My Morocco
Written by Tyler Van Fossen
Unfavorably Illustrated w/ Quotes from “Fellow” SAS-holes
In light of the experiences of the SAS-ran trip, Camel Trek in the Sahara, I figured a short-story style was necessary. In no way will this do the absurdity, vulgarity, or comicalness justice, but we can only try! Especially in the quotes section, if you don’t want to feel embarrassed or offended by the reputation of Americans left behind in Morocco by a few of my shipmates, please by all means skip over the camp section! Though I had a blast, it was for all of the wrong reasons, and in retrospect was a really depressing display of drunken debauchery.
Chapter One- Whole Lotta Chaos
Nothing says “Good morning voyagers!” like an early morning announcement from the captain warning us of all of our approaching doom. But nothing could be worse than the fact that lingering Egypt kept me up and the restroom occupied for over half the night after an already late night of drawing that had set me back a few hours. Apparently the port of Casablanca has a reputation for strong undercurrents and swells, so we were all warned to stay out of the halls, secure personal belongings, etc. Not sure what all the hubbub was about, because the first few days of this voyage in the Atlantic dwarfed these waves. Anyways, I was up and started my day early.
My trip was scheduled to leave at 10:00, two hours past the time of arrival, but I had to eat, shower, and pack for the upcoming four days. We punctually gathered in the Garden Lounge dining hall, all two-hundred of us, and waited for our passports. And waited. And waited.. Up until this point, SAS-ran trips have been nothing short of a mess, so none of us had high expectations at leaving on time. But when the passport distribution finally began, tensions were high. A few days prior to leaving, we were instructed to sign up for roommates in Tymitz Square on ship to ensure that we had our friends on our trip since there were two separate hotels. However, when the trip leader began to read off the list of participants at the Myriem hotel and my name was the only name from my crew to get called, I became really pissed! I had signed up with Hillary, the twins, and Jenny all on the same sheet, so leave it to SAS to completely screw up my final trip, the one I was looking forward to so that I could hang out with these people. To make matters worse, the hotels determined who you would ride with in these little passenger vans because the mountainous roads were too untamed for a ginormous tour bus. (All 24 hours of expected driving time, so if you get stuck with the wrong crowd, it’s gonna be a loooong trip.) I didn’t recognize any of the names at my hotel, so I figured I was in for just that. To make matters worse, Meclazine (motion sickness tablets) were distributed and barf bags adorned the vans because the switchbacks prove to be too intense for the weak-stomached time after time. That announcement caused a bit of panic and doubts began to form whether or not people even wanted to make the trip.
My personal disappointment was escalated with the worst efficient passport process ever constructed that lasted over an hour, one by one, in random order, and by number, not name. There was a skirmish at our table, leaving things at an awkward dangling comma as they left to their busses and I walked over to my lonely side of the cafeteria.
Upon arrival, I overhear someone (Greg) in my same predicament, but on the other end. All of his friends were at the Myriem, all of my friends were at the Oudaya, so we had the brilliant idea to swap. The field office lady wasn’t going to have any of it though, but took down my name and ID number just in case some strings were pulled in the next couple of minutes. Well, Greg and I decide to just switch identities secretly and most likely no one would ever know, so we wrote down names and ID numbers on a scrap of crumpled up paper and stuffed it into our pockets. Greg then insists that we swap passports, but I’m no idiot and quickly shot that down. The field office lady gets back to me and says that they can’t do anything about it but they can double check who I signed up with to make sure they didn’t screw up. She comes down with the clipboard and sure enough, my name was written in glimmering purple gel-pen on the wrong sheet in the loopy penmanship of a female and the position that I should have been was etched out and replaced. Perfect. It’s not my fault, put me on the right bus! That would have worked except that’s the manifest and there is nothing they can do about it, so not only did the moron who swapped me out get away with it, but I was paying the consequences.
Sticking to the plan, Greg got on my van and I headed to his, but the field office lady was standing right there! Since she already knew me, she knew that I belonged on the other vans and directed me there. I made eye contact with Greg before reluctantly getting on the last van, the only one with room left on it. Confused and worried, I didn’t know if I was to sign my name, because if Greg had already claimed my identity, the whole thing could be a disaster once we arrive at the hotel! Playing it on the safe side, I signed my own name and then realized I had lucked out with van-choice. I recognized Caroline from my Cappadocia trip and her two friends, plus a kid from down the hall and we had a few empty seats in our 14-passenger van, AC that worked, and a fresh aroma in the air. (As opposed to the same sized vans with 17 seats, no AC, and a overwhelming scent of mildew) Disappointing fact number one- the trip leaders who were on my van told us that if anyone asks later on, our van is full. The reason they said was because there were are least a dozen people that left their van after finding out the leaders were on it, because there was no way that this van was going to be the party van!
Leaving an hour and a half late, we finally hit the road….sleep…first stop. All fourteen vans decide to stop at the same petrol station, so our driver and one other decide to head to the next one, squeezing past one van that was coming head-on up the off-ramp blocking the highway traffic as he waits for us to go by. Looking back now though, this is one of the least dangerous driving moments!
Good thing we all had Moroccan currency on us for this 1pm pit stop to buy snacks to hold ourselves over to the 4 o’clock lunch- NOT! Picture the most deserted, yet surprisingly done-up gas station and we were probably there. There was nothing around the Afriqua but arid desert field, and since none of us had any money to buy snacks and our bus driver that spoke no English disappeared around back most likely smoking the hookah for 45 minutes, it made for an interesting continuation to the already screwy start to the day. A fellow van-mate, Cheyenne, and I debated stealing one of the potatoes in the sanitary box sitting behind the restroom because we sure haven’t had enough of those on the ship, but lucky for us, the leaders, Michael and his wife, Joellen, bought us some pita bread with their few Dirhams.
Lunch was nothing special, except that it was in the square in Marrekech, complete with snake charmers and henna tattoo artists to rip you off!! Casualties included a $5 unwanted photo of me and the snakes, $40 henna tattoos forced onto both of one girl’s arms and a leg, and one genius that had left the group before we arrived at the restaurant in his ragged wife-beater to go find an ATM was now wandering around lost. At this point we knew we were in for one doozy of a trip, because in the first half of the day, we had seen the guide once, and he told us NOTHING. There was no itinerary (unless you consider the map of Morocco scotch-taped to the seat back in our van with the word “Itinerary” sharpied on it an itinerary), he spoke only spotty English, and had no interest in educating us on the country. Michael uneasily told us at lunch, “We will meet in the hotel lobby at 7:45 tonight where I will enlighten you with the details of the camel-riding, because it is too much of a treat to do that now…” Well, I was told by another SASer that we will be riding for 90 minutes the next night (not what the description had said), but there were only enough camels for half of us to ride, and the other half had to walk… through the Sahara!
Though we had done basically nothing all day, we were all exhausted and ready for our two hours of free time at the hotel. But like all concepts of time, this number was extremely skewed. It may have been from just waiting for tardy people to recongregate in front of the restaurant before walking past the horse-crap entrance (horse-and-buggies lined the entire walkway), or the fact that 200 of us walked for ten minutes in the 110 degree heat to this parking lot that did not hold our busses, but people were ready to head home. How do you lead 200 people to the wrong place? Who is in charge here!? The sad part is, the leaders were being blamed when it was the tour guides’ fault. My personal favorite quote from the walk out of the wrong parking lot came from one of us, pony-tail guy appropriately nicknamed “Transvestite” not because he looked like one, but because Cheyenne had overheard him saying that in Spain he got so smashed that he blacked out and woke up the next morning naked in the bed of a transvestite. After this voyage that isn’t even that shocking of a story, but anyways, Transvestite says, “Now that they have corralled us into a back-alley parking lot, enter the machine gunners.” Perhaps the fact that none of us had water, since bottled water is a necessity in Morocco and we were delirious, but nobody even had the energy to respond to that. Joellen just shook her head.
None of us were even surprised when after arriving to the real van-site over half of them weren’t there. Asking the tour leader who spoke spotty English as well, he says he has no idea (as usual). We sat on the curbside in the blazing sun waiting for about 20 minutes since the quarter acre of shade had already been staked out by twice the number of people than it could sustain. It is beyond words to describe how the vans roll in, but even that simple procedure was chaos. Vans everywhere, some on the curb, some going the wrong way down the street, some parked halfway down the street because they thought maybe it would be too convenient to park within the same minute’s walk from their passengers.
Yet finally we reached our destination to be greeted with another crap-system of hotel check-in. At least the unnecessary form to be filled out was in “English” if you can call it that. Just fill in the Nº and the !#@$!@$ and the ASDLieh before signing and standing in a line to get one room key to share with your roommate that you probably don’t even know.
In the worst possible Coastie tone of complaint, “Why the hell didn’t SAS do this for us!? What the F are we paying for?” Some people just like to pawn off all blame on SAS and have such negative attitudes that us half-full people just squeeze them dry for entertainment, much like the fresh orange juice at the square! The process required passport checks and that you check in with your roommate (though they did not tell us this while we were waiting in line) of course took about 30 minutes, leaving us a whole 40 minutes of our scheduled two-hour time to swim, shower, or nap. At least the Horse Fantasia and 10pm dinner sounded exotic and was something to look forward to for the night.
Chapter Two- Horse Fantasia
With a name like Horse Fantasia, one enters the night not knowing what to expect… unless of course you are on one of the privileged party vans. Only those few elites are able to coax the driver into making a pit stop at the nearest local liquor store, in which case you can expect this night to be just as grimy and blackened as every other night of your alcoholic trip. (Because I am writing this from an aftermath point of view, I will fill in the knowledge that I found afterwards as it happened in real time.) By the time we had rolled out of the hotel and driven for close to an hour to the outskirts of Marrekech, there had already been whole bottles of vodka consumed. I cannot speak from experience, but I feel like nothing really hits you harder than straight pulls while cruising through the ridiculously littered fields of the Moroccan countryside. A note on the litter- I was planning on writing an article to the newspaper when I got back home saying how much of a disgrace the West Bend trash system is in respect to the lack of recycling/donating when compared to the rest of the world, but now I praise them. Trash systems, when existent, are a mess over here. I have never seen so many plastic bags in the same place as in that field, and that’s saying a lot considering my Pick n’ Save employment!
Anyways, the Horse Fantasia greets us all with a dozen or two horses with armed men in costume lining the gate. This place is a FORTRESS. It is complete with a palace or two, bleachers around a large open field, musicians everywhere, dancers surrounding you, a true spectacle of overwhelming tourist culture. Blah, blah, blah, we eat dinner in a big tent, it was yummy and I ate meatballs with poached eggs (in the same dish) for the first time in my life. The real treat of the night though was the show. Strobe lights, belly dances, horse tricks, GUNS, fire, parading, drunken SASers on camelback, and O Fortuna being played with fireworks in the background. (which was cut off BEFORE the finale, what the heck!?) The night was more than my cultural sponge could absorb. There were so many cultures clustered into one that it was like shopping on Black Friday. But the night cannot be complete without grinding on the wall in front of all.
For being in a 50+% Muslim country, the line of cultural acceptability was surely breeched here! There were girls lined up in a row just goin’ to town, and it was such a great idea that the European tourists joined in as well! Oh man, how embarrassing. I can only imagine what the fully covered eye-slit women were thinking… but who knows, maybe they were jealous that our girls got to dance all up on each other showing off their idea of conservative dress.
Well we disturbed the peace at the show, lets move onto the roadways! What can we do here? There ain’t no moon, let’s make one! Yep, through the swaying of vans keeping the beat to their passengers’ dance moves, ass-cracks lit up the night. From here, knowledge of the rest of the night is unknown, but one can only imagine what happened if at 1am one SASer was awoken from a passed-out slumber in the hotel lobby to go out to the club.
Chapter Three- My Name is Fred. Have You Seen My Camel?
I can’t imagine how some people dealt with the scheduled 5:45am wake-up call that actually came at 5:20. I had achieved close to six hours of sober sleep and felt like crap. But I made it to six o’clock breakfast that consisted of carbs only. Bread, biscuits, rolls, pastries, potatoes, ugh. Oh yeah, there were some runny eggs too, just like being on the ship! Half asleep, we loaded our bellies and our gallon zip-lock bag with food (one learns to be quite the food clepto after living on the ship for two months!) before meeting for the vans. “We need to leave at 7:00 sharp,” said the guide last night. Oh, but dontcha know, there were only two of our six vans there! We waited until about 7:45, then didn’t have two of our people who were nowhere to be found. Michael says it’s their own fault, everyone answered the wake-up call and they were probably passed out again, so we leave, but go to the other hotel. It was all a flurry; a bus left without all it’s people, some people decided to go home without telling SAS the night before with friends, some people were sick, and even some came running at the leader with fumes arising from their heads shrieking, “We need WATTTERR!!!!!” as if the eight hour bus ride was going to be excruciatingly strenuous and dehydrating. After all of the drama was sorted out, we head back to our hotel for reasons unknown, but Michael writes up the incident report for the two that scrambled to their van an hour late.
I cannot do the report justice, but you must know that Michael is the creative writing professor, and his description on the incident report was a riot! It went something like, “The students finally arrived to their vans over one hour later in an alcohol-soaked state, alcohol seeping from their pores enough to inebriate those within close range.” (He didn’t even see the people, but assumed this was the case!) Whattya know, we leave one hour and twenty minutes late.
We-need-WATER-girl was in luck, because within the first twenty minutes, our guide needed a smoke break and we made our first pit stop… Literally. This place was so run-down that not a single one of us felt comfortable even stepping foot out of the van.
Enter mountains. Enter ridiculous roads with even more ridiculous driving. To distract our minds from thoughts of “Holy crap, I’m going to die,” Joellen tells us the story behind why she carries this bizarre stuffed man, Fred, with her. It has something to do with somebody they work with back home that everybody has an issue with, so they hold meetings without him, but put this doll in his spot. Apparently he looks somewhat like the real Fred and has a nice white-out beard and hairdo as well, wrapped in a toilet-paper robe. My personal favorite fact is that “Mystery Night w/ Fred”, which was auctioned off at the silent auction last week for over $30, turns out to be with this doll! Ha! For some reason, Michael makes a sign in bold caps saying, “My name is Fred. Have you seen my camel!?” and I offer to draw a camel on it for one of my eight required drawings in every port! It sort of sucked, but everyone loved it and praised it to the point that Joellen asks me to draw something for her to keep. I offer to draw Fred, and after a few hours (carsickness) he came out pretty darn good! She loved it and said she is going to frame it for her desk at work.
Besides the numerous blind passes around switchbacks, smoking tour busses, and goats down the side of the road, nothing happened until lunch, which is naturally close to 4pm again. We enter the “restaurant overlooking the dunes” to find sofas for chairs! Though the restaurant did not actually overlook the dunes, which I still get the impression that the Sahara does not really have any, it was delicious and dinner conversation was fascinating as well. The quote of the trip has a new contender with, “Why didn’t they just fly us here? I mean this is way to much driving.” The perfect response was given as well. “Maybe they don’t have the Middle-of-the-Desert Airport open yet!” Brilliant. Lunch would not be complete without leaving our distasteful mark, so after dining, a majority of the students laid out and fell asleep on the sofas with their shoes and all, not disrespectful at all considering to point the bottom of your foot at someone in Morocco is taken as a severe insult… People also left he tables without paying for the water, because no one ever told us that wasn’t included, so our guides had to pay out of their pockets. I don’t think I stress enough how unorganized and hectic it is to travel with this many people!
“You know I wouldn’t mind driving. In fact, I would prefer it! I was a taxi driver in NYC for awhile…” Michael was denied, but that says a lot about the safety of the drive. Hillary said her driver would close the side door by gunning it and slamming on the brakes! After making a 10-minute stop at a grocery store (all six vans so it turned out to be 50 minutes) so that we could buy water and over half of their supply of alcohol, we decided to pass the time by playing 20 Questions. There was only one problem, we have Josh on our van. Josh is supposedly from Mexico and got a full-scholarship for SAS, but somehow has NO social skills. He basically told us we were all too stupid to know who his person we were supposed to guess was, which pissed everyone off. At question 18 we said, ya know what, just tell us who it is, but he refused and laughed like an idiot. “I don’t think..”
BAM! GRAB YOUR CRAP, GET OUT, GRAB A CAMEL, DON’T LET GO! You would think after driving nine hours in a van we would get a five minutes heads-up but ohhhhh no! It caught everyone off guard, especially because the terrain looked just the same as when we left Casablanca- some sand, rock, palm trees, power lines, huts. If that is the Sahara, then the whole state of Arizona is comparable! The only Saharaesque feature was the sand in the air that was partially blocking out the sun from the clear sky like a partly cloudy afternoon. But at least this 90 minute camel ride will be worth it. WRONGO! 90 minutes is equivalent to 30 minutes on our tour guide’s watch, half of which people had to walk. My experience was watered down because I was at a cut-off point and got thrown to a new group, the one that had the 3 guys showing off their “muscles” going shirtless within the first ten steps off their van. I was so irritated by the fact that they were doing that in a country where you even swim with your shirt on that it blurred the conversations of “We’re gonna get so F’d up in the desert” into one thought in my mind of, “You’re all a bunch of SAS-holes.” But it only gets worse from here…
Dinner, fire, dance, it was culture in a can, or should I say bottle? Beer bottle. All the “traditional” Bedouins cared about was money and they made bank selling alcohol to our idiots! I say traditional in quotes, because Michael told us when he went to find a real Bedouin, the first guy he talked to was from Brooklyn. So not only was our camel trek pretty short and we weren’t actually really in the Sahara, the nomads weren’t necessarily nomads! They were mostly wearing polos and khakis with the traditional garb tossed sloppily on top, so I’m thinking it’s all one big tourist scam.
The one clean aspect of this trip that I enjoyed was star watching. We were at least 20 miles from any city, so the Milky Way illuminated the sky beautifully! A nice, peaceful gazing-session segways perfectly into the whole reason that I decided to write this in story form… the point at which we are all in the tents sleeping or whispering amongst ourselves and the drunks return to the tent-area. Keep in mind that wake-up is at 6am so we can catch the sunrise, and it is already past 1am, so people are testy.
In the aftermath calm of the initial surge of drunks comes the most pathetic whimper that a girl’s voice can make, “Eli?” Pause. “Elllliiii? Guys, I can’t find my tent!” Already the attempting sleepers respond ferociously with something to the extent of “It’s your own damn fault, or shut the hell up.” Here begins the 2-3 hour mess of filthy chaos.
I haven't decided how to write what happens next and am having second thoughts on the whole quote-section, but in the meantime, it’s back home to the US of A, back to the real world, back to work, back to family, back to friends, back to school.. Some things that I cannot wait for in particular:
- Being able to drive in a car without feeling like you are going to die
- Being able to drive in a car that is not a taxi with a seat and belt all to myself
- Being able to walk down the street without getting the crazy eye
- Wearing SHORTS when it is over 100 degrees outside
- Being able to workout at non-obscure times of the day because of the gym having 30 daddy’s plastics in it at all times
- Being around normal people again… I have concluded about 10% of the males on the ship and 25% of the females are actually worth talking to
- Guitar (I finally got one checked out today and played for 3-4 hours for the first time in about 60 days, so my thumb is all bloody and fingers are burning!)
- Knowing where I am
- Knowing how to get where I am going
- Not having to convert currency figures mentally
- Fitting into my surroundings
- Fixed prices while shopping so you know you aren’t getting ripped off more than other people
- MILK
- Cheese, specifically quesadillas
- Food variety, I am so sick of pasta and potatoes or potatoes and pasta
- Normal bowel movements… I’ve felt sick at least 2-3 times per day for the past 12 days and the rest is unnecessary detail!
- A ROOM ALL TO MYSELF!!!!!!!!!!!!! More like a place to get away since there is none here.
- Buying my first legal drink in the Norfolk airport :)
- Not having my balls grabbed every other time I go home
- Not having to wait in lines
- Not having to travel with an armed guard
- Clean cities
- GREEN
- Skippy
- Big ol’ bed
- Listening to music off of good speakers and DVDs off of a television
- Not having to wear that God-awful money belt
- LAUNDRY WHEN YOU WANT IT
- Toilets that are more than just a hole in the ground
- Being able to throw the toilet paper in the toilet rather than a basket next to it!
- Being able to eat at a table by yourself (morning)
- FOOTBALL
- October 17th (Go BADGERS!- Hillary is coming to this game against her Iowa losers)
- Weekends or a day off for that matter
- Normal yogurt
- Getting out of the lair
- Seeing people again!
- No more pre-ports!!!
- Sorting through all 3000-4000 pictures
- Not being treated like a baby anymore
- Rain
- THUNDERSTORMS
- Madison
- And of course, family and friends
Also, some things that I will miss:
- Camel, horse, or donkey as a mode of transportation
- Not being cheap
- No work
- ART! Especially hallway art until 4am on multiple nights
- Kinda weird, but I don’t miss Internet all that much, or cell phone for that matter, it is kinda nice to get away from that stuff
- DING DONG. “GOOOOOD MORRRRNING VOYAGERS!”
- Daily room service
- Being picked up after at every meal
- The ship
- Deck 8 sun time
- Rumor Rangers
- Happy Hippos
- Ocean
- The roar of the engine to lull me to sleep
- The ship’s super-suctiony toilets
- Gelato
- Magnetic walls
- Ice cream cake
- Souvenirs
- Letters or postcards
- The 30% of the ship that’s worth talking to
- Ridiculously easy classes
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