They had a serious demeanor, but it seemed that they didn’t want to cause any problem for us.
We passed some items on the side of the road that seemed discarded. A couple gallons of cooking oil, a plastic bag and a cardboard box. We were running low on cooking oil, so we had a quick discussion about whether we should take some. It looked like something that had just fallen out of the RV of one of the European tourists that had passed us. I thought it seemed obvious to take it, but Susan didn’t want to. Susan and I went to check it out, and when she found her favorite candies in the box, her mind changed, and she wanted to take it. But when I started to realize that this might have been left here intentionally for someone else to pick up, I thought it might not be a good idea. As we started to walk back to the cart, and old nomad man emerged from the desert onto the side of the road. I exchanged greetings with him, but he seemed unfriendly. He started pointing and yelling in Arabic, and I had no idea what he was talking about. He grabbed my hand and walked me back to the items on the road. He angrily started pointing at them, and pointing at the road. The best that I could guess was that somebody had left them for someone else, and that he was not going to let anyone mess with that. We hadn’t taken anything, and we tried to explain this, but he just continued to yell at us as we walked away. It was a confusing interaction, but I couldn’t really feel bad since I had done nothing wrong.
About ten kilometers from Plage Blanche, we came to our steepest, longest uphill yet. Jonathan and I had to get behind the cart and push, while Susan led Shuwya Shuwya. Of course, this was followed by our steepest downhill yet. We immediately saw that Shuwya Shuwya could not descend it safely. We decided that the best way was to have Jonathan and I take the cart down like a rickshaw. We staked Rough and Ready down, then Susan led Shuwya down the hill with full saddlebags. Jonathan and I rickshawed the cart down without too much difficulty, other than strong burns in the triceps. The cars passing on the tight turns also added stress, especially the SUV with French tourists that stopped to ask directions. When we got down, Susan went back up the hill to retrieve Rough and Ready. She was taking an exceptionally long time, so I decided go check on her. Halfway up the hill, I could hear her yelling, for what I didn’t know, but could only assume that the donkey had escaped from her. Sure enough, as I turned the next corner, there was Rough and Ready, coming to a halt as he saw me. I just walked slowly towards him, and realizing he had nowhere to go, he turned around, and started running back towards Susan. She caught him after a brief chase, and started to hit him and curse him loudly. This was a great sight, as she had always been against any sort of use of the whip against the donkeys.
Soon after, one of my flip-flops broke, and I had to finish the day half-barefoot. At sunset we were only 4 km from the beach, and we decided to push on through in the dark. The “village” seemed to consist of a police post, a school, and a few new buildings that didn’t have an obvious purpose. As the road turned to sand, we found a person, and asked him where the beach was. The man showed me where the road continued, and descended sharply for a few hundred meters toward the beach. It looked too steep for us, and impossible to do in the dark. We asked the man where we could get water, and he said at the police post, which he happened to work for. I walked over there with him, and found his supply limited, and he could only give us a few liters. He then said that we should come for tea, so I went back to where Jonathan and Susan were setting up camp. Only Jonathan came with me, as we had made a rule that we never leave the donkey cart alone. The police officer, and his fellow officer seemed disappointed that Susan couldn’t come. We explained that she had to start cooking dinner for us, so they invited us to eat with them. We said that she had already started cutting the vegetables, and we didn’t want them to go to waste. The first officer kept asking for her to come, so I agreed to go back and continue dinner, and she could come for the next round of tea.
All of a sudden, as I was working on the dinner, I saw Rough and Ready running toward Shuwya Shuwya. He had gotten loose, and now was looking for some action. Shuwya Shuwya panicked, knocked over her food bucket, and struggled to get free from her rope. I jumped up and managed to get a hold of Rough and Ready, with the help of Shuwya Shuwya’s sweet double back kicks. As I re-tied Rough, I heard a small crash. Shuwya Shuwya, having knocked over her food bucket, was now tearing at the 100 kg. grain sack, which was supporting the front of the cart. After she chewed a small hole in it, it tipped over, causing the cart to also fall forward, and allowing many things on the cart to slide forward and fall off. I didn’t make much progress on the dinner before Jonathan and Susan got back.
When they did get back, they were discussing an incident that happened during the tea. Apparently, the first officer took Susan outside to show her the ocean or the lighthouse or something, Susan wasn’t sure but went anyway. At some point he tried to hold her hand and even went in for a kiss. Susan wasn’t too bothered by it and just blew it off, but when she told Jonathan, he was furious. He wasn’t angry out of jealousy, but more because in this man’s culture, this kind of behavior was extremely out of line. Against Susan’s wishes, Jonathan went back to the police post to have a word with him. Of course, the man denied doing anything, and said that he had only grabbed her hand because she was getting too close to a cliff. Jonathan made it clear that he was angry, and came back. Ten minutes later, they came to our camp, with the first officer trying to apologize, and explain himself. I was more forgiving than Jonathan, and told him things were fine, and that they just needed to leave us alone now. They left, but came back soon after with several blankets, which we gladly accepted. The mosquitoes were brutal during dinner, and I quickly jumped into my tent after it was over.
We had a slow morning, as we weren’t really sure what we would do. The road to the beach was steep, and the ground was very loose. As we made our coffee, A young woman, whose age could have been anywhere from 15 to 30, and a small girl, who could have been a sister or a daughter, came, and in French more broken than mine asked if we would like to buy some bread from them. We said we would, but not until tomorrow. She invited us to tea at her home. This time, Jonathan stayed back as he had some things he wanted to fix on the cart. We also went with an empty 30-liter jug, hoping they had some water, or at least could point us toward the well.
They had a large tent that was made from scrap fabric and t-shirts stitched together. It maintained a cool temperature, despite the outside heat. I wasn’t sure how permanent this home was. In addition to the tent, there was a small mud brick compound. It seemed just plopped down in this field alone, but later I realized that other tents were also scattered around this area, but so spread out I could barely see them.
The girl was very quiet, but not shy. When she did communicate, she had forcefulness in her words. As she prepared the tea, she asked again about the bread. Even though she was charging more than double what it would cost in a town, we knew we could not get any bread in town here, so we agreed to order one for the next day. The girl’s mother came in with a large platter of runny eggs and bread for us. I had originally thought we had been invited to tea as a way to sell us bread. It seemed now that they were being genuinely nice, but would still like to sell us bread if they could. We managed to have some rough communication through the second round of tea. The mother was very friendly and curious about us, but she didn’t speak any French. We must have smelled bad, because one of the first things she did was bring a huge plastic bottle of perfume. She poured some in my hands, then motioned Susan to lean closer to her. She turned the bottle’s nozzle toward Susan and just squeezed it all over her chest, face and hair. Susan tried to resist the dousing, but there was not much she could do. Susan was annoyed, but I thought the whole thing was hilarious. I mean, I might not normally like to smell like cologne, but I also don’t normally like to smell as if I have been without a shower for a week.
After the girl showed us around the rest of the compound, she had her brothers fill up our water jug, and we were on our way. When we got back, Jonathan told us that he had scored a bottle of cooking oil from some French tourists that had passed by in their van. He also decided that we should try to take the cart down to the beach. In the past few days, Shuwya Shuwya had become increasingly reliable and strong, so we hooked her up to the cart. We took Rough and Ready down first, with saddlebags filled with water jugs, so we could reduce the weight on the cart. Susan and I supported the cart as Jonathan led it down, and navigated it around ruts and potholes. It was not easy, and Shuwya Shuwya slipped quite a bit. At the very bottom was the steepest part, followed immediately by a flat stretch of soft sand. As we reached the bottom, we used the downhill momentum into the sand, and ran quickly to the back of the cart to push it through. There were a few European RV tourists nearby watching us push our cart across the beach with mild curiosity. We couldn’t make it too far, but we found a decent spot to set up our camp. At some point as we were setting up, Rough and Ready got loose, and went for Shuwya Shuwya again. Both donkeys were free, and I managed to get a hold of Rough’s neck rope as he chased her. His momentum was enough that he dragged me along with him, allowing me to basically do some barefoot sand-skiing before I got him under control. This led to the idea of donkey-skiing. This consisted of pegging Shuwya Shuwya down and then attaching a rope to Rough and Ready 50 meters away, then hanging onto the rope as Rough ran towards Shuwya Shuwya. In theory this would have been great, but it seemed that pulling nearly 200 lbs. really killed his libido, and he could only make a slow trot towards her.
That night a man named Ali, who had told us he was Italian, but later explained that he was a Moroccan living in Italy and was just on vacation, brought some fish that he had caught. He spoke good English (which he said he had learned in Italy (?)) and we cooked the fish over the fire.
We decided to stay on the beach a little longer since it was such a nice spot. However, this would mean that we definitely needed more supplies, as we were still a long way from the next village, and donkey traveling was moving much slower than expected. I volunteered to go back to Guelmim for provisions. I hitched a ride at noon from the first car that passed. It was depressing to cover the distance we had covered in a week in an hour and a half by car.
Our starch supply was in good shape, so I mostly filled up on fresh fruits and vegetables. I also was able to refuel on the foods that were working well for us, like tins of sardines and dates, and neglected to get the foods that had been a bad idea, like eggs. I also got a new 30 liter water jug, as we knew the next leg of the trip would be very unreliable for water.
When I was done, I took a shared taxi back to Tessegnan, where I knew that if I couldn’t hitch a ride back to the beach that day, I would at least have a place to stay. While I waited for a ride, an opportunistic man who had heard of our love for donkeys, insisted on taking me to his home to see his donkeys. He wanted to sell one, and really didn’t want to accept my “no” for an answer. I needed to get back on the road with my thumb out. It didn’t take long for one of my old Tessegnan friends to find me, and they insisted that I pass the night there. Hassan brought me back to his place, which was fine by me. I was exhausted, and feeling really weak. He prepared some tea for us, and we ate some bread with oil. He had to leave for a couple hours, and said I could stay there, and that some of the other boys would be coming eventually. I fell asleep almost immediately, and woke a couple hours later to Abdulrahman and his friend arriving to make some tea and smoke some hookah. I made some delirious conversation, and had some tea and hookah between bursts of sleep.
At 6 in the morning, they woke me up, and we left together. I don’t know where they had to be so early, but I went right out to the road. They also mentioned that they would take their motorbike to the beach, as they heard they could get construction work on a hotel being built there.
Before I could catch a ride back to the beach, I got a text from Jonathan that said, “donkey night from hell. Bring 5 more kilos of pasta and 5 more kilos of rice.”
My dream was to never return to Guelmim, but I knew that that would never really happen. So I took a taxi back, and went to the first shop I could find to get provisions again. I also picked up some chocolate and yoghurt for Jonathan and Susan as I could only imagine what had happened the night before. They would need some treats.
Back to Tessegnan, and my thumb was finally out by noon thirty. It took about an hour, but I finally got a ride. This man was middle-aged, and a bit scruffy in a beatup car. A more average Moroccan man than the typical, well educated and wealthy people that usually pick us up. Within minutes of driving away, he casually mentioned that he was from Al-Qaeda. I just laughed and said there is little if any Al-Qaeda presence in Morocco. “Maybe in the north and in the cities,” he said, “but out here, in the desert, there are many of us”. I still didn’t take him seriously and just continued to chat with him like normal. He said he had seen me before, traveling with the donkeys. This made me more amused than worried. He then said he had had to drive past us with his mother, and be exposed to the girl who was dressed so immodestly. It was true that Susan had been dressed completely inappropriately for Morocco, especially in these rural areas. But since a car would pass us every twenty minutes or so, she didn’t feel the need to cover up. I hadn’t pushed the issue too hard, even though her attire embarrassed me. Jonathan had warned her too, but she just blew him off, saying that she just wanted to feel free in the desert. Now it was my problem and it made me furious. I apologized profusely to the man, and tried to explain that she didn’t understand the culture, and that we would make her cover up in the future. After a harsh scolding, he dropped me off, saying he had to turn on the next road, but would be back in a couple hours to take me further. I was glad to be out of his car, even if it was obvious that he was trying to scare me with his Al-Qaeda talk. The next vehicle that passed picked me up and took me all the way to the beach.
The Tessegnan boys were already hanging out with Jonathan and Susan when I got there. They were preparing coals for the hookah, preparing tea, and cooking lunch. Jonathan and Susan had done some work on the cart, and had found some heavy fishnet to put around it, creating walls to stabilize the load, and to hang trinkets on.
I got the story about the donkey night from hell. Apparently there were multiple escapes during the night, leaving Jonathan and Susan with very little sleep. At one point, both of them got loose and were caught gallivanting a few hundred meters away. They had also gotten into the dry food bag, and torn apart all of our bags of rice, pasta, corn and flour. Shuwya Shuwya also got a bad cut on her ankle from the rope that she had pulled herself free from.
I spent the afternoon jumping in and out of the river that flowed into the ocean. Jonathan went on a water-finding mission. We had confirmed that there was no well within 10 kilometers of us, and that everyone here gets their water trucked in from Guelmim. So it was basically a water-begging mission. Jonathan took Rough and Ready, who needs exercise during the day or else he will surely cause trouble at night. A few hours later he came back with 60 liters. He got 30 from the school, and 30 from a French family at their vacation home a few kilometers from the village. They also gave him some canned food, and a bottle of wine. Jonathan said they stay so far out of the way because they like their privacy, except of course from sweet donkey travelers.
We made a tajine for dinner with the Tessegnan boys, and they left soon after. I think that was Halloween.
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