The day that I turned twenty we had been in Morocco for almost a month.
After three weeks in
frenzy of Marrakesh we had taken a bus to the coast and were staying
in the most uncomfortable, most revolting self-catering apartment
that we could ever have imagined. We acquired it through a Helpful
English Stranger (wheeler and dealer) who lived in the town and whom
we'd met in the queue in the pastry shop. We were tired of hostels,
of sharing a bathroom with eleven other people and a cockroach, and
we were desperate to cook our own meal after three weeks of eating
bread and oranges (a diet which, incidentally, almost entirely
removes the need to use the shared toilets). We paid a week's
rent upfront and heaved our backpacks onto our skinny shoulders. We
moved in and I feel asleep instantly on the misshapen shape, draped
with a polyester faux fur blanket emblazoned with a lion's head
surrounded by leopard print, the kind of which is inexplicably
popular in Morocco. Nye bought a bottle of bleach and started
scrubbing, desperate to rid the bathroom of the smell of fermenting
human waste, a smell so strong that it was impossible to go into the
room without gagging and which insisted that we block the crack under
the bathroom door with towels in an attempt to stop it escaping into
the rest of the apartment. It didn't work.
Looking back it's
easy to wonder why on earth we stayed, why we gave our meagre
resources to sleep in this stinking pit where no, we didn't have to
share the bathroom but where we couldn't actually use the
bathroom without tying a wet cloth over our faces. It certainly
wasn't the 'cooking facilities' which were a plastic washing up bowl
and a gas camping stove which leaked so badly we had to take it onto
the roof to use. It was actually just a simple combination of youth
and exhaustion. We were young, broke and Having an Adventure,
therefore fairly willing to endure squalor (and oh the squalor) but
more crucially, we were exhausted. Broken. I was wrung out, I was
anxious, I was suffering with chronic fatigue and increasingly
relentless abdominal pain. During the week of my period I collapsed
to the ground all over Marrakesh, needing help to stumble to a quiet
alley and then on to our hostel and bed. It was a small mercy that
the painkillers available over the counter were twice as strong as at
home. A black cloud had attached itself to me a few months before and
while I had tried to shake it off, it was getting darker and more
ominous. I cried a lot in Morocco. I fought with Nye and I spent a
lot of time in bed, not sleeping. When I did sleep I was rocked by
nightmares that I can still see now, as clearly as if I had them last
night. I was 19 and I was trying so hard to have an adventure, to
Travel.
I'd been saving
money all summer, working to fund a solo round the world gap year
that I had become too ill to go on. Morocco, until our money ran out,
was what it had boiled down to. It was before cheap flights to North
Africa were a thing so we had flown to Malaga in Spain, stayed in a
creepy hotel opposite a sex shop and then got the bus to Algeciras on
the south coast. I thought Algeciras was the saddest, most depressing
place in the whole world, but that was before we had made it to
Casablanca, a city that tore right into my soul. A town of shipping
containers and desperation, Algeciras is Spain's gateway into Europe,
its defences against Africa and those who would flee it. We boarded a
ferry from which a number of passengers had been removed in handcuffs
and crossed the straights of Gibraltar, churning past that weird,
unlikely rock beloved of sea birds and tax dodgers. We lurched into
Africa at sunset, the lights of Tangier twinkling in the fading
orange and navy sky and the smell of hot dust drifting out into the
sea. It was magic. It took us two days to get to Morocco and another
twelve hours by train to reach Marrakesh. And when we got there it was
another world, we had Travelled. And despite my pain and the storm
cloud I was lugging around in my backpack it was the most wonderful,
the most beautiful adventure.
I turned twenty in
the coastal town of Essaouira. I opened the small gifts that had been
wrestling with my cloud for space in my backpack on a rooftop
overlooking the maze of streets. I ate a lunch of two pence breads
stuffed with canned sardines sitting on an ancient seawall, watching
the fishing boats come and go and tiny Moroccan children play in the
square. We went out for dinner to an actual vegetarian restaurant, an
establishment where the vegetable tagine didn't come with a chicken
foot or a goat knuckle lurking beneath the squash, and we walked back
to our vile apartment through the winding, cobbled streets that
whistled with sea air. Those are my three memories of my 20th
birthday; the rooftop, the seawall, the restaurant. The next day we
left the apartment, a few days before the week we had paid for was
up. Nye engaged in a fight with the owner, a puffed up business man
in a shiny suit, and attempted to get the rest of our money back. I
don't remember if he managed it or not.
We moved a few
streets away, to the prettiest hotel that £3 a night can buy, where
we were woken in the mornings by the sounds of the orange juice carts
rattling down the street and the squawking of seagulls over the
town's ancient fortress walls. When Nye went out for bread that day
he bumped into the English guy who had brought us to that horrible
apartment. He asked how we were getting on and when Nye told him that
we had left the apartment early his friend laughed; “I can't
believe you took them there,” he said, “that place is a shit
hole.” The Englishman had the decency to look embarrassed. He
offered to find us somewhere else but we were done with the help of
charming strangers. Besides, we were planning to leave Essaouria and
travel further down the coast over the next day or two. We'd had a
tip from a surfer who worked in the chessboard shop and were planning
to head to a village on the sea, one that had been forgotten by both
electricity and plumbing and relied on generators and the water lorry
that came to fill up the tanks every couple of days. Two days later
Nye helped me to lift my backpack onto my shoulders, to settle its
weight there on my back where I would carry it with me, 150km down
the coast.
That is where I
began my twenties, carrying my weight with me on my back. Now, almost
exactly ten years later, my weight is spread all around, the dark
cloud that I carried so close then has drifted off and is but a tiny
smudge on the horizon. I turn thirty tomorrow, something that I've been
looking forward to for the longest time. I'm ready to shed my
twenties, to say that this decade of struggling, of striving, of
being broken down and built back up over and over and over again is
done. I know that it's arbitrary, that life on Saturday won't
tangibly be any different from life on Thursday and yet when did I
care about the tangible? Hardly ever, that's when.
Photos of young boys gutting fish, Essaouira, Morocco. Taken in 2004, on a Pentax K1000, with Ilford film.
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