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Images of Morocco

 

 

  

  

    

  

    

 

  

Around Chefchaouen

 

 

 

 

The rain got into everything, seeping into our bones after having done so to our boots and clothes, wearing plastic bags on our feet, trying to stay warm in hotels without heating, dark, damp rooms facing onto open-to-the-sky courtyards.

 

There’s snow in the air, the indigo blue washed walls of the medina is like being in a wave, but it’s Antarctic, every second man sells hashish or so he says and it must be true, that everyone smokes it, all the cafes outdoor settings, as if it was forever summer, like the people are

insulated from the cold, most likely from the hashish, even elderly shopkeepers show me their pipes.

 

 

 

 

When the rain clears, after five days in Chefchaouen, a week in Tangier, the sun appears on the twin goat horn mountains beyond the Chaouen, grey rock, green pine wedged into the rugged slopes. Wandering between the two, climbs steeply to 1800 metres, the pass covered in snowfalls, splattered across the understorey of tall pines. The view is into a green valley of tiny villages of the Rif Mountains, to the north the Mediterranean almost visible through the haze.

 

Six hours on a muddy track gets us to Azilane where Abdel invites us into his gite, blue-wash walls, white tipped rock mountains through the window, his dogs the only thing breaking the silence of the starlit night. There’s a a hot stove to sit around, Abdel with his pipe, smiles, eyes twinkling, brings tea and French toast, one of his 8 children calls, he floats off again in his jellaba.

 

 

 

 

Wandering around the back of the mountains to Afeska, savage dogs come at us, we get disorientated on a wet track, a gully scramble before going over a ridge and descending into a steep valley of red rock cliff faces, birds soaring in the uplift, terrestrial Barbary apes scurry across rocks and are gone. The kif terraces recently harvested, the town of Ouaslaf emanating a constant beat as if machinery, but it is people beating large drums with sticks, compressing kif in what is said to be the region of the highest production in the world.

 

 

 

We come out the other end, toes hammered on the downhill loose rocks, temporarlily lost in potato fields, the sun shining again, snow clouds lifting, getting a ride from Ackchour back to Chefchaouen, around the foot of the Jebel el-Kelai, the low sun shining, the moon out, it’s peaceful, like the people,

procession-like in Plaza El Utal Hamman, beside the kasbah, strolling as if in a thousand years nothing has changed, thawed out from last weeks rain, people emerged from their caves, an North African lilt humming across the airwaves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the belly of Fes el Bali

Going into the Fes medina is like descending into an ant’s nest, down underground where there’s no connection to the outside world. It’s a place of its own, another world, one where what goes on is only apparent within the immediate vicinity, that anything elsewhere is irrelevant, only the proximate fully relevant. There is no where else in existence, when you are in the belly of Fes el Bali.

Over 1200 years old, the medina of Fes is said to be one of the largest living mediaeval cities still in existence. It’s full of hangovers from an era long gone elsewhere in the world. Narrow streets twist down from its numerous gates, descending deeper into dead ends or weaving, tunnel like, into other tiny laneways that thread across the walled market. Mules, donkeys, men, women and children wind through the labyrinth with walls too high to know what colour the sky is, dogs and cats run overhead; a concoction of sellers, jewellery makers, leather craftsmen, tannery workers, butchers, dried frutists, herbal medicine men, brass artisans, blacksmiths, sandal sellers, guides, beggars, chanters, dancers, singers, con-men, blend among one another, working side by side often with tools from other centuries. There are plenty of tourists too now, in hordes, by the bus load, following their guides who hold up red umbrellas or some obvious object for their group to follow. They appear as if invaders of the nest, but everyone in the medina knows how important they are to its survival. We’re constantly reminded that without a guide our discount is larger, just for today a two for one, amazing deals to be had, if we only step across the line, into a shop. It’s a ruthless world, everything has its price, all is up for grabs, nothing will be spared, including us.

We dodge the mules. Loaded with enormous weight they are the kings of the road here, giving way to no one, plodding their way through the narrow lanes while people buzz around, scurrying this way and that, if they’re not just hanging on a corner, minding everybody else’s’ business, waiting for a chance to get some lucky break, to lure someone somewhere, into a carpet shop, or a tannery, where there’s money to be had.

We head for light, climbing our way out of the nest, after sitting sipping coffee, eating cakes, while bees swarm the sweet meats. We follow the flow, one wrong corner and we could end up anywhere; there has to be a Queen ant somewhere, a forbidden sector. We come to a gate, take a bearing, coming up for air, then plunge back in again, into the incomparable medieval world.

In the light of the Dades Gorge

It was beginning to look like independent travel in Morocco was just a plain bad idea. You can’t ask a simple question about direction without somebody wanting to take you there (for an overblown fee). You’re bait for hungry swooping fake guides. The two tourist offices we’d been in were completely disinterested, had nothing to say, nothing to show us, the man in Marrakesh annoyed we’d interrupted him reading his magazine. But it isn’t like Morocco doesn’t have tourism. Tourists are everywhere. They pour out of four wheel drives, guides in tow, ushering them every step of the way, herding them away, like a school of sardines, from the circling sharks.

We had a guide book that we needed to read round and round in circles, flicking back and forward to try and work out what it meant, wishing they’d cut the verbosity for more detail. It’s a guide book for driving tours, at best, but with its big reputation doesn’t need to let on it’s changed, that it’s aimed now at vacationers with wads of cash. We didn’t have a car. Nor that much cash.

Our venture along the Draa Valley had already gone sour, stuck in Agdz all day waiting for a bus, getting ten different stories at the same time. Knowledge is power. It costs. I guess that’s why people go on tours. You might as well. It was as if we were the only independent travellers in Morocco, we’d missed some vital information, like needing to have a larger budget.

The country took some getting used to, the aggressiveness and incessant money grabbing tiring. A German we met said he thought it was because it was a Muslim country, basing his idea on the fact he’d had the same experience in Java twenty five years ago. But it wasn’t that. Not a religious thing. We’d been in Syria and Jordan recently and it was nothing like that. The opposite. Sometimes locals wouldn’t let us pay. I thought it was to do with Morocco being so close to Europe. Like the west owes them, and maybe we do. At Tangier the continent of Africa and the Iberian Peninsula kiss. It’s a brush on the wet lips across the Straits of Gibraltar, but Moroccans must want to slip the tongue in.

We made it out of Agdz back to Ouarzazate, a nice town with good restaurants and an impressively restored kasbah. Sixty five kilometres had taken us most of a day so from there we tried the CTM bus, reputed to be the best, the one foreigners use, and arrived in Boumalne du Dades to the hustle of guides and restaurant staff. We’d looked at the menu before we had a tea and an omelette, knew the price would come to 50 Dirhams. The owner came out of the kitchen, said it was 100 – they just can’t help themselves, everything has to be worth a try.

A trekking guide insisted we go to his office. We were interested in going up into the M’Goun Massif. Our book had indicated treks start from Boumalne, but the one they described was on the other side of the Atlas, a five day hike away. It was as if the book set out to trick you, giving you a little Moroccan experience before you left home. Only we hadn’t read it before we arrived, expecting it to be full of facts, not a flowery overview to tempt you in a bookshop. We asked the price. The guide ummed and aahed, like he’d never thought about it before.

You want a cheaper or more expensive one? he asked.

Cheaper, I said. The cheapest you have.

Okay, he tapped his fingers on a table, poised with a pen, thinking.

Okay, 2000, he finally said. For everything.

I nodded, pretending it sounded reasonable. For both of us?

Each.

It was harder to pretend then. That’s the basic, the cheapest?

Yes.

Okay, we’ll think about it, I said, turning to leave.

How much you want to pay then? he shot back.

I thought it was supposed to be his best price. Let you know when we come back from the Dades Gorge, I replied.

You need a hotel, how much you want to pay?

Cheap, I said again, interested to know what he’d come up with.

One hundred and twenty.

Seventy would be cheaper.

Eighty?

Seventy would be better.

Okay, Seventy then.

Everything was a haggle. Nothing realistic.

We went to the plaza opposite the mosque to catch a mini businto the Gorge. A man came up to us.

It’s not Afghanistan, he said. You talk to people in Morocco.

We talk to people all the time, I replied.

Your wife, he said, indicating P, she’s reading a book.

She was looking for the name of the stop we needed. I decided to use a suggestion from the book.

Please respect our time and don’t disrespect my partner, I said to him.

It worked. He apologised, backed away sheepishly. They love an argument. But respect is a word they, well, respect.

The guide book wasn’t totally useless.

It was a one moment good, one moment bad kind of thing. A mix up of confusion between fact and fiction, reality and astronomy (astronomical prices – at least as in value for money). Knowledge is powerful and worth cash. A guide would be an advantage. I could see that.

When squeezed into the minivan on our way up the Gorge, the woman next to me smiled and chatted, the man behind pointing out sights. French would be an advantage, more so than Arabic, the Berbers speaking their own language, or French.

We clambered off at kilometre 18, a collection of crazy rocks lying across one side of the gorge, weathered into long smooth shapes and symmetrical patterns, rising out of the ground like monolithic mushrooms, a bizarre location.

We bartered our way into a room on the top floor of a Hotel, our room a little turret overlooking what the locals called the Monkey Fingers. The sunset manipulates the colours of the rocks, switching them, chocolate, cacao, red, burnt orange, long shadows casting across the weird Daliesque landscape.

The next day we avoided a guide, which would have cost us as much as our daily budget, and sneaked off on our own into the Agouni Gorge. Besides, we wanted to go at our own pace. We had all day. We didn’t need to be brought back for lunch in the restaurant.

Walking behind the first layer of rocks and up into one of many gorges within the 27km long Dades, the going was easy for a while though we had to keep taking off our shoes to wade through pools to continue going up, squeezing through crevices. Twice we thought about turning back, but kept climbing, figuring it couldn’t be too much further. The narrow gorge was spectacular, smooth red cliffs, tumbled down boulders we had to wriggle under, crystal clear rock pools, some deep enough to swim in.

Eventually we made it to a near dead end. I wedged myself up against a fig tree, climbed high to a vantage point. I could see we could get out of the gorge, it wasn’t quite as clear how to get back down to the river. But then people emerged over a hill, revealing the track, and we climbed out, had a lunch of cheese and bread and sat in the quiet air, inhaling a magical atmosphere.

The next day we caught a mini van up to kilometre 28 where the Dades Gorge narrows and the walls rise vertically a hundred metres or more. A road snakes out to the north, a sharp series of hairpin bends. We walked back down along the river, under fig trees, through oleander patches, walnuts, peaches, the locals smiling, friendly, welcoming, until we reached the straw mud kasbah of Ait Arbi, in good condition near the river, the ruins of other kasbahs on the nearby hills. Excited Berber kids offered to be our guides, but were polite, non insistent, and just tagged along for a while. We crossed the river on a rickety bridge, three days in the Gorge had changed everything. Morocco was cast in another light.

Toubkal Impressions

Sprinkled in autumn snow falls, the blue sky contrasts the reds, browns and greys of rock, sparsely populated by stunted trees. Goats meander casually up the valley, following either side of the gushing river, though among these imposing landforms, it’s appears more like a trickle. The vastness, stretches skyward, into wispy clouds, bitter coldness waiting to pounce in the deathly silence of the timeless mountain range. It’s not death though, nor timelessness, just seems that way in the scale, the crawling sculpting of valleys and streams over tens of thousands of years, human existence so insignificant.

 

But there’s been people here for thousands of years and the Berbers still ride their mules as they have done for centuries despite ski pole and alpine clothing trekkers dotting the landscape, reminding us how close Europe is.

 

Sixty kilometres south of Marrakesh lies Imlil, a Berber village that serves tajines if you order early enough. We leave early one morning, buying hot bread in the bakery, walking through walnut trees, past the Kasbah, the setting for Scorcese’s Kundun, to the nearby town of Aroumd, then hobbling across a rock strewn river bed, a wide flood plain, locals greeting us with a “Bonjour, ca va?” and us replying in Arabic “Labas, shukran”, not having yet learnt any Berber words but our Arabic better than our French, which isn’t saying much.

We drink mint tea in the occasional tea house, watching mules stacked high and wide with trekkers’ food, packs and tents trudging by, not yet feeling envious, still content to be going it alone. At least we know there’s a refuge and we’re happy to have left our tent in Imlil.

But Toubkal seems aloof, we can’t see it, or think we can’t. There’s no obvious tallest peak, the valley sides steep and full of rocky crevices, sharp and unforgiving. We wind around the ridges, hugging the slopes, following the river while different mountains come into view, until suddenly we see the refuge, nestled between the river and a sheer and threatening scree slope.

The Berber staff are super friendly, will cook you dinner, give you tea or let you use the kitchen if you prefer to cater for yourself. It’s a hive of activity as more mules and trekkers arrive and the lights come on, the fire is lit, dinner is served.

Early next day we start up the scree over massive boulders littered with thistles and tough grasses, going over a ridge only to find another, then another, then another. The going is tough, the path not obvious and at 4000 metres, every step burns, inching toward the summit, at times on hands and knees, We block out the thought of the descent, it’s moment by moment existence.

On the snowy summit the landscape unfolds as far as the eye can see, the Sahara to the east, the Barbary Coast to the west. We’re on Jebel Toubkal, at 4167 metres, Africa’s 3rd highest mountain after Kilimanjaro and Mt Kenya. We soak in it, look down to Aroumd, a speck in the distance, the air thin, silent, breathtaking. There’s something powerful here.

 

We intend to walk back to Imlil the same day but after sliding back down on treacherous scree, or trying not to, we arrive late and exhausted back at the refuge and in no mood to rush. We stay another night in the gite, sit around the fire, knowing we have an easy walk out to Imlil the following day, a much better option.

And when we look back to see snow covered Toubkal, from down once again at the river in Aroumd, two Berbers singing as they harvest apples, autumn clouds rolling in as the sun gets low, we feel an affinity with Toubkal, as if to climb it is to acknowledge it, respect it, pay homage to it, the walking affecting us in days, like the sun, moon, weather and season alters the impression of the mountain, though its core changes need millennia. We feel impermanent, time-wise insignificant, indelibly linked to nature.

 

One and half million steps to Dylan

I’d walked one and a half million steps to Vigo, in the Spanish region of Galicia, along the Camino de Santiago, some 800 kilometres from Roncevalles near the French border to Santiago de Compostela. The route was an old Christian pilgrimage, but I wasn’t walking for any religious reason. I didn’t have a reason. But I knew Bob Dylan was touring Spain and would be playing on the 27th June in Vigo on the coast, just north of the border with Portugal.

I got the feeling not much happened in Vigo. People knew Dylan was in town. The guy in the tourist office told us how to get tickets, had a black and white photo of him in the 60’s behind the counter. We made our way out near the airport, got tickets and checked into a hotel. A bar across the road had a sign up – Bob Dylan Bar. We had a drink, walked to the small auditorium holding about 5,000 people.

Dylan comes out right on time, in a black suit, green shirt and white broad brimmed hat, on keyboards, right side of the stage, facing across the drums to bass and lead guitar, rhythm and mandolin to the side and behind him, opening with Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat, pumping out rock and roll blues, slipping into a super melodic Lay Lady Lay, his voice strong, a new phrasing as ever, before he jumps into a powerful Sad and Lonesome Day Blues, rocking the hall, not super loud but solid, thick, like a heavy thud moving through us.

The Conjuror of Doubt – Chapter 2 – From She Knew Not Where

The little plane swirled over the dusty town. It circled in long motions, swooping the foothills to the west, going in low over the flat land and swinging around and disappearing over another hill. It reappeared minutes later, far in the distant sky, a speck of metal above the hills and steeper mountains beyond. Maria la Dulce watched, perspiration trickling down her spine, with other thoughts in mind. The unpredictability of the man with whom she’d spent a decade traipsing the globe was never more evident. He had left her plenty of times before when he had things to do and she was happy enough to amuse herself, to stand apart from his charades. He claimed his solo side trips were simply to fund their travels. But Maria knew well enough that since he had come from nowhere he could just as easily return.

They were in South America, as they had been on and off over the years. Maria had become absorbed in the ancient cultures and mysteries of the Andean lands. As if, finally, the link he had been hinting at for longer than she could remember was beginning to emerge. Yet something troubled her. A doubt rose within her at the same time. The initial spirituality that held them for so long, appeared to be wearing off. They needed some kind of replenishment. The plane was coming back into view. Maria could make out a four or five seater lowering toward the end of the airstrip. Finally it touched down, spewing up dust on the basic runway. The plateau, known as the pampa, above the green valley of the village of Nazca, was almost entirely bare of vegetation. Maria was there for one thing only. To see from the air the view of the infamous Nazca lines in the stony pebble desert. She knew how important they were in her mentor’s scheme of thinking. He had, in fact, visited them many times. But she had to find out for herself what was so fascinating.

Oceans Apart – Chapter 2. Caye Caulker, Belize

Through Guatemala to Honduras, a river journey

in Nicaragua, hiking in Costa Rican jungles and

wandering the streets of Havana, the author delves

into the significance of travel and the difficulties of

language learning, and interacts with an array of

quirky characters.

This book offers an insight into the life of travelling.

It’s a template for anyone who ever doubted

they could just pack up and go, regardless of where

their lives were at.

And for the author it was Oceans Apart from where

he otherwise would have been.

This travel narrative is now available to be purchased in print or

downloaded from

http://stores.lulu.com/timaxelsen

Chapter 2. CAYE CAULKER, BELIZE

With the pot holes of the ride to Chetumal behind us I went to sleep, waking suddenly to catch, out of the corner of my eye as the bus rolled gently to a stop, a sign stating “Boats to Cayes.” It had to be Belize City. The driver was off the bus, without a word, as I gently touched P’s leg.

“Come on”, I said. “We’re in Belize.”

“Where?”

“Belize City, I think.”

It was just before ten in the morning. A couple of other passengers stirred as I went down the aisle.

“Where are we?” someone asked.

“Belize, I think.”

We got down off the bus to where the driver stood by the luggage, his Mexican Spanish now less authoritative, English spoken by half the population of the former British Honduras. There were no signs of other Mexicans, the dock full instead of African descendants. Many Belizeans were the ancestors of Jamaican slaves brought to the area by the English in the early 1600’s.

There were twenty minutes until the next departure to Caye Caulker, twenty five kilometres offshore. We had no money and the banks were shut for a public holiday. At the credit card withdrawal desk I somehow, stupidly, agreed to a twelve percent commission in a kind of panic at not having any money. This was a whopping 60 Belizean dollars. And why had I done that when we both had US dollars in our pockets, worth two to one and readily usable throughout the country? Because, after fourteen years of salaried employment, I was conditioned to disposable income, to paying my way out of hassle. I knew I had some relaxing to do, to kick start a new mindset.

The rush to the head, the feeling of being out of my depth, drained away as we got on the boat, heading for Caye Caulker on clear as crystal water, morphing, in its own depths, into shades of aqua blue.

Caye Caulker was a small island where bicycles and electric golf carts were as fast as anything got on the beach sand streets. The waterfront of bars and cafés used the same white-as-flour sand as their floors. Gentle whitecaps broke on the offshore reef in the distance. We walked into a hotel, intending to inquire about their rates. An American woman was behind a counter, talking to a large bare-white-bellied male who sounded like he was from New York.

“We came across a floater,” she said.

“Oh yeah,” smiled the New Yorker.

“A drum barrel floating in the water and full of coke, worth, at least, a hundred and fifty thousand.”

“Oh yeah.”

“The locals tried to get it on this boat packed with tourists who started to help. I mean it was ‘eavy. They were ‘aving trouble with it.”

The man kept chuckling. “Yeah.”

“This Japanese woman asked Scott, who was just sitting there doing nothing, why he wouldn’t help. ‘If they give me ten percent I will,’ he said.”

The two of them giggled harder.

“But gasoline’s so expensive, the Japanese girl said.”

Their giggles shifted to laughter.

“She thought it was gasoline,” the woman explained.

“Oh yeah,” said the New Yorker, cackling. “You bet.”

They laughed a bit harder, a bit longer, then the woman looked to us, as if seeing us for the first time. “Can I help you?”

Bungalows in that beachside resort were way above our budget so we went looking for food instead. We ate a lunch of marinated octopus and a cold Beliken beer in a brightly painted wooden café with a palm thatched roof. Later, we wandered around the hotels until we found something affordable and settled on the Tropical Paradise, a series of yellow wooden cabins at the southern end of town where the road forked one way to the beach, the other to the local airstrip. From there back to the main jetty were restaurants and bars, a couple of shops where locals sat out the front with their feet on the wall, a concrete basketball court crammed with sweaty teenagers, a police station. There was nothing to do but eat, drink and soak up the sun.

Too hot to be out walking, we waited until late afternoon to go looking for a cold beer. We strolled to the northern end of the island to what the locals call The Cut, a narrow but deep body of water that splits the island in two. We sat on the wooden stools and ordered a drink. A local, distinguishable by his sing-song Caribbean accent, was sitting at the bar clenching a Cuba Libre in a hard fisherman’s hand.

“How’re you, man?” he said.

“Good,” I said back.

“Been here long?”

“Half a day.”

“Welcome to you.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Kids dived off the wall into the water. The sun was growing wide and orange, lowering into the waters between us and the mainland.

“You know about dis place?” he asked.

“Not much,” I replied.

“Dis is de cut.”

“I heard about that.”

“It used to be part of de other side, man,” he said, waving his hand to the north where what looked like another island, heavy scrub, no sign of other life, lay.

“Yeah,” I said. “What happened?”

“A cyclone ripped de island in half.”

“A cyclone?”

“Sure did.”

“When?”

“Before my time,” he said.

“Have you lived here long?”

“All my life.”

I reckoned him to be early thirties.

“Kind of handy, that cyclone,” I reckoned.

“Makes a good place to get de boats through to da other side, outta da wind,” he nodded. “Dat’s where we keep dem over night.”

The Palencar Reef, stretching south from the Yucatan Peninsula to Honduras, is the second longest reef in the world. But it was a kilometre offshore, offering little in the way of shelter for boats.

“The name’s Ramsey,” he said, stretching out a thick arm. “Dis is where everyone watches da sunset, man.”

It wasn’t the only time we would watch the sunset from that bar. Happy Hour Cuba Libres saw to that.

We booked ourselves into a snorkelling tour. It left early the next morning, taking us first to a manatee sanctuary where the dugong related mammals, living amongst a series of sand and mangrove cayes, were declared protected. Though the shy creature only ever lifts its nostrils to the breeze, one came to the boat revealing its cow-like size in the form of a shadowy blob underwater. We snorkelled on the reef but found the coral disappointing, the colours not wide-ranging, the fish kind of scarce. Hurricane Mitch, which lashed the Central American region in the late 1990’s, had caused the destruction of much of the coral, according to some. Lobsters used to be plentiful, though the reason for their demise lay elsewhere.

Our guide turned out to be Ramsey from the bar at The Cut. He told me it wasn’t only the quantity of the lobster catch that had decreased, but the size of the lobsters were well down too. Since the dramatic decline of fish stocks, tourism had become the number one dollar earner in Caye Caulker. And there was a sense that the locals resented it. Lunch on the snorkelling trip was two slices of white bread with a thin scrape of tuna and a lettuce leaf. Ramsey demolished a large barbecue wrap of pasta and potatoes, which he said was given to him by “someone cooking over there,” referring to another tour group, one I supposed we could have been with. Though I knew it was not Ramsey’s fault that the company he worked for was tight, it did highlight something already apparent on Caye Caulker – the lack of value for money for anyone other than the two week package tour vacationers direct from New York. They probably wouldn’t resent a twenty dollar meal that left you hungry. And they might not begrudge bars who sometimes forgot to add the rum when making a Cuba Libre. While Belize was still much cheaper than other Caribbean destinations, for the budget traveller, value was in doubt. And it made me wonder if, when the tourists ran dry like the lobsters had, the locals will have managed to instil in their next generation an attitude that doesn’t take it all for granted. Yet that was a problem far from being restricted to Belize.

The wind had been blowing onshore almost constantly since we’d arrived on Caye Caulker, keeping the ferocious heat bearable. But when it dropped, heat was not the only problem. Sand flies, too small to see, swarmed over the island, driving us away from the beach. Our solution was to buy a small bottle of white rum in an unsealed old beer bottle and go, with Coke and a couple of lemons, out to the jetty in front of our hotel where the rising full moon laid a golden path from our feet to the horizon. It was on this path that we not only contemplated where we were going but could see back to what we’d left behind. Or maybe it was just the rum.

It was St Patrick’s Day, the day of the United States decision on whether they would invade Iraq. There were bars with cable TV, but we got our news from one of the two internet cafés on the island. We left one café late afternoon and walked two blocks from the beach, following a sign to Wish Willy’s restaurant. There were two guys sitting around a table, drinking beer. One welcomed us, offered us a seat and introduced himself as Willy, a Belizean who’d grown up in Chicago. We ordered a couple of drinks and sat on the wooden balcony for a while. More customers came in, mostly gringos. We ordered some food discovering it was one of the better value places we’d found. We ate whole fish, drank beer and rum while spliffs passed around the tables. A black door up a stairway had a slogan on it, daubed with white paint – “the man on the bike told the truth”. Conversation was inevitable. And the imminent war was not far from the surface. There was the usual; should they? Should we? Shouldn’t we? An English guy, rum soaked and a sunburnt face, raised his voice.

“How can we know more than the politicians?” he growled. “They have access to privileged information. They can make a proper decision. It’s up to them. We, the average man on the street, don’t know nothing about it.”

“Speak for yourself,” somebody said.

“Maybe you’re not an average man on the street,” the English guy sneered.

“You’re allowed to decide for yourself what to think.”

“Don’t belittle me! All I’m saying is – who say’s you’re right?”

“I’m not saying I’m right. I just doubt they’re telling us the truth.”

“Why wouldn’t they? They have the people’s best interests in mind.”

“Which people would that be?”

“Their own people. That’s what governments are for, protecting their people.”

Emotions run high on the subject of war. Of course, there were people who had views different to us. But it was difficult not to point out what seemed obvious. We went back to the jetty with our white rum, a dull sense that perhaps, since we’d last been on the road, there was now a different kind of traveller. Before the climate of globalisation and effortless travel, respect for cultural difference, for fellow man, seemed a prerequisite for, or in the least a symptom of, travel. Time on the road usually made one see that the majority of people everywhere were inherently good, and not so different to anyone anywhere else, and certainly should not be held accountable for what their governments did. For that reason alone, amongst many, warfare was never a reasonable option.

After that night, I decided to be more reticent, as if I was more aware of the vacuum through which I had been sucked, about being in another land, another place. There might be people I couldn’t read, couldn’t pick. You never know what some people might do. But trouble was unlikely. I felt like I could be dropped anywhere, apart from a war zone, and feel at home. As if I could go through the vacuum and wake up on an unknown street and be okay. Somebody would help me. I was certain of this, still am. And it’s what makes travel so ordinary. It was merely life. People living lives around the globe, existing, or trying to, are the same all over. But it was exactly that, the fact it wasn’t extraordinary, that made it so special.

On the jetty, we decided it was time to leave Caye Caulker the next day, but when we woke it was late and we wanted to get as far as Guatemala by night. It was better to stay one more day. We stopped for granola and yogurt at a café where the heat was kept at bay by a thatched roof shade on a veranda. A man caught my eye.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

I told him.

“I’m from Idaho. I’m travelling with my son.” He nodded at a twenty year old opposite him. “He’d only come along if I let him bring his dog,” he added, pointing to an animal lying under the table.

“Nice dog,” I said.

“I got this truck,” he told me. “We decked it out with a tray for sleeping and it’s got this place for cookin’ you know, a kind of kitchen and stuff.”

The dog pricked its ears up at a passing stray.

“Keep him under control,” Pa said.

“He’s alright, he ain’t going nowhere,” son sneered.

“Anyways, we gonna try and sell him…”

“The dog?” I said.

“No, the truck. In Honduras. Maybe it’ll pay for our trip.”

“It better pay for the trip,” son sneered again.

“And I got an old computer in there,” Pa said. “In case somebody’s might want it.”

The dog was well behaved, dozing on the deck, a nice looking animal, brown and white, short haired and well kept. Later, at the beach, it was sniffing around five or six local dogs and the son couldn’t get it to follow him. He walked down the beach, back again, calling the dog to go with him. At least the dog was into the freedom travel brings.

We went for a swim at The Cut and I got talking to an Italian woman who had lived in Belize two years before and had returned to try again.

“It is better to be here than anywhere else in the world right now,” she said.

We bought fish, rice and beans from a woman on a bike who gave a healthy serve, swinging my opinion of Belize back in favour. Sitting in the sand under a palm tree, this was even better value than Wish Willy’s. The island grew on us as we grew more relaxed; we decided to stay yet another day. We had rum at The Cut, watched the sun go down and then took Beliken beers to a jetty to watch a red moon rise, transforming to gold over the Caribbean Sea.

The next day we went up to Ambergris Caye, a bigger island half an hour north of Caye Caulker and apparently famous for being the subject of Madonna’s “Isla Bonita” hit in the 1980’s. With traffic and paved streets, hotels and restaurants, Ambergris was full on and after lunch, we were ready to escape. We snorkelled at Hol Chan, a fish reserve with plentiful barracuda in a deep channel that led out to the other side of the reef. At Shark and Ray Alley both the reef sharks and rays were virtually tame, coming within touching distance of snorkellers.

That night we discovered that the Seaside Cabanas had a bucket of beer special. Eight beers were jammed into a small bucket of ice and sold for a slightly better deal than taking them out of the refrigerator. Of course, the idea was that you commit yourself to eight beers, though you could do that, in theory, with other people. But since the scheme was to keep your beer icy cold, it was better to have your own bucket. That night ended, noisily, in Wish Willy’s again, where an English guy explained where he got the Foster’s t-shirt he was wearing.

“It was given to me,” he began. “By the British consulate in Managua. My girlfriend and I were in a cab when two guys got in and pulled knives and took my wallet. They demanded my pin number and told the taxi driver to take us to an automatic teller machine while they made sure I had given them the correct number.” He took a slug of his beer. “My bank told me that I shouldn’t have disclosed my pin even though the guys threatened to stab me and rape my girlfriend. They’re refusing to refund the twenty four pounds the thieves withdrew.”

This diminutive loss said two things. Banks are ratbags and Central American muggers have absolutely no idea how much a standard transaction in a developed country could potentially be. The story sparked a heated conversation.

“Did you hand it over willingly?” an American asked.

“They had a knife and might have had a gun.”

“I would have fought them,” said another Englishman.

“I would have killed them,” the American said.

“Maybe they needed the money,” somebody said.

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“What’s right and what’s wrong?”

“The trooff is right,” said a south Londoner.

“But is your truth the same truth as someone else’s?”

“The trooff is the trooff.”

“Is the truth of the thieves in Managua the same as our truth?”

“There can only be one moral truth,” the American said.

“Is cutting off a hand for stealing a moral truth?”

“That’s barbaric,” said the Londoner.

“Doesn’t it depend on your morals?”

“The truth is that there are no truths.”

It all must have had something to do with the slogan daubed on the door.

We went to a disco where the locals danced punta, a Caribbean style of simulated sex on the dance floor. The women bumped their buttocks in a circular, rising and falling movement, against the groin of their male partners. But this was strictly dancing. It meant nothing else. Or so a local told me.

The next day we went to breakfast in one of the Cable TV bars, watching Oliver North reporting the invasion, from Iraq, for CNN. We watched in silence, eating eggs and potatoes, drinking coffee. It was good to be in the Caribbean. But we’d done one more day enough; it was time to move on.

From Astorga to Santiago

We’d walked over 500 kilometres by the time we could see Astorga, a town of 13,000 from the 1st century AD, on a hill, the spires of the Cathedral visible from several kilometres to the east. The Camino de Santiago took on a new phase after that. What it was for sure, I don’t know.

Astorga was a modern town, with a history of cocoa and a chocolate museum. A towering cathedral stood next to the Antonio Gaudí designed bishop’s palace, a unique place, bizarre by all but Gaudí standards, medieval, magicial. We’d arrived late in the day, 30 plus kilometres in the sun, so spent a morning relaxing, setting off in the afternoon.

Bishop’s Palace, Astorga