Students help Moroccan children with the 4L Rally

 

I was sitting in a café in Ruzafa, the old Moorish barrio of Valencia last night, having a quiet chat with some friends, when a tall, tired-looking young man in his early twenties walked in. Picking on me as the obvious looking foreigner, he asked if I knew of a hostal nearby, which I did, and we went out into the street so I could point out directions.

In the small square outside the café were a group of six weary young men and one weary young lady, leaning against four old Renault 4Ls, covered in sand and stickers. We’ve got a beach in Valencia, but I don’t remember a sandstorm in the twelve years I’ve lived here. They’d brought it with them from the Sahara Desert, where they’d been competing in the 4L Trophy, a rally that had taken them on a seven thousand kilometre drive from their home in Soest, near Dortmund in Germany, through France, Spain, the heat of the Sahara and the bitter cold of the High Atlas Mountains in winter, to Marrakech, where they’d had two days rest and recuperation before beginning the long drive home.

I walked them to a local hostal, which is, strangely enough, run by an ebullient lady from Tetouan, and while they sorted themselves out, had hot showers and a coffee, we chatted about their adventure.

 

In 1998, six French students from the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce in Rennes, set off in three Renault 4L cars to drive through Morocco and deliver educational materials to impoverished children and schools along their route. This year the rally celebrated their fifteenth trophy, and each of the 1,300 cars, carrying two people aged between twenty and twenty-seven, delivered ten kilos of food and forty kilos of school materials. Over eighty tons of education was handed over to the Association Enfants du Désert. For the first time in the rally’s history, the participants also donated twenty euros per car, to help build a school. It became known as the student version of the Paris to Dakar Rally, and the tired but happy group I was chatting with had been part of it.

But it hadn’t all been plain sailing.

“We are all students at the University of South Westfalia, and it took us a year of very hard work to get the project together,” Dominic Glinka told me. “We were split into two groups, one to raise the 36,000 euros we needed to buy the cars and pay all the expenses, and another of mechanics, who are engineering students, who spent three days a week for eight months finding the cars and then almost totally re-building them. But we also had to work on our degrees, so it meant that we had to double up on our study time when we weren’t working on the project.”

With their great adventure ahead of them, they set off on February 14^th, pointed in the direction of Poitiers, where the Rally officially began – but didn’t even make it to France. Max Müller was driving one of the cars when the fuel pump failed. Fortunately, it was one of the spares they were carrying, so a change by the side of the road got them going again. At Poitiers, proudly displaying their official plaque with their car number 1443, they began the first stage – only to get as far as one hundred kilometres south of Bordeaux, where this time their problems were more serious.

“One of the wheel bearings went but you need special tools to do the job, which we didn’t have, so we had to call a tow truck to take us to a garage to do the repair.” A long nervous night was ahead; not only because the hotel they stayed in and the cost of the repair was eating into their limited budgets but because they had a deadline of six a.m. two days later to reach Algeciras for the specially reserved ferries to take them over the Straits of Gibraltar into Morocco.

“We barely slept that night, worried that we might not even get to the ferry, but the mechanic at the garage was great. He found some second-hand parts and worked late to get the job done. The drive through Spain was one of the most nerve-wracking I’ve ever experienced, but we got to the assembly point at Algeciras in time.” Which they shared with 2,500 other people – and not a toilet in site!

 

The adventure really began when they drove off the ferry at Tangiers, (which is probably what the cleaners on the four ferries also thought when they surveyed the results of a night without toilets for their six hundred passengers.)

“It was incredible,” comments Lukas Twittenhoff. “We were in Africa. It was such an amazing culture change, but that had been part of the adventure for us, to go somewhere so different from what we would usually experience.” But they soon discovered that Africa isn’t always hot, and the summer clothing they’d taken didn’t give them a lot of protection from the bitter desert nights or the minus ten degrees they experienced driving over the High Atlas Mountains.

“We were driving over a mountain pass and we could see cars coming toward us covered in ice,” says Max. “A few snowflakes started to fall, and the French drivers in front of us were terrified. They went so slowly that at one point we began to slide backwards. It was the same in the desert; we’d charge through the soft sand to keep moving while they would drive so slowly that they began to sink.” And the stalwart German team laugh at the memory of the French, who seemed to spend more time at the side of the road cooking a meal than actually driving.

Maren Rump is the only girl in the team. “It was a bit strange the first time we went off-road, and I think we were all a bit nervous, but we soon got used to it, even though at times, when you were driving through a dust storm thrown up by over a thousand cars, you weren’t too sure where anyone else was around you.”

The route sidled south along the coastline from Tangiers, skirting inland above Rabat and passing through Meknes, Midelt, Erfoud, Merzouga, Tighremet and Quarzazate, before arriving at Marrakech. The nights were spent sleeping alongside their increasingly grubby Renaults, the workhorses that carried everything they needed for the eleven day rally; food, drink, sleeping bags, clothes and spare parts – and a camp chair each so as not to totally deprive themselves of a semi-civilised life.

 

A two-car team from the university completed the Rally in 2011, selling on their cars to this year’s team, who added two more, which will in turn be sold on to another group who will continue the new ‘tradition’ next year.

“It was a wonderful experience,” reminisces Dominic. “We worked so hard for a year, not just on the project, but also to make sure our studies didn’t suffer. But it is such an incredible event, not just for the rally itself, but for all it does to help children with their education.”

I leave them as they get ready for a night on the Valencian town, and pray that the three day drive they have ahead of them to get home will be free from failed petrol pumps and broken wheel bearings – but I can be pretty sure that they won’t be getting bogged down in any sand dunes.

Mowed down by a moped in the Medina

 

When you are wandering through the souks, you spend half your time dodging mopeds. At least the mule carts and bikes travel at a sedate pace, but the mopeds are pretty nippy and it can give you a moment’s nervousness to be staring the rider in the eyes at a distance and speed that makes you wonder which one of you is going to come off worse in the inevitable collision. Fortunately they usually nip past without doing any physical or emotional damage – but that’s not to say it never happens.

Eight years ago, on my first visit to Marrakech, I’d just walked away from Jmaa el Fna and the handlebar of a moped brushed my side. It was summer, and I was wearing a lightweight shirt, and as I felt the handlebar touch me I turned into it to avoid anything serious happening. The rider was full of apologies, but I just patted him on the back, said something to the effect, “It’s okay, no harm done,” and he smiled and rode off. I turned to continue my walk, and felt a light breeze around my midriff, where the handlebar had torn my shirt right across the middle, leaving my stomach exposed. I hadn’t felt a thing or, in all the hubbub, heard anything either. I was more amused than anything else that I’d actually patted the chap on the back and parted with smiles, and here I was exposing my paunch for all of Marrakech to see.

And today, when an actual collision between man and moped did occur, I still walked away with a semblance of a smile. 

I was ambling my way back to my riad in the Sidi ben Slimane area, not taking a great deal of notice of anything, when I heard a moped rev up. I looked up, and about two metres away I saw a small boy on a moped careering towards me, and it was obvious by the panic in is eyes that he’d only learned how to go forward, he hadn’t quite got the hang of braking and steering yet. If it had been a scene in an Indiana Jones film, where the hero was walking through the souk and an evil assassin was attempting to run him down, although it would probably have been a Harley Davidson in that case, and not just a tiny 50cc Yamaha, Harrison Ford would have dived out of the way at the last second, probably doing a roll through piles of antiques lamps and collapsing the tent poles that supported the awning to the shop. Me, I’m no Indiana Jones, I’m neither quick witted enough or know how to do forward rolls to end a neatly executed dive, so I just stood there and watched the panic stricken ten year-old hurtle towards me. (Although to say ‘hurtle’ is probably gilding the lily a bit.) I made a half-hearted attempt to get out of the way but he hit my leg with the front wheel, which was probably the bit of steering assistance that turned him to the right out of any other harm’s way.

When I turned around he’d managed to stop, and was on that point where he could well have burst into tears. Behind me I heard a man shouting at the lad, but as he didn’t look at me it could well have been that he was pretty brassed off because the nipper had ridden the moped in the first place. I turned around, just as an old woman joined in the tirade. When I looked at the boy again he was even closer to tears, so I just waved my arms around a bit in a huffy sort of way and walked off.

But I did have a bit of moped malarkey earlier in the day. I’d gone to do an interview with a delightful young chap who is the only hand-made football maker in Morocco – more of that another day – but stupidly, I’d left my recorder in the riad, on the other side of the Medina. By one of those delightful quirks of serendipity, he lived about three streets from the riad, and offered to take me there on his moped. It was great, and I got a chance to see life from the other side of the handlebars.

We dodged and weaved through the crowded narrow alleyways, and there were times I thought my kneecaps were getting just that bit close to the walls. As we left the tighter alleys of the souk he took some of the wider streets, in deference to it being my first ride on the back of a moped, with a rear seat which clearly wasn’t built for someone my size. It was great fun, although I think I’d stick to a bike if I’m piloting something through the souks myself in the future.

Seduced by a shimmering fire hazard

 

A major treat for a job that had finished with everything going according to plan, was to be dinner at Le Comptoir Darna, a chi-chi establishment made doubly enticing by the promiseof a bevy of beautiful belly dancers. While I hate sounding like the T-shirt – been there, seen it, ticked it off – I’ve seen the dance a few times before and didn’t find it particularly enthralling. In fact, I once won a belly dancing competition at an country fair in Pennsylvania, which, to be perfectly truthful, was more belly than dancing, and only three of us took part so I had an odds-on chance anyway. By the time the show at Le Comptoir was supposed to start I’d usually be tucked up under the duvet, but it was a celebration, and what the hell, a bit of swirly-girly never did anyone any harm.

Le Coptoir is dark and decadent, wonderful in its sparkling exoticness, although I couldn’t help feeling that, like so many of this sort of night-haunted places, the ambiance is a bit different when the cleaners come in in the morning to do the carpets. Ever a pedant, I’m afraid.

The meal was wonderful; the service I can’t tell you about as I was distracted by the voluptuous waitress who glided around in tight black outfits with brightly coloured pouch bags shimmering with gilded tassels.  But I experienced something that made an old man very happy, and will stay with me as one of those moments….you know the ones, they happen, linger briefly, and pass, to reward you with a smile years down the line when the mind isn’t concentrating on the realities of life.

Needing to relieve the strains of too much excellent Moroccan white wine, I wandered up the sweep of the elegant main staircase and found myself on a richly carpeted hall that would have made a pasha proud. In front of me an enormous pair of mirrored doors reflected back a bemused chap nervously looking for the sign that said either gents or had a stick figure of a body with two rigid legs spread astride, showing me where to go. Oh good Lord no! Nothing so banal – and besides, they speak French and Arabic in Morocco, so I would have looked in vain for the ‘gents’.

The huge door mirrored door opened up in front of me like the secret cave of the Forty Thieves when Ali Baba struck the rock, although in this case it was more an Ali Barbara.

Round at all the points the good Lord decreed that provocative roundness should appear on a lustrous young lady’s form; curves to defeat the best geometrical designs of a luxury hand-built boat-maker, lips as rouged and full as one of Raphael’s cherubim, dark cascading locks framing a face of delicious plumpness set in which were two deep brown incandescent pools masquerading as eyes. As I approached, those entrancing pools sparkled, her rose red lips seductively bid me, “Bonsoir, Monsieur,” as she gracefully opened the door to which she was guardian. Never in my life, from the far flung Indies to the high-falutin’ gambling soirees of Paris, have I encountered a toilet door opener of such beauty. That was her job, to open the door to the toilet at just that perfect moment of arrival…and, by some magical device, probably known these days as a video camera, to repeat the action on departure.

It occurred to me later to wonder how far into the gents’ urinals did the camera focus? Did they cover only as far as the sinks, to make sure we actually washed our hands before taking the ten dirham coin from our pocket to give as a tip, or as far inward to focus on the ritual shaking and zipping that we all, each in our own way, perform? It mattered not, the smile was as welcoming on departure as on arrival. I was tempted to feign a case of prostatic hyperplasia (look it up) to keep going back, but I think she may have noticed a bald old degenerate making repeat journeys. I consoled myself with the thought that all of us, even if our job is only to open toilet doors, can do it with the greatest aplomb we can muster, because it may just raise a smile for an aging juvenile who can drift back for a few moments to the time when his smile was one of love and longing, when it didn’t just cover a shell of skin and bone, now lost between desire and capability, looking for nothing more than a cheery sidelong glance, the sort we knew about so many years ago. And this gift the little darling, who I will most likely never see again in my life, bestowed upon me.

Lights lower, vibrant music, four tall men in white robes and turbans descend the stairs with a palanquin shouldered between them. On the small platform a curved figure is sheeted in white, behind which sway two women in shimmering floor-length dresses; on their heads are balanced silver trays, glistening with lighted candles. As they shimmy down the stairs the candle flames perform their own iridescent sparkling dance.

A burst of music, and a flurry of red and white butterflies in slit-sided silk pantaloons clasped at the ankle, twirl and swirl diaphanous shawls; broad sparklingly embroidered waistbands paired with lustrously beaded and shimmering bra tops; the belly dancers, the luscious ladies of the raqs sharqi, enter the room with a fanfare and sensual exuberance. They weave between the tables, their hips gyrating and flicking in a staccato rhythm. It is a thing of beauty and a joy to behold.

Kohl outlined eyes, seductive finger, wrist and pelvic gyrations, with tiny toe-to-heel steps they sashay around the room. As they pass tables, men slip one hundred dirham notes into their waist belt or tops, but this, in a slight way, seems to diminish the beautiful sinuous dancing to the bar-top ‘exotic’ dancers in the sleazy bars of Queens in New York City.

Most of the attention is focussed on the young beauties, but I’m captivated by the two older ladies balancing the trays of candles on their heads. Broader of beam and stouter of girth, their movements, nonetheless, have refrains of a more mature sensuality. Were they the belly dancers of twenty years ago?

I watch their dominance of the restricted floor space. When a svelte young ingénue parades her comehitherance as she passes too closely to a candle dancer, the latter extends her arm in what appears to be part of her dance routine, and carefully but surely moves the belly dance aside. She is, after all, carrying a potential fire hazard on her head, whereas the young girl is merely exhibiting a strategically sexy control over her hips.

As a table of seven men, one of whom has tucked a fair few dirhams into the lingerie of various young ladies, we eventually share the spotlight of which the dancer is the sparkling star. Glasses and plates on our table are moved aside and a gorgeous young thing with flaxen hair, abundant cleavage and a mock-leopard-skin outfit is assisted onto the table by one of the waitresses. After some eye-raising shimmying she bends over backwards and executes a perfect arch, her well-filled top directly in front of the Moroccan with the an equally well-padded bill-fold. Under the gaze of everyone who can get close enough to the table, he ostentatiously folds a 200 dirham note under each strap of her leopard-skin top.

I’m sitting directly opposite the centre of attention, and my view is of a pair of beautifully formed feet with toenails painted in a devilish shade of crimson. I may not have had the best view in the house, but it consoles me to think that there will be an awful lot of photos of a beautiful upside-down Moroccan darling with bank notes sticking out of her costume, with face of a tired old man in the background, wondering if it’s time to go home yet.

Talk to the hand

 

A couple of years ago I was with a friend in the Medina in Marrakech. She’d successfully bartered her way to ownership of a very attractive rug, and was feeling pretty pleased with herself. The salesman was all smiles and compliments until my friend made a gesture which, to you and I would indicate that, “Great, everything’s fine, we done good!” She smiled and put her thumb up. Instantly the salesman’s jaw dropped and his eyes glared wide. He bundled the rug at her and sharply turned his back, much to the distress of my friend, who realised she’d done something wrong, but for the life her didn’t know what.

Imagine you’d stuck your middle finger up to an American; basically you are saying, ‘screw you’, ‘up yours’ or, as a Brit might say, ‘sit on that and wiggle’. That’s exactly what my friend had said, albeit unwittingly, to the carpet salesman. So, far from showing her pleasure at a deal well done, she was telling him to stick his business where the sun don’t shine. Best not to do it in Latin America and West Africa, as well as Greece, Russia, Sardinia, the south of Italy, either.

Travel certainly broadens the horizons and can provide a fund of uplifting experiences. Interacting with people is the best way to understand different cultures, societies and ways of life, but if you visit non-English-speaking countries and you don’t understand their language, you have to fall back on body-language and gestures. The problem is that some gestures have a completely different meaning in one country than they do in another. Not only could your intended message get lost in translation, you could actually end up offending someone or getting yourself into a difficult situation.

Some simple everyday gestures that we take for granted can get you into big trouble elsewhere in the world.

 

Years ago, I was working in Athens at a time when the English football team were playing an international game in the city, on the same day that Greece was playing away elsewhere. England won 5-0, the Greeks got hammered. That night hoards of England supporters roamed the Athenic streets chanting, ‘Five-nil, five-nil’, and thrusting their hand, with the palm open and the fingers extended to represent the number five, in the face of any male Greek they could find. When the Greeks started battering hell out of the visiting team’s supporters, the Brits thought they were just very bad losers. They might well have been, but the one thing you never do to a Greek male, whether you’ve just won a football match or not, is stick an open palm with fingers extended in his face. It’s known as a moutza, and is one of their most traditional insults, telling the recipient to ‘eat shit’. The gesture comes from Byzantine times, when people would smear excreta on the faces of prisoners as they were dragged through the streets.

 

Another gesture that doesn’t go down well in the Arab world is the A-okay sign, making a circle with the thumb and forefinger and extending the other fingers outwards. Like the thumbs up, we mean it to imply that everything is good, fine, okay, and is used to communicate between sub-aqua divers, when shouting, “Yes I’m fine, thanks,” isn’t really an option. But what’s good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander, as Suzanna, a friend who lives in Fez, found out when she wanted to show the workmen restoring her riad that all was going great. She made the A-okay sign, and was surprised when the men showed obvious shock, and not the smiles she expected. Without realising it she’d told them they were a set of arseholes, or, in the worst case scenario, they were all homosexual. The circular shape of the gesture is seen to represent the anus, with all the unwholesome connotations it brings to mind, and you would never, ever use the sign in Brazil, Germany and a number of Mediterranean and Arab countries. There is the apocryphal story of President Richard Nixon arriving on an official visit to Brazil, which received an enormous amount of media coverage. As he stood at the top of the gangway he put both his hand in the air and made a double A-okay sign. While Suzanna only offended a handful of chaps, Nixon told the whole of Brazil that they were a set of arseholes and poofters. History doesn’t record how successful his talks were. It’s also an insult in France, although not quite such a serious one, as it signifies something or someone as being worthless. Not a good way to show your appreciation after a delightful dinner.

The corna (making a fist and extending the fore- and little fingers) may be the thing to do at heavy rock concerts, but in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Colombia, Brazil, Albania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, it’s seen as saying to someone he’s a cuckold and his wife is cheating on him – although residents of these countries seem happy enough to use it at football referees. Curling your finger toward you as a “come here” sign is perceived as derogatory in many South East Asian countries. This gesture is commonly used for dogs in the Philippines so when used for a person, you would be implying that you see them as something inferior. What’s worse, this gesture could get you arrested, and to prevent you from using it again, the authorities could break your finger.

 

Perhaps there might be a new guide book here. It’s unlikely we need another Guide to This That And The Other, or a phrase book that tells you everything you will ever need to know about asking for a postage stamp in Swahili. A picture book of offensive hand gestures might just save you getting your head kicked in Athens.

Mulling over mules

I sit on a stone in the shade of a walnut tree and watch a young farrier hammer 3-inch nails though a mule’s hoof, nipping the excess nail off before bending the stub over. It seems over-kill on size, but as I’ve never shod a mule who am I to say?

The mule gives the occasional enquiring look backward and downwards, but other than that stares placidly ahead. New shoes fitted, it’s led away and a blue plastic bag of feed hung around its neck. By the time it begins chomping, another shoeing job has been backed into place and the farrier begins hacking off the bent and split old shoes.

When the muleteer has hobbled his animal to a hug stone he walks across the street and sits under the shade a few stones from me.

“Hello, how are you?” he says.

“Very well”, I reply “And how are you?”

“Very fine, thank you.”

He’s from Armed, the village high above Imlil, and he’s come down to have his mule shod. He’s a mountain guide who, when times are good, will make the regular two-day trips up Jbel Toubkal, seven hours there, four back.

“So how’s business?” I ask

He puts his hand out flat and wiggles it up and down in the universal signal of ‘not so good’.

‘Is bad’ he says, ‘not much tourist.’

We sit in comfortable silence for a while, until a mini-bus pulls up in front of the mule park.

“Bus,” he says, and jumps up, walking quickly over to the driver’s side. Words are exchanged and the driver shakes his head, while leaning back in his seat as a passenger points a fat lens at two tethered chomping mules. Photo taken, the bus moves off up the village street.

My new friend wanders back and sits a couple of stones away. We resume our companionable silence. A few minutes later we hear the peeping of a message on his mobile phone. As he takes it out I stand up, shake his hand and tell him I hope it’s a booking for him and his mule.

“Inch’allah!”

Don’t believe everything you hear

The first time I visited Marrakech was in the spring of 2003, in the company of my friend Dan, who’s full moniker, Daniel Moresco Pierce, I’ve envied since the day we met in Malaga a few years earlier. So much more distinguished than the mundane Derek Workman.

On a morning warm in the sun, although still a little cool in the shade of the narrow souk streets, I wandered off to the outskirts of the Medina, away from the early tourist bustle of Jemaa el Fnaa. There’s nothing quite like sitting and gawping at the passing parade, and as I sat outside a crowded café having a cafe au laite – you need to take a break from mint tea sometime – an English voice asked if they could take the empty seat at my table. After years of living in Spain I was a bit startled; you don’t do that sort of thing here, a table in a cafe or restaurant is the gastronomical equivalent of an Englishman’s castle. But this being in the Arab world, I politely acquiesced.

Inevitably, my coffee companion and I got into conversation. The chat followed the usual lines of where are you from, been here before, are you on holiday, etc. but it was his answer to the last question that brought me up short. My answer had been simple; a bit of a break and to see somewhere new, but Tom (as was his name) was in Marrakech to record his feet. I kid you not, but to be fair, it was the sound of his feet that was being recorded, not his feet themselves. He was a Foley artist, which to me didn’t mean a thing, but if Tom and his fellow artists didn’t exist, almost any movie, radio and TV programme or advert would loose half the impact our ears absorb.

When you see Colin Firth walking across his voice coach’s floor in The King’s Speech, Meryl Streep beating eggs into a bowl in Julie and Julia, the story of TV cook Julia Child, or the rustle of silken robes just before the heroine of a blood-lust horror movie succumbs to the hacking and slashing of a Freddie Kruger-like character, the actions are theirs, but the sounds are those of an un-named Foley artist. Pages being turned, squeaky doors opening and closing, a cup placed on saucer when The Queen finishes a cup of tea, (or in the case of our dearly departed Queen Mother, an empty G&T glass being placed on a table), all those sounds are the work of the Foley artist. Their work helps to create a sense of reality within a scene. Without these crucial background noises movies feel unnaturally quiet and uncomfortable.

It would be very easy to dismiss the Foley artist as a wannabe actor who never quite cut the mustard, but that’s far from the truth, and the top Foley artists are highly regarded specialists in their field.

It began in 1927, when Jack Foley, who had been working for Universal Studios since 1914, the heyday of silent movies, was asked to be part of the sound crew of Show Boat, Universal’s answer to The Jazz Singer, the first ‘talkie’ ever made. The microphones of the time could only pick up dialogue, so Foley and his crew projected the film onto a screen and recorded a second audio track of the actions to capture the live sounds. Their timing had to be perfect so that footsteps and closing doors would sync with the actors’ motions in the film.

My new-found friend Tom was recording the sound of a man walking through Arab streets for a film about Egypt (as with many productions, a scene is never quite where you think it is), and it was a lot cheaper to send him and a crew to Marrakech than to Cairo.

So when you watch Sex in the City or any other movie purporting to be either about or filmed in Morocco, don’t assume that the sounds of jangling bracelets or swishing curtains you hear are being made by Sarah Jessica Parker or Kim Catrall. They could be a colleague of Tom’s shut away in a dark studio somewhere in downtown L.A.