Moroccan Diaries

A woman hitchhiking through Maghreb

Written by: KÍVIA MENDONÇA COSTA

Translated by: CAROLINE MOLINA SILVA

Copyright © 2016 by Kívia Mendonça Costa First Edition – 2016 www.se-lo.net ISBN 978-85-919959-4-3

Summary

Prolog August 25th ​ August 26th ​ August 27th ​ August 28th ​ August 29th ​ August 30th ​ August 31th ​ September 1st ​ September 2nd ​ September 3rd ​ September 4th ​ September 5th ​ September 6th ​ September 7th ​ September 8th ​ September 9th ​ September 10th ​ September 12th ​ September 13th ​ September 18th ​ September 21th ​ September 26th ​ September 27th ​ September 28th ​ September 29th ​ September 30th ​ October 1st ​ October 3rd ​ October 4th ​ October 23th ​ November 4th ​ November 5th ​ November 6th ​ November 7th ​ November 8th ​ November 9th ​ November 11th ​ November 12th ​ November 14th ​ About the writer

Prolog

The nearly three months I spent in Morocco, between August and November 2015, was a trip more​ felt than planned. Few months before, while I was crossing the Balkans hitchhiking, I went through the biggest emotional and financial stress since the beginning of my nomadic life, in May 2013. I had already done a round-the-world trip on my own, facing a lot of difficulties, but nothing that would drain out my forces and confidence like that. I felt I had reached my limits. I thought my days on the road were counted.

Then I came up with the idea to go to Berlin. Back to Germany, where I was an exchange student eight years ago, I felt in a net of unconditional friendship and serene days that gave me back lightness of spirit. After six weeks, I felt it was time to put my backpack back on. But not in order to back home – not yet.

Why? Why living this wandering life, why exchanging certainty for doubt, a comfort home for the stones on the path, warm friendships for loneliness? These questions are frequently asked by others and myself. The answer is different every trip I do. During that summer in Berlin, the answer came as clear and inevitable as the Saara’s sky: I travel to hear, live and tell stories. But why Morocco? Maktub! This one, only the universe can answer.

I already had a Düsseldorf – Fez ticket, but I was nearly out of money. By coincidence, a Dutch friend I had hitchhiked together with was planning to go to Morocco exactly by that same time. He was my travel companion in the first 2 weeks and lent me about 250 euros. That was the only money I had to live the stories in theses diares.

Since I began to hitchhike, with my mother, still as a child, I am convinced that in order to travel, to live, we need more courage than money. This is not an apology to poverty, this is about not depending on the (dis)order of this world full of social injustice and insensitive privileged people to make true dreams that are supposedly attached to financial powers. This is about prioritizing the things that give me existential meaning, instead of only working to pay bills and acquire items that will give me merely marginal benefits. If the activities that fulfill me pay me well, excellent. If not, they will still be priority.

At last, a nomadic life is not the choice for an easy life (which is not easy at all, as it will be evident on next pages), but a visceral commitment with the search for freedom, empirical knowledge and lightness of spirit that the first one demands.

Logically, a trip will be more or less full of meaning and learning, depending on how we choose to face it, like everything in life. It’s also true that we only really know our limits when we touch the thin membrane that separates them from irreversible losses, and it’s only in these moments that decisions and searches gain maximum meaning. As the arrival to this thin wall is not always voluntary, mostly it will be the universe who will call us for this crossing. Getting in this boat or not, which rarely is equipped with everything we need, will be a task for our free-will. Taking the call for this Moroccan trip was one of the greatest gift the road has given to me. As if it was not enough to have the unique hospitality of these people that I consider, without hesitating, one of the most hospitable in the world, the journey also allowed me to break concepts that, I believe, not even years of reading about the Middle East could have broken. I do not want to minimize the importance of academic studies, but to emphasize the need to become a real and an active character stories, in order to see others not as strangers but as companions or even antagonists of these happenings, in order to dissolute prejudices and for greater understanding among peoples. Traveling and, mostly important, doing it in a way to integrate oneself with native populations, with the purpose of knowing them to widen horizons and not to better dominate them, is fatal against racism, radical nationalism and maliciously distorted historical records.

The following 39 stories are true to the reality presented to me, without fiction. However, even rich in details and descriptions, they have no intention of addressing all aspects of Moroccan society or representing all its colossal plurality of opinions. As much as I have been careful to look up the issues raised and double-check data, these lines are written without any historical or journalistic intentions. In other words, these lines are no anthropological study, but merely a compilation of my experiences with Morocco and the stories and impressions reported by people whom I mostly met by accident. For privacy purposes, most of the names are fictitious. It also needs to be explained the concept of Couchsurfing, which appears in the following pages frequently. Couchsurfing is a social network focused on hosting with solidarity and cultural exchange. It has over four million users worldwide and it is very popular among backpackers. The mechanism is simple. If I am going to Casablanca, for example, I will search for possible hosts in that city. I read some profiles and make lodging requests to those whom I believe I have affinity with. The request can be accepted or not. The social network is free of charge and the hosts can not charge for hosting. I have been a member of Couchsurfing since 2007. I have received more than one hundred people at home and I have stayed with innumerous hosts on all five continents. It really works.

August 25th ​

Invisible and noisy mosquitoes clouds ate me alive in my first Moroccan night. Still, I’m convinced​ that the first day in this tip of Africa couldn’t have been better. For our surprise, the 35 euros flight didn’t land late in Fés airport, a little before 10 a.m.

My Brazilian passport caused comments and inaudible laughs between the immigration officers, but the 3 months free visa was given to me right away. But Aron, the Dutch friend of my age whom I share the first adventures of this more and less planned trip, had to wait a little longer. The officer looked with surprise the full pages of his red passport. He stopped in Kenia visa, after in the “Swazi… swazi what? Swaziland? Where is that?”. What to expect from a man that went all the way from Ethiopia to South Africa hitchhiking?

We walked about 10 minutes to the main road, that circumvented the airport. There was a line of smalls palm trees on the median strip. We took out the backpacks on the other side of the road, close to one of many bunches of olive tree that gave the dusty land a green sight. If no one stopped and the hot weather increased, we had that strategic shadow to use. The cars even stopped, but they wanted to charge us. As usual, by principals, we refused to pay.

I met Aron a year and a half ago, in Egypt. We traveled a couple of weeks hitchhiking trough the land of pharaohs, Jordan, a small piece of Israel and we never saw each other again. This time, by coincidence, both of us wanted to take a close look in Morocco. Why not get our backpack together again? From Berlin, where I’ve spend the summer, I hitchhike to his house on the south of Netherlands. It was the father of my friend that took us to that secondary airport of Düsseldorf, with huge glass walls where rain water flowed and set the scenario of our travel plans mixed with our court jester moonshine. Passed midnight, we inflate our mattresses happily and comfortably, still dreaming and smiling before falling asleep. With 60 countries in our visited list, it was like none of us had never travelled.

We kept walking. We didn’t have an agreement about the hand sign to hitchhike. The information available on Hitchwiki, a website that I’d call the hitchhikers bible without any guilt at ​ ​ all, in Morocco you don’t shake your thumb in the air for a car to stop. Here, the hand sign to hitchhike would be shaking the forefinger, like someone taking a bus. Since we couldn’t agree, each one did a hand sign. Aron also gave bye-byes, but I think it was pure excitement for being back on the road after six months working in Netherlands to make some money for the next trip – something that he does for 5 years already, by the way.

When someone stopped, he was the one that talked with the drivers, all men. In half hour waiting, a green Honda Fit stopped, with some peeled paint here and there. A girl was driving, on her side there was a woman that reminded me my mother. The first one used a tight scarf on the forehead, covering all her head. The second one had her hair uncovered.

“Go there, Kívia, they are women”, asked my friend.

In French, I explained to them that we were going to Fés medina. I clearly said we didn’t want to pay for the ride. They agreed to take us, right away. Yes! ​

It was necessary 20 minutes of conversation to Rachida, 50 and a few years old visible in her rounded face, invited us, in Spanish, to have lunch in her house. Of course! Mother of two handsome boys, whose complicated names I tried, without success, memorize, she also speaks English, French and Arabic. She said she studies languages as a hobby and she took Spanish classes in an NGO.

From the young and quiet driver, we don’t know much. She is neighbor of our host and left us as soon as we got in their neighborhood made of small and yellow-faded buildings with big windows. To leave the countryside of Netherlands, filled with clean dream-houses, straight to the Moroccan suburbs, with garages that began to be made with red ceramic and were finished with white-yellow-indigo tiles, gave me a breath of life. I have true fascination in observing people organizing life with “what have in hands”, some with more, others with less money and freedom, all of them reaching similar results: families, friends, problems, houses, routines and family lunches.

The couch of our host, or at least the impact it caused me, deserves a paragraph itself. An elaborated structure of solid wood was set on three walls of the huge living room and sit not less than 25 people – I counted one by one the big red squabs made of taffeta, with gold embroidery, that were used as backrest. The perfect high and soft upholstered looked like agglomerated of single mattress with covers richly well made. I would have slept there smiling and feeling great. It was the famous “Moroccan room”, required room in almost all homes of Morocco, from the simpler ones to the wealthiest, from big families to single dweller. The reason that it’s so important? Us, unexpected visitors.

We barely sat, a silver bow with chocolate cake, another one with fennel bread and two glasses of fresh milk came. Rachida went back to the kitchen and emphasize, with her little black eyes, sharp and friendly, that we were home. Me and Aron exchanged looks of children that just got a new ball, with the same comment on the tip of our tongue: “Ah, the Arabic hospitality…”

While the meat was being cooked with plum, a little bit of ginger, some onion, salt, sugar and cinnamon, Rachida took us to know the neighborhood stores. They sold everything. Men with tanned skin and grooved by the time that demanding manual jobs usually incur carried chickens, cut strips of fresh fishes, sold used clothes and shoes and cut fruits under those dirty sheet tent, like those that saved Aladdin and Prince of Persia from epic smashes.

Lunch was the greatest part. We waited about 20 minutes for Rachida’s husband, which works in a hospital, and soon we set on the rounded wheeled table, surrounded by another upholstered that skirt the three narrow sides of the dinning room. In two bowls, small platters arrived with pasta, lentil (or some kind of tinny bean?), pricked tomatoes with onions and other condiments. There were also some small rounded ceramic vessels, like those Chinese ones, with a cucumber juice thickened with herbs – the most refreshing thing on earth! And I hate cucumber!

On the center of the table, the climax, the food of the gods, one of the best dishes that has ever been cooked in the world, in my modest and little dramatic opinion: lamb and plum tagine! Rachida and her husband sucked little pieces of the rounded bread in the hearty soup where the super soft meat and big plums floated. “In Morocco, we eat a lot, that’s why we are like this”, she said, pointing to her rounded belly. The husband stretched out his green eyes on the joke and imitated the gesture.

After the banquet, guess what happen? Another banquet! A large bow arrived, full of Indian figs, one of the most common fruits in Morocco. They grow in cactus and it’s yellow on the inside, very sweet and juicy. I have never tasted before, but it was straight to the top of my list of better fruits. Right after that, a huge bowl came, full of green and purple figs.

Aron called Farouk, a Moroccan from Couchsurfing, that, gently, accepted our lodging ​ ​ request. As we knew, he was leaving for a small trip and he’d let us alone in his apartment. The only way to get there before he was gone it would be taking a cab, which ended up costing 5 euros, about two times more than the bus that leaves the airport would have cost – who cares?

August 26th ​

The other side of Moroccan hospitality appeared. After solving some bureaucracy of backpacker’s​ life, like getting Wi-Fi in some cheap coffee place and buying tampons in a country which apparently isn’t part of the culture, we went straight to what interested us in Fés: the oldest medina in Morocco!

The historical center is an endless alley maze, noisy kids, skinny cats and little stores with straw mat or stretched sheets upon the doors, in a very effective way to protect from the sun light. The faded houses spliced and stretched over its three or four floors – not to mention the terraces with old shirts and colorful veils drying on the Mediterranean wind. It’s a mess, a lot of mess. Life, a lot of life.

It’s weird to be a tourist exactly where people expect tourists to be. Step on any Unesco patrimony, take the camera out of the backpack, wear a pair of sun glasses or any other piece that differs you from the local population. Done. You became a one-dollar bill everyone wants to grab. The annoying people and the sneaky tries of robbery differ from place to place, of course, but if there’s something that generates cumulative stress in nomad life is how people see you as a walking bag of money, willing to buy everything, when all you want is to enjoy a moment alone with your camera or make a friend without commitment. Anyway, I don’t blame people that explore tourists more than tourists that behave like kings that want to be served and spoiled all the time.

In the andalous part of the big medina, a boy decided he wanted to “help” us. He explained where a certain mosque was and he wanted at any cost take us to an observatory. We thanked and insisted we were going on our own. About 20 minutes later, we met him again, still desperately trying to help us. Aron had already lost the interest (or patience) and step away to take some pictures. Instantly, the boy changed the course of the conversation – and the language.

“Don’t you want a Berber boyfriend for a noche caliente?” ​ ​

I couldn’t contain the laugh.

“No, I already have a boyfriend”, I lied.

“But he is not Berber, no és caliente. If you want una noche caliente, caliente, I’ll be close ​ ​ ​ ​ to the mosque, vale? ​ ​

We kept on walking. We barely stopped for a sip of water under a straw tracing, another insistent helper came. The boy of thirty and some age, bright clothes highlighting the tanned skin, with a huge longitudinal scar on his almost shaved head, smiled like no one. He insisted, he really wanted to show us “from the heart”, with no interest, his beloved andalous neighborhood, ​ ​ composed by four families, “an Arabic one, a Berber one, a Jewish one and a Christian one”, according to him.

We tried, really tried to keep our independent tour, but the man wouldn’t leave us. He said, ​ ​ in a mist of Spanish, French and English, that we had to meet the oldest Fés cemetery, where members of the four families shared, literally, the same space on the ground. What could we do?

The insistence ended up on a complete tour through the andalous part (it comes from ​ ​ Al-Andalus, that is how Moors referred to Iberian Peninsula). The inoffensive faded houses hided sumptuous patios tiled and a whole symbols displayed that crossed centuries. The oldest entry doors exhibit on the superior part some kind of trident lying down, that can have five, three or one dent. The first one shows that the family that lived there was Arabian, according to our guide. The second one represented the Jewish families and the third one, the Christian families. Another symbols, mainly of the Jewish presence and French colonizers, were more obvious. All we needed was to look up to an alley to see a huge star of David in high-relief on a yellow building.

The tour kept the good level for an hour and something. After that it dropped to show us ​ ​ hurriedly the weavers, the little shop of spices, the ceramic workshop, anyway, that conversation of “I’m not doing it for money, but to show the culture of my country” was nothing but conversation and he probably would win a commission from the products we could have bought. By the way, when we said brighter than Saara’s sky that we weren’t interested in buying not even a needle, the conversation changed its tone. The guide brutally reduced the sympathy and said in a very straight way “are you going to tip me now or latter?”

Our budget was 5 euros per day each. On that evening, the colored papers of our dirhams totalized 9 euros. We decided to give four euros to him and saved five to our dinner mission.

It was the same thing that cursing his mother. The boy called us on a corner, said that if we wanted to give charity that we “should give to that homeless guy over there”, that he was a first class guide and the price, to be cheap for us, was 15 euros each. We laugh loudly. “But didn’t you say it was from the heart?”. After some discussion, in the end, I almost raged in a very tough Spanish, the boy kept his 5 euros. And he still showed us the “way out”, even though we were on the street.

What left from the money bought us exactly two chicken Kebab with eggs, chopped olive and red sauce inside rounded breads that were stocked under a lavatory of a medina snack bar – it will fuck us up, yes or for sure? The coins took us back home, right on that pleasant sunset time where everyone turns into canned sardine on a bus. I took a deep breath and thought, relieved, that in São Paulo was worst. Really worst.

August 27th ​

Queen day in Fés! Sitting on the throne, simple as that. The trip prediction according to that yesterday’s​ sandwich came true as a terrible diarrhea for me, and it spoiled our firm intentions of hitchhiking to Taza’s national park, basically only to satiate Aron’s will of nature and camping on the woods. My brain doesn’t work to either read or write. I content myself by observing an unknown palace from the balcony and by trying to handle the heat of the ending August. Aron left to buy food and to access the internet about five hours ago – or would it be fifty? I am dying of boredom and hunger, while worms set a party in such loud sound it almost bothers the neighborhood. There are signs of fever and stress.

Update: Aron’s brought a natural yogurt, tuff, without sugar, looking like hospital food, but that turns into food of the gods when it’s mixed to pieces of “young plum” (according to the description on the tag). For dinner, he prepared a pasta with vegetables that looked wonderful, but it was so unpalatable that I preferred trying to read again and to fight with mosquitoes.

My friend admitted it was one of the worst pastas of all times and we watched an episode of a TV show of insipid zombies on his seven inches’ tablet. We are about to sleep on the balcony, where the fresh and super arid wind gives us a good reason to cover ourselves from head to toe and, in addition, to avoid the unfair war against the mosquitoes.

August 28th ​

I woke up much better, but still weak for a day of hitchhiking in the heat of the summer. At least resting​ yielded long hours of morning readings. By 3 p.m, we were ready to jump out of the window, not much for the heat, but for the boredom of domestic jail. “So, let’s try to hitchhike?”, I asked.

“Sure! But it’s almost 400 kilometers, I don’t know if we get there today”.

“Better than staying here.”

“I fully agree!”

Road was right at the door. We didn’t even walk for 10 minutes and we already were in a great roadside, just like those we pray for to the saint of hitchhikers before we sleep – whoever it is. A nice car, with air conditioning (off) took us about 12 kilometers ahead. The driver spoke a perfect Portuguese. He said, with pride, he’d never entered a classroom, but he spoke French, Portuguese, Japanese, “a little of German” etc, because he’d been taking tourist to tours in the desert for 16 years. He asked the attendant in the gas station to arrange us a ride, but we preferred to come back to the roadside and try on our own.

We waited for 15 minutes. An old truck stopped. The little man who were maybe 60, grooved skin and super-green eyes, had over the glove compartment a straw sombrero with a green ​ ​ ribbon, announcing its precedence: Disneyland. He didn’t speak much, in his scarce and muy ​ intelligible Spanish he learned in La Rioja, where he worked for many years. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure if I should either close or wide-open the window, in order to deal with the sweat. The wind blew so, so stuffy I didn’t dare to put my hands out of the window, under the penalty of cooking them. No kidding!

At the end of a curve of ocher aridity, dotted with spiny shrubs and hard-clothed trees, a mighty river rose out of nowhere! I mean, a lake. No, wait ... “what is this”?

It was a huge water reservoir built to alleviate possible droughts. The man stopped for some photos and told us that Morocco is full of them. I thought certain portions of southern meridian Tupiniquin lands densely populated should follow the example and manage their water resources better to avoid supply cutoff.

We stayed in Taza, capital of homonymous province, basically half the way to our destiny. We saw a medium-sized city, without a single woman inside its crowded coffee shops. We bought four bananas, two packs of chip potatoes and came back to our post. The clarity of a dispersed sun in morose helped, but the traffic, reduced to cars with Taza’s signs, ruined our plans.

Night kept on going and so did we, walking to the city’s exit. Almost there, we came across a police blitz. I always have doubt about this: will it help, or not? When we passed by them I whispered bon soir. There wasn’t even time to accommodate our backpacks on the dusty ground. ​ ​ One of the cops came all smiley, in his well-groomed shirt shining under the pole’s light. His boss said it was dangerous to hitchhike, that it was dark and it was better to take a cab, blah, blah etc., same as always. He surrendered to our stubbornness and said we couldn’t cross the last light pole. Okey.

Soon a truck stopped in the roadside. The young driver seemed to be the crazy, great heart ​ kind of guy. What other kind would have stopped for two dirty foreigners in the dead of the night, next to a police blitz? We communicated with a few words in English and French. Between one cigarette and other, he said he had lived 3 years in Amsterdam and was arrested five times – or that is what we have understood. GPS and road on, we found out he would pass by the road of Outat el Haj, our destiny.

We spent two hours listening to unbearable music, then another police blitz showed up exactly when a great hip-hop started to play and we got excited. The cops stopped him. He stepped out of the truck and talked, and talked. We were on the exit of Guercif, medium-size city.

We have no fuck idea of what have happened. All we know is that the driver came back savorless, said “problem, passport, taxi, ok?”, turned around and left us in front of a cab station. Great… Worst then being somewhere unknown in the dead of the night is to let others uncomfortable for leaving you in an uncomfortable situation – and it wasn’t the worst kind of situation! I’m dramatizing just because the story is getting boring, but it has an end that deserves to be read.

We had the classic sidewalk kebab with bread for dinner, and stopped in a coffee with wi-fi. The place (that kind of place that tries, disastrously, to be fancy) was more mirrored and illuminated then show houses, with plastic tables on the sidewalk. Literally, there was only men. Tired of being the center of the looks, I took rescue in a corner. Like 100% of the clients, I ordered a tea.

The tea infusion is for Morocco just like cold-ice beer is for Brazilian Carnival. It’s served in smalls silver teapots of 300ml approximately, which the Moroccans lift over a meter from the small glasses that traditionally receives the liquid. Before that, they mix two or three sugar cubes of the size of a chocolate bar each (alert: this is not a joke!). A full teapot costs about 60 cents. Sodas are considerably more expensive and beer doesn’t exist. They also drink coffee.

Completely fatigued and with headache, we decided to set Aron’s tend under the few olives trees that were set in a calm street, upright the main road. We would be right at our goal, and we could hitchhike as soon as the sun came out.

There wasn’t even time to set the rods. The lanterns of two cops came to us. They were nice, but didn’t allowed us “no way, with no chance at all”, that we scratched a meter of canvas, because “here it’s too dangerous, there are thieves and they come with a machete this big”. In perfect French, we were gently “invited” to get in the dark back of their truck. The destiny, they said, it was a camping 2 kilometers inside the city.

“Nice, tomorrow we will have to walk all the way back”, commented my friend.

“Yeah… I am looking forward to see how much this people will charge us for arriving 1 a.m.”.

The cops woke up the owner, that left on a nightdress – or what seemed to be one. It was the only women with no scarf on the head that I saw in all the region, besides me.

“Hey, good night. How much is the camping day cost?”

“Nothing. They said you were about to sleep on the street. You can set your tend wherever you want, inside is safe. Close the gate when you leave, alright?”

Oh, all right!

August 29th ​

We had to walk back all the the way of ride that the cops gave us last night – and a little more. The sun​ didn’t help and we forgot buying food. We still had water. By the way, Aron has a magic filter: a tub of the size of my hand that you enroll on the top of any plastic bottle, full of dirty water. All you have to do is to squeeze the bottle and clean water comes out.

Thanks god we had filled three bottles to the top, because no car wanted to stop – and the few drivers that did, wanted money. When the driver understands French, I explain why we don’t want to pay.

The road was small and few cars passed by. After, I don’t know, an hour, a little truck sympathized and took us to a village ahead. The driver used his disjointed Spanish to give me a lesson of how dangerous it was travelling without money. He said that I would have to come back to my country to ask money for my parents. All the speech was only for me; he didn’t even look to my friend. I did a poker face.

The man parked in front of a police stop and said we should ask for the cops to arrange us a ride, because no one would take us without money. We waited until he speeds up and crossed the road to point out our fingers on the air again. Hitchhike in Morocco is very common. Other backpacker friends had the same impression and just yesterday I counted another five groups of hitchhikers, all, I believe, Moroccan.

I still don’t understand what happened next, but it was something like this: a boy was hitchhiking just before the shadow we were under, on the same side of the road. When we put our backpacks down, he crossed the road to the other side and stopped right in front of us. After a while, I said “hi” in French. It was enough for him to cross the road back all smiley, asking for our destination. When he heard Outat el Haj, he said we had to come back to Guercif and take a cab, because there was no transportation straight to Outat.

“No, no. It took us effort to get here, we won’t come back. And we don’t have money for a cab”.

“Well, well, it’s hard without money in here”, said, always smiling. Then he went back to the other side of the road. Always smiling.

Suddenly he made sign for a car that came on our side of the road and the car stopped. “My family, my family!”, said, running to the car. The driver, an old man even more smiley, left the car and came to us to explain, in perfect French, that we had to come back to Guercif and take a cab. No, sir, no cab and no coming back to that place…

In that moment, another little truck passed and stopped because of the old man’s sign. After some talking, the three boys on the truck opened the back door for us.

The back seats had a few things: tow bags, a weight balance like those my grandfather used to weight rice, and more dust then the hen house my grandmother had in corn time. I sat over a tire with a blanked on it and Aron set on his backpack. A little window on the top of the car separated us from the driver and it was opened every 20 minutes. “Coffee? Water? Bread?” They offered us (almost) everything. 5 stars’ treatment. Almost a limousine. They left us 5 minutes away from our host’s home, without asking for a single coin.

Omar is at least 20 years younger than what I’ve imagined. He couldn’t say if he had 23 or 24 years old, because “I don’t care much about age”. He said he was born in 1991 and left calculations on our own.

In his house, in a shed of a single room, there was the most traditional food of Morocco waiting for us. There it was again, Tagine! The legendary mud pan with a high top of a cone shape (also called tagine) crackled on a little gas fire. There wasn’t any stove. No fridge too.

The food was very different from the one we’ve tasted on Rachida’s house. Along the edge, a circle of green peppers, followed by a circle of tomatoes and two pieces of chicken split in half, everything on a bed of onions. “The onion is the sacrifice vegetable. If tagine starts to burn, better burn the onion than the meat”, explained Omar. To finalize, tomatoes pieces on top of everything. Instead of cutlery, we used our fingers to grab little pieces of bread over the food. Cutlery are as common on Moroccan tables as two Asian sticks on Brazilian’s table. Individual plates have no place here. Everybody eats together, from the same bow or pan.

Omar excused himself before we shared the bread to start eating. “I don’t know if it will be as good as the one you ate in Fés. A man’s tagine is not like a woman’s one.”, said with a big white smile on his tanned skin, torn eyes, robust body; I believe our host has a lot of success with the opposite sex.

He said, with his strong American accent and a calm voice – which became his registered mark, that he studied languages with an English specialization in Fés, in al-Karaouine University, considered, not with a lot of controversies, the oldest in the world. He works for a United States NG, teaching Moroccan dialect, the darija, to north-Americans volunteers.

It was Aron’s time to feel sick. My friend couldn’t even finish his side of the Tagine’s pan. He shrunk in one of the mats over the straw mats and announced he was unable to visit Omar’s family, where we would spend the night.

I left with our host to explore the repetitive streets of Outat and to get a decent sign of internet on a coffee shop, Inshallah! A muddy riven crossed the city and had some young boys ​ ​ jumping on it. We set ourselves on some nice rocks, on the opposite margin of a majestic white mosque. The sunset imitated the blows of manga heroes’ and well deserved a round of applause.

Stars and darkest hours add intimacy to our conversation. Omar told me he comes from a very poor family, very religious and little studied. He said he used to be very religious himself, but studies made him question a lot of traditions and practices. “My parents always made me study, but I think that if they knew study would transform me that way, they’d have changed their mind”, he joked.

Among three brothers and one sister, he is the only one with superior course. He already travelled for a few Africans countries because of his work, like Uganda, that he really loves. He has that dream that I know well of doing an around-the-world trip, meeting people and accumulate experiences, but he feels guilty for not working for a good salary to help his parents.

“But sometimes I keep thinking I am not the only child. I helped my brother to build his little shop and had to fight a lot to study. I worked as a builder under the sun, lived all my university period on a very precarious student’s living, where almost no one could stand to stay over two years”, he told me.

My host says he has great worries about gender – and like to repeat it. If there is a subject that hardens his parsimonious countenance is the disadvantageous treatment that the more conservative Islamic communities gives women. “When a single lady of a village gets sick, the family doesn’t take her to the doctor, or they do it hidden, because community will know and will think that she has fragile health and will bother her future husband”, said, increasing his tone.

Omar said that it’s still common families from remote and poor areas, like the one he was born and raised, stop sending their daughters to school after certain age.

“If they became too independent, they can desire to get a job in a big town and stop thinking in marriage”, he commented.

I remembered lunch and Aron asking if there was still arranged marriage in morocco. Omar laugh sarcastically: “ask me if there is NO arranged marriage”.

Moon was already scaled half of the sky. We shake the dust of our clothes and made our way back home. Half of me was thinking on dinner, and the other half on the long day we had ahead of us.

August 30th ​

It’s today! Heading to our first “lost” village in Atlas mountain range, where Omar was born – don’t​ ask me the name, I already forgot where I am. We filled our bottles with water, put the tagine’s pan in a plastic bag and got a shared cab for 10 kilometers. We weren’t less than 6 in the car. In the middle of the mess, I dropped my reading glasses. Apparently, I’ll have to write with the text editor zoomed in 200% for the rest of the trip. Shit! Half degree of convex lens makes an absurd difference after an hour facing the computer’s screen.

We walked half an hour through the dusty land to a “waterfall”, a big rocky hole with edges beautifully scalped. Going down to the margins was a light climbing exercise. The muddy aspect was kind of disappointing; When Omar showed me a picture from the lake in normal weather and rain conditions, before last flood, with that crystal-clear water, I suspected we were in front a Photoshop joke. But since it was a cellphone picture, I believed.

More than the cold water, the dress code bothered me. Following our host recommendations, I wore pants and long-sleeve shirts (with UV protection) over the bikini. But… you know what? We were alone, why all this drama? I took off the pants and kept the shirt. Until water hit my belly button, Omar kept the most eloquent silence, looking away.

We made fire with some big stones, cut the vegetables and put tagine to cook. Not me, the boys did it. I am lazy to cook. Actually, today the romantic-philosophic breeze hit hard. The two hours tagine took to cook I was laying down between two parallels rocks, pulling out little stones from the “ceiling” and working on my ideas for, let’s say, make the world a better place – while I suffered the interferences of immediate problems, like “what are we going to eat tomorrow?”. I really am a dead cause.

About two hours before the sun left, we kept on walking to Omar’s parent’s house. Now here things started to be amazing. We passed through the inside of a slimy valley. Such amazing curves, such amazing rock formations! Many pictures were taken. We followed on a sandy flat land, splashed with bushes. Sky was setting to a huge rain, in my interpretation, but our Moroccan friend thought it wasn’t going to rain. Just a few drops felt. I did all the way few steps behind them. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts – it was making me too serious, but, how to escape from yourself?

Before reaching a mud house, we stopped at the family’s garden to eat figs. Funny thing. In my grandmother house in Minas Gerais, there is a fig tree three times bigger, but I think I have never eaten fig from the tree, peeling the milky skin with my own hands. People always told me figs milk burned. Our tradition is to make the laborious fig candy (that I have never learned and never will) and only then eat it.

Omar’s family reception let me more hablante. As soon as we jumped the mud wall, they ​ ​ came to salute us. The boys had to get in the house through the left door, that leads to the living room, and I entered the house through the right door, that leads to the kitchen. In there I met Omar’s sister and his brother’s wife, two beautiful ladies of twenty-and-few years old. As someone offering chocolate politely, I offered myself to help making couscous. They tied up a scarf in my head and an apron in my waist. The laugh of my disastrous way of removing the carrot core (why to remove the carrot core, for Christ sake?!). Omar, that had just passed the kitchens door, came to rescue me. “I’m just a man and I’m trying to teach you how to cook… I can’t believe”, he provoked, with sarcasm. I let the food cooking and, after invited, went to sit down on the living room to have some tea and eat almonds.

I took the opportunity to take a shower. By the way, what an amazing bathroom! Everything filled with colored tiles. The toilet is on the entry, a hole on the ground surrounded by a porcelain structure, Turkish style. The flush is a water tap and a little buked.

In one of the corners of the bathroom, there’s another water tap, where cold water comes out. Underneath it, there’s an enameled pan, embedded on the floor, with… surprise, hot water! The explanation is: behind that wall there’s a huge wood oven, that heats water and also heats the floor where you step to take a mug bath. The old and good Roman style. Almost a steam room.

To cook the vegetables until it almost undo itself is almost law in Morocco, so there was still time to visit his uncles before eating time. It was one of those mud houses with stained walls and glass windows reverberating the young boys laugh and noisy conversation of the oldest ones. There were so many relatives in the Moroccan hall, a simple and cozy one, that if I had to point out who’s is who’s bother, cousin, uncle and mother, it would be an epic shame. I remember his grandmother, haughty in her many years, center of attention and respect. She greeted me with a kiss on my hand.

Omar translated our story to Arabic and talk back in English the avalanche of questions. Someone wanted to know if Brazil was in Europe. I told one of my grandparents’ farm stories. I don’t know if they were amazed with the resemblance or with the fact that there’s a snake 10 meters larger or more – here they even say phyton is an anaconda.

I’m glad Omar’s mother arrived and disperse the conversation, otherwise we would have drunk another super-sweet teapot – did I say already that Morocco has many cases of diabetes due the excess of sugar in their drink?

Finally, Couscous! It came to the little plastic table smoking, in a round mud bow that had no less than half meter diameter. Over the yellow semolina, all loose, it came the cooked vegetables. Underneath them, right on the center, the meat (chicken, in this case), the last thing you eat, when eating tagine or couscous. We received a piece of bread and got to work! Each one eats in a corner of the bow, without taking from others portion. For dessert, the sweetest grapes in the world! Seriously, I have never tasted such sweet grapes as the Moroccan ones. I’m even healing from my chocolate addiction.

Something, someone was missing on the table… where was the girls? Not even Omar’s sister, not even his sister-in-law ate with us. I confess it wasn’t with little astonishment that, when I took the dishes to the kitchen, I faced both of them sharing the couscous in a little plate. How can it be that the cookers of our delicious dinner couldn’t sit with us on the table? Is this that feeling that many foreigners feel when visits Brazilians countryside families and see that the housekeepers sleep in their bosses’ houses and are called “part of the family”, but are prevented from sitting on the table to eat the dinner they prepared, along the others?

Bed time. But who said anyone wanted to go to bed? I started to show pictures of my trips to the family and there it goes the sleep! Even the girls came to meet Machu Picchu and Australian beaches through the computer screen.

“Is this a mosque?” No, it’s Taj Mahal, in India. This is a Mosque. It is in Bosnia, a country mostly composed by Muslims. “And where is Bosnia?” In Europe. “Europe?!” Shame I couldn’t understand Arabic to be able to translate the noise that they’ve made.

Midnight arrived, too late to someone that is used to go to bed at ten and start working hard on the ground before the sun appears. Me, Aron and Omar had to accommodate ourselves on the small mattresses in the living room. Before that, I finish writing this exhaustive lines, completely incomprehensible for my host’s sister, that follows the slide of my agile hands over the keyboard with an indescribable fascination in her black eyes. This twenty-and-few years old lady, that couldn’t complete her studies simply because she’s a woman.

August 31th ​

If only I knew how the last day of august would end… maybe I’d make all September days the same!​ We woke up in the middle of the night to come back to Outat el Haj in time to meet another village in the middle Atlas. The transportation was little in the early afternoon, and all we could do was to wait.

Watching the minivans shaking the peasants from the village to downtown and vice-versa, took my mind back to the chicken buses of Central America. Cars that doesn’t fit the citizens of wealthier countries cut the dusty road loaded of provisions, burlap sacks and families of big hands and cracked feet inside. Instead of cumbia and reggaton, the drivers of Atlas prefer to hear verses of ​ ​ the Koran and, although the heat vibrate in similar frequencies this and the other side of Atlantic, female, male and infantile bodies are considerably more covered in here. If me, tied hair and short-sleeve shirt, almost get sick in this few airy boxes (by the way, they closed the windows and curtains when we passed through a blitz), I can’t even imagine what goes on people’s covered heads by hijabs and turbans. It’s a lot of physical resistance to my standards. The rides, the comfort of reclining seats, air conditioning and friendly drivers that offers food and water frequently had let me in clear natural selection disadvantage.

We would have to face one of these vans for about 40 minutes to meet one of the most picturesque village of the region. The next van wouldn’t leave in less than 1 hour and a half and probably would be the last one of the day. How would we come back to Outat? Excellent question – and we didn’t care about it. We killed some time in another coffee shop with wi-fi. Aron was checking his messages, while me and Omar dove in a complex discussion about machismo. Women should also change their behavior, according to our friend. In his family, for example, if some man wants to cook his grandmother, which is the family boss, hardly would see the attitude in a good way.

The village, which name got lost in my memory as much as its streets in Moroccan map, it’s really special. I’ll stop the description here, otherwise you take the risk of thinking that you are reading about the most fantastic place on earth. According to my Dutch friend, I’m dazzled and I think everything is beautiful. Maybe. The fact is that the imminence of a storm gave sky a powerful contrast with the mud houses, the blue cracked windows and those mountains more irregular then the scratches of my 3 years old niece. Not to mention the kids laughing and following us through the tight streets just to say good-bye and scream “bonjour mademoiselle!”. How not to feel like ​ ​ Carla Bruni? By the way, she and other residents has very different features than the what I am used to see in Morocco. Lighter skin, almond eyes, sometimes green, beautiful smoother hair. Some people say that the village people has a French influence. Some people say this is taboo, but the truth is that many women were raped by French people in the occupation years.

Below the gorge of little houses, a mighty river flows, all crystal and green-water, that… okey, I promised not to go on with the description. I just need to say that the water flowed fresh ​ from the mountains in a metal nozzle, under the twigs of a fig tree. The dictionary makers should take a picture of that place and place it in front of the verb “bucolic”. It wouldn’t be needed to say anything else.

It’s simply fantastic to take few mature figs, wash it on the cold water and eat it. The liquid flowed so fresh, but so fresh, that we used it to cool the apples and the grapes we had in our backpacks. We put the fruits on the water and, while we ate bread with sardine for lunch, they got like they’ve just left the fridge.

I confess: this round-n-round talking was intentionally built to make you think that everything was nothing more than an innocent day on the mountains. And probably it would have been, if it wasn’t the dangerous combinations of adverse conditions and adventurous spirits – not to mention clueless.

We tried everything to get a van to come back to Outat. We called the driver that took us and promised to pass by later that day, but he gave up. The rain got worst and we refuge in Omar’s friend’s hostel.

The balcony view was breathtaking. Even with the blurry from the storm, the horizon delineated mines curves and chains of sharp peaks, the kind we don’t see in Brazil. Over the table, guess what, a bunch of Moroccan tea popped up with sugar cubes. Our host raised the silver teapot almost a meter above the little table (no kidding!) and turn the dark liquid over the little glasses. What an aim! After that he returned the teapot to the silverware, to mix the sugar well, he repeated the ritual.

We shared the effusion with one the hosts, a Spanish guy from Melhila. Like Ceuta, Melhila has a curious situation. Both cities belong to Spain, but they are in Morocco territory. Our tea partner told us that everything is different in there, “there’s a movie, disco bar, bars that sells beer all around”. In the beginning of the conversation I’ve asked if he was Moroccan. He answered yes.

Rain stopped a little and we came back to the village exit. No sign of transportation. Some residents gave us the phone of a van owner. We called him and the man said he would be there in one hour. Not bad! We stopped underneath a tree to have the protection of the depleted branches and for the proximity of a 4x4 car. We had hope that the owner would come back soon and would give us a ride.

We waited more than an hour. We didn’t see the owner of the 4x4, nor the van owner, even less another ride. When answering our call, the van driver said he would have to take some bees (!) downtown and would only reach us around midnight. Wroth, Omar threatened the man saying that he would make a complaint in an association of transportation, to which he answered with a fuck you and he wouldn’t take us, not even midnight.

The only transportation we saw was a donkey with technically positioned buckets of hay on its back, guided by two man and a woman, until the donkey’s face wasn’t more than a little grey point on the yellow mountain. A bucket of hay was left behind, apparently super heavy, and that wouldn’t fit over the donkey anyway. The men fit it over the woman’s shoulder and kept going downhill, both with empty hands.

“Can you see who’s their other donkey?”, Omar sounded mad.

We were clearly few minutes behind clarity. What to do? My Moroccan friend didn’t want to spend the night away from home, and my Dutch friend preferred to wake up early and keep hitchhiking and none of us had money enough to pay one more night at the hostel. We cogitate knock on random doors and ask for shelter, when I had a revolutionary idea, genius, effectively never tested before in history of humanity.

“Let’s go walking! If a car or van pass by, we make a hand sign and they will stop”.

“Walk?! It’s 20 kilometers only to the main road. What if we don’t get anything?”, Omar didn’t like the idea much. “This is four, five hours walking. For me, it’s ok”, my Dutch friend commented. Above all differences that makes Aron and me almost two opposite poles, a similarity makes us great travel partners: that sparkle in the eyes when it comes to adventure and to go through a hard time.

We started to go down the gravel and mud ramp, in a hurry to cross the bridge before the river volume increased too much. How not to remember the death of Alex Supertramp, in John Krakauer narration?

The excitement of the first minutes soon became silence in the hurry pace of our host. Omar seemed not to believe. “This guys really want to walk all the way back, in the dead of night?” As for me and Aron… more the moon outline showed up, more scandalous the laughs, more strident the singing. Yes, the singing! After telling scary stories in the half-light – the kind of stories that oldest people love to tell in Minas, just to scary the kids, I filled the dark hours absolutely entertained in singing. I sang every kind of music, grunge to samba, and nothing, no one could make me shut up. Aron followed me in the songs he knew and laugh of my tuning. “Where do you take so much energy from?”, he asked. Omar faked a complaining and asked Aron if there was no way to make me stop. But as soon as I stopped to rest my vocal chords a little, a rain of musical requests came “Can you sing Hotel California? And that one from Beatles?”

From song to song, we won the 20 kilometers in a blink of an eye and reached the main road. There was a concrete home right on the edge of the road. We thought about spending the night there, but the place stink so much that we couldn’t even pass through the door. Omar decided to face the stink to be protected from wind. Me and Aron inflate his little mattress that barely fits a person. We throw it on the edge of the road, half meter the hot asphalt, so the light of any car that passed by us woke us up. Each one of us occupied half the mattress with our tired bodies, and rolled up the way we could with what we had of clothes. In my case, a scarf.

I slept like a stone. I have no idea for how long. Maybe two hours. I remember waking up facing those little stones that get loose from the asphalt, the wind and the lights of a car. Fuck, where the hell am I? I looked around to recognize the territory. I faced that huge starry sky. Oh, wow! I’m here on my own, just taking a nap on a lost road of Morocco. What an amazing life! Thanks god for this peaceful and tranquil sleep!

We kept that way, awaken, maybe over an hour. Omar was beaten by the stink and joined us on the external lateral of the casita, our silver shield against the big wind. Two, three cards passed ​ ​ by, to the direction we had to follow. We crossed the road running and did all possible signs to hitchhike, help, S.O.S. Didn’t work. Around midnight, maybe 1 a.m, a minivan showed up from the gravel road that we had traveled on foot. The driver brought hives and more hives, filled with bees. We squeezed inside the van with three other men. I don’t remember anything else. I put my head on Aron’s shoulder and, one more time, slept like a stone.

September 1st ​

We started our work on the road soon. Before we left, Omar prepared a delicious omelet with olive oil,​ in which we “steal” from the frying pan with a long bread crushed between the fingers. We left about 40 reais to cover the spending with food. We knew our hold wasn’t in a very comfortable financial situation and he had always fed us. I left the towed house happy to know about the existence of an intelligent young man, with energy and will of change. We said goodbye with a hug.

A smooth walk took us to the exit of the city. Aron found it with the tablet that never leaves his hands. Fantastic to have someone taking care of the logistic and location – mainly if you are completely lost, like me. By the way, I don’t even know how can I travel so much. I don’t even know how I could survive in China. Anyway, today lucky was on our side – at least that’s what looked like.

We got a ride straight to Midelt and did, in one ride, almost half of the 350 kilometers to our next destination, Tinejdad. If I were alone, probably I wouldn’t have stayed in the blue cabin of this truck half an hour. The driver was really weird and in an awful mood. We didn’t speak any language in common, not even sign language. Passing by a blitz, he wanted to tell me to put my feet over the seat (I don’t know why). Instead of showing me the movement with a gesture, he simply hit my ankle and hit the other seat. That would be the moment where I would have asked to get off the car and stayed there, wherever it was, like I do when I feel uncomfortable. Travel with another person increases my security feeling, and the feeling of responsibility for others.

We were left on a gas station. The man asked us if we had money (in French, English and hand signs). We said no. It was the first time a truck driver gave me ride and then asked me money. When he was walking back to his truck (he came down with us) he took a look in our luggage, trying to find out what we were carrying. He found a chicken-shaped keychain hanging on Aron’s backpack, a plastic shitty thing that had a lantern on it, with no monetary value, but very symbolic to my friend, for it was a gift of a family member, some kind of travel amulet. The man simply pulled off the keychain and said “my souvenir”. It was a huge mess to recover the little chicken. ​ ​

Next to the road two man was selling apples. We bought a big plastic bag full of apples for 3 reais, and threw the backpacks on the asphalt. Before the third bite, a 4x4 had already stopped. The driver was a very polite language teacher, if I’m not mistaken, and also high school principal. His friend was also the top of the politeness.

I had a purple scarf around my head, that the women of Omar’s home gave me. On the six or seven Arabic countries I’ve been to, I’ve never had to leave on the streets using hijab (just to enter mosques) and I never felt pressured to do so. However, around here, and around other places where women also cover themselves, like India and Nepal, I love to throw a scarf over my head. This is one of my favorite methods to hide from the sun (I hate clarity and hot weather) and here I can walk freely with a pashmina shawl over my eyes with no one pointing the finger to me, like I was an ET.

Why am I talking about the scarf? Because I made the mistake of keep it tied around my neck, plus the shirt, plus the long-sleeve t-shirt, even inside the car, with doors and windows closed, air-condition almost-working and a hell heat. My blood pressure, that was already dropping, plummet. Thanks god the men spoke English and the social interaction was on Aron’s shoulder. I put my sunglasses and shrink on a corner.

When I was about to ask them to stop the car so I could throw up, the driver stopped in front of a school where he taught to deliver some papers. I explained the situation to my friend and he mixed a hydrating powder with water and gave it to me. It made me feel better.

The teacher left us in another gas station. He was so gentle that he came down and unloaded our backpacks from the trunk. I thank him and ran to the bathroom, to throw water on my nape. The desire to vomit went away.

In a little restaurant on the gas station, many tagine pans smoked on the gas stove. We had to reach Tinejdad until 5:30 p.m, when the last van leaves to Yassine village, our next host from Couchsurfing. Since it wasn’t even 1 p.m and we were a little over 150 kilometers from our destiny, ​ we allowed ourselves to eat calmly. The big pan of lamb tagine costed us 15 reais. Some kind of thin pepper was the cherry on the cake, right on the top of the vegetables cone.

“You can eat it, if you want, I don’t like it”, I said.

“Hmm!”

I thought his eyes was going to jump from his face. The pepper was bigger than my hand and he hadn’t eaten less than half of it. He still tried to chew the vegetables, before spiting it on the plate, almost in tears.

Is there a bigger sign that our luck on the road had ended?

We were completely stuck on the exit of the gas station. The car movement wasn’t that strong and those who passed by didn’t stop. The clock was reaching 4 p.m. Our host send us an SMS, saying he was already waiting for us in Tinejdad, where we would grab the van to his village.

“Time won’t be enough”, Aron commented.

“Well… lets explain the situation to him and see which van we have to take. Worst scenario, we set the tent in Tinejdad and keep going tomorrow morning”.

Aron agreed. Immediately a brand-new car stopped. The driver went down smiling and helped us to put our luggage on the trunk. It was another teacher, a math one. Since he spoke little English, it was on me to do the social talking, which I did really badly. I didn’t want to talk and the man talked with the most forced sympathy. I answered even more forcedly. Half an hour later, we felt on the comfort of the silence.

It was over 5 p.m when my friend reminded me a little detail: our clocks was adjusted according to the official morocco time, that had advanced one hour couple of days before. However, most of the villages still set the time according to the “local time”, with an hour of advantage to us. We will make it, we will make it!

Just to add a tension, the driver stopped 5 p.m local time to pray turned to the Mecca, on a mat extended on the edge of the road. We arrived in Tinejdad with less than 5 minutes missing. The driver wanted to charge us, but, fortunately, we repeated that we were hitchhiking and he gave up his mind. Between a cab offer and another, we found Yassine, another smiling host. We ran to the minivan. We had to wait half an hour on the condensed human heat because a woman from the village that went to Tinejdad to go to the doctor still hadn’t finished the consult. Not even the drivers, not even population thought about coming back and leaving the woman alone in the city. Everyone waited with patience.

After a long hour shaking on the van, we arrived in Yassine’s house, that was in a Amazigh village, one of these precious stones that Atlas hides and protect. The Amazigh or Berber (name given from colonizers in reference to “barbarian”) are the dominant ethnicity in morocco. They speak Amazigh, which is very different from Arabic and became, not long ago, one of the official languages, after years of persecution. Actually, there are many variations of Amazigh, dialects, for some people, sometimes people from a tribe don’t understand other people’s tribe language. They live in morocco and other north Africa countries for thousands of years, way before the Arabic arrived.

To open that little iron gate was like exploding a bag of laugh. Yassine simply has the cutest nephew of the universe! The delicious little laughs follow his torn, black and aware eyes, highlighted by circumflex eyebrows. The dark three years old body, swing one way to another to the smallest sound. Apparently music is the soul of Amazigh.

Sorry, I almost forgot to present the rest of the family. Yassine lives alone with her mother, a beautiful advanced lady and with penetrating black eyes. When she lay down to kiss my hand as a sign of welcome, I could see more clearly the tattoo that separates her chin between right and left, like an irregular line. My friend said that, when Arabic invaded north Africa, they started taking the Amazigh virgins to the Arabic peninsula. After violating them, they send them back with a tattoo in their chin. To confuse Arabian men and scape kidnaping, the Amazigh virgins started to make tattoos like the victims.

Let me go on, because we have more people to present: I hugged Yassine’s brother’s wife, a big and smiling woman, mother of the smiley little boy and two teenagers. Maya, 19 years old, is the oldest daughter. This super smart Biology and Physics student surprised us with her scientific knowledge and her desire of learning languages. She was on college vacations and was spending some weeks on the grandmother’s home.

Before such spiritual wealthy, I perfectly understand that you might have seen the scene happening in a palace from Arabian Nights. But everything happened on a cement yard, next to a small orchard where the family unroll their mats and blankets and spend the night. There is a shed in each edge of the land. The closest one has three kitchens and three rooms, basically with no furniture. On the other side, there’s a long hall, with a beautiful black and blue Moroccan couch. Next to it, there is a stable of goats and sheeps. On the other corner, the bathroom – a hole on the ground to make your needs and a water tap next to it, where water that gets out to clean the needs and take shower.

Guess which one of the room they reserved for us? The most beautiful one, the Moroccan hall. Here on the corner I’ve counted the wood windows, painted blue a long time ago. All I can think about is sleeping and waiting the first sunlight to come and tell me what is there on the other side of the wall.

September 2nd ​

I woke up just like some clothes in my backpack: all crumpled and messed. I was feeling lazy to get up,​ but since that was the last day on Yassine’s house I made an effort. Aron wanted to adventure in unexplored mountains (by foreigners) and I wanted to take pictures of little mud houses and observe the modus operandi from the washerwoman on the river. Fortunately, Yassine ​ ​ chimed in, inviting us for breakfast and with the complete day schedule ready. Aron hates people telling us what to do. I also don’t like having people choosing for me, but the man was born and grew in the village.

We set over the mats around the low plastic table. On the center of the table, the woman put rounded-breads, black olives and dates. Everyone had already eaten. On my side of the table, a line of olive lumps was setting. On Aron’s right side, a line of date lumps was gaining volume.

“In here we notice how identical we are” – my friend doesn’t miss an opportunity of being ironic, or laughing.

We walked on a huge stone valley, it looks like those sidewalks that waits a paving promise on election time. Both sides, a bunch of rows of medium-sized palm trees, full of dates. Before we got there, we passed through the “old village”, which is where people lived in 19-something. Some houses still have shooting marks from French people from (neo)colonial times. The Amazigh says, proudly, that their land was the last one to be conquered by Arabs and later by the French. Anyway, the reason people moved to slightly more modern (and less interesting) houses was purely a matter of populational growth, according our host.

I was thrilled from walking between the high mud walls smashed with stones, completely abandoned, with those cracked-wood windows. Like I told Yassine, I felt between pre-Colombians ruins in company of an Inca that survived everything.

We did a light and pleasant track through the opposite margin of the valley. I knew we had to swim in some hole, so I was already with my bikini and a wettable suit on top, but not in the most absurd dreams I was expecting the paradise that appeared between the frivolous foliage of the palm trees.

What is this rounded swimming-pool of turquoise water? And this ocher canyon, with panoramic view to a date valley and oven-bird houses? And these two, ten, twenty men of filled out abdomen? Would it be heaven? A harem?

As usual I was the only woman. If I was cold after diving, someone offered me a towel. If I was thirsty, someone brought me fresh water. They set around me on the border of the swimming-pool and played an invented music that mixed Spanish and Amazigh. Later they made a line to take pictures with me. I called Aron and said:

“Look, I don’t know what I’ve been doing of so good in this life, but God decided to give me the 40 virgins earlier”.

“Oh you, Kívia…”

Unnecessary to mention that I wanted to spend the rest of the trip on my private harem. The ​ ​ entry is full of temptations. But since I’m always curious to know what will be my next temptation, I always move forward.

We keep going upward. We stopped on Yassine’s friend camping and ate tagine, as usual. The plastic table was strategically fit under a olive tree, with view to the swimming-pool that, from far away, became a magic turquoise oasis, (des)harmonized with the arid curves of the horizon. In Minas we have the perfect phrase to this kind of place: what a beauty!

We went back to the asphalt and took a van to a village right on top of the Medium Atlas. Yassine said that some redhaired people lives in there and, by local suspicion, they would be descendent of Scots. I remembered seeing in the van a beautiful torn up eyes, redhaired girl.

If the first village was heaven, this is Xangri-Lá! What a place! The crystal water sprout from the bigger mountain and flowed like liquid diamond between terracotta houses and green corn plantations on sundecks. Not to mention the kids laughing here and there. The higher place, with panoramic view of the village, is to rub your eyes off! It looks like a painting. This time, I remember well the name of the village, but I won’t tell not even under torture! It could easily become one of the most touristic places of Morocco – and this is the last thing we want.

In the absence of transportation, we came back on foot. We were lucky to get a ride with a political propaganda car (next week is election time in Morocco) and we arrived before sunset, exhausted – at least me.

I took a mug bath and went to show the pictures and videos of the day to my family, while tagine cooked on the stove. It was a party! I felt asleep in a rate of happiness that you cannot calculate.

September 3rd ​

Aron’s time to be sick. We are not talking about a small headache or some twinge on the stomach.​ Three a.m he was hugging an aluminum bucket on the floor, puking his guts out. He woke up with no conditions of leaving the couch, let alone hitchhiking. We spend another day in Yassine’s house.

“No problem, you can stay as much as you want”, our host pronounced.

I could spend another super-pleasant afternoon in my harem, but I was hurt on my Achilles’ heel: extreme heat sensibility. In the morning, me and Yassine went to a little market to buy yogurt, toilet paper and water for Aron – he decided to substitute filtered water for mineral water, and toilet paper is not exactly a first-need product on Moroccan rural houses. Before the third step, I already was with my cotton scarf enrolled on my head, with a strategic piece falling over the forehead to make a shadow. On our way back, I greased my face with solar filter for the second time. It was unbearable!

I took the afternoon to treat photos and to spend some time with my host’s family, sometimes laying down on the carpet on the cold floor, sometimes under the huge pomegranate tree on the orchard. By the way, do you know how to say pomegranate in Arabic? “Roman”.

The communication with the family was based on gestures, except with Aïsha. Unlike than the last two days, this afternoon, she wasn’t using a scarf over her head. As usual, her black eyes were strongly eye-lined and a sweet perfume escaped her neck. I asked her to show me what she was using. Happily, she got inside one of the rooms and came back with a liquid eyeliner and a colored little can. I was in doubt if it was hairspray or whipped cream, but it was the perfume. She asked me to close my eyes, pressing them, and, at once, she eye-lined the two lines of eyelashes of an eye. It was the same method from the Syrian girls I’ve met in a refugee camp in Jordan. The thing almost get you blind, but it works!

With the heat truce at the end of the afternoon, I went for a walk with Yassine. We came back to the stone valley, considerably more crowded. The cinnamon little wall that extended on the opposite margin, under the date palm trees, looked like the plazas of countryside cities in Brazil: full of noisy teenagers, making music and dating – here, in a subtler way. Boys were the majority, but we saw some girl groups and some couples walking together here and there, without touching themselves.

Approximately 10 boys gathered around a guembri, one of the most interesting musical instruments I’ve ever seen. It looks like a narrow guitar, rectangular, with three strings and no opening over the leather piece that covers the frontal part. Unplanned, the musical instrument was even more interesting. The box was an enameled bowl, with an irregular leather piece stretched over the edges. They fit a red metallic pipe, in one of the sides of the bowl and it became the fingerboard. The three strings were three pieces of twine and pin to attune them, three pieces of pencils. The musical instrument owner was 11 and guaranteed that he made it all by himself, without any help from adults.

Ahead on the valley, the date palm trees thickened, the incidence of almond and olive trees increased. Yassine said that each family owned a piece of that land. I missed the fences, but he said it was normal, each family knew which date palm tree was theirs and which was the neighbor’s. On the right season, the family harvest just the olives, dates, almond that belongs to them. What is left is commercialized on the markets or trade with neighbors. The community life sense is strong in here. Everybody knows each other, visit each other, help each other. It creates a strong support link, but also lacks too much on privacy for my standards.

For how long the Atlas villages will survive, following this community model, we don’t know. On Yassine’s village, children and teenagers are heard everywhere, but there are few adults, specially men.

“Looks like everyone is leaving to work in the cities”, I observed.

“Exactly! There’s no work here. When someone gets married and wants to have better conditions, they go to Fés, Zagora, Midelt. I only came back to be with my mother, because she was alone”.

“I see. Another thing I observed is that in every city I go to in Morocco there’s a lot of mosques, sometimes more than schools, but I didn’t see any in here. Don’t you have any?”

“Mosque? Oh, yes! There is one ahead, but it’s always empty. Do you want to see it?”.

It was about 7 p.m when we stopped in front of the small minaret. The big arc door was partially open. Over the stamped mats, a group of five or six men was apparently reading and discussing the Koran.

We came back home by the night fall. Aron was better, but he still couldn’t eat right or do any other thing. To fight boredom, I rescued a quick memory from when we arrived the village, a small group of people playing pool. Was that a mirage?

“Hey, Yassine, is there any place in here to play pool?”

“There’s a bar with billiards. Do you want to go?”

Looked like the people from the bar had never seen a woman in their lives. Or at least not a foreigner, at the bar and playing pool. Before I arranged the ball’s triangle on a corner, I could already count 20 heads from teenagers in the audience. There wasn’t a single piece of the wall in the small precinct that wasn’t being used of backrest to the spectators. The situation was so critical, that was impossible to do a shot without colliding with an Allah’s son. Yassine lost his patience and kicked out the boys, which concentrated behind the large entry door.

You know how it’s when there’s a crowd on the street; the more people stopped, the more people will stop to see what’s going on. The smallest ones jumped over the other’s shoulders to see, sometimes me, sometimes Yassine missing an unmissable play. All I’d do was to aim, and the silence would settle. To hole an easy ball was reason enough to a round of applause and whistles. To hole a ball with zigzags and corporal movements was enough to hysteria, the classic soccer game way. Surreal! At the end, there was only the black ball, that my friend holed. Here you play according the European rules. The last ball is the black one, not the number one. It is on the pool during all the game and if you hole it before the end, you lose. I just realize the size of the audience when we passed through the crowd to come back home. If I had sold tickets, possibly I’d have money for the rest of the trip.

September 4th ​

Sometimes people ask me if it’s not hard to see so many beautiful craftwork and don’t buy it all. It’s not.​ Even if they are super cheap, I think about the extra weigh on the backpack and the desire goes away very fast. What is hard is to leave people behind. I gave Yassine’s nephew a sweet kiss on his cheek and tried to immortalize the scandalous little smile on a picture. The truth is: we get used to not look back. Life on the road, the lightness that the constant movement demands, cannot sustain the attachment weigh – to things or to people.

We came back to the same dusty road that brought us. Van to Tinejdad or a ride? Whatever comes first. An old truck stopped, with a caw and its owner on the back. Smiley, the driver opened the bodywork wood cap and helped us to jump in. On the sharpest curves, we weren’t sure if we hold the rolling backpacks, the badly tied cow or ourselves. The hay flew more than silk scarfs on the clothes line. Later, in the shower, I took off grass even from the panty. In a certain inaccurate moment, the jiggle stopped a little and I could sit. I just remember seeing the cow raise the tale in a weird way. Or is it about to…

“Aron, look out!”

I’m glad we had time to take away the backpacks. With the amount of shit that this cow spawned I could plaster green half of my clothes.

The driver delivered our little friend and its owner in a little farm, and left us downtown without mentioning money.

Tinejdad was emptier and messier than a ghost town. It was Friday, election day in Morocco. Few touristic coffee shops opened (without tourists) and the wind spread garbage and dust on the streets. Where is everybody? Are they so excited about politics that everyone went voting? And vote in here is not even mandatory… judging by the comments we heard so far, I’d say they’re all eating couscous, drinking tea, watching Indian or Turkish novel, doing anything but voting. Even though a lot of Moroccan went to the streets in Arab Spring and got a lot of social reform, constitutional reform included, the discouragement with the political process is in an intensity that not even Brazil has. The youngest, mainly, talk about the vote like a mere confirmation of pre-orchestrated schemes between groups of power, to which they are powerless.

We had two overpriced sodas on a hotel’s coffee shop, just to use the internet – that wasn’t working. All we had left was to cross the western scenario and find the exit of Tinejdad, wherever it was. At least we were just 150 kilometers away from our next destination, Tamellalt, the fabulous valley of Dadès river. The ultra-famous Todgha Gorge is slightly out of our route. We really wanted to visit it, but we didn’t know how to.

The first or second car that passed by us was from a fancy blue (don’t ask me the model, please). The kind of car that never stops for you anywhere in the world, except Morocco. The boy that was with the driver got out of the car so smiley and willing to help that my first reaction was saying in French that we needed a ride and we had little money. He almost felt offended. “Yes, yes, I know. Get in, be welcome”, he answered in a French three times better than mine.

The boy is an engineer, he studied in France and is looking for a job in Morocco. He travels with his uncle to… guess where to? Our destination! Is it good enough to you? No? So keep following: they were nice enough to leave the main road and drive another half-an-hour just to show us Todgha Gorge! It’s a huge canyon, cut by a emerald river and by the road itself. If you are not a climber this is the kind of place you see in 15 minutes and start asking “okay, now, what can we do here? Eat in that inflated restaurant over there?”

How come one of the most tourist Morocco places to be the less interesting one? And pretty? The casbá city they’ve shown us on the way to Todgha is prettier! Only the propaganda can explain the lines of cars.

On our way back, we stopped on a typical restaurant, covered in colored tiles, stamped with florals and geometric patterns that Arabian loves – and so do I. We asked a tagine for two, the most expensive so far, 30 reais approximately. Aron wasn’t feeling 100% yet and he barely touched the food.

Back in the car, the boys showed us pictures of beautiful beaches on Moroccan Mediterranean (I prefer Brazilian beaches) and pictures of the hotel they’d be in, an astounding luxurious beauty! Many tiles, arabesque and well-made carpets. We commented “between us” that it wouldn’t be bad to have enough money to be in a hotel once in a while. They said they would pay, both, about 240 reais for the day in. Not bad.

Gently, they left us in Tamellalt downtown. The problem is that Ayyur, our next Couchsurfing host, lived outside the city, somewhere close to the highway, according to GPS. We ​ got rid of the horde of men trying to arrange us a hotel and a cab and we got in a 2 reais minivan, full of people and bags of waste of cotton. We called Ayyu, letting him know of our imminent arrival. In less than 15 minutes, we were at the place indicated on GPS. Hey, wait, but this…

“Aron, but this a hotel!”

“Yes, looks like it…”

There wasn’t time to speculate more. A boy of our age, kind of short, ringed hair thrown on his back, came to our direction with a bashful smile. It was Ayuu. “Hi, and welcome! Come, over here”.

We were led through the huge hall of the hotel-restaurant, full of charming tables, twisted iron chairs and many glass windows with spectacular view to the mountains. The tapestry was loyal to the Moroccan style, with all its miscellany of colors, needlework and lines. Everything was perfectly clean. We crossed a mirrored wood door to a huge square patio. It was two floors, with a lot of doors. Ayyu opened door number one.

Hey, is this a double bed with impeccable cotton sheets? No, it’s two double beds! And this plasterboard lining on the ceiling, full of high-relief, paintings and reasons? Private bathroom, is this real?

“This is your room. I hope you enjoy it”, said our host, leaving us alone. We almost collapsed.

“Aron, are you sure this is for free?”. He was the one who requested our staying on Couchsurfing.

“Well, yes… they have really good references, no one mentioned money”.

“Look! We have a toilet! And toilet paper, shower, hot water… awesome!”

“I know! And we were talking about how great it would be to stretch ourselves in a bed…”

It looked like we had never seen a hotel in our lives. We took a bath and came up to the terrace to meet Ayyu, still wondering if it was everything okay. We started making questions, surprised, while he poured the mint tea in the transparent glasses.

“Are you the owner of this hotel?”

“It’s a family business. When it’s not season period, we have many empty rooms. So I thought: why not host someone that truly needs, make friends?”

We completely agree. It was an adorable sunset, with constructive talks and the weird mountain behind us changing color each second.

“We call it ‘monkey finger’”, explained Ayyu, pointing to the piled of elongated stones that really looked like a bunch of gigantic phalanges.

We ate a Moroccan salad (tomatoes and onions). With no energy, Aron went to bed. As for me and Ayyu, we put two mats under our arms, followed through tights secret passages, walked through the edge of the central patio (so scary!), to the top, under the light of the night and our cellphones. We unrolled our mats on the terrace and set for a toast with a fig distilled stronger than cachaça, that mixed with water it’s not undrinkable. We counted the starts that kept falling, until we lost count and time.

September 5th ​

We woke up tired, feeling kind of weird. We looked for Ayyu everywhere, but he wasn’t nowhere.​ In few minutes, he came back breathless with a plastic bag between his fingers.

“Good morning! Sorry the disappearance. I went to the village by bike to buy eggs to make an omelet, but there wasn’t any. I brought some things for breakfast”.

He unpacked two bottles of yogurt, fresh bread, processed cheese with a little cow on the tag – I always find this cheese in French ex-colonies, like Vietnam. He dropped some olive oil in a little bowl, some jelly sweeter than brigadeiro in another bowl (another habit inherited from French), and everything on a tray.

“So… are we going to pay for this?”, the generosity was such that Aron started to wonder.

“No, no! Can you help me to take the breads?”

In a table, on a corner of the restaurant, at least 10 men were talking seriously in Arabic. They were chief of local councils newly-elected forming alliance, according our Moroccan friend. The rest of the room was empty.

After the eating, I helped with the dishes and ran to the bathroom. The stomachache hit hard! My turn to be sick and stuck in bed the whole fucking day! Unbelievable. I won’t even bother you with the rest of this day, that resume in stomach twinges and an undrinkable “tea” tasting those cheap esfiha condiment, ideal to provoke the run. I could also add a detailed description of the high-reliefs of the ceiling, with the center painted dark blue, pink petals around etc etc etc, bla, bla bla. I could write the meditation and negative thoughts that filled my mind in this tedious day, while I faced the decoration, but… please, who’s interested in that?

Let’s talk about the pictures Aron showed me in the evening. They went exploring those weird rocks from Dades Gorges. Such ravines, Grand Canyon style! Ok, I’m overreacting. But the landscape reminds it a lot.

I ate a little for dinner, a super decent spaghetti made by my Dutch friend, that, like me, was longing for occidental food. Before going to bed, we commented that something didn’t feel right in that place, something was draining our energy. We also talked about Karma and to “discuss the relationship”. Why our hitchhiking plans was crossing again, after a year and a half?

It’s not what you are thinking. Although all beds, dinners and beers we shared, me and Aron never had anything more than friendship, and we are convinced we will never have.

September 6th ​ Holy shit! How to describe it? How to explain? We are here (we don’t know exactly where, to vary),​ completely amazed, in epiphany, nirvana state and etc., repeating to each other that this needs to be shared, but the scene is impossible to be filmed, registered or, mainly, felted by others.

This wind, the effect of the stars and the candle’s light, the euphoria felted with the surprise effect the road gives to madness… how to transmit that? We are two lonely wolves, my friend and I, wandering travelers, sometimes stubborn, with that wild grass protecting what we have of most precious in our spirits. We connect with everyone in 5 minutes, but we rarely allow that others come too close or stays too long. Neither of us is too fan of traveling in group or pair, no matter how experienced the person is, but this time… he was the one that laugh and said: “yeah, I’m glad we are together and this moment is being shared”. For some weird reason, which surpass the voyeurism that corrodes the magazine’s-cover-relationship-type of nowadays, to have an eyewitness and a partner transforms course surprises in pure catharsis. Forgive the sweet daydream. I really got thrilled with these weirds constellations in which we are sleeping under – I mean, will sleep soon, if the light from the trucks that pass by about 300 meters away from our eyes allow us.

We are in a double bed with soft sheets and fluffy blanket, on a terrace of a beautiful living room. The curtains that separates us from the living room is made of such a light cloth, that my cloth knowledge can only compare it with silk, although this one is transparent. In our right, a stairway that leads to I-don’t-know-where (would it be stairway to heaven?) is illuminated by little ​ ​ candles aligned in little mud pots, with the light passing through the geometric and sidereal carvings. How we ended up in here? Long story…

I woke up better and willing to explore Dades Gorges. Our host was also desiring to show me the canyon in which he had been with Aron, so everything would match. It would, but something super-weird happened. As we went down through the sand path of the valley and through those huge stones covered with figs drying on the sun, my energy simply depleted. I wasn’t feeling stomachache anymore, just an irreversible weakness. We stopped in Ayyu’s friend to eat grapes and nuts harvested from the yard. The herb tea should be good for digestion, but, with that amount of sugar, all it did was to reduce my blood pressure to the ground. When we went back under the sun, I barely could raise my leg. I apologize and asked him to come back to the hotel.

I survived the heat and dismantled on the bed. Our plan was to hitchhike that afternoon to any camping in Drá Valley, between Ouarzazate (our next big city) and Zagora (our next destination). In other words, we still had 200 kilometers ahead of us, through mountainous roads, before we could stretch our bones again, probably in our inflatable mattress inside Aron’s claustrophobic tend. Just thinking about that made me twist myself under the sheet, like a dying centipede. My friend waited anxiously for me to get better from my health and spiritual state. About 3 p.m he went straight to the point:

“Kívia, if we want to go today, it has to be now”.

“Nooooo! I don’t want to go back to the road!”

“I looked at the map, apparently, it’s easy to hitchhike to Ourzazate. But if you are not feeling okay, we stay another night.”

“No! I don’t want to stay in here staring this colored ceiling!”

He laughed.

“Hmm, so I think we should pack our things”.

“Damm! That why it hurts me when people call us vagabonds, saying we have an easy life. To hitchhike is a fucking hard profession! Put this people that only knows the temperature of air conditioning under Morocco’s sun and you’ll see what happens”.

More laughs.

Complaining doesn’t fix any problem, but it helps to create courage. We took a minivan to the beginning of the right road. It was an immediate change. My weakness was gone and Aron returned to be the super optimist guy he usually is.

“I don’t know why, but that place really was draining our energy”, he said. I had to agree with my friend.

We didn’t have to wait much. A young smiley engineer with brand blouse, brand glasses, was going straight to Ourzazate. Yeahhh! On our way, he stopped in a little famous town known by its plantations and roses cosmetics. The stores had bath soaps incredibly perfumed. Now that I think about my supermarket discolored bath soap, I deeply regret not buying a rose bath soap.

We traveled the rest of the (amazing) way by the sound of Tomorrowland 2014, that the driver was listening with pleasure. He dropped us in Ouarzazate’s downtown. On Morocco movie capital, all we were interested in was eating. We stopped in a boulangerie and filled Aron’s little ​ ​ backpack with breads. Later we decided we needed real food and we automatically entered in the first restaurant we saw - in this occasion it was a seafood restaurant, apparently expensive. The kind of restaurant we only pass by.

But this time we set without discussions. We ordered a fish dish, fried shrimp and squid, salad, pate with eggplants in oil and an ultra-crunchy French fries portion with Dijon mustard to follow. We ate to death and admitted we couldn’t handle the duo tagine-couscous. We paid 30 reais for everything.

Food ate a precious part of the day and what was left of sunlight time. When we reached a good place to hitchhike, the light poles were already on.

Luckily, a good-vibe man took us to the city’s exit, that seemed even worst to hitchhike. We waited, and waited, and waited… The only driver that stopped wanted money. Actually, an hour later, another man stopped and it’s because of this man that we are here.

He was on a fancy 4x4, with leather seats and Rali Dacar sticker on it, with his young sister. Both of them lived on a small city, half way of our camping. They went to Ourzazate to organize her “wedding papers”. Such a young lady and already getting married… so sad. He seemed to hear my thoughts.

“Weddings are not like it used to be. Before the parents choose everything and the couple didn’t even see each other before the ceremony. Today woman can say ‘I want this husband’ or ‘I don’t like this one’”, he said, out of the blue, breaking the silence. We almost didn’t hear the young lady’s voice.

We stopped in a small and exquisite restaurant on the edge of the road, property of his family. He invited us to a cup of tea (no sugar, yes!) and a bottle of water. Judging by how fast we drained out the bottle, he must have felt sorry for us. Next offer was a place to sleep:

“I have to go to the city with my sister, to our family’s house, but you can stay here”.

“Thank you, but we will try to hitchhike, if it doesn’t work we set up our tend here”.

“No! We have a bed, blankets, everything. Your choice. Come, I’ll show you the place, in case you decide to stay”.

While the man unrolled his keychain, Aron requested my French-English translations to say, again, that we wanted to hitchhike and camp still today! My friend is crazy for nature, but as soon as he reached this stair and saw this outdoor bed with lines of candles disappearing upstairs, he completely changed his mind:

“Hey, why don’t we sleep here, Kívia?”

“What a slut you are! All they need is to offer, and you take it”, I joked, as soon as the man turned the key on the outside. We laugh.

What can we say about this moments? “You know, Aron, life is like this. Sometimes it gives us a lot, and it’s just a trap, like that hotel that seemed perfect, but was draining our energy. If we don’t leave the places, the situations that causes us discomfort, as much tempting it is, we will never have a bed like this, under the stars’ light. We might have what many others want to, but, if it doesn’t fit what we are and what we choose to be, it will only make us miserable.”

He agreed, with that shine on his brown eyes. Night makes me a legit bar philosopher.

September 7th ​ ​

As if it were not enough to take us from the street on the middle of the night, give us tea, water and 5 ​stars hosting, Ali still came back in the morning to give us a ride to Agdz. Before that, we ate the filled breads with vegetables and a lot of orange condiments we bought in Ouarzazate boulange-rie, in which we regretted not buying more than one. ​

Short distance, arid, with more curves than Brazilian sensuality. The imposing mountains, in many tons of ochre, deserved at least 20 pictures. When we arrived, Ali still invited us to a last tea, in a sumptuous friend’s store, that sold tapestry, typical clothing, small and big vases, candle holders, swords, shields, hats, staffs, teapots, well, all kind of bauble you can imagine, but more. Our friend apologized for abandoning us in the middle of the tea and left to arrange the “weeding papers”. His friend wanted to show us his store, “with very accessible prices, nothing to do with the Marrakech prices”. We didn’t want to buy not even a pair of earrings, and, for our relief, he just smiled and wished a safe trip.

We were already on the edge of the road. A calm, cult and almost shine man stopped. To Aron’s happiness, on the backseat, he spoke a good English and both went all the way talking about something I didn’t pay attention, distracted by the scandalous landscape that we were passing by. I just looked back to them when questions and provocations were directly made to my person, like this:

“She wants to get marry, but I don’t”, said my funny friend, probably answering the classic “are you married?”

“Shut up!”

He laughed.

“Oh! So, you don’t want to get married?”, the driver seemed interested.

“Not at all”.

“But why not having a husband?”

“And why having only one man, if I can have many?”

Laud laughs. “Nice, I liked the joke”.

“But it wasn’t a joke, mister…”

Later Aron commented that the man seemed to be gay and I agreed. We tried to picture how it is to be homosexual, married with an opposite sex, national of a country where your sexual preference is a crime and there’s no changing perspective. My god, what a burden!

We left the car in where it seemed to be the heart of Draa river, which is the most scenery landscape in Morocco, according the travel guides. The crystal-clear river cut yellow little-grasses looking like puberty hair, followed by little trees, a string of mountains perforated on the edges and a sky full of perfectly-shaped clouds. Honestly, this is one of the most gorgeous roads where this little body has been to! Not to mention the donkeys’ movement, washwoman, messy kids and veil hitting the ladies’ feet, back and forth. We took not less than 50 pictures each, for sure.

The other ride we took was funny. It was a little truck from a food multinational company, in charge of taking globalization to the most hiding places of Morocco. The uniformed boy, a smiley, tanned and strong man, opened the trunk and accommodate our backpacks over the packages of I-don’t-remember-what. He asked where we have spent the night. When I finished relating yesterday’s epopee, he smiled proud of his compatriot that hosted us: “This is Moroccan!”

The other ride, already in Zagora, was even more funny. Think of a gaudy, thrilled man, squishing his English to the last drop to explain how much he likes to talk with foreigners, how much Morocco is beautiful and that “we love our king”. Immediately, I remember another person that gave us a ride saying: “if you see a Moroccan criticizing the king, you should know he is a very, very brave man”.

Mohammed is a cop and works right on the middle of the desert, in Algeria’s frontier. Speaking in desert, the landscape changed from wine to (lack of) water. The sand clouds forced us to close the windows. The bikers drove with no helmet on, with those 1-meter-longer scarfs (seriously!) rolled in all their faces and neck, looking like they had a wasp box in their head. Just their eyes were out of the amount of tissue and they were covered with those old-style sunglasses. Too much style!

We took the opportunity to ask about their issue with Algeria. At the beginning, we wanted to go by land to the neighbor country and later to Tunisia, but we found out that Algeria frontier is closed since 1992. Both Maghreb giants has wrangles related to drug traffic and to the dominance of Occidental Sahara, land portion that covers almost half of Morocco south and claims its independence. The cop said that, if people came from Algeria with passport and visa, could cross to Morocco. I didn’t believe. I read that there’s a lot of people crossing that frontier illegally.

Mohammed left us on the eye of the small Tagounite, our final destination, with the most effusive handshake you can imagine. While leaving the car, I was careful not to knead the grey uniform that lied on the backseat of the old truck. Something that only who had to iron your own shirt can understand – and I don’t miss it at all.

Out next host, we also contact through Couchsurfing, is Maria. She is from Malta’s island ​ ​ and lives in a date palm farm with Musatafá, her Amazigh companion, and with her 5 years old son. The property was on the middle of the desert, 2 kilometers away from Tagounite. She asked us to contribute with 5 euros a day, each, so they could prepare 3 meals a day. No problems.

Mustafá came to get us on the village, in a black car, drove by a morocco young boy that spoke Spanish. The translucid green eyes caused impact, mainly in contrast with his tanned face and the slightly grimy turban. He could be on a magazine cover!

A super-tranquil Spanish guy named Marcos and a German couple named Nina and Karl was also staying in the big mud house almost without furniture. They were our company to a round of tea with date fruit and melon pieces that was followed by a spectacular sunset behind the mountains.

We are already in Sahara Desert, but the dunes made of slim sand cannot be seeing yet. Tomorrow we will thing about how can we reach them.

September 8th ​

About a year and a half ago, when I felt the liquid gold of Sahara leaking from my fingers, it was clear​ that something magical attracted me to the big African desert. I am anxiously waiting for this reencounter since my Egyptian experience.

We are very close and very far from it. About 70 kilometers separates us from Erg Chigaga, the higher dunes from Morocco, that can be 300 meters high. To get there we need about 5 days on the back of a dromedary (camel) or about 250 euros each, for a tour in a 4x4. We didn’t have time ​ ​ for the first option (Aron needed to come back to Europe) nor money for the second one.

Smaller, Dunes of the Jews appeared as an alternative. It was half an hour away by car, that we could share the cost in 5, paying 10 euros each. Mustafá give us the contact of a driver that was going to get uns 5 p.m to see the sunset. I thought it was too late.

This Dunes have this name because of the many Jews that lived here. By the way, Davi’s people presence in Morocco was remarkable and left many heritages. Their relationship with Moroccan monarchs and with colonizers was kind of conflicting through the centuries. A lot of governors imposed specific taxes not only for Jews, but also for Christians.

Morocco was even home of the biggest Jews community in the Arab world, with th approximately 250 thousand Jews in its peak, on the first half of 20 ​ century. Basically, all medina ​ today has a Jew neighborhood, called Mellah, and many synagogues are still standing. On the 50’s, after Israel state was created, Jews immigrate massively to a new country. A group also immigrate to Brazilian Amazon, during Rubber Cycle. About three thousand Jews still lives in Morocco, mostly in Casablanca. They have the right of manifest and practice their religious beliefs in Moroccan constitution.

Back to the desert, the heat and the dryness were killing us, and this is not a metaphor. 100 meters far from the house, there’s a briny water reservoir, that the family also uses as a swimming pool. I walked to the borderline on the beginning of the afternoon and I thought I was going to faint. I gave up on the dive. I spent the day over a mat on the clay floor of the house, talking to Nina and Maria. Our host told me that, year after year, the region gets dryer and the water, that comes from artisanal wells, more scare.

The boys had gone for a walk through the closest mountains, saying they’d come back in 2 hours. The hours later, they came back all red, sweaty and drinking more water than a camel. We ate a Tagine that Nina cooked (she was learning) and prepared ourselves to go to the Dunes.

The driver was half an hour late. Came all smiley, talking about spending a “magical night” in the desert, under the light of the stars, in a nomad tend, for only 30 euros. The German couple were interested. All the others weren’t. Acting like he had nothing to do, our guide turn on the radio, light up a cigar and kept talking with his friend he brought in the Land Rover. I was shocked. All that came through my mind was that he would do all he could for us to lose the sunset, just to convince us to spend the night at the dunes and stay until the sunrise. I hurried him up hardly and said clearly that we were just going to the tour, if he promised to bring us back on the same day.

“Okay. I’ll just fuel in the city and I’ll be right back”, he said, with no worries. I couldn’t believe. After all difficulties, all rides to reach the desert, to be treated with that disrespect…

The ups and downs on the sand reminded me a road between Jijoca and Jericoacoara, in Ceará State coast. But the sand of dunes at the end of the “road”, this I didn’t see in Ceará! Sahara is really unique!

It’s a shame we arrived when the yellow ball already touched the dunes, that didn’t have any gold anymore. It was fast, intense and beautiful. After a red, orange, purple and pink-aniline aquarelle came, the abstract art of goodbyes under the sky more and more dark. Marcos was jumping and rolling on the dunes like a child. Mustafá’s son followed him and I didn’t want to be out of it. We came back to the car more breaded than chicken steak and with 8 years old.

The German couple were dropped in a nomad tend and we came back home, straight to a “shower”. A barrel of water next to an artesian well was replacing the shower. I dressed my bikini and went to shower with Marcos. We took turns to throw on each other the water heated by the sun, with a plastic bowl. The wind shivered the wet and soaped skin and caused a funny fight over the next bowl of hot water. It wasn’t that bad to take a bath beneath the starts. I dressed Marcos’ shirt and went to change on the bathroom, a hole on the ground between four walls.

Aron wants to climb those mountains close to Marrakesh and I want to go to the coast. We decided that tomorrow we are splitting and we will meet again in two weeks in Essaouira, where I’ll volunteer in a riad (small hotel and with a familiar environment, with a central patio, topical in ​ ​ Morocco).

Marcos travels without plans, he asked if he could join us. Of course! The plan is to leave 7 a.m, the three of us, before the sun gets too strong. We can go 160 kilometers to Adgz together. After that, Aron goes north, while me and Marcos have to keep going another 400 kilometers to Agadir. The road is tortuous and we don’t believe we can make all the way in one day, what makes me feel exited, despite the emotional fatigue of this weekend.

I regretted not going to the big Merzouga desert., mainly now that I know that from there leaves caravans in camels to Sahara’s Dunes for 30 euros, with one night with food and shelter included. I promised myself that one day I’ll reencounter Sahara, still in its Moroccan portion.

The roads stain the farm darkness of white. Unlike yesterday’s night, today we didn’t improvise Berber music in drums and with our legs. Mustafá, and his thunder voice, is tired. We all are. Each one choose a piece of the yard to stretch the mat and, maybe, pull a blanket. They think it’s too hot to sleep inside the house, but not me, not with this wind!

Before laying down, I went to the family’s carpet to say goodbye and to thank for the hosting. Little Chris was watching Pepa cartoon on his mother’s tablet, before falling asleep. I couldn’t stop thinking on the thousand, maybe million, children that watches TV this evening on the living room all over the world. Do they ever played with mud, grazed their knees in a tree, ran from cows and chickens? I’m not a big fan of putting myself on the woods (or on the desert), but I was afraid of cohabit in a world, in a very close future, with a majority of ultra-connected technologic, unconnected from earth and nature.

September 9th ​

There’s nothing like a (good) day of surprises on the road to deal with melancholy. We left our mud ​house along with the sun. The long leaves from date palm tree said goodbye, while we dragged ourselves through the irregular asphalt. It was a very windy night. I woke up with the little wood-window almost breaking in two, after hitting so many times against the board. Marcos rubbed his half-closed eyes, saying that it was impossible to sleep outside.

We walked 2 kilometers to Tagounite. All stores were closed, few fruits tend were in activity. The boys tried to withdraw money, but the only ATM we found wasn’t working. Everyone wanted to sell us a cab run, bus ticket and hotel daily, again. We walked to the city’s exit, and set the “ride spot” under a shadow. The damn sun was already hard-working. Almost no car passed by. We already assumed that this probably would be the most difficult part of the way.

Aron suggested that we set apart. He stayed under a tree and we walked 20 meters ahead. A 4x4 passed by. My friend did a hand sign and nothing. We did a hand sign and the car stopped. Yes! ​ The driver was taking two Italians to Marrakech. They agreed in taking the three of us to Agdz. Yes! ​

The Italians was really, really cool! Two boys on vacation from work, spending some time in Morocco. We went chatting all the way, while Marcos took a nap on the back seat. They told us about the tight itinerary, one day here, another day there, car here, plane there. They said they were envy of our travel style and that they’d like to have more time.

“I’d like to go to Asia, but what cazzo can you do with one month in Asia? Tell me!”, ​ ​ Marcello complained with his hands. He’s an electrician and he’s very proud of the mountains where he was raised, close to St. Moritz, next to a Switzerland boarder. He even invited us to stay in his house.

It was three pleasant hours of trip. We were left in Agdz, on the crossing we’d split. Aron took the road that leads to north and we took the road that leads to west.

Actually, we didn’t even stop on the road. Lazier than a giant sloth (even too lazy to do a better comparison), we stopped in a small restaurant, mostly to sit, but also to eat. We shared a “Berber omelet”, paying approximately 4 reais each. In Atlas, everything is Berber. The omelet, clothing, massage, just to attract tourists. After lunch, we crossed the roundabout that was right ahead and we followed to the west road.

There was no shadow on our side of the road, and no tumbling too (well, if tumbling is a piece of gravel floor, then there was one), but on the opposite side of the road there was a beautiful little tree. Guess what we did? Siesta! We set, no… we laid down under the tree and kept observing ​ ​ the car movements on the roundabout. When someone completed the round and went the direction we needed, we crossed the road again and made a hand sign. Actually, we took turns on this task, such laziness we were in. Sometimes we just kept chatting, forgetting to look the roundabout and some cars just passed straight by us. Just with a miracle we would be able to do the 400 kilometers to Agadir.

I hitchhike to a very beautiful car. It stopped. A young couple was in it, and they’d go 30 kilometers ahead. The lady is a doctor, she used a veil and spoke a perfect French. Her husband was driving. When we arrived, they felt bad for not being able to take us farther, and tried to stop an old truck and ask for a ride for us. It worked! They said something in Arabic and asked us to enter the wood trunk. Another two men shared the place with us. They came down soon, each one in a different spot. I realized they took coins from their pockets. I don’t remember more. Stretched on the floor, I felt on a persistent sleep, waking up sometimes with the shakiness. Such amazing curves, mountains and clouds… was I in heaven or dreaming? I know that with so many complements to the south of Morocco you don’t trust my judgment anymore. But believe me, what a beautiful landscape!

My friend only woke up when the truck parked on a cab square of some small town, that we had no fucking idea where it was. With no GPS, we also didn’t know how to leave the city, how to reach the road, even less if it was to the left, to the right, up or straight on the curve. If you ever find yourself in a situation like this someday, my friend, this is my advice: buy a bottle of water.

After asking a lot, as usual, we reached the road. The movement was good. We took our backpacks off and drank some water. I applied another layer of sunscreen on my face. The asphalt dust glued on the skin gave a delicious exfoliating effect.

We were already alternating between slow running and reverse, when a 4x4 stopped, and we were not even hitchhiking. The driver, a man with glasses and casual clothes, came down and started to clear up the backseat for us.

“Salut, where are you going to?” ​ ​

“To America”.

I swear to God! This was his answer.

“Pardon, where to?!” ​ ​

“To America, United States. And you?”

“Well, we are trying to reach Agadir…”

“D’accord. So, I leave you in Agadir and then I go to America.” ​ ​

“Yeah… so, we are hitchhiking, we don’t have much money…”

“I know, I know. I also traveled a lot hitchhiking in Europe, when I was your age”.

Abdul is simply one of the most interesting person that crossed my road. Surgeon, he worked over 20 years in Switzerland. Later, he said, he got tired of the “money medicine”, that keeps trying to find excuses to do complex procedures, to raise the patient’s bill and health insurance. He came back to the desert where he was born and now he lives alone with his dromedary and his date palm trees. One time, he said, he took a plane to Cuba just to know Che Guevara’s grave.

Now that our way to Agadir was guaranteed, Marcos went from a nap to a deep sleep. The first hour was dedicated to “What do you do in your life? How old are you?”. With creativity and knavery, we tried to set out time and freedom on the same life. Later, just to spice the conversation, we add the most complex of all variable: love. “Oh la la, l’amour!” How to experience love without ​ ​ sacrificing freedom? Which one is worth the most? To laugh and to open the car’s windows so the wind entangles my hair was the answer for everything. I didn’t share words with such a wise person in a long time. It was like we had the same age, we felt like we already knew each other.

It’s hard to believe, but we bypassed Agadir’s entry roustabout still under the (strong) day light. Marcos woke up. Some kind of phobia hits me when I saw so many people, cars and buildings, after two weeks on the mountains and desert. Big cities are really monstrous at first sight.

We went straight to the beach, to see the sun setting on the joint of the flat sea, next to the mountains. In one of those mountains there was a signpost in Arabic that it can be understood in from any part of the world: “God, King, Homeland”.

The beach was a family place, with a little amusement park on the sand and a loud speaker playing child’s songs. The beautiful restaurants along the pavement followed by palm trees reminded me the South cost of California. The scenario occupied the place of Agadir’s Medina, destroyed in 1960 by an earthquake. Everything was too new and fancy for my taste.

Abdul had the irresistible idea of eating fish. We had two options: to sit in one of those expensive restaurants, or to go to the “poor” one, where local population eats. Poor one, for sure!

We bypassed the border, crossed the Italian’s ice cream shops, the imported cosmetics stores and a small commercial center. Turning on the last street was like changing city. A bunch of dirty restaurants gathered ahead scented smoking grills and plastic tables were spread over the sidewalk, infested by skinny cats. We went to the last restaurant.

Abdul asked if we liked sardine and ordered. Later he went to a little water tap on the back, washing his hands like a surgeon.

Three plastic dishes arrived, with a dozen of huge sardines on each dish. We also got breads, olives, and a chopped tomato sauce. With our hands, we removed the white meat from the thorns, as someone that takes hard gelatin out of a mold. Honestly? I don’t remember eating more delicious sardines then that one in my whole life! Abdul ordered another dish, that we shared. When he walked to the “cashier”, we asked how much was the bill.

“Do you want to know?”

“Sure, we will share”.

“5 euros everything”, he said, after paying. I wanted to register our surprise face.

Aron contacted a Belgian in Couchsurfing that could host us for a night. Later, he explained ​ ​ that the plans had changed and said he would call when he reached Agadir.

Elise came by cab, immediately asking for a place to have a coffee and light up a cigar. She asked if we had fire and Abdul said he quit smoking.

“I had stopped too, but Moroccan men makes me smoke”, she said. “One day, my toilet got blocked. I called a plumber and he asked me right ahead ‘where is monsieur?’. There’s no monsieur ​ ​ ​ in this house! He fixed the toiled and then said, ‘say to the monsieur that…’. There is no man in this ​ ​ house! They don’t understand that a woman can live by herself!”.

We laugh a lot.

It’s not every day that we met two people of this kind on the same day. After years working with human rights, Elise choose Morocco to live her retirement. Her children and grandchildren stayed in Belgian. Impossible not to ask why she exchange Belgian chocolate for Maghreb one’s. “Because I love Morocco! For 19 years I come and go from this place. Nineteen years!”

Abdul was gentle enough to take us home. Me and Marcos commented, in Spanish, that it would be fantastic if both matched. Who knows if Abdul wouldn’t change dromedary by the coast ​ ​ or Elise wouldn’t get interested in living between the dunes.

Unfortunately, nothing happened. The only thing that happened when we said goodbye was that I forgot my sneakers in our Moroccan friend’s car. Flip flop is all I have now.

September 10th ​

My God, how great it is to have a good night of sleep! Nomad life makes me value the comfort of a bed​ even more. I don’t even want to get up. We got up late and had breakfast even later. Marcos decided to go to Essaouira, since he had little time before returning to Sevilla.

Elise was very excited, she said that she’d take me where she takes all her “girls”, to hammam! Known as Turkish bath in the south of Spain, where it’s very common, hammam is a type of sauna. Going to a hammam was one of my dream trips, maybe because I’ve tried before, with no success.

Elise gave me a bucket, a plastic bowl, a rubber mat, a sponge (in Morocco, it looks like fluffy socks that you wear in your hand) and asked me to get my bath utensils. Since I wasn’t sure of the dress code, I wore a bikini under my clothes. On the way, Elise bought two big bottles of water with gas. “In hammam, you have to be hydrated!”

It was one of the most anthropologic experiences of my curious career. We paid 20 dirhams, approximately 8 reais, to a boy and got in through the right door, the women door. Let me tell you something, hammam universe is the opposite to its exterior. On the three large rooms, filled with white tiles from the floor to the ceiling, I was the only woman covering the nipples. “Wow, why are you so covered?”, the eyes seemed to ask me. Everyone walked with panties (three times bigger than mine) or naked. We were the only occidentals.

Under Elise’s instructions, first I filled the bucket with cold water and throw it in an empty corner, to clean it. I put my rubber mat on the flood and put my bath utensils next to it. We had left the clothes on a closet. I came back to the water tap and filled the bucket again, this time with hot water. I beat the shame and I removed the top part of the bikini.

I stopped for a while to look around me. There were women of all ages, all sizes and all forms. Even children. I don’t remember seeing anyone with nail polish. They took great care of their hair, but I think if they were in brazil, the quantity of hair creams and treatments would be significantly bigger. Few women shaved her legs and groin with a razor. The floor was intentionally ​ ​ made in “V” form. The hairs had to go somewhere. Some women rubbed other women bodies and hairs. I kept thinking that this physical contact increases the friendship bound.

Two or three women walked around hammam’s room offering exfoliations and massages for money. Elise hired one to rub us. I think my skin changed its color! As she circled her strong hand over my body (sometimes I was facing down, facing her and lying on the side) those black lines of ​ ​ dirtiness left from me. I don’t even remember the last time I had my skin so soft.

After that, we opened the water bottles and we made a toast. I pretended it was champagne and felt like I was rich. On our way back, we stopped to Elise’s sacred coffee. Our conversations were always around women issues. Even with all the problems, my friend feels confident. The current king, Mohammed VI, made important changes, she said, mainly after the rain of protests for more rights and democracy that followed the Arab Spring. Not even 15 years has passed since the Moroccan Civil Right gave women the right to divorce, she told me. Elise also said that there’s a feminist group in the parliament, which has 10% cote for women. Still, it’s not rare the cases of Moroccan women that, victims of rapes, are forced to get married with their rapists. Sometimes self-hurting or suicide cases appears, like Amina Filali, that touched the country in 2012.

As I’ve explained before, Elise could just host me for one night, because on the next day she’d receive visitors, another Couchsurfing member. Hamsa accepted my lodging request. I called ​ ​ him to know where we would meet and he volunteered to get us at home for lunch. We went to a ​ ​ very clean and well decorated restaurant next to the beach. Elise paid me a delicious seafood’s tagine, but not so good as the “poor restaurant” tagine, I must confess.

I left the table feeling that the most interesting people of Morocco are in Agadir. Hamsa had graduated and post graduated in interior design, in France! Behind the strong appearance and serious look was a heart from the size of the world. One time he hosted seven Polish people at the same day on his Moroccan room. ​ ​

When Elise mentioned about having a coffee, he invited us to go to his house, explaining with charm and seriousness, what kind of grains and machine he had. He looked like a super fancy ​ ​ ​ ​ sommelier trying to please VIP clients. ​

We were amazed with the paintings that covered the living room, the kitchen and the space next to the stairs that leads us to the second floor, most of them portraying traditions and typical ​ ​ Morocco characters. The Moroccan room is behind a thick hard-wood door, and it’s filled with tiles ​ ​ in Arab style. After sitting next to a little table on a well-designed garden, next to the swimming pool, Elise was straight to the point: “I think you made a great deal trading Couchsurfing!”. ​ ​

September 12th ​

th didn’t scape September 11 ​ on purpose. I just had a great opportunity to spend the long 24 hours I ​ between​ my double bed with two pillows softer than cats’ paw and the spacious black leathered couch on the living room. I turned on the TV and watched at least 3 movies. I just left my after-hitchhiking-hibernation to eat and to get another three couchsurfers with Hamsa. ​ ​

Jack, Megan and Ruth are British students traveling. Ruth is about to start an exchange in Rabat. They were talking about some Paradise Valley, that was few kilometers away from Agadir. I’ve never heard of it, but when I took a look at the pictures… oh my God, I have to go to this place!

This was how Hamsa made me the first question today, asking me if I’d like to go by car, everyone together, to this amazing place. Of course, man! I can’t refuse an offer like that.

The road wasn’t even close to Draa Valley’s scenic scenarios, but it had its charm. Hundreds and hundreds argan threes spotted green the arid land. I’m talking about the argan oil, those magical drops that appears in hair, face and body creams.

Argan has an historical importance between Amazigh. It’s used as a medicine and on the food. It’s some type of round seed of three centimeters, that you break (with lots of strength!) to get ​ ​ a white chestnut. It’s from this --- that you remove the sacred oil. It’s all handmade mainly by ​ ​ women, around Agadir and Essaouira. Also, around here there’s the Argan forest, endemic in Morocco.

Who passes by here has the feeling that goat grows in trees. I mean it! I counted over 20 goats next to the same tree. With ninja methods (I didn’t have the privilege to see) they climb the highest trees to eat the fruits. But the farmers’ income growth from the recent boom of oil ​ ​ ​ exportation has contributed to the forest’s reduction, because with the extra money they usually buy more goats. Can you believe that?

Close to the Paradise Valley, the view in front of us changed completely. One more time those sandy rocks from the south, full of suggestive forms and date palm trees. I light track of half-an-hour lead us to the heart of the place: a sequence of natural pools flowed in different colors between the rocky walls, like liquid emerald. It’s obvious why there’s “paradise” on the valley’s name.

For recent health matters, our host preferred to stay in one of the restaurants on the beginning of the track, under the shadow of stamped sheets. In front of them, tables, plastic chairs and sun umbrellas stuck at the river’s rocks, on that strategic place where water can’t go over the ​ ​ shin. Tranquility guaranteed. ​ ​

The second abuse was the last natural pool, set between 20 meters high walls. Moroccan tourists with tends, sun umbrellas and food on a styrofoam box was the majority. If they were at São ​ ​ Paulo’s or Rio’s coast, possibly they’d be called “farofeiros” (term used to define someone that ​ ​ takes food to the beach and leave the mess behind). Environmental education isn’t strong in there and the laterals was full of garbage.

The fun activity was climbing the rocks and jumping on the water. But not simply to have some adrenaline running. No, no! The intention was to put up a show – and watch it. The audience was worthy of Olympic Games, with shouting, applauses and cameras on. Just men were jumping, ​ ​ ​ ​ just men took a bath and was showing the torso and legs. The women just looked, covered from ​ ​ head to toe.

I’m tired of this “respect the local tradition” talk, so I jumped on the pool with my pink bikini – and I don’t care if people stare, I won’t put a shirt and I’ll dry on the sun this way!

On the way back, Hamsa left us half of a huge lamb’s tagine. I ate to death and lay down on ​ ​ a corner of the couch-bed, contemplating the golden sunlight that leak from the palm three leaves, on the happiest state ever. Life is so worth living!

The British decided to spend a night in a mountain hostel, to be around nature. Back to Agadir, I joked with Hamsa that we should visit their parents one more time. They received us yesterday with a gigantic bowl of figs, dates and all quality candies and ARABIC cookies. Without saying anything he stopped and pointed to a candy display window on a fancy bakery: “what do you ​ ​ want?”

And that’s how I ate macaron for the first time, this French candy that looks like a suspiro ​ ​ ​ full of filling and dye. Delicious!

September 13th ​

It didn’t look like hitchhiking day. 2 p.m and I was still all stuffed on the couch. I had 160 kilometers​ ahead of me to Essaouira, north direction. Neglecting the extra time that that tortuous road demanded, I stayed there, until Hamsa offered to take me to Agadir’s exit.

I bended the clothes and but it on a bag. This super-small backpack obligates me to be organized in a level that I didn’t have not even in my office, when I shared a desk. The backpack is like the road. Sometimes it forces me doing what I don’t want to, but it takes me away from the inertia, lethargy and negativity. What will I eat today? Where will I sleep tomorrow? Where to hide ​ ​ from the sunlight or snow? And this stamped shirt two times bigger than others, do I need it?

Road and backpack, my bosses. Those two connect me in a visceral way to the mutable nature of life, the beauty of the looks that changes color and shape along the world map, the need to learn and accumulate experience to not need other people’s opinions and decisions, to not fall on the unhappy easy life. Those two gave me so much in terms of knowledge and humility, that I think ​ ​ it should be obligatory college subjects. Nonsense. Like revolutions, it comes from inside out. ​ ​

Distracted with the sea-view, Hamsa took me to Taghazout, a surf paradise, few kilometers from Agadir. Actually, I think he was afraid of leaving me on the road alone. Just when I put my flip flops on the hot asphalt I realize that… damn, it was the first time I was hitchhiking alone in Morocco! How is it to be a woman and hitchhike alone in here, hã? Let’s see.

On the sand roadside cars ignored me. Single men, family and tourists left their car next to me, crossed to the other side, and got in the long waves of the infinite beach. The road I’ve chosen had less movement, but followed the Atlantic until the end.

In 20 minutes, maybe half-an-hour, a clean car stopped. The driver of 40-and-something years old explained he’d just go 20 kilometers ahead. Better than nothing. He liked swimming and wanted to stretch the muscles to end the weekend well. He seemed worried about my safety and regretted not being able to take me further. He said goodbye with a handshake.

Next ride came fast. A young French teachers couple took me half-way my destination. On the first kilometers, they asked me if we could stop on the beach to stretch the legs.

Her husband sit on a “bar” to drink tea and we took a walk on the beach, she was wearing veil and flat shoes, and I was barefoot. The cold water provoked chills sometimes. One or another camel left footprints on the thick sand. Occidental tourists were minority. We talked about life, relationships, and how Brazil manners was different from here.

“We date, see each other sometimes, but living with a boyfriend… this doesn’t exist in Morocco!”, she said laughing with dimples in her delicate face.

We walked over half an hour or more, until the subject became love – this one seems to be the same shit all over the world.

Almost at the end of our trip, one more stop, this time at the mountains full of argan threes. They took a thousand selfies with the sea on the background, while I enjoyed the golden hours to play with my camera. Ops! The golden hours! Soon there will be no more sunlight and I still have half way to go! I answered the requests to take some selfies and slightly hurry them up.

On the village’s road where I stayed, no car, donkey or dray passed by. The movement was as stopped as mosquitoes water. The ones that passed by didn’t stop, and the ones that stopped I found suspicious. Why? Imagine this situation: an old car with a wood trunk stopped few meters ahead of me and started honking, even without me making any sign for him to stop. When it’s too good to be true, it’s harder to trust. This one wants at least money! I made “no” with my hand and didn’t move a finger. The guy kept on honking and I kept trying to hitchhike for the few cars that passed by – and wasn’t stopping. About 10, 15 minutes later, the guy was still honking! Now I won’t go there, at all!

Tired of honking, he came to me with his car. I can’t believe this is happening! Well, let’s at least talk then, maybe someone needs help.

If he wore a felt hat instead of a turban and button shirt instead of white Djellaba, he could be my grandfather.

“Essaouira, Essaouira?”, he asked anxious.

“Yes, I’m going to Essaouira. But, no money, no cab, ride”.

He taught for two seconds.

“Okay, come, come!”

I didn’t really want to go! What a weird man. But I looked to the last sun light in the horizon and changed my mind quickly. What an old man like him can do with me?

I spend the whole trip neurotic. Every time he spoke on the phone, I held tight my backpack, and prepared myself mentally to open the car’s door, jump and run. On my mind, he was calling to a younger and stronger man and everyone was going to abuse me. Communication was hard, almost none. I understand he was a farmer and was coming back home. Almost at night, a police blitz stopped us. I was kind of relieved. They discussed, the cops analyzed some papers, they discussed again. At the end the old man gave a lot of money to the cop and we kept going.

We arrived in Essaouira about 9 p.m. He asked me where I wanted to go, I asked where the medina was located.

“Medina? Don’t you want to go to my house?”

“No, I don’t want to go to your house”.

“Why not?”

I looked firmly in his dark eyes.

“I won’t go to your house, ok? Where is the medina?”

“Ok, ok! The medina is over there”.

I said goodbye politely and I saw myself alone on a well illuminated town square. The wind and the inedited cold required the jacket I gave to Yassine’s niece, in Atlas. I pulled down the shirt’s sleeves, rolled the scarf on my neck and walked to the medina’s entry, which would be my house for the next weeks.

It was a time travel, back to India, super thin Asia’s alleys, dirty corners and nigh markets. The mystery and mysticism from the silhouette that crossed dark arches was almost tangible. Since the first minute, Essaouira touched deeply my poetic needs.

A very beautiful boy led me through the maze to the riad where I would volunteer in ​ ​ exchange of bed and food once a day. And what a bed, what a room! Decorated in Moroccan style, double bed with twisted iron support, wood desk and a corner fireplace. The glass window open straight to the wall that involves the medina, where the sea hits with no mercy, as if it was trying to shake the salt from itself and infest the air with that sticky humidity. Something says that inspiration will be my roommate.

September 18th ​ Morocco is hospitable, safe and very beautiful. I didn’t even need to say that so you realized the good​ impression that the country has been causing me. Even so, something is weird, like a camouflaged oppression, a need to “adapt” to the manners, almost like pretending, and it lets me very uncomfortable. Aron commented right in the beginning that something of oppressor in Arab countries that he has visited let him, many times, with no space to be himself.

How to explain that? It’s the fact that we can’t wear shorts calmly on the streets, and no neckline too – almost an offence. It’s the lack of bars and alcohol, except on specific bit cities and hotel areas. It’s the strong lack of women in the coffee shops or swimming in the sea or even walking on the streets. It’s not having space to talk about sex. It’s the men afraid to declare themselves, at the same time that they eat you with their eyes and stick around to take advantage. It’s everyone trying to “help” all the time, mainly if you are a woman, as if you were fragile, vulnerable, stupid or uncappable of doing anything alone. It’s family, religion and society always around you, very close to you, always ready to help – and submit your private life to its “advices”. It’s collectivity killing the individual, even this being one of the most beautiful marks of Morocco. It’s the drink stores, where I went this week with some guests, which has no name, like it didn’t exist, and roll the beers and vodkas in old newspapers, to be hidden on the (male) waists, under the pants, and on the secret division of the blazers. I don’t know if I can call it hypocrisy or tradition, if it’s habits or fear, but this is it. These things let me uncomfortable, melancholic and super reflexive once in a while, like today.

I invited a European guest to take a walk around the port. We set on a small wall that goes to the bulwark full of cannons, outside medina, away from the medina’s walls. I come here almost every day to see the sun hiding behind the sea, it’s my little place.

It was night already and the serious conversation didn’t seem to fade. We were interrupted by a man that I imagine being of our age, asking where we came from. We thought he wanted to offer us drugs or sell us anything. We tried to change subject, ignore, but the boy was insistent. He started talking, as if he needed to deposit his frenetic words in attentive ears to exist.

He talked about the things he couldn’t do, what he was afraid of. It’s natural of Essaouira. He said that he didn’t talk with Moroccan ladies on the street, because, even if it was just a friend by whom he had no interest at all, “maybe they see us together, everyone will talk and later they’ll want to marry us”.

The girls, he said, didn’t even look at him. To get marry with a foreigner also wasn’t a good deal: “if my wife is French, all community will think I am wealthy. My cousins, my neighbors, everyone will ask me for money”.

He kept on talking fast, said he liked Moroccan girls, he thinks they are beautiful. “You really can’t believe in your eyes when some women take out the veil and the djellaba! Way more pretty than many women that walks around with make-up. Women in Morocco is beautiful. They stay all day long at home brushing their hair, passing oil in their bodies. The men are ugly, we have to work all life for our family, under the sun. We get tired and ugly.”

In a breath, his own monolog bothered himself. He asked how it was the “process of meeting someone in Brazil”.

“Process? What process? You met a guy, if he likes you and if you like him, you go to bed”.

“You are kidding me! I need to go to Brazil”, he was amazed.

Tired, we thanked for the conversation and jumped the wall to the other side of the street. He was nothing more than a silhouette in the penumbra when he touched his chest with his opened right hand, in a sign of gratitude, and said goodbye from far away.

God, or whoever was the day’s architect, seemed to answer all details of my thoughts. On the riad central patio, an uncommon little lady was spread on the couch, with open legs. It was the ​ ​ first girls wearing small shorts that I’ve seen in Morocco. The grey tight shirt reveled many details of her black bra, while masked her thin waist. Her little arms crossed behind her head reveled a great amount of black hairs on her armpit. She had curled and short hair in a black quiff with golden dyed tips. I just saw that Arab tattoo showing itself from inside the thigh, almost on the groin, when I set in front of those little black eyes and her very white smile, Aïsha was her name.

“Freedom!”, she said radiant, when I asked the meaning of the tattoo.

“Cool! I always thought about tattooing this word, but I’ve never had the courage. Where are you from?”

“Saudi Arabia”

For a few seconds, I was petrified. My friends from Berlim or São Paulo looks like this, but not the women I was used to meet in Morocco, even less the ones I’ve met from Saudi Arabia. Wonderful! Thanks for this girl, Allah! That’s why I travel: to surrender to the complexity of the different. That’s it!

Aïsha kept on smiling, talking and gesticulating that she’d organized a rave on the desert. Later she said with her unquiet legs, perfect English and forced American accent that, one time, she left the bus in Casablanca wearing small shorts and socks to her knees and a man came all impertinent asking where were her clothes.

“I don’t speak Arabic, if you want to talk to me, learn English first, I said to him. In Morocco man comes and say anything they want to you. In Saudi Arabia, you pass by on the street and they open the way for you. They are afraid of being accused of harassment”, she said.

Well, in Arabia, where women are forbidden even to drive, she certainly didn’t go out on the street wearing shorts.

She said it has been two years since she left Saudi Arabia to live in Morocco, her mother’s homeland. “I have a rich family behind me. If my father found out I have these tattoo (at this moment she jumped from the couch as a spring, revealing the scratches on her belly) he kills me!”, she said, with that adolescent urgency, passing an imaginary knife on her neck, to then explode in a laud laugh.

She and a French friend couldn’t pause to take a breath while narrating their “transgressions”, as if the silence or any pause would cut the air from their lungs.

Aïsha said that she is few weeks away from getting married with a German military that she met two months ago, and saw twice in her life. They’d move to Italy and then to Germany.

“He took me to see the sunset and proposed. In Taghazout! Ahhhh!”

I usually get bored easily with ultraromantic and attention-hunting kind of people, but I saw my time being kidnaped by this beautiful young skinned girl.

It’s Friday night. She wanted to go to a dance club and take me with her, no matter what. I didn’t even know that there was one in Essaouira.

“Of course it does! And it has live music. Bad music, but they play for 10 minutes and then the DJ takes place, and he is good”, she explained. No one was on the mood to go out, but Aïsha dragged me and two more boys to the night life.

It didn’t even look like I was on a small town. Even without charging entry, the dance club was full of pharaonic will. High ceiling supported by huge pilasters that went around the dance floor, purple curtains that came down from the ceiling to the varnished wood floor and many armchairs around the almost-empty tables. A 250ml beer costed at least 20 reais. A single couple adventured under the colored lights of the dance floor. Everyone else was just looking.

Immediately, Aïsha dragged me to the house beat, that she followed without saving movements and didn’t care to anyone that might be looking. Ten years younger, many distinct choices and an Atlantic of cultural differences between us. Even so, Aïsha is SO like me when I was 19 years old!

On our way back, on the cold night, she kept talking about her marriage, this time not so sure of the decision:

“I’m bisexual, I don’t even know if I like more girls or boys … I’ll try it out, to see how it is”.

She got in a little shop to buy I-don’t-remember-that. Outside, some contained laughs escaped. “Is she crazy?”, a man asked.

I commented that she might be eccentric, but for me everything makes a lot of sense. She is real, faithful to herself. She was born and raised on the country that most represses women and she makes of her libertinism and happiness the most beautiful protest. I know she will get disappointed, suffer, be disillusioned and cry sometimes. But I’m not worried. This is the price to pay for whom goes after oneself, for whom is real to one’s mutant truths. I know well the price of this search and I can’t stop being fascinated when I met a person, a woman, willing to occupy any place she wants to.

September 21th ​

It’s sardine season. Still, I got surprised when I realized grills smelling white meat and fishermen selling​ fresh fishes in styrofoam boxes on the less touristic streets of Essaouira. I entered in one of the medina’s full restaurants. I tried, with no success, to explain my request to the barbecue grill. A Moroccan of approximately 40 years old that could speak French helped me, but he stopped making my request on the middle of the sentence: “come with me, it’s better here”.

We came back to the street. We stopped in front of the first styrofoam box. “This are fresher”, he explained. I paid 5 dirhams for a dozen, approximately two reais.

Back to the restaurant, the man explained the system: “You gave me the fished to grill, grab the breads and pay 5 dirhams when you leave”.

We went upstairs to the third narrowed floor, the only one with panoramic view. A friend of mine waited on a table. We ordered olives, Moroccan salad and that big plate full of pomegranate. By the way, someone explained to me that olive in Arabic is al-zituna. ​

They also ordered the always-present teapot of herb tea, followed by three sugar cubes from the size of a candy, they’ve used only one. They invited me to the banquet and told me that a lot of fans of Atlético Mineiro went to Essaouira when they played against Raja Casablanca, in the Mundial of Soccer Clubs of 2013. Morocco is the only country where I’ve been that everyone recognizes my soccer team – for different reasons than those I’d like.

All of this happened last week, in some irregular routine day of my new home, days that makes me lose track of time. I’ve learned the thorn path (sardine’s thorn), very used by cats, and today I went back to the restaurant alone, already with a bag of fresh fishes under my arm. I went to the last floor. Who I met on the table? My friends! They’ve pulled another plastic chair and happily shared the bread.

They’ve just came back from the mosque, which lead us to an inspiring conversation about religion, this source of peace and hope or power and control, depending on the person. My friend said he’s satisfied with the current papa, because, for him, he’s different from the church and its mistakes. He also commented that he doesn’t like Eid el-Adha, one of the most important holiday in Islamic calendar. This holiday occurs this week and it’s a generalized lamb killing.

They’ve given me a bag with grapes and a dozen grilled sardines, that I asked the restaurant to roll in an aluminum paper. We went back through the same way of the other day, both hugging each other by the shoulder and I walking next to them. We said goodbye with open smiles, warm handshakes and reencounter promises.

September 26th ​

It’s like my brother always says: “all roads lead to Berlin”. I left the hostel in company of three rare​ creatures, three boys that were born and raised in the German capital, with whom I had the pleasure of spending the last three days of adventures and beaches in Essaouira. The next destination, Mohammedia, was about 400 kilometers north, right after Casablanca. I wanted to meet Adil, a Moroccan musician of powerful voice and energy that I met on a rainy night in… guess where? Berlin, of course. He lives at France, but he’s spending a time with his family. By the way, the rest of Morocco is doing the same thing. The reason is that yesterday was Eid al-Aidha’s day, or Sacrifice Party, one of the biggest traditions of Islamic world. Each family buys and kills a lamb and get together to eat it. The parties and the eating takes 4 days and a couscous with the leftovers from the lamb on the second day is included. The animal’s death is to remember Abraham’s will in offering God a maximum sacrifice, his own son, as a sign of faith and devotion. But God, through angel Gabriel, told him to sacrifice a lamb instead. Yes, this is a Biblical passage, but it’s also in Koran.

On Thursday, Essaouira woke up covered in blood puddles, with weirds lamb skins accumulated on the corners. Basically, all stores were closed. Because of the amount of smoke, in the afternoon, medina was similar to a bunker. Each family or group of neighbors made a grill with bricks right on the middle of the street and toasted the lamb’s heads for hours, to “remove the fur”, as a man explained to me. When the skull is already toasted, they split it in two pieces to get the brain, that was fresh as guava’s core. “We will eat it tomorrow”, another man said.

Memories, lots of memories passed through my mind while I walked on the seagull’s beach for the last time. The walled medina was far away now, and my German friends too. Aron was sick, again, so he wouldn’t be able to go with me.

Sometimes I feel like a seagull shit. A walking nothing of 1,68 meters, 52 kilograms, with no possessions, no decedents, dragging a colored backpack here and there, under a pair of flip flops. What if I disappear on the next highway’s curve? The foreigners’ sea where I’m always in will drag away everything that’s left of me under the cold waves of Essaouira, and everything will become oceanic dust. It looks like we don’t even exist, so light we are. And there’s no better medicine to feel alive, in all its urgency and transience, than the epiphany of non-existence.

Half-hour walking, I was on the city’s exit. In 10 minutes I was in a comfortable car, sit next to the driver. We spend 10 minutes talking about Isla and the richness of Arabic language, when I listened, out of the blue, a female voice. The beautiful wife, with a baby in her arms, was sitting on the backseat. We greeted with a smile.

“My wife speaks little French, but if you have any question for her, I translate it for you”, commented the husband.

With a calm and serious voice, like a teacher that makes questions leading to the answer he wants to have, Rachid told me that Arabic has over 4 million words, that there are 50 different ways of saying “lion”, and that “it’s easy for you to understand the Koran, because you don’t speak Arabic’. I said I’m Buddhist, when he asked about my religion.

“I cannot ask you to leave Buddhism, or that Isla is better, no way. But… the truth is not easy to find”. He also said that I should try to know and understand Isla through theory, not through people that practices it.

I was left on the beginning of a road that seemed to have left from some prophecy. Medium-sized trees with leafy tops followed the irregular asphalt in both sides, creating a tunnel of shadow. Donkeys, horses and drays kneaded the lateral ground, almost a parallel road. I was between the car and the animal’s route.

Again, luck found me. A man of approximately 30 years old was driving next to an older man. He said he could take me 20 kilometers ahead.

“Thank you! Wait a minute, I’ll grab my backpack”. “Wait, I help you”, he said turning off the car and coming down.

Amim lives in Casablanca, but he was spending the holiday on his family’s farm house, a little olive and argan farm next to the road, where his mother and one of his sisters waited for him with aunts and nieces. I was invited to meet them so gently that I couldn’t say no.

Fátima, his sister, was washing her face on a can in front of the white house. She’d just woke up. She threw her medium-sized hair to one side of her shoulder and raised her soapy face to greet me with a smile. She’d driven since Agadir, where she lives by herself. She must had been tired.

The disorder of the big room with almost no furniture disappeared in few minutes, right in front of my unexpected presence. Sit in one of the mattresses around the small and round wood table, their mother coordinated the cleaning in Arabic, while she explained to me, in French, how Olive oil was made: “we shake the tree with a stick, after putting a cloth under it, so we don’t lose any olive. After that, we take them to the mill. Almost all families have a mill in here. If they don’t have one, they take their olives to the neighbors’ mill. If you produce 100 liters of oil, for example, you must leave 5, 10 liters to the neighbor”.

One neighbor came with two little boys and a small gift: a bottle of olive oil and half dozen of red eggs. We turned the green liquid on a small plate and we dove small pieces of round bread on it.

“This is lunch for many people in this village. They make the bread, dive it on the olive oil and that’s all for the day”, the mother said.

Another little plate arrived, with peanuts toasted on oil. For some reason I don’t understand, just me, Amin and his mother was sitting and eating on the table.

My host took me to the yard to see the plantations. “Green” olives are awful! Too bitter. Before they are in conserve, they cannot be eaten. When we squeeze it, a white and oily liquid gets out. The olive trees are full, but the harvesting will only occur in November. “This place changes completely! We work night and day. A perfume appears, fresh olives perfume! It’s really good!”, I remember his mother’s words. The production supplies the families and what remains is sold on the market.

Amin also showed me the argan trees, asking me to be careful with thorns and snakes, “that sometimes are hidden on the shadows”.

Very good talk, but I needed to get back on the road. But Amin didn’t want to leave me hitchhike.

“I pay a bus for you, with no problem at all”.

“No, no way, you did a lot for me already and I’m used to hitchhike”.

“But you are a girl and you are alone, it’s dangerous. Please, take a bus”, and he walked with me to the road.

He tried to stop a few buses that passed by, with no success. The time we were waiting ended up on a great talking about “Sahara”, that’s how Moroccans refers to Occidental Sahara, that portion of the territory that claims independence. They almost get offended when you treat south like a distinct country.

“Amin, thank you for everything, but I think you should leave me alone now. I can’t hitchhike with you here and I don’t know when a bus will stop”.

“I can’t leave you in here alone…”

“Don’t worry, man! This is the life I’ve chosen”.

He realized I was right, so he stood up from the piece of tree we were sitting on half an hour. On the handshake, he left a 100 dirhams bill, about 35 reais.

“No, Amin! I don’t need it, I always find a way!”

“This is no problem for me, it’s a pleasure to help. If you find a bus, go with it, okay?”.

I waited maybe half an hour more, until a little truck stopped. Two boys were distributing the cooperative’s dairy. They could take me to Safi, which would leave me on the half of my destination. They opened the cold trunk and put my backpack on an empty corner. I couldn’t communicate so well with the driver, but his helper spoke French and English fluently – and non-stop.

What a happy man! Mohammed said he loves to meet foreigners, one of the best things that can happen to him is to receive someone from abroad in his home, close to Agadir. He is the same age as I am and he has a Geography degree, I am not sure if this is a college diploma. His dream was to become a teacher, but he was afraid not passing on the admission test, so he didn’t even try. He was engaged and said he’d be killed if the lady saw him talking to me.

Seems like today everybody wanted to talk about Isla. Mohammed was talking about his religions as if it was the greatest spoon brigadeiro. A refugee, a joy, a source of unshakable inner ​ ​ peace.

“Ah, Isla is really good! I can’t explain it correctly, I’m not an expert. I’m afraid I can’t explain it right, you know? But it’s the best thing of my life!”

If he only knew that his humility, his serene and clean smile said everything about his relationship with the transcendental, about his religion.

I didn’t have to wait a lot for the next ride. A stutterer mechanic stopped in an old car. He spoke little French and seemed to be profoundly hurt by a turbulent divorce with a woman “that was only interested in my money. I worked all day and everything was for her”.

He was going straight to Casablanca, but I wasn’t, not anymore. I left Essaouira desiring to know El-Jadida, if I had time. Mazagan was a Portuguese fort, built on the period of Africa’s circumnavigation to reach India’s territory. Recently archeological findings on Brazilians Amazonia reveals that Lusitanian lords expelled from Moroccan cities by Moors intended to build another Mazagan next Macapá, at the time of Colony.

When I crossed Jadida’s yellow-faded walls, sun was already prepared to give place to the moon. Almost no tourist walked by the dirty streets with Portuguese names. Drugstore was named “farmácia” and the corner’s restaurant was named “Café Mar”.

The doors, drastically different from all medinas, was protected by iron grids, similar to grids that surround countryside’s houses in Brazil. The beach outside the wall was long and beautiful. It was already night when I crossed half of it. What do I do now?

I was about 100 kilometers away from my final destination, but I would have to walk at least an hour to reach the road and hitchhike again. I decided to use Amin’s money to get the first bus in Morocco. I asked two man where was the bus station. Full of information about the city, they invited me to drink an orange juice on a terrace with a sea view. Okay, lets see if Jadida convinces me to stay one more day.

I was so, so bored with the older man, saying he owns I-don’t-know-how-many buildings, that I-don’t-know-which-relative is a politician, that I could stay in his mother’s fancy house for how long I wanted to. It was with great relief that I’ve heard Adil’s voice on the phone that I’d borrowed. My musician friend said that there was no more train straight to Mohammedia that Saturday, and maybe I’d be better for me to stay in Jadida.

“No! I don’t want to stay here. I’ll do something to arrive in your house today! I’ll call you later”.

In 10 minutes I was in the bus station, breathless. On the ticket window, they said that the next bus to Casablanca would leave only tomorrow, for 50 dirhams. But no! I have to arrive today!

I ran to the departure and arrival patio. I asked to a uniform man if there was any bus to Casablanca. “Casablanca? Over there, run!” The bus was stopped at the control station, the middle door was open. I got in. I paid 25 dirhams and felt asleep. I woke up two hours later, surrounded by the sea of cars and buildings. Casablanca looks a lot like São Paulo.

A man that was on the bus helped me to find a shared cab to Mohammedia, on the cost of 5 reais, and lent me his phone so I could contact Adil. How great it was to hug my Moroccan friend! To see that flaming smile again. We saw each other only once, one hour of that summer night in German and here I am, in his country, with his family.

The small iron gate on a peaceful street opened a particular universe: guitar, people spread on the grass, gnawa song playing on the radio, brothers hugging each other, cousins dancing with ​ ​ small shorts and cleavage, wine here, Cuba Livre there. If we had meat sticks instead of the lamb meat couscous and the plum, I could say I was on a Brazilian barbecue, that went all night long. The similarity of what I miss makes me feel so free! I slept on the flood, like an angel on a grace state.

September 27th ​ ​

Laziest day ever! We woke up almost 2 p.m. Everybody had gone to the beach, few meters away from ​ the house, to take a ride on the jet-ski and enjoy the heat. I set on the couch on the yard and enjoyed the shadow of the sunshade. After years facing the sun hitchhiking with my sensitive skin, I unconditionally love shadows.

On their way back, my friend’s brother brought us sandwiches, french fries and lemon soda. While I bit the bread with meat and lettuce, blankets were being folded and pillows were being shake on the air. Backpacks accumulated on the outside. Everyone were getting ready to go to Casablanca and to “work” on Monday. I had the feeling of begin with a São Paulo’s family leaving Santos beach after a holiday.

Six of us took a cab, two on the front seats and four on the back seats. “Moroccan cab”, the middle brother said and smiled. Their cousin stayed on the train station. We stayed on the city, in a three-floored building from their deceased grandfather, where another cousin lives with her husband and their daughter. Only the husband was home. She was working and would only come back around ten p.m.

Around six p.m, my friend went to the supermarket with Ali, the cousin’s husband, to buy some stuffs. Around eight p.m, Ali started to prepare the shrimp and boil the water to make pasta, so the dinner would be ready when his wife arrives. He was a restaurant chef on a ship and he owns the fame of a good cook on the family.

When the sauce was ready, I finally dropped my laptop and went to the kitchen to ask if he needed any help. “No, no way” was the answer.

I set on the other room and kept watching a TV show that was discussing, on a specialist and authorities ring, what has been done (or not) about the high analphabetism Moroccan taxes. I thought it was a French channel, not really for the language, but for the physical characteristics of the participants, hardly found in Moroccan streets. The discussion was heard on the kitchen.

“There are also white people in Morocco”, Ali commented.

“I know, but in TV sometimes seems like there’s only white people. Like in Peru. Population is majority indigenous, but actors from novels are all white. They are less represented there then Brazilian does in TV.”

With my ineptitude on the stove, the best way to help was washing the dishes. When I finished, I went to a small shop on the corner with my friend to buy flour for the quiche. It looks so much with Latin-American suburbs! And so different. The same narrowed shelfs holds from dippers to crackers. But there are no grids or locked doors to try to stop robberies.

On my way back, Ali was smoking a cigar on the doorstep. We set next to him to make company. My friend travelled in time, on his childhood. “We stayed till the end of the night playing on the street. All families left the doors open, one neighbor kept watching the kids, then the other neighbor did. Today it’s all locked, kids don’t go out”, he commented.

Me and my brothers used to do the same observations about our childhood in Minas Gerais. As if it was to shut us up, a group of kids passed by us playing on rollerblades, bikes and balls.

“Nice! They still go out to play!”, I commented.

“Yes, really good. But only the men, see?”

It was true, but I remembered seen in Atlas a group of boys and girls of 8 years old approximately screaming on the street, playing, after ten p.m.

I commented I liked the fact that the buildings were small, three or four floors. On Brazilian big cities it’s hard to see the horizon, as you saw the neighbors window.

“Do you know why it is still like this?”

“No.”

“Because everyone lives together. For example, their aunt on the first floor, then the cousin, then the grandparents. Do you want to know the building?”

We went straight to the roof. The full moon light circumvents the sea of small parabolic antennas. The sight of a mosque stood out from the other things.

“Masjid?”, I asked.

“Yes! Masjid means get people together, group people.”

The light from one terrace stared at us. On it, we could notice a group staring straight to us. It’s impressive how people like to watch other’s people life! It’s like a boy said to me once: “in Morocco, everyone is a cop, they are all the time controlling what you do”. It might be. Anyway, gossip it’s not a Moroccan monopoly.

The last floor is empty. We went down one more stair set. A perfumed smoke smelling meat left the open door. Another cousin was preparing barbecue to her husband and all four kids. We picked a little of their dinner. They were sit on the couch around a little rounded wood table, in front of the plasma TV. Two actors and one actress made comedy on a poorly furnished stage. Even not understanding Arabic, I laugh.

When we went back to the main floor, the liver quiche with cream was leaving the oven. My friend’s cousin and her daughter arrived. The girl had a beautiful fishbone braid on her black hair and the lawlessness of a child that sees an unknow adult and want to get notice. The cousin greeted me and went to her bedroom to exchange her uniform to a comfortable outfit.

The food was even better than how it looked. An amazing flavor! And we still had a chocolate pudding as dessert. Behind the seriousness of the Mexican mustache, Ali was satisfied with our reaction.

“I’m glad my cousin married this guy!”, Adil commented, very excited.

I’m glad too!

September 28th ​

The day began late, with another languid banquet, this time prepared with Adil’s cousin. Later I watch​ another gnawa music show, with guitar, crying voice and percussion between the legs. The whole family felt on a trance – me included. I felted a part of it. Can you understand why I just left Mohammedia on the afternoon?

I paid about 10 reais for the train that would take me to Rabat in less than half-an-hour. I calculated I’d spend the same on a cab and a bus to get to the bus station, hitchhike and who knows what time would I arrive.

Hassan, my Couchsurfing host, went to Sale’s station to get me, city close to Rabat, where ​ ​ he lives. Smiley and talker, he guided me through the suburb alleys where everyone greeted him. He lives with his parents and his younger brother on a small house with little glass door and with no gate or grade. His mother received me with that hug and sweet smile that break idiomatic and cultural barriers. These families that receives me as a daughter and sister… Ah, if they knew the emotional strength they give me to carry on. Yes, I feel fear in my traveling. I am afraid of hitchhiking, I’m afraid of going through difficulties, I’m afraid of writing, I’m afraid of so many things. I’m very thankful to fear, for the protection it gives me all days. If it wasn’t it, maybe I wouldn’t be here to tell stories. I try to have fear as a partner, a security lock, not a sea monster, gigantic by ignorance, blocking the doors of life. Fear is one of my greatest travel partners.

Hassan took me to a ride through the river BuRegreg, before dinner. Salé was on our side of the bridge. Rabat was on the other side. On the Moroccan capital indeed, there was a sidewalk larger than Copacabana’s one, and it was completely occupied by noisy families, group of friends and couples in love that didn’t kiss each other.

The walk was big and so was the conversation. Hassan has super interesting stories. Recently, he hitchhikes with a Polish girl from Morocco to Senegal, crossing Mauritania and Gambia. They hitchhike with a single motorcycle (and their backpack) and they also hitchhike with an important Mauritanian politician. In 2008, Rali Dacar, which left from Paris on the way to Senegal capital, was canceled because of security issues. Since then, the competition happens on South America. For this and other news, like the recent Ebola epidemic, west Africa was basically scratched from my hitchhike map. After this simple report, my mental map drew a tortuous line from Morocco to South Africa, passing through the roads of Gana, through the legend Iaundé of Nigeria and the Namibia desert. Why not?

The line of boats and buildings, the walled little town at the end of the walk, the pink sunset and the whole thing mirrored perfectly on the placid water of Bu Regreg was enough to convince me that Rabat is one of the most photogenic capitals in the world.

September 29th ​

Tourist day. I woke up late and left home almost noon, with my camera and a list of places that I want ​ to know. The intention was to go to all of these places on foot. I ignore the super modern tram that connects Salé to Rabat and I crossed the long bridge walking for few minutes. Once I crossed, I was already beneath the symbolic monument of the capital, Hassan Tower.

It’s hard to believe that this monument of 44 meters had the intention of being the highest mosque in the world. At that time, the king wanted to raise the bricks to 80 meters, but after he died the building wasn’t completed.

Few steps away there’s the Mohammed V Mausoleum, grandfather of the current king, Mohammed VI. In front of the sumptuous white marble building, with the four access doors watched by four guards dressed like a gala’s night, I couldn’t not think on the captivity place of Malika Oufkir. General Oufkir was murdered when trying to participate to a coup. His daughter, still a teenager, was kept 20 years in a subterranean prison in Sahara, with her mother and five brothers, as a punishment for her father’s actions. The youngest brother was still a baby in arms and he just met the world as an adult. I read her biography (“Malika Oukfir. Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail”) about seven years ago. Her unbelievable story never left my head.

Next stop demanded a walk of 5 kilometers on streets surrounded by palm trees and luxurious diplomatic buildings. Chellah is a place of many stories. Between walls and a garden that seemed an orchard, coexists ruins of a Roman city and a mosque of many arches, everything is very photogenic. Nothing attracted tourists more than the stork’s nests on top of the colored minaret. I set on a wood stool under the trees. I took of the yogurt and the grapes from the backpack and did a great and calm picnic with myself. I should walk a lot to arrive on the other medina I wanted to see. I was stopped on the street at least three times by common people asking for information. In Rabat, I’m comfortably invisible and everyone thought I was Moroccan. No one tried to sell me anything on the streets and stores and restaurants are considerably more expensive.

Rain caught me by surprise and made a generous mud on medina’s street – that doesn’t even get close to be as charming as Fés or Essaouira. When I was stopped on the street waiting a traffic light, I notice a boy next to me talking to his colleague, beautiful and slim on his black suit. He had strong marks on his brown face, beard done, his mouth… what a delicious mouth, man! – I thought. I stared at him. Suddenly, he turned to me and caught me looking. Too late to turn my eyes away.

The traffic light opened. From the other side, he asked me something in French. I answered, full of smiles. In one minute his colleague disappeared and the conversation took a course.

“Where are you going?”, he asked.

“Kasbah of the Oudayas”.

“It’s right over there. I can go with you, if you don’t mind”.

It was 4 p.m.

“But don’t you have to get back to work?”

“No, I’m done for today”.

He said he worked on the Countryside Ministry, after he graduated and post-graduated in political science. We walked with no hurry through the main street of the city, which was already residence of the last moors expelled from the south of Spain and now it’s going through a process of gentrification, with a lot of foreigners interested in the houses full of charm.

The walk ended with a breathtaking view. From the top of the rampart of borders perforated in squares, you lose sight of the large stairway that went down to that magical point where the river meets the beach. On the other side, all Salé stared at us from their white houses. What a dream! The man wasn’t so impressed. He said, politely, from the trip he made to Europe and his dream to know Greece.

“But in Atenas you don’t have a view to the sea like this one.”

“Really?”

“Well, you can see the Mediterranean far away. But here you want ten minutes from downtown and you are already on the beach. I think you live in one of the most beautiful capitals I’ve ever met, my friend”. I swear it wasn’t a flirt.

At 5 p.m, they close the access to the belvedere and we had to leave. He is so cute, but my finger was tickling to photograph those houses and, for that, I need to be alone. He understood and respected my will. We said goodbye at the entry of the Kasbah, with smiles, hugs and kisses on each other’s cheek.

My photographic plans were completely frustrated by a pain in the ass that stalked me through the most uninhabited alleys. “Come over here! It’s beautiful there”. “I don’t need a guide, ok?”

“No guide! I have money, look!”, he said, showing a pile of high cash. I basically ran away from Kasbah.

For my luck, Rabat is very generous with my lens. The contiguous Andaluz Garden gave me excellent pictures. The sun melted in a baby-pink color over a sun filled with little and synchronized clouds, in a way that I spent over an hour to follow the river margins and I arrived home already at night, not without losing myself a little.

I asked a random teenager that was listening to music on the sidewalk, comfortable with his sweatshirt, where Youssef lived. He stood up and took me to my host’s house. Everyone really knows each other here.

I ate with the family that delicious pasta – each one with a fork, sharing the same bow. After that I went to the bedroom I share with Hassan, to play with the pictures and lose myself a little on the internet.

I talked with a dearest Israeli friend that also traveled a lot, through Skype. Hassan joined us for a few minutes and we kept analyzing routes on the Africa map and pointing the influences that Morocco left on the Jews and their legacy in here. I just observed both of them with that big smile on their faces, thankful by the “travel bug” that bounds us.

September 30th ​

I doubt that there was someone more lost than me on Rabat’s streets this morning. Hassan walked​ with me to the tram station before the sun rise. He left me with a ticket on my hand and a detailed explanation of where to go down and how to reach the road to hitchhike. Did I remember the instructions? No. Did I find the road easily? No. Did I found the road after an hour going back and forth to a hospital, almost being ran over by the cars on the rush hour? Also, no.

There’s a time where you, expert in hitchhiking in another country, with no hat, no map nor a GPS, get tired of being stubborn and accepts a advice from the water seller and pay two reais for a shares cab that leaves you right where you wanted, on the road, next to that amazing roadside.

Even with good weather and in ideal hitchhiking conditions, I waited for about an hour. A lot of cars passed by me, leaving smoke rings on the hot air and ignoring me completely. The intercity buses left and received passengers right next to me, messing up all my scheme, the drivers couldn’t see me and park.

I think it was because of my insistence that she stopped. The 4x4 came slowly, after leaving a gas station nearby. The driver had huge sunglasses over her big eyes, thin arms with a blazer with chalk mark and some wrinkles from her 40-50 years of age covered with a subtle mid-ton base. Her hair felt over her shoulders in big circles, perfectly combed and dyed chocolate.

Najla is a college teacher of Arabic literature. She has never “ever!” in her life she gave a ride. She thought it was weird to see a girl alone on the road, so she stopped by impulse, thinking it was a foreigner in danger.

I felt I needed to speak more about me to undo the tension. I told her I didn’t think it was dangerous to hitchhike in Morocco, that I’m actually very respected by man. “They respect you because you are a foreigner. The way they treat us, Moroccan women, is very different”, commented.

After she knew that I also write, Najla spoke with her hands, expressive face, with a disconcerting rich French. She finally seemed comfortable in her own car. She said that if I needed a more academic help for my behavior studies, I could count on her.

Without knowing my route, she recommended a trip to Atlas, to know “the deep Morocco, that has nothing to do with Casablanca or Rabat”. The conversation followed it’s natural course and lead to “how can it be that such a small country has so many cultural variations alive?” and Amazigh language. She corrected me, very emphatic.

Amazigh is not a language, it’s a dialect, she said. It doesn’t have a full system of rules stablished like Arabic, for example, it doesn’t have an alphabet. I said that on the countryside I could see information written in Arabic and Amazigh (which has a lot of characters similar to the Greek ones, by the way). She said that this written had been invented few decades ago, to, among other reasons, allow Amazigh to be taught in the schools. It’s estimated that 70% of Moroccan has Amazigh origins.

We made a pause on the “class” to a breakfast: croissant and natural orange juice in a snack bar of a gas station. Delicious! We also had a little porcelain plate with dates and dry fruits, covered with a white napkin, that she had in her car. I thanked for the invitation. She (finally!) smiled and said this would be her “little gift”. She left me on the road, entering Casablanca, making me miss my academic life. One day I’ll go to back to college!

I was afraid of being ran over by the super high speeds cars, but it was for a few time. In five minutes, a French man stopped in an old car. What a creature! Judging by the calm way he speaks, as a person that is never notice on the street, you could never imagine the stories of this man.

He said that, when he was 16 years old, he ran away from his house with a fake passport and came to Morocco. The idea was to hitchhike to Senegal, buy a camel and go to Brazil (!).

“Oui, oui! In my head, I needed a camel to reach Brazil. But until today I didn’t”, he laughs. ​ ​

The fake was discovered and his parents rescued him. As an adult, he came back to Morocco and married a Moroccan. Today, he lives with her and two children in North.

His job is to take cars like that one to Mauretania and sells it. Actually, there a scheme with the cars, that has benefits with the exorbitant prices in Morocco, due to high taxes, that I’ll not even try to explain, under the risk of explaining it wrong.

What really matters is that I arrived pretty soon to Marrakesh, before two p.m. Germain invited me to have a chicken tagine for lunch, delicious. He said goodbye with a coffee and a list of telephones and emails. He said that if I needed a place in Morocco or in France, all I needed to do was saying. Less than two kilometers separated me from THE medina.

The legendary Jemaa el-Fna, heart of Marrakesh, seemed not interesting at first sight. I bypass the orange juices tends and tried to find Carl’s hotel, a Texan friend that hosted me in Panama, which I reencounter in Thailand almost two years ago, and that recently arrived in Morocco. Distracted, I almost stepped on a snake. What a shock! The snake whispers put najas (and another snake I couldn’t identify) right at the square’s cement, sometimes over rugs. I don’t know how they don’t scape and bite everyone. Jesus Christ! After an afternoon gossiping and laughing with Carl, I went meeting my new host, Hajj, in front of the mythical mosque of Kotoubia, majestic with its skyscraper belvedere. A lot of people got in and out the building. It was couples, women in hijab, men flirting with the young ladies blatantly (okay, I’m not that young). For some miracle, Hajj and I recognized each other on the middle of the crowd.

This boy is one of my people! Smiley, party type, smart and no talent in the kitchen. From our disastrous attempting to prepare an eatable pasta for dinner came instructive and captivating conversations.

He is an engineer, few years younger than me. He dropped his job on a bank to help a family housing business to prosper. He lives in a small and comfortable apartment, with a beautiful pink Moroccan hall.

And it’s in it, that suddenly, the day is over. I choose the corner that seemed to be less affected by the morning sun, that certainly would enter by the big windows, and made it my bed for today.

October 1st ​

I just had a great lesson of how not to administrate time, how not doing things that I’ve planned, and still have fun. Hajj works all day and couldn’t go with me on my walking. Another Couchsurfer ​ ​ I’d contacted agreed to show me Marrakesh. We decided to meet on a coffee near the house I’m hosted. I waited almost two hours and he didn’t show up. Later he sent me a message saying he couldn’t find the place. There it goes my morning.

I took a bus to the medina (two reais) and went to Carl’s hotel. He wasn’t there. He got lost inside the medina and he took almost an hour to find his way back. When we met, we did it again! We got lost with conviction on the labyrinth of alleys, stuffs, smells and flavors.

Marrakesh’s medina is an organized chaos. Disappointingly organized. The pink flamingo dominates the exterior of the lowered buildings. There are many small shops, almost identical. Inside them, every kind of bauble that you’ll probably leave on the shelf accumulating dust and never use it: jewelry holders, mug holders, vases, mirrors, swords, turbans… And a lot of useful stuff too: light fixtures, wallets, keychains, bracelets and t-shirts that says that you were in Morocco.

I missed the irregularity of colors from Fés’ medina, the tiled buildings, the kids getting dirty while playing on the street, the barber shops infested of filthy cats and those amazing crafts workshops, that looks more like the Craft Corporation of Middle Age.

As for the size, Marrakesh really has THE medina. One store after another in an infinite line of rectangular doors, connected by straw mats or roof tiles that covers the alleys. The sensation is that you can go through this path for the rest of your life, without ever reaching the end.

Marrakesh’s medina has that constancy and strength from empires that wants to conquer the world. Marrakesh really dominates the world of colors and smell. It’s impossible to pass without noticing the mountains of olives, the seasoning pyramids of all colors, the blocks of chestnut candies and the perfume and incense shops.

We walked in one of these stores, more as curiosity than interest in buying anything that fits and it’s worth to carry in my backpack. The salesman is a very calm old man. With a big smile on his tanned face, Bob Marley’s t-shirt on his skin chest and a good reggae, mixing with the musk in the air.

He was selling squared bars of all kind of colors and smells, which he rubbed in our arms. It seemed like I’d just taken a shower! He said that it’s a perfume for all life, and the small bar lasts for 20 years. My friend bought a pair, not that he trusted the product, but he liked the story. The salesman presented me with a “Berber lipstick”, not leaving any doubt of his sympathy, a little mud cover, with some kind of golden ink inside that you rub with your finger till a red dye leaves the container. After that, all you need to do is to rub your dyed finger on your mouth and, done, you have your lipstick on!

We spent all afternoon at the medina, having fun exploring each store. When we finally found Bahia’s Palace and the Saadino’s grave - what we really wanted to visit, it was already closed. The Marjorelle Gardens was charging too much for me. I resigned and went back to the Kotoubia’s entry to wait for Hajj. I suggested we had a coffee in one of the terraces that we could see Jemma el-Fna.

Until this evening I didn’t understand what this place had of so special, since it attracts tourists from all over Morocco and the world. Under the moon light, Jemma el-Fna suffers a real metamorphosis. Musicians, story tellers, fire eaters, actors and all kind of street artists leaves their cocoons and goes out on the street to fight for attention (and coins) from those that just left their jobs or those that are here specially to see them.

As if it were magic, this insipid concrete turns a high standard festival that tries to preserve the Moroccan culture. One of the most traditional activities on the square is the story teller. I would really melt if I listened to the tales of spells and distant kingdoms, Arabian Nights’ style, right at the heart of Morocco, but I didn’t find anyone telling stories in English or French.

Actually, it’s not even easy to find story tellers that narrates millenary stories in Arabic. The solitaries story tellers had been losing space for more modern, pyrotechnic and noisy performances, that attracts more crowd than Evangelic prayers or musicians playing Andean flute in São Paulo – Sé Square.

It’s a shame. It’s like a Moroccan saying: “When a story teller dies, a library is burned”.

October 3rd ​

It’s unbelievable, but I left Marrakesh without knowing the Saadino’s graves. Architectural jewelry,​ Unesco patrimony, they are nothing less than the monument that most interested me in this country. I prioritized Bahia’s Palace yesterday, because I knew how to arrive there, and, when I got to the graves, the doors were closed. Never mind. I’m fascinated by architecture, but even more for people, stories and adventures. And today I had enough of that to sell!

Hajj is really a lovely person. Before going to the office (he also works on Saturday), he took me by car to the road that leads to Fés and just stopped when we found that strategic roadside to hitchhike, that kind of roadside that basically begs a car to stop.

I really liked meeting this guy. It was a terrible goodbye, really bad. That hurried hug and no exchange of glances. No one wanted to risk being too emotional. Hajj turned on his black car and left. In 10 minutes, he was back.

“Hey, what happened?”, I asked, wondering what was going on.

He parked and left the car, head down, with a little plastic bag in his hands. He brought me two croissants, a pack of wafer and a big bottle of yogurt.

“You left home without breakfast...”, he said, giving me the bag.

What a big desire to cry! We hugged again and got back to our respective social functions, both aware that there was nothing else to be done.

In few minutes, a small blue car stopped. It was a very polite French man, that took me only 15 kilometers ahead, a small warm up to a marathonist. I don’t say that only for the 500 kilometers of tortuous road that separated me from Fés. I still had to pass by the camping which Aron was hosted in his last night in Morocco (he’s already back in Europe), close to Fés airport, and get the money he lent me and the phone chip we shared. Now that I have a cellphone, Hamsa’s old Nokia, the chip didn’t need to be discarded. After that I still had to go to Fés’ downtown to meet Farouk, our first host, and grab some objects I left in his house and I still needed. Not to mention that today is Saturday and Farouk said he had a party. Not a day to play on duty.

The second ride took longer to get, but took me farther. A super handsome boy came driving a 4x4 with his friend, that should be two times older than him (he seemed to be 24 years old). Me and Abu, the driver, didn’t have a common language, but I went chatting with Musfatá, his friend, all the way in Italian, language he dominates better than French, because he lived and worked somewhere in Italy. They are from Beni Mellal, one of Atlas’ capitals, in which they insisted in showing me.

Since we had done over 200 kilometers before noon, I thought it wouldn’t be the biggest irresponsibility to make a touristic stop. And we still had lunch, a delicious lamb’s tagine, French fries portion and Moroccan salad in a fancy restaurant, weirdly attached to a gas station.

By car and with my stomach filled, we went up the beautiful gardens of Beni Mellal, a green park that receives water from the Atlas in a waterfall, and a lot of teenagers in it’s clean squares. Seen from above, from the Beni Mellal castle, it transforms itself in a true painting, with flowers and mosaics in high relief, due to the artistic pruning they do on the trees.

It was only there, after three hours together, that the question was made. Mustafá wanted to know, by his friend request, if I had a boyfriend. I look to the well-made beard, large and bright smile on his tanned face, strong arms under the folded sleeve shirt… Boyfriend, me? Not at all! We exchanged numbers and both of them took me back on the road. I said goodbye with a hug on each one of them.

I waited and waited… Until a nice couple took me 40 kilometers ahead. Later, under a tangent shadow of a random roundabout, another long waiting. Another car stopped, but when I saw the sun close to the mountain lines, I decided that the next ride would be straight to Fés. I remembered Hajj words: “pay attention on the car plate. If it starts with 16, it is from Fés”.

A beautiful white sedan got closer. The first number on the grey plate was 1. The second was 6. I waved my finger on the air, repeatedly. Yes, it was going to Fés!

Aziz is a big, gray haired and quiet man. We talked a little, breaking the cold and darkness of the night with loose sentences. He works for a car rental agency and he needed to take that car to Fés airport. He said he hadn’t slept almost for 40 hours now, which considerably increased my will of having a conversation, despite the tiredness. He said that I shouldn’t worry, because he was used to drive for 10, 14 hours, almost with no pause. Already close to Fés, we crossed a small group of mountainous and charming cities, where the wealthiest north Moroccan likes to stay on winter vacations or to ski on weekends. The most famous is Ifrane. People say that the lowest temperature of Africa was registered in here – less than minus 20 degrees. The forest of cedars and oaks, the little houses with inverted V and the wool layers of clothes of the couples didn’t match at all with the idea I had of Morocco. Countries are like souls: as more you know it, more you delight yourself with the complexity that is hidden under the clichés.

Since he had to go to the airport, Aziz offered to take me to Aron’s camping. Actually, the place was pure leisure, with hotel, water park, fields and events rooms. I thank him as soon as I left the car, and so he left. One of the well-dressed security guards stood up from the plastic chair in a hurry, yelling something in Arabic to Aziz, gesticulating, asking him to come back.

“What is going on? Isn’t it an exit?”, I asked.

“The entry of the hotel is on the other side, he has to leave you there”, he said fast, while yelling in Arabic with Aziz, that was already back.

Imagine how ashamed I was! The man did a great favor of leaving me here and now he had to listen to someone yelling at him, for leaving me on the “wrong” place. I made a hand sign asking him to leave, that everything was fine. The security guard came and started to speak out loud with me, saying that the entry of the camping was far from where I was. I can walk! Where is it? He spoke on the radio with someone. A head-down boy appeared, and he crossed the water park with me.

The reception employee said and insisted that my friend hadn’t left any envelope for me. I let it clear that I wouldn’t leave without my envelope. Then he found a white envelope, with my name on its back. He asked for my passport, took a copy and gave me the envelope. I thanked him and left.

“Wait! Where are you going?”

“I’m leaving, why?”

“Cabs don’t come here, I’ll call one for you”.

“No, thank you, I don’t usually take a cab”.

“Wait!”

Than he yelled to a van driver that was leaving by the gate. The driver came down, they spoke in Arabic. After that he turned to me, very emphatic, gesticulating with the corner of his opened eyes:

“It’s dangerous to leave alone at night! I’ll take you to the other entry and I’ll call a cab. You will sit next to me and will wait, understood?”

“I won’t wait a fuck! I just crossed your country by myself, my friend. No one tells me what I have to do, did you understand?”, I raged and left on the darkness of the street. No one tried to answer or to stop me.

No man will put me under his protection under the excuse of “it’s for your own safety and comfort”. Fuck safety and comfort! No intention to protect me is more important than my free will. They love do to that with women. No men or even women have the right to choose for us due our social vulnerability. They have the obligation to respect us and valorize us, so this vulnerability disappears. To travel alone is not irresponsible, it’s rebellion! It’s dangerous but it’s not my fault or any other female colleague that I know. We can do whatever we want to. There will exist male chauvinism while women accept the “duty” of marriage, housekeeping and keep waiting for her “protector”. They still limit our space (and most of the times it’s the space we want to occupy), in the name of protection. They want to protect us from the threat they represent! Protection… pff! What a subtle (and effective) way to oppress. It’s not you that must be quiet at home, “living” your dreams through the TV and computer screen, they have to change their behavior and learn to respect you, no matter the circumstances.

I opened the envelope on a dark and desert street. I checked the content. There was a small note from Aron: “Good trips and have fun!” I laugh loudly. Then I put the chip on the cellphone and called Farouk. He asked me to meet him in front of the French embassy, downtown, and from there we would go to his friend’s party in an apartment. He asked me where I was. I answered that I had no idea, but I would find out and I’d call him once I was on the right place.

The neighborhood had fancy houses, balcony parties, pools, walls with intercom and no bus line circulating. It passed 10 p.m. I asked some boys on cap and hoodies where downtown was. They pointed me the way and… guess what? My flip flop’s strap teared apart! The good thing is that I’d bought a cheap pair of sneakers in Marrakesh the day before, for about 20 reais, otherwise I’d have to walk barefoot. My feet were with the same color than the asphalt and I didn’t really want to inaugurate my shoes in this condition.

I stopped in a better illuminated spot of the large avenue and tried to hitchhike. No one was stopping, only cabs. The ride to downtown would be too expensive. All money I had now was the 80 euros that my friend left me and I’d need to survive with it for a whole month.

A car stopped. Two men. He said he transport passengers and he’d charge me six reais to take me downtown. I offered three and he accepted right away. When we arrived, he said I didn’t need to pay. I put the five dirhams coin on his hand. A deal is a deal.

Farouk came to get me with an open smile and tight hug. I love reencounters! In a few days, he’d leave to Senegal hitchhiking with his girlfriend and still he offered to host me. We walked to his friend’s apartment, two young English teachers from United States.

The strings from the guitar and from the violin vibrated strongly in the room, full of curtains and paintings of soft tons. Top music and musicians. I left my backpack on a room and I locked myself on the bathroom. I put clean clothes on, put makeup on and came back beautiful and girly to the social environment, no one could ever imagine I’d just crossed half country hitchhiking to be on that living room.

October 4th ​

I can’t even explain how it happened. Today I failed, big failure. I woke up later than the planned,​ still on the teacher’s house, next to a French girl that left me a good space of someone’s double bed. We had a great breakfast and, as usual, we talked about the night for a good time. In another words, when I finally leave the house the sun from 11 a.m was brutal with those without a hat, like me.

Since I’d lost my smartphone on my way to Holland, I had no GPS. Nothing that would spoil my plans of hitchhiking, I thought (wrongly), even more in a francophone city like Fés. Before leaving the house, I looked at the map where was the highway leading to north. All I had to do was to walk for 20 minutes. Chefchaouen, or the blue city, as it’s known, due to the blue houses that fill the medina, its 250 kilometers north from Fés; not much for someone that made over a thousand kilometers hitchhiking in one day.

The problem is that this path is tortuous and there’s no direct road. So I’d spend at least 5 hours. I needed to arrive that same Sunday, because next day I’d start a month volunteering in a hostel. I’d have a place and three meals in exchange of four or five hours as a receptionist. How did I got that? Internet! There are many websites that provide this kind of exchange, like Workaway and ​ ​ Wwoof. ​

I got distracted. No doubt that the stores in the new Fés’ downtown are interesting, they do deserve a good looking, but the reason I got distracted was another one, completely out of the script, by the way. An older man approached slowly on an old bike, his eyes hidden under the faded cap, he put his penis out of his pants and started to masturbate himself. “Oh lord, what a character”, I thought laughing.

I crossed the street, turned randomly to the left and to the right. Looked back three times; and the man kept a few meters away from me all the time. I wasn’t laughing anymore. I found a pair of cops and tried to report the pervert. He disappeared, of course. And appeared again. I talked to another cop, a woman this time. Worried, she looked around for the guy with me, but, again, he’d disappeared. To sum up: when I got free of the pervert, I was completely lost.

I walked some kilometers under a burning sun to find the exit to Chefchaouen. Still inside the city, I got a short ride that left me almost on the highway. Then a young couple stopped:

“Good afternoon, are you going to Chefchaouen?”

“No, but… this road doesn’t lead to Chaouen”.

“No way!”

“The road to north is on the other side of the city”

“I can’t believe… I spent almost an hour to get here, under this sun. Do you know which bus can I take to the exit?”

“We can leave you on the bus station and from there you go to Chaouen”.

“No, no, I want to hitchhike”.

“So we take you to the other Fés’ exist. Get in”.

I thanked immensely. They left me close to a gas station. I waited a lot. At last, two young men stopped on a black car.

“Hi, are you heading to Chefchaouen?”

“Chefchaouen? This isn’t the right way!”

Today the world is playing with me! I was already wet from my sweat. If I applied another layer of sunscreen, people would think I’m a mummy!

But there wasn’t much I could do. I took a deep breath, crossed the road and started to hitchhike back to Fés’ downtown. I’d find a coffee with Wi-Fi, I’d study the map meticulously and then go back to the road – it’s yet to born a more stubborn person than me.

The big issue is that the clock was around three p.m and I wasn’t even thinking in arriving Chefchaouen on the next day, after all I had a job commitment. Actually, I don’t even know how I could keep my sanity under that burning sun. Now that the wind is fresh I can organize my thoughts… but in that moment…

When I passed by a construction site I saw a group working under the heat, with the shadow of their caps, only. It gave me chills. This is not human! This life on the road, “on the world”, as some relatives would say, taught me the meaning of sub-human, in a way I can never forget. I don’t dare to explain it. I will just say that my confirmation of the prolonged hunger, the cold that mutes, the heat that hurts and the involuntary loneliness can affect tremendously the ability of thinking and the judgment of the most resilient people. We don’t have the same conditions as humans, on the most animal meaning. The ones that are most of the time in social, climatic (heaters and air conditionings) and nutritive conditions to build thoughts and projects are, indeed, privileged.

I had to wait a long time, but luck finally found me. When a nice middle-aged man opened the door of his blue (or green?) sedan I was about to faint. He notices and commented, on a good mood, that I was crazy. He was driving since Casablanca, 200 kilometers away, just to meet a woman he met on the internet. He spoke Italian better than French, so I asked him in Italian to take me to the road of Chefchaouen.

“But don’t you think it’s better to take a bus, or a train?”

“No, I’m used to hitchhike, don’t worry”.

“I see, but actually I don’t even know where this road is, I’m not from Fés. But if you want, I can leave you at the bus station. I pay for your ticket, no problem.”

“I think it’s better not…”

“Girl, it’s four p.m already, don’t do it to yourself! It’s dangerous. I’ll pay for your ticket with pleasure”.

It’s hard for me to admit, but he was right – I wasn’t even in conditions to think. We got lost a little bit before finding the bus station, but we had fun talking about Italy. He was in an unshakable mood.

We went to the tight ticket window of the bus company. The bus would leave in one hour. He asked if it was good for me and bought the ticket. It was about 30 reais. I gave him a warm handshake and wished good luck on his date. He smiled from ear to ear and returned the “good luck”. It’s a shame I’ll never know the end of this story.

The bus had some issue with documentation and took a little longer to leave. It was full and it left us cooking on the heat for at least half an hour. I don’t even remember what I thought or if I was thinking at all. I just registered the tight seats, crowded, and the man next to me that seemed to be afraid to touch my arm.

We arrived about eleven p.m. As I was told before, there was still 5 kilometers to Chaouen and I’d have to take a shared cab for about 3 reais. I’ll never forget those first minutes inside the mystic Chefchaouen’s blue medina, the dark arches dilating the entry of the maze, the hooded figures protecting from the soft wind that I missed so much.

The glass door opened when I rang the bell. It was Alex, the smiley Australian that would be my work partner for a couple of weeks. When I said my name, the answer came as a bullet.

“Oh, you are the Brazilian! You came hitchhiking, right? Insane!”

“Well, more and less…”

“Come here, I’ll show you our room”.

I reached the last floor breathless. A group of girls was around the terrace table.

“Hey, girls. She’s Kívia!”

“You are the girl that came hitchhiking? Uhuuu!”, one of them asked me, followed by a round of applause from the group.

“We were waiting for you, congratulations!”

What an embarrassment…

Alex kept showing me the place and explaining everything, on the speed of a comet, his registered mark. He left my backpack next to a bed with a soft sheet and a clean towel on top. He pointed to the ceiling, the paintings on the wall, the window with a scandalous view to the blue city and to Rife mountains.

“Isn’t this the greatest room you have even been in?”, he asked me with his 23 years old excitement.

Yes, not bad.

October 23th ​

I’ve been away from adventures in Chefchaouen. Sometimes people ask me why am I’m not going​ to the waterfall, or climbing the Rife or why I don’t go out to have dinner with guests. Well, because I don’t want to. I joke that I’m taking vacations from traveling. Indeed, when I’m on the road I participate of so many dinners, walking and beach days, that now few activities sound better than sleeping, reading, writing and studying Russian on the Tablet – yes, now I have a tablet and GPS! Gift from a friend trying to travel with less baggage.

You must be wondering why the hell am I writing if nothing is happening in my sedentary life. Well, if I am creating a new chapter just to tell this story than it’s because it wouldn’t be fair to leave it out of my diary.

There’s a very nice group hosted in here. Actually, each one of us came by ourselves and we all met here. We stay the whole night laughing and talking on the cold of the terrace. The idea appeared in one of these drinking nights full of stars. From all miraculous ideas that we’d planned to create together, this was the easiest – and more common. Chefchaouen region is internationally known as one of the biggest hashish producers in the world. The production attracts a lot of foreigners, but to smoke the powder extracted from the marijuana’s leaf is to Chefchaouen just like ayahuasca is to Amazonia’s communities.

Although it’s officially forbidden in Morocco, hashish is almost a local patrimony. Teenagers, older people and family parents smoke freely their kifis, a long and thin smoking pipe, in the afternoon or at night, to finish a job or to take a siesta – colony of Spanish people for many ​ ​ years, the north of Morocco kept some characteristics, like the language, more usual here than French. Watch them reminds me my grandfather smoking his straw cigarettes, nothing like these kids smoking marijuana hidden behind the high-school.

Well, our idea was to copy the idea from an Australian couple and so many other tourists: to visit a marijuana plantation. Where? We had no puta idea. Someone said that someone commented ​ ​ that in the mountains behind the Spanish mosque (which is already outside the city) there was some farms. We met this afternoon, willing to follow those coordinates with a compass. There was me, an English man, a Holland man and a boy from Hong Kong.

The way to the Spanish mosque was easy and fun. After that… is that the mountain? Should we bypass this hillside? Should we go down the valley? A Moroccan from our age approached:

“Are you trying to see a marijuana plantation?”

“No, we are just doing a trekking”, one of the boys answered.

I looked at us: wearing shoes with 2 cm sole, pants that looked like pajamas, long bottom shirts, avocado milkshake with straws, no water, zero snacks, no backpack. Even a brainless capybara would have noticed that we were doing anything, but trekking.

“I can take you to a farm, show you how we do hashish. Don’t worry, I don’t want money. I sell for big buyers, 20, 30 packs, I don’t need money.”

After announcing he was a big dealer, tranquility wasn’t exactly the feeling in our hearts. The man kept talking. We waited quietly, patiently, until another guy appeared, saying something in Arabic, and both left. When they disappeared behind the mosque, we got back on moving.

Not even if I wanted to I would be able to draw the path we’ve followed, better, that we’ve invented. With the goal of reaching “the other side”, we crammed in the thorny bushes and dry trees of the valley. In certain point, we couldn’t even distinguish if we were coming back or forth. We arrived in a small farm surrounded by cactus and we greet the farmers, in Spanish. Soon another small farm appeared, and another farmer. This one spoke a little English. Never, in my dreams, I thought that a simple and soft invitation would come from that body mistreated by the sun, wearing a faded polo shirt, dirty pants and used tennis:

“Would you like to know my marijuana plantation?”

In a few minutes, we were alone on a brick surrounding, some kind of lonely room, with no roof or plaster. The floor, very dirty, that was covered by dry leaves, was sustaining a pile of bricks on a corner and a bucket with clothes pieces on another corner. The man brought four plastic chairs and disappeared.

The deal was that we would pay about 10 reais each for the tour on the farm, a demonstration of how to produce hashish and five grams in powder - this last one, one of the boys ad to the “contract” by himself, playful.

We were alone for 10 minutes, saying all our thoughts and commenting about what may happen next. None of us got even close to what the man brought in his thick hands when he left his house in which he shares with his wife and small kids: a tray with a teapot and five glasses. Sometimes Moroccan hospitality is surreal.

After tea time, another man arrived, younger and simpler in his clothes and manners. He greeted us, shy, and took the bucket with the clothes. Throw the clothes on the floor and turned the bucked so we could see the bottom. No bottom at all! Half of it was full with smashed marijuana leaves.

With ability, he took an enameled fruit and tied a piece of cloth in one border. He spread a hand of marijuana over the flat surface of the tissue and covered it with another tissue, also tying it. He set on the floor, with his legs stretched and half-opened. He held it between his feet, grabbed two thin and long sticks and started hitting the (how to call it?) pile of clothes filled with herbs. He turned the thing few times and kept on hitting it hard and fast with the sticks, like a hardcore drummer. At the end of it, he threw the smashed leaves on the ground and showed us the bottom of the cloth: covered with a yellow dust. That was hashish.

The most surreal part was about to happen. Our guide grabbed the smashed marijuana leaves, threw it on the floor and called the chickens. Like trained dogs, the birds crossed the small iron gate and started to eat the sprouts, selecting the greatest pieces.

“Jason, am I retarded or am I really seeing chickens eating marijuana?”

“That’s right, Kívia, the chickens are eating marijuana.”

Sometimes while traveling I doubt what my eyes see.

The farmer kept on showing us the property. The marijuana plantation was small, maybe 40 square meters, and unrecognizable. Just the dry stems and small buds had left of the last pruning. For what he said and what we’ve seen through the pictures of other tourists, the plants can reach two meters. Now the farmer has to rip out the roots, clean the field and plant all over to the next harvest, that is annual. After he knew that I was from Brazil and I spoke Spanish, he was more comfortable in explaining and commenting.

“There must be big plants in Brazil, right?”, he asked curious, as if he was buying cabbage from the neighbor’s garden.

“Oh, I don’t really know! In Brazil, I’d never go on the meddle of the woods to know a marijuana plantation”.

“Why? Oh, you have mafia in there, don’t you?”

We said goodbye with a handshake. Passed by the same chickens, now inert. The farmer took one of them and put it outside the fence. The chicken didn’t even move, just move her little neck to one side. He still gave us a little bag of hashish, but no one wanted to grab it. The ones that didn’t smoke (like me) wasn’t going to do anything with it, and the ones that smoke, had enough.

If is there violence liked to drug dealing in Chefchaouen? A friend of mine was born and raised on the city and he said that there’s a place where it’s dangerous to go at night, outside the medina and away from tourist’s views, because there are armed groups that doesn’t go along with each other.

In our expedition, we didn’t see any sign of guns or organized crime, we didn’t pass by any mob or gang; just a bunch of white sheeps, that screamed along the speakers from a faded mosque.

November 4th ​

It’s not every day that I have the opportunity to cry like a baby, letting the redemption tears run through​ my neck. I was blessed with a movie sunset on my last day in Chefchaouen. At the end of it, the ring of mosques that surrounds me broke the cold air with its synchronized prays. Magical!

I recap in seconds my walking through the anachronic alleys of the blue city, where people lack in hurry and exceeds in serene countenances. I always had the feeling that nothing happened in this city and I also didn’t want to do anything, or talk to anyone, sometimes. But what is this nothingness? What was the discomfort that followed me in my dark room, in my lonely walks through the mountains?

This nothing is me. It’s me watching myself, it’s me talking to myself. It’s me stopping ignoring people in front of me, with all their urgencies and stories, it’s me finding happiness in my own company. Nothing is: little matter and a lot of mental and spiritual exercise. It’s the silence of slowly life hitting against the castle of obsessive thoughts and wrong opinions that the world shaves down our throats, blocking the inner vision that is, after all, all we are and all we really have.

This nothing, that mixes with the taint of the simple homes, bounds amazingly. It remembers me that traveling is not just jumping from a country to another, collect climbed mountains and paradisiac beaches in our résumé. Travelling is this crossing we make inside, that we cannot photograph and show other people, and its unnoticed in this era of selfies and megabytes.

In Chefchaouen nothing and everything happens. And what happened today is that I saw myself following the pray that left the mosques, wishing every person in this world that is currently suffering, as I was 5 months ago, can have strength to put their backpack and move on. There will be a sunset like this one in the horizon, there will be tears like these.

November 5th ​

Since I have to go, let’s go then! I woke up before the alarm, in which I was unused, and backpack​ without postponement or nostalgia. It was a month of conscious confinement in these mountains and I was anxious to go out on the road again, with all its beauty and danger.

Hussan prepared me a Moroccan Parfait for breakfast, just because I asked him, mixing natural yogurt, fruits, dates, dry figs and that omnipresent smile. If someone will be missed, it’s him, a friend and almost a Moroccan brother. This young and beautiful boy of 20-and-few years old used to pull my blanket in the morning and dragged me out of bed to eat fried cookie with chocolate on the terrace. In one day, I was cooking lunch for us, in the other day he washed my dishes and my towel. In one day, we were gossiping about Real Madrid, in the other day we were singing “Aïcha ​ ecoute moi” out loud. I hugged him and all the others fast, like I use to do in farewells that threaten ​ to bother.

I walked over half an hour to the road, to a decent place to hitchhike. The sun dried the dew from the green grass and heat the bones in a nice way. Chefchaouen was a little blue point in the horizon, it was already past. I asked some boys to take a picture of me hitchhiking, so I could remember this day. I took the tablet just to check that I do have GPS and the odds to get lost again were small.

In two minutes, a nice car stopped on the roadside. The boy was so polite and calm. He was a director of some electrical company and would take me just 10 kilometers ahead. No problem! If it keeps going that way, I’ll easily arrive in Meknes.

But it didn’t. Not really because I was hungry, but because I was bored, I took from my backpack the half kilogram of olive with lemon, the small goat cheese and two breads that I’ve bought yesterday for less than two dollars on the supermarket. I had that banquet crouched on the road. Not bad! Bad was the bus passing by me and throwing that black smoke on my face.

Almost half an hour waiting until a persona with a checked shirt and Prada’s glasses stopped on a big silver car, just to take me. Mohammed is completely in love with his adoptive city, Madrid. He likes the beer and overall the people – Latin friends in which he likes to party.

“If I need a home or anything in Madrid, God always put someone on my way to help me. Always! In the beginning, I lived in Barcelona, but it wasn’t easy. People look at you like they’re saying ‘what are you doing here’. These people never left their home or their country. When they come to Morocco, to spend their vacations or to live here, we treat them really well. Why can’t them treat us the same way?”

Unfortunately, Mohammed just took me 20 kilometers ahead, to the next village, where I was stuck. It wasn’t less than an hour of boredom, that’s for sure. So much boredom that I took the tablet out of my backpack and studied Russian just to spend some time, until a headache got me hard.

As if the lack of cars wasn’t enough, competition showed up. Three old ladies covered from head to toe stopped just few meters ahead of me, in a way they monopolized the only available piece of roadside any car could stop. What can I do?

I walked up to another shadow, close to the road curve, next to a “roadside” that not even a master in madness would stop, even less to give a ride. And to get even worst, a beautiful young lady with a black jellaba came two steps on my side and started hitchhiking. Again, what can I do?

I offered olive with lemon and tried to start a conversation. This lady had such a strong, lost and beautiful look. She had her black, shiny and smooth hair in a bun. When a car passed by us, she timidly raised her painted-in-red index finger –like a child that wants to make a question in class. Men honked or did hand signs for her to leave or asked what she wanted. She asked me, in a rudimentary French, if we could go together to Ourzane. I smiled and said yes. She smiled back, weirdly disturbed, and crossed the asphalt, disappearing on the road.

The ladies got their ride. An old truck stopped and waited, with no hurry, for them to get in. The third one almost felt. On the second try, she raised her jellaba to her knees, revealing her skirt, pant and socks, dropping one flip flop of the fatty boy. On the third try, she was pulled by her friends.

They left behind a little bit of luck. The next old truck stopped for me. I put the backpack on, all pride of my experience in getting in cabins and… I almost felt back! These trunk’s stairs are so far away from the handles that is supposed to help us going up! I had to stretch so much my leg that I’m still limping.

This is a guy that likes to listen to super high Arab music, taking both hands from the steering wheel and shaking them from one side to another, like the purple dolphin he had close to the windshield. Another information that was clear about him is that he’s a fan of Barça, due to the canvas with the team shield that covers completely the ceiling of the cabin. By the way, Morocco splits into Barcelona and Real Madrid fans.

He tried to convince me to participate his weird dance, raising my arm and saying that he wants to go to Brazil. On the beginning, I showed sympathy. At the end of two hours traveling with him, all I thought about was getting out of there. What a pain in the neck! At least I had done half of the way.

I got hungry, so I finished my bread with smashed cheese. A cop arrived saying “bon jour, ​ ça va?”, asking my nationality and if I was hitchhiking. When I said yes, he asked me to stay close ​ to his station, that it was safer. After he asked me if he could help me reaching Meknés, 100 kilometers away from there. No, merci! ​

Two men on a truck took me 15 minutes ahead, to a gas station. I took the opportunity to fill my water bottle on the bathroom sink, for emergencies.

I got scared when I saw a bunch of uniformed teenagers on both sides of the road coast, when I left the bathroom. What the hell? A squad of backpackers?, I thought, laughing. A group of 10 girls stopped right in front of me, using all of their French and curiosity.

They were all students and every day they needed to walk few kilometers between the village and the closest school. A gas station employee arrived and repelled them. Soon a truck with three happy boys stopped, without me even asking for a ride. I set on the back, over a blanket that covered a tire.

In five minutes, they stopped. The lateral door and the back door was opened. About 15 teenagers got in, with that silence, characteristic of their age, happy with the ride. When they saw me, they threw a party. It was wave of questions. They made a line to take a picture with their cellphones, passing their curious hands on my backpack. When they went down the truck, one by one shook my hands and, with the other hand, touched their chest as a sign of respect. I thought that was absolutely beautiful! I even got my eyes full of tears.

Soft hills of an intense green followed the asphalt where I came down. On the other side, two shepherds were walking with about 50 adults and nestling sheeps. I left my stuff on my side of the road and crossed it to take pictures. After that I played shepherd. The wood stick is sadly powerful. All you have to do is to get close to a sheep with it, and it runs away of the stick. I really wanted to put one of them in my backpack! I would never feel alone again!

A small truck passed by with three men. I insistently hitchhike for them and the driver, with a cowboy hat, stopped. He could take me a little bit farther, which was good enough. Not good, amazing! It was the most beautiful path! I jumped on the back of the truck, stretched my legs on the uncomfortable floor and just enjoyed the view. A sea of soft hills perforates the sky in random tons, something between ochre and moss-green. Another sea, of olive trees, filled the sides of the road here and there, carried with black lumps, just waiting for the imminent harvesting stick.

The wind blew deliciously in my hair and I didn’t want anything else but that. After hearing so many stories of my mother’s hard life, that was born and raised on a farm, this ideal of perfect life on the field definitely don’t convince me and the idea of living on the meddle of the field attracts me as much as two opposite sides of a magnet. But, I’ll tell you, seeing as an outsider these serene people, with healthy food on their table, full of smiles in their basket full of food that the donkeys carry… they seem to be very happy!

The next ride woke me up to the big city’s life. Omar studies IT in Rabat and owns a very smart argumentation. He said, in a fluent English, that he likes Marisa Monte and Tom Jobim, while the radio was playing Magalenha.

He said that a group of Moroccan, influenced by the king, made a recent protest in front of the Swiss embassy in Rabat, after the country recognize the Occidental Sahara (that portion of the south of Morocco, remember?) as an independent state.

“They celebrated when Switzerland recognized Palestine, but when they have to give up something, they don’t like it”, he commented.

The conversation was so long that he gave up his initial destination and took me to Meknes. He said he’d take the opportunity to visit his sister. Great, because the night was falling upon us. He left me on a supermarket’s parking lot, close to my host’s house.

Hussem went to pick me up with that characteristic smile. While he agilely walked with his crutches on the perfect sidewalks of this neighborhood, my host told me he’d survived poliomyelitis and he’d developed a project of accessible tourism, to allow physical deficient to travel to Morocco and encourage them to travel the world.

On his sister’s house, which has an impressive three meters’ height ceiling and two smart and studious nephews, we cooked a chicken’s tagine. I finally got the secret of this simple and unique-flavor dish. You don’t think I’ll tell you, do you?

November 6th ​

Meknes is one of the so called imperial cities, like Fés, for having hosted the Moroccan th th royalty, between 16 ​ and 18 ​ century. The gigantic Bab Mansour gate is one of the jewels of ​ ​ ​ Moroccan architecture. It’s really one of the fanciest buildings I’ve ever seen, embellished in dark-green mosaics, royalty color. But what really brought me to Meknes isn’t it. The ruins of the Roman Volubilis city is 30 kilometers north. the only reason I got up earlier this morning was to know this place.

Singing people followed by drums sounds came in through the iron door of our building, that leads to the street. About twelve women walked around the building, having on their center a woman with different clothes, covered from head to toe. Hussem was taking me to the cab stop and he told me that was part of a wedding celebration. On the night before, that woman had lost her virginity and now everyone was celebrating. For a moment, I imagined my friends in São Paulo singing in my window, after I had sex. I would kill them!

Downtown, outside the beautiful medina, I took a bus to Moulay Idriss, another imperial city, 2 kilometers away from Volubilis. What a lovely city! It was entirely built on two hills, a large one and a narrowed one. From far away, the little white houses perfectly form the head and the hump of a dromedary, breaking the green of olive trees and conifer forest.

It was on this bucolic and semi paradisiac scenario that I met the man. I asked where hammam was, which I imagined would be the ruins of a Romain bath. He said to me to follow the channel of the emerald river. Then he ran after me and said he’d go with me. Oh lord, another guide wanting tips.

I said he didn’t need to bother, but he came with me, in silence. Slowly, he started saying some information. All the families on the margin of the river gets water from it, since they are not provided by the government. “This pipe is the sewer from the houses. From here down, the water is no longer good”, he said. More to south was the piece of land of his family, covered with olive trees. The trees close to their propriety was from the neighbor – again, no fences. Cactus and some kind of gigantic slug was used to separate the proprieties.

The Roman bath was a round pool of concrete next to the river. The green water, crystal and warm hit on half of the shin. It entered on a hole in a cornet and came down to the river trough the other hole, on the other cornet. On summer, the pool fills to the edge of two meters and receives a lot of bathers.

The clock, almost marking two p.m, scared me.

“I have to come back”.

“Ok. I go with you to Volubilis”.

“No, I don’t need! I rather go alone, I like to take pictures”.

Before he answered, I jumped to the other margin of the river, to take some nice pictures. Instead crossing the road back, I let myself go by a pleasant walk between bushes and rocks. At the end of it, he convinced me to take a tea in a house.

How old would that baby face be? About 19, 22. I thought it was weird that he lived alone, in a small house. He said his family lived on a farm, far from there. I saw some notebooks on the table. He said he studies “Islamic studies”, to be a teacher. After, he said he also plays soccer in Meknes and go to practice on the big city every day in the morning.

He treated me with milk and dates, literally. He left me alone and went to the other room of low ceiling. He came back dressing a grey hoodie pants and a very white polo shirt, that highlights his soccer player curves. I kind of desired to be accompanied to Volubilis.

It would be two kilometers walking. For the first time, the boy abandoned that taciturn shyness, all charming, and emended all my comments with accurate answers. The subject was, obviously, soccer.

A cop car cut our way, asking where he lived and what was my nationality. Later they offered us a ride to the ruins entry. On the way, they asked if Youssef had gone to the mosque today – Friday noon is the “big pray” moment to Islamic. My friend answered a direct “no”.

Volubilis is one of the most beautiful classic ruins I’ve visited. And I say that after living in Italy and Greece. Roman city had over 20 thousand inhabitants. A lot of marble is missing to complete this column and arches puzzles in the royal buildings of Meknes, took by the Moroccan royalty. Later an earthquake came and knocked down many other things. Still, all we need is a little imagination to see a Roman city in front of you.

The court arches get your attention from far away, but you need to look to the floor to see the big treasure of Volubilis: the colored ceramic mosaic, wealthiest houses’ floor. One of the most beautiful is the Orfeu’s House, which represents the Greek poet captivating animals with the sound of his lira. The representation of Dionisio surrounded by muses impresses by the amount of details and conservation. It looks like it was yesterday! Another famous mosaic is the Athlete House, representing a man mounted on back, on a horse.

Like all Roman cities, Volubilis has a monumental triumph arch, that leads to the main avenue, Decumanus Maximus. One of the neighbor’s house had a curious structure, an embedded penis on a dark stone, reason of a lot of laughing between a group of teenagers. That’s when the conversation changed its tone.

“Have you ever had sexual relations?”, he asked me without hesitating.

I tried to explain, gesticulating a lot, that we have different manners in my country. Mostly of people isn’t interested in staying virgin to their wedding, that usually occurs in an advanced age. He listened with attention.

“I’ve never had sexual relations”.

The boy’s words felt on me like a bomb. As far as I remember, no men have ever told me about their virginity like this. This simple sentence have me the deepness of the behavior abysm that separates me from him, just like separates Brazil from Morocco, South America from Meddle East, Islam from the five daily prays of our “catholicism”. I was convinced that Moroccan single people that doesn’t live on the bubble of cosmopolitan big cities rarely has an active sexual life. Men and women that are not in a wedding have huge difficulties to find partners, like they’ve told me. The sexism disguised of “good manners” take from all genders the right of sex, one of the most beautiful aspects of life.

You could see from the road that takes us to Meknes the white Moulay Idriss configuration on a golden camel, ready to cross the night. We came back to the small city’s road.

The black fruits from the olive trees shined desperate, claiming for harvest. I put my heavy head on his strong shoulder, as he hugged me carefully, while we waited for my bus. Nothing more than that could happened.

The full bus took me back to Place Hadim, where I agreed to find Hussem. Neither me or my host thought that Meknes downtown would be so full of people. Families and many single men gathered around a big stage to watch the concert of Moroccan famous artists, like Mahmoud Idrisse.

All this party is because today people celebrate the 40 years of Marche Verte, maybe the ​ ​ main civic event of Morocco. This holiday remembers me the walking made by over 300 thousand Moroccan to the current Occidental Sahara, asking Spain to give back Moroccan territory. Unarmed, they carried just flags of their country and Koran books (the green color of the marsh refers to Islam), escorted by Moroccan armed forces. The movement was orchestrated by the king Hassan II and didn’t find any resistance on the Spanish army. Although, it triggered a war of 15 years with the Polisario Front, a fight movement, until today, to make Sahara independent from Morocco.

Here at home, seemed like the TV was going to reprise the march and the current king speech forever. We decided to play cards, until Maradona came inside the soccer field to a commemorative match, taking smiles and mean comparisons of his round forms with the ball. The Argentine master scored a very good goal. We shut up and went to our beds.

November 7th ​

I wish my improvised diaries gave me a permission to get in the kingdom of these lucky writers that enjoy​ the privilege of invoking muses and demigods to guide their linguistic works. I believe that not even the Olympic torch in front of these lines could transmit, with some decency, what this eyes (and ears and nose) witnessed today. But, since we can’t escape the try (or the mistake), let’s do it.

On the last minute possible, Hussem invited me to go to an Amazigh wedding. The celebration would take place close to Midelt, about four hours by car from Meknes, already on the way to Sahara – after the bad experience in Zagora, I couldn’t leave Morocco without coming back to the great desert. I, obviously, accepted the invitation.

We left the house together. I went to the road to hitchhike and he went to the bus station to take the bus.

“Let’s see who gets there first?” My friend accepted the challenge.

The hardest part, like in all big cities, was reaching the exit. Once I reached that strategic roadside, it was only good news! I didn’t even wait 5 minutes.

Two young public workers took me straight to Zaida, just 35 kilometers missing for my final destination. About them, I don’t know much. The mountainous landscape and my thought steal my own attention. I passed by Ifrane again, that number one winter destination in Morocco. The yellow leaves felt like feathers over the steep roofs houses, build on purpose to drain the snow. It was there that I received the first message from my friend. He was 40 kilometers behind me, complaining that the bus was too old and slow.

I lost the advantage when we stopped on a gas station. The boys didn’t want to fill the tank, nor eat, but to pray. They got in a small white mosque, few steps away from the gas pump, and returned unfolding the pants bars, laughing a lot.

On the exact moment we reached Zaida, another Hussem message arrived in my Nokia: “I’m here!” Dammit! I lost for 35 kilometers. The remaining kilometers I made with a very polite group of teachers and musicians. The driver told me later he diverged his path just to take me to the village. What about that!

Fátima, Hussem’s friend that invited us to the wedding, came to get us with another girl. My friend left us to visit I-don’t-know-who. Me and the girls walked around the dusty alleys and open sewage, to a salon. A dark hall, filled with dressed mannequins with fancy jellabas, took us to a small door with a curtain. People that are going to a party and doesn’t have proper clothes can rent one of those dresses for 40 to 80 reais. From the street, it isn’t possible to see the women getting ready.

The hairdresser, that had her head covered with a veil and was wearing a stamped robe, stretched the black hair of a groom’s relative beneath her waist. Before them, an old wood balcony sustained a lot of products made of shea and argan oil. The hairdresser cut those three fingers of bad hair and held the rest on a bun, then she put a veil on top of the hair.

We were from the groom’s family. By the way, as I soon found out, we were from nobody’s family. Fátima, my friend’s former girlfriend, was our only contact on the place. Not even Hussem knew a single face on the family. Still, we were received with tea, coconut donuts and bread with fresh olive oil – which I dropped on the fancy table cloth, carefully arranged for the wedding.

The ladies sympathized with my lack of clothes and shoes. The groom’s sister arranged me a wine-color jellaba, covered with a veil with a lot of embroidery flowers and small pearls. I don’t think I wore such a fancy dress since I was a bridesmaid on a countryside wedding.

Fátima gave me a heel shoes and make me up, which I filled with a dark shadow almost to my forehead. I put red nail polish on and gave a small gift for the groom’s brother – according to traditions, the guests must give a gift to the family member that made the invitation. We finish our dressing almost six p.m. Time to go get the bride.

I already got in many parties. Never before with so much guts. About five cars left to the neighbor village, the bride’s village. The groom’s car had him, the driver, a relative, me and Hussem. They stopped in a certain point of the asphalt, where we met another group of cars, to do the “trade”. The groom disappeared on the dawn and two family ladies got in the car in his place. Imagine their faces of “what the fuck”, when they heard an English conversation on the back seat. I smiled in Moroccan style inside my jellaba.

The entry on the groom’s house was very beautiful. Members of both families, women mostly, made a big ring that, if we were in Brazil, people would call “samba’s ring”. Many of them were playing Bandir, a drum shaped on a big cake, with the corners made of wood, decorated with florals.

In a happy and fast rhythm, one family sang welcome songs to the other. Close to each other like Japanese rice, they danced like they knew it of the top of their head; their body went back and forth, in fast circles. Their hands also moved and their shoulders moved a lot. No buffet food, prays or rings. Since the beginning, it was clear that the soul of the Amazigh weeding is the music – a lot of music!

Inside the house, we split up. The men from the groom’s family went to the Moroccan room, with stewed and curtains in black, white and dark pink. We, women from the groom’s family, went to a long and narrowed saloon, filled with mattresses, pillows and about four little rounded tables. The bride’s family were upstairs. Hussam called me, saying they’d be like this for the next two hours, until the dinner was served and everyone got together to the big party. He asked me if I wanted to visit one of his brother’s wife’s relatives.

It’s good to sit on the couch of simple and happy people, isn’t it? It warms our hearts. The family’s father, rural producer, was talking about a tourist that wanted to buy from him three apples, paying five dirhams. But, with this money, she could buy the double, so he put more apples in the bag. The lady insisted she only needed three apples and she wanted to pay that price, but it didn’t stop him to give her the amount of apple he thought it was fair. He commented with us that he thinks it’s an absurd that people tries to explore tourists and charge exorbitant prices.

His daughters were playing of taking pictures of me next to Hussem, like we were engaged. We laugh out loud. One of his daughters, divorced and with a son, landed me a beautiful emerald-green velvet jellaba, with golden finishing on the edges. They told me that the tradition is changing the dress after the dinner and that I’d need another one. For someone who’s used to alternate between three pants in three months, having two gala’s dresses on the same night… I feel like a 15 years old debutante.

The music never stopped on the women saloon. Spread on the floor, they “cried” super romantic songs, that a lady who lived in France translated in my ear. “They are singing that they’ll be forever with their husband. Even in the cold or in the forest. If the lion eats him, so it should eat them both!”

The kids were dancing, rolling on the floor and, at last, sleeping on their mother’s arms, that didn’t drop the Bandir. What could happen instead was the instrument going to another’s women arms.

The dinner was an entire baked chicken, on top of an entrails soup, with a bowl of olive and seasoning. Each table received a frame. The bread we shared substitute the cutlery. The chicken disappeared fast. In few minutes, the plastic on the table was with a sea of little bones and cartilage. The dessert was served, a bow of apples and pomegranates.

I changed clothes right there, after they left, and joined the rest upstairs, to the big party. A screamed, cried, wiping, frenetic, powerful and hard to describe in words flowed through the little brick stairs without plaster. The band had a lot of musicians. Violins, keyboard, percussion and Berber instruments. It was only two dancers. They were wearing white cotton, sleeve shirt amended to the skirts that rolled over the tight pants. They put a string with smalls adornments crossing the back. By the simplicity of their clothes and by the curves (one of them had voluminous curves, the other one, almost no curve at all) they were distant from the Brazilian dancers’ beauty standard.

They were the absolute the center of attentions. Mainly after they tied up a colored cloth, craved of shiny little disks, on their hips. The flounce was between belly dance and axé, and it was breathtaking. The ladies knew it. They got close to the men, especially the older ones, and waited until the dirham notes were played this or that way. Other women, even girls, also tied up scarfs (the ones that goes on the head) on their hips to emphasize their curves and the movements that jellaba hided due to its straight cut.

The groom, wearing white jellaba with hood and colored cords around his neck, made an entry that almost passed unnoticed. He set on the space reserved for the couple, a wood “throne” against a wall adorned with well-made mats.

The bride only joined the party later, about 3 a.m. She was wearing a flat jellaba, absolutely white and well ironed, a cloth crown with golden embroidery and an unflinching countenance under the tulle veil that went down her chest. She set next to the groom, holding a golden little bag between her long fingers. How old was she? Twenty? At least ten years younger than him, I think.

A little before her arrival, the “offerings” were put on the table in front of the groom: a bow with candies for the kids, another one with dates and a bow with incense sticks on apples. There was also a white bowl with one egg and three lighted candles stick on a bunch of henna, which the mother used to wash both of the groom’s hand and clean them next. Next to the table, wedding gifts were places – thousands of blankets.

I don’t even need to say that I danced to death, tried to imitate the choreography, took pictures and talked to everyone. About 4 a.m, me and Hussem, broken than love promises, came to an immediate and unanimous decision that it was time to go home. We would sleep on their relative’s room.

For a moment (a disconcerting moment), my eyes crossed the bride’s resilient eyes. How many brides have you seen that are not happy and shiny in their “big day”? So far, I’ve only seen her. A Moroccan lady commented she should be sad, because she should leave her family. A Moroccan man said that she probably hasn’t seen her future husband more than two or three times in her life. I didn’t hear her voice. Hussam told me another weird tradition. In a certain moment of the party, husband and wife goes to the room to consume the wedding. A sheet is tanned with the bride’s virgin blood and exhibited with pride to the guests, that would celebrate. My friend said it was an old habit, losing strength, and he wasn’t sure if that would happen in this wedding. I rather not be there to find out.

November 8th ​ What do you do when you know you have to hitchhike to Sahara alone? Go to a party, dance till you ​can’t stand, get home almost in the morning, wakes up noon, leave the bed 1 p.m and spend some time on the internet and with your friends until 2 p.m. After that you eat a 5 reais snack in that dirty snack bar and drags your backpack to the road, waiting for a miracle.

Some businessman once told me that what defines success is not how prepared you are to do something, but your courage, motivation and persistence level. I took that philosophy for myself. I could spend the rest of my day blaming myself to start everything wrong or transform my days in adventure, experience and stories for my grandchildren.

It would be about 310 kilometers to the super mystic Merzouga, that is right at the middle of the dunes, more and less where the asphalt and Morocco maps is over. I don’t even remember who gave me the ride through my first kilometers, to get back to Zaida. But the second ride… how could I forget the hunter? He is the president of I-don’t-know-which goat creators’ association and owns a camouflaged pants, a used black hat, a pair of aviator’s glasses and that acid humor that pokes even the laziest minds.

We advanced at least 50 kilometers together. After that he stopped on the beginning of a dusty road, pointed to a yellow shad at the end of it and said that his fellows waited for him there. He asked if I wanted to join him, because one of them could be leaving to a city 100 kilometers ahead. I didn’t think it was a good idea to go on a desert road with a bunch of hunters. His words passed through my mind, saying they were reliable people, that they were just having a wine and a good beer. Hey! Beer! My mind made that risky turn and I decided to go on the rocky path. Alcohol in Morocco is almost luxury item and having some to increase my courage wouldn’t be bad.

There was about 10 apparently retired men drinking, laughing and talking loudly. Around them, Moroccan wine, rusty cans of beer, soda and energy drink got mixed with rigid bushes and dry land. I greeted one by one with a handshake. They offered me a can of 250ml, national size. The Casablanca’s beer was so delicious! How can Morocco forbidden alcohol’s sale and fabricate, legally, one of the greatest beers in the world? I finished the one I had and asked the hunter to take me to the main road. His colleagues were fun and respectful, and the drink was great, but the sun was closer to the horizon line and my biological alarm ringed. I had two hours of sunlight, tops.

A happy and talky man, the same age as the hunter, parked a comfortable car (I’m really bad remembering models and brands). He was an agriculture consultant to the producers. He asked which grans we planted in Brazil besides coffee and how our beaches are. More than interested in my country, I saw he was trying to understand, a little bit scared, my nomad life.

“But… what if you are on the road and doesn’t have where to sleep?”

“I don’t sleep”.

“And what if there’s no food?”.

“I don’t eat”, I simply answered.

He smiled, unbelieving and happy with my answer.

“You know, I must be strong”, I commented.

“Ah! That’s what I meant! This life isn’t for anyone”.

“Maybe. What you see as a problem, for me simply isn’t, it’s part of the experience. If a surfer says that he bought a board of thousand dollars, I’ll think it’s too expensive and I won’t understand how could he spend so much money with that. But he pays the price without thinking twice, because to surf is very important to him. His board is what freedom is for me. What is a problem for you, for me is the price of freedom. And if I’m on the road, it’s because I’m willing to pay that price”.

Sunset really inspires me. At least I had the tranquility to go along it to Errachidia, that is just 130 kilometers far from Merzouga. When he left me on this city’s downtown, I didn’t even think about getting a bus. I didn’t even had the money. I had about 30 reais of Moroccan currency in my wallet, few euros and an inoperant bank card, that I was never able to use in other countries.

It was a long walk to the city’s exit. The street was well illuminated by unwired light poles and filled with neon Christmas decorations (!). I tried to get a ride from time to time, but only one car stopped. In five minutes, he started talking about bisous. Kisses my ass! I asked him to stop and ​ ​ left his car, walked to a gas station and waited for a long time.

I change messages with Driss, which would host me in a small village before Merzouga. He said that, when I reached Rissani (closest city to him), I should ask the cab driver to stop in Hassilabiad. Cab? What cab?

It’s not always that I try to hitchhike at night. Morocco let me unused, it makes me felt in what I call elastic bed. The feeling I have is that in any situation I felt on I will always find someone to help me. Am I loosing fear, my protection?

I remember an Israeli friend that I met in Asia, talking about a girl he knew that disappeared while hitchhiking in South America and was found dead. “We always want our traveling friends to come back, to have stories to tell, but it’s not always like that”. This memory shook my optimism more than wind.

Kívia, what are you doing? Look at you: hitchhiking alone at night, in Morocco, going to Sahara dessert. Be careful, girl, be careful! I thought about my family in Minas… they don’t deserve to receive bad news.

I’m very selective when hitchhiking at night. On the last minutes in Errachidia, the selectiveness was almost neurosis. In each pair of lights that illuminated my women’s face or my tied hair I asked myself: would this be the last ride?

It was a black, new and clean car. The boy should be around my age. He wore a pair of thin glasses over his big eyes, social shirt in his skinny and black body. He spoke a good French. I asked him if he was going to Erfoud, next city. He answered he was going to Rissani. Perfect! But I wasn’t convinced. I asked if he was a cab driver, I explained I had no money, I was hitchhiking, well, I started a conversation to check his intentions. I would never ever have imagined I’d pass the last hours of that night listening to Gipsy Kings and Celine Dion on the last volume, disputing with the boy who was the worst singer. I don’t know what he does for living, if he has a wife or kids. At that point, all I thought about was getting rid of the stress with music, jokes and stupid hi-fives.

When we arrived in Rissani, tearing of laughing, there wasn’t a single soul that were going to Merzouga. Close to 10 p.m, not even cab drivers wanted to drive the 35 final kilometers. I asked him, smiling, to leave me on the city’s exit and I’d see what I could do. The boy stopped smiling.

“I can’t, I can’t. I kept thinking about my sister, my mother. Stay here, we are going to Merzouga! I still have an hour to go to bed”.

My friend, there wasn’t even a firefly on that fucking road! Just Sahara. I’d have waited to death! I thank him so much when he left me, coincidentally, on my host’s house. I gave Driss a big hug and I apologized for arriving so late.

His eyes were two shiny Jabuticaba, and they couldn’t believe that a completely unknown was really arriving his small village almost eleven p.m on a dead Sunday, hitchhiking. When he showed me the double bed mattress with clean sheets and three pillows he prepared for me, I had to give him another hug. After that, I ignored my empty stomach’s calls and slept like a stone.

November 9th ​

It was a good night of sleep, filled with a lot of nightmares, as it usually happens to me in strong energy​ places. I woke up late for the breakfast that Driss’ family have with the first sun shines. Even so, all I had to do was getting up to my friend cover the varnish round table with olive oil, black olives, strawberry jelly, breads, cheese and an egg specially cooked for me. He set on the carpet, next to me, and served me hot tea, while he watched me eat. I didn’t know where to put my head of so much embarrassment. And my hands - what can I when everything is on the reach of my hands?

Aware of my passion for the dessert, Driss suggested a walk around the surroundings, even under the noon’s sun. We are almost reaching winter and the heat isn’t so hard. When he opened the metallic gates of his house, I almost fainted! A monstrous golden sand dune, not less than 100 meters tall, scale the small cotton clouds right at my face, behind the village’s line of houses. I really wanted to run, jump and roll on the sand! Driss smiled at my dazzlement and, patiently, conduced me to the big dune. I thought it was close, but in Sahara not everything is what it seems to be – almost nothing is.

After the houses, two steps away from the dessert, a long green line of date palm trees and other smaller plants, less recognizable and lower on a beauty scale, could be seen. “It’s the village’s garden”, Driss explained.

For me seemed more like an Eden’s Garden. Not just for the beauty and the miracle of coexisting with the biggest dessert in the world, but for the magical social and aquifer system that guarantees its existence – and the village’s existence.

Each family owns a piece of the garden. A fence is not needed, because each one knows exactly what is your date palm three and you pepper plant. The terrains are squared, one in front of another, with the line of date palm trees between them. Between the majestic plants crystal waters flows in a small cinnamon channel. The liquid is nothing less than the small part of a water table that passes underneath the dunes and its accessed by a big system of artesian wells. They come down in a line through the dessert, to that pipe.

How does the water reaches each plant of each family? Here is the magical part! There’s a lot of entries on the sides of the main pipe that crosses the garden, each entry leads on another pipe. This other pipe crosses all the extension of a land, irrigating the plants from each family’s land.

The exits of the central pipe to the secondary ones are closed by a small bunch of earth. Every two hours, more and less, each family’s representative destroys your bunch of earth and gives water strength to flow through the neighbor’s plantation. Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s a shame for me, someone that comes from the country that has the biggest amount of fresh water in the world, and still has families suffering from drought, while a whole agriculture village works pretty well in the biggest dessert in the world. And people say that the drought causes poverty. Sure, just look at the Californian’s dessert.

We step on Sahara’s sand. I took of my shoes and put my feet on the liquid gold, with the same pleasure as someone getting rid of an armor and falling in the lover’s arms. I’ll never know how to explain what made me go on a looping on Morocco map just to reencounter the big dessert. It’s like being in a sanctuary, feel that magnetic attraction for so much brightness, so much beauty, run and hug everything until I have no strength left, on my knees before such wealth, the dune’s sea, the nature and our smallness before it. Sweet Sahara, dry and savage. Sahara, me.

The top of the big dune, that seems a tagine’s pan (Driss showed a big smile on his skinned face when he listened to this comparison), it’s further than a mirage. Like a backbone, the tops of the two smaller dunes transform themselves into routes, guides for our steps to the top of the biggest one. I arrived there on tiptoes, with difficulty, almost breathless.

To sit on the peak of the gigantic Erg Chebi dune is like going up a building of many floors and have that panoramic view. I buried myself on the sand (which, by the way, is used like a medicinal treatment to arthritis and other bad stuff) like an armadillo and just enjoyed the sea of dunes. In few minutes, my shoes almost vanished on the sand.

We came back for lunch. A tagine full of thin slices of eggplant smoked on the aluminum pan. His sister shared, with her hands, the round bread made at home. His father served the tea in small glasses. Me, Driss, his brother and his sister ate. They are a family of few words and serene faces. The dryness and suavity of Sahara. They were watching on the TV hanged on the clay wall a Turkish soap opera that didn’t require Arabic fluency to be understood. For desert, we break apart some tangerines and a date fruits that had the size of a handball ball.

What did we do after? We came up and down the dunes, of course! What else is there to be done in the dessert? What else did I want to do? I’d find out that the sunset was the greatest and the worst part to be on the dunes. It’s so magical watching the sand changing color each minute, and it’s a nightmare to have the silence broken by the noisy engine of bikes and jeeps. At least 15 tourists were passing by with their cars, raising sand on the passersby without apologizing. No one respected the dune’s line, made like roads. Few times in my life I was so afraid of being ran over.

I commented with my friend that it must suck to see the village where you were born transformed in Disneyland by some people with no respect. He said that a lot of dromedaries, when listen the sound of the engines, run scared and ruin the caravan. Besides being a touristic attraction, these elegant quadrupeds are used as a transportation by nomads, that live in huts behind the big dunes. With the night came the silence again. On the place of the dunes, a rain of starts filled my thoughts and the corners of the horizon. We outlined the constellations with our fingers and pointed out the shooting starts. Without a jacket, I handled the cold the way I could, burring the feet on the hot sand.

But there’s a moment on the day that the wind is too strong, the conversation slows down and the stomach asks for food. Then we’ve got to do the same as light does: turns itself off to keep its shine.

November 11th ​

What to do when the way is kind of long and hitchhiking seems unlikely? Wake up early and get out of​ the bed fast. Backpack and don’t give space for ideas to articulate much. If you let doubt and fear get close to you in these moments, it’s possible that you cannot even leave home.

Super gentle, Driss family didn’t let me leave without a great banquet for breakfast. When I tried to leave the table, Driss called me back: “Eat a little more! You have a long way ahead of you”.

I had longer ways than the 400 kilometers to Ouarzazate, capital of Moroccan cinema, where I’ve passed by with Aron, remember? But leaving the dessert outside touristic season and soon in the morning, before the sun hurts too much the skin, it’s almost so uncertain than reaching my destination this night.

Driss walked with me to the road. He was feeling kind of bad for living me alone, but I sent him home. To have someone with me would only decrease my chances of getting a ride.

That piece of asphalt wasn’t bustling. The road fused with the dessert, that became black on the laterals. The golden dunes were already behind me, was already past. All I had to do, somehow, was going home.

The first car was a cab. The first 4x4 didn’t stop, the second one neither. The forth vehicle ignored me and the fifth was a tourist van. I hitchhike just so my conscious don’t bother me latter. And guess what… the driver stopped! I asked for a ride to Rissani. He said he could take me to Ouarzazate. Ouarzazate! It’s a shame I didn’t know how lottery works on Morocco. If I knew, today I had won something!

I set in one of the first benches, next to a smiley man. He’s from Nepal, he had studied finances in New York and he lives with his wife in Switzerland. He said he travels a lot and he had never met someone hitchhiking outside Europe. It encouraged me to keep telling stories, to come back to Nepal someday, and do that wonderful Anapurna circuit through Himalayas.

The van stopped for lunch in Tinghir, had by tourists as Amazigh’s capitals. The driver came to talk to me, to explain that another driver would take his place and, to avoid problems with the agency, it would be better for me to take a bus to Ouarzazate. I completely understood.

It was noon and I had just 150 kilometers to do. Easier than melting butter in a hot bread, I thought. Wrong. It costed me effort to reach the other city’s exit underneath that burning son, and it costed even more to make a car stopping. I arrived my final destination almost at night, on the comfort of a Moroccan engineer’s car that lives in Germany.

I ate a lot of sweets and salty things on the unforgettable bakeries of Ouarzazate. Is there a better way to spend almost half of the Moroccan money that’s left on the wallet? At the end of the avenue, I laid on a hard chair from a fancy coffee shop and waited for my host, a Letters student. His friend showed up instead, very young, in a yellow cab. You can imagine the price of this ride and realize that this kind of transportation is cheaper and more common in Morocco than in Brazil.

We went to the middle of nowhere, where Judas lost his boot, to meet three girls and two boys. One of them ran in my direction, his rebel hairs hitting his eyes:

“Kíviaaaa!” It was Yassine, my host.

We went to the girls’ apartment. They had emigrated from a big city exclusively to study Cinema. Still on their first year there, they complained about the lack of activities in Ouarzazate and they were worried about the imminence of the first winter “in the dessert”. Leila, the most talking girl, apologized for the simple room, with a central table and three mattresses around it, doing the job of a couch.

“Students’ home, you know…”

Oh, I do! By the way that two bedrooms’ apartment, high ceiling and big kitchen was way bigger than most republic where I’ve been in my college years. The big glass windows were partially closed and the male voices were partially controlled, so the neighbors didn’t notice the presence of a male person in the house. Everyone spoke English.

I saw a bottle of skin-toned nail polish on a corner and asked for acetone and cotton. While I removed the rest of red nail polish of my nails still from the Amazigh wedding, a lot of things happened.

Yassine kissed the beautiful Amina, long hairs and well delineated eyes. Leila was timidly hugged by Mustafá, all charming in his scarf. The rest of us was laughing of Nádia’s laugh, inebriated by nature, like me. Oh, I missed being in a house that every woman could wear a blouse and could curse, with no fear.

I had decided to put on the skin-color nail polished, actually I was on the second hand already, when I asked the couple how long they were together.

“But we are not together!”, Leila answered, in a hurry.

I did the same question to the other couple and received the same answer from the girl. I’m so proud!

Amina made a delicious chicken for dinner, which we ate with big slices of bread and spicy sauce. The boys cleaned the bones’ mess over the table and washed the dishes. Leila hit a pan of water, so I could have a shower, since the shower didn’t work.

“It’s the best I can do for you”, she apologized with that sweet way. And did I need anything else?

I was preparing myself psychologically to lay down, fixing these lines on the computer’s screen, when a “big thing” happened. Two boy came in the apartment. One of them, that didn’t even say good night, went straight to Amina’s room and started to speak really, really loud. In few minutes, Nádia was in the middle of the drama, crying and with shortness of breath. In the kitchen, Leila seemed to give a sermon on the other boy. I was listening to everything at the living room, without understanding anything. The other boys (my host included) said goodbye to me right at the beginning of the mess, without giving me much details.

When everything was calmer and no men were at the house, I got to know what happened. The two boys were long term friends of the girls and their family, whom delegated for them the mission of “giving the girls a hand, in case they need”. When they notice the presence other male in the house, the taller one got pissed and came in calling the girls whores. Apparently, this word has in Morocco the same meaning that in the rest of the sexist world’s dictionary.

Whore: The girl I tried to hook up with, she didn’t give me attention and now she is with ​ another boy.

The big boy had tried already, without success, to kiss Amina and, guess what, now he was pissed because he saw her with another boy, enjoying his right of breaking in the girls’ house and calling her a whore.

“In my house, he doesn’t have the guts to say those things, because he knows I don’t accept it”, Leila commented. “Dammit, I didn’t expect this from him, we moved in together to this city”.

With the end of the scene, we calmed down Nádia and moved the mattresses to one of the rooms. On the daylight, they are used as a couch, at night, as a bed. My bed for tonight.

November 12th ​

You know when the alarm rings, everyone ignores it and no one goes to college? It happened today.​ The result was a brunch made of breads, rests of strawberry jelly, processed cheese and complaints about students and their lack of money. We gossip and speculated about everything we could.

I asked where could I buy a cheap jeans pants, already worried with the semi polar cold of Berlin. Leila took a dark blue skinny jeans from her wardrobe and asked me to try it on. Perfect! “It’s all yours, I’m fat, it doesn’t fit me anymore”. Fat, really?

It was almost half a year that I didn’t wear a decent jeans. I felt like a diva! I put a lemon-green blouse on top, these five reais kind of blouse, and went for a walk downtown. I wanted to exchange money and buy something for dinner. I had my glasses on my face full of sunscreen, GPS on my hands and was about to walk for 40 minutes to reach downtown.

Before the tenth minute, a man stopped on a black car, offering a ride downtown, with that face that said “I know you won’t get in a stranger’s car, I just want to start a conversation”. Poor boy. He didn’t know with who he was talking to. You should have seen the shyness multiplying on his nervous smile when I sat next to him and put on the seat belt.

Khalil works on a store of roses products, on the central market. There are rose soap, rose oil, rose cream, rose perfume, rose shampoo, dry rose. One of the most perfumed stores I’ve ever been to! And I’m not talking about that rose water that my grandmother’s generation passed on their bodies. I bought a body cream and a argan based oil, to solve my cracked feet issue. It was almost five reais for 150 grams of product, that works better than most cosmetic of the kind. It costed a little bit more than I’d pay for a cab from home to downtown.

Here, outside Khalil’s store, the true mission had started. Mission: exchange money, buy pasta, tomatoes, olives and my dearest zucchini for dinner. Time spent: more than two hours. The exchange houses weren’t exchanging – each one had a different problem. The bank had a huge line and wasn’t giving change in Euro. When I found a bank that did change foreigner currency, I had spent one hour already. Very good.

The supermarket had no vegetables – none! For reasons that scape human comprehension, the pack of pasta was more expensive here than in Germany. On the market, most of vegetables sectors were “closed”, with wood sticks blocking the doors. On the last door, I’ve found olives, but there was nobody inside. I came back to Khalil’s store and asked if he knew where was the place’s owner. The man was taking a nap behind the balcony and I didn’t notice!

I would be looking for zucchini until today, if it wasn’t for my newest friend. He took me to another store, where I bought a bag full of vegetables for two reais. Right next to this store I found a cheaper pasta. I passed by a bakery and bought some chocolate to please the girls.

GPS on my hand, let’s get back! For a moment, I wanted to visit the cinematographic studios of Ouarzazate, but, you know what? Better spend my time and money with Cinema’s students and all their fun conversation, then some replica of Egyptian ruins that I’ve already seen.

I arrived breathless and excited, with the plastic bags under my arms. I open one… where are the zucchini? The hole on the bottom of the plastic bag was the only evidence of the tragedy. The zucchini, my secret ingredient, the thin fried slices that makes all the difference in one of the only dishes I know how to cook had been lost on the red sand of Ouarzazate. Big tragedy!

I resigned and prepared a tomatoes sauce with onions and olives. I’m glad that Moroccan houses has all kinds of seasoning of quality, saffron included.

We were waiting Amina to arrive so we could eat and after take a shower on a hammam of their neighborhood, by my request. When she arrived, the tomatoes had almost melted and the steam room was about to close. I left the pasta ready on the stove and follow the girls in the night, carrying my buckets with me.

A hammam’s employee was cleaning the last tiles on the floor when we arrived. Closed.

“If it was in my city, it would be open to midnight, at least, but here they want to force women staying in their houses, so they close at seven. Like a hammam would be the only reason I left my house at night!”

How not to love Leila and her comments? She left her bucket with us and took a cab right there to meet her “boyfriend” on a coffee shop downtown.

At home, all I wanted was to eat that pasta! I threw the food on a big bow and let it be attached by forks. It wasn’t that bad, actually. Well, with the amount of olive oil I’ve put in, it couldn’t be.

One hour later, the bell rang. It was the same boy from last night, the one that was pissed, on the companion of the other boy. He came in very polite, shaking hands and saying good night. Amina said he was inviting us to have dinner in his house. No, no, thanks. The rest of the house entered the boy’s car.

At three a.m I was still the only person in the room.

November 14th ​

Yesterday was another lazy day, the alarm wasn’t working and we tried to go to hammam again – this ​time, with success. Today I couldn’t beat around the bush any longer, in one of the houses that I’ve most felt comfortable in Morocco. We leave college, but college doesn’t live us. I really feel good among students! I hugged Amina, but I didn’t see Nádia. Leila was sleeping, hugged with her “boyfriend” in the living room. It was better not to wake her up.

Before 8 a.m, I was already with my backpack on the hot asphalt, thrilled like someone going to the first day at school. It would actually be the last one. The last day hitchhiking in Morocco, last day on this classroom with no walls, no fences, that taught me so much about myself. My flight to Tunisia would leave from Agadir in less than 24 hours. I still had 400 kilometers to the coast.

Conviction gives us luck. The first car I hitchhike for, stopped. It was two crazy Dutch boys, a little bit older than me.

“Funny thing, I started this trip hitchhiking with a Dutch boy, and here I am ending it with Dutch boys”, I couldn’t avoid commenting.

They were going straight to Marrakesh, which would already be half way of what I needed. Still on the first kilometers, they happily accepted my suggestion of passing by Aït Benhadoud, a fortified city, on the old caravans’ route between Sahara and Marakesh. It’s a Unesco patrimony and it was the scenario for many movies and TV series, like Gladiator and Game of Thrones. In the middle of the way, we gave a ride for a little boy.

After visiting so many lost casbas in Atlas, Aït Benhadoud wasn’t so impressive, honestly. Denis bought an expensive pan of tagine and we got back in the car.

I miscalculated the distance between Ouarzazate and Marrakesh. Well, the distance was the same from the map, 200 kilometers, but there were so many curves that we couldn’t drive faster than 50 kilometers per hour, most of the way. It was the most dangerous road in Morocco, according to one of the cops that stopped us. Two times in a row the boys didn’t notice the “Stop” sign before the cop blitz. In both cases, the cops, smiling, said that usually this action would be enough for a ticket of I-don’t-know-how-much dirhams, but they would be forgiven.

I’m not sure if it was one of the most dangerous roads. But it absolutely was one of the most beautiful! It’s a continuation of the Draa Valley scenario, with those milled mountains in different tons of red. How can a landscape be made of dry land and dehydrated trees, and still be more colorful than an impressionist color pallet? I swear this is not one of my dazzlements. Even one of the boys stopped twice to take pictures, and he barely took his phone from his pants in Aït.

We also stopped for a quick lunch and to change drivers. When, at last, we were reaching Marrakesh’s entry, the sun was in its last hours. What about the 200 kilometers to Agadir, Kívia? What are you going to do? Think fast, woman!

I asked them to leave me few kilometers away from Marrakesh. It would be impossible to hitchhike inside the city. A 4x4 soon stopped. I asked if he was going to Agadir. He wide-opened his eyes and said that no car would go to Agadir in that road. He offered me a ride to Marrakesh and said he’d let me on the road that leads to the coast.

I was close to this road, but right in Marrakesh’s downtown, with those smoking cars, horns and people. I was desperate! I tried to walk as fast as I could in the sea of people, but the city’s exit was 5 kilometers away from me. I didn’t understand which bus to take and the driver wanted 30 dirhams for the ride. I only had 25.

I stopped for a moment before the palm trees silhouette getting darker, sculpted by the pink sunset. I’ve never imagined that my last sunset in Morocco would be like this, on the legendary and chaotic Marrakesh, in this crossing of screams and dazzlement, passions and pains. So, Kívia, another night hitchhiking?

Settled on the sidewalk, a man was drawing on a notebook, patiently and with skills, while his costumers weren’t buying the cigarettes he was selling on a box. I asked, just to get some time to think, if that was really the road to Agadir, and how could I leave that chaos.

“Why don’t you take a bus on the bus terminal?”, he said with that calmness from people that dominates their art, pointing to the other side of the street. “It’s only 70 dirhmans”. I still had ten euros, and two 5 reais. Why not?

And it was this way, in the last minute, that I paid for the first time for a bus in Morocco. Immediately I remember the promise I’ve made to a Portuguese teacher, friend of mine, of taking a picture with that famous palindrome, so he could show his students: “Help me, I got in a bus in Morocco”. Promise made and accomplished!

The bus was almost empty. It remained some time stopped on the patio, with its engine on, while the employees tried to get more people and convince them with the immediate departure. It was really hot inside the bus, between the narrowed seats – narrower than low cost flight companies.

A 10-year-old boy came in selling cookies. I refuse the offer and tried to put my backpack under my seat. The boy took my water bottle on the sit next to me. I asked, with gestures, that he returned it to me. He hid himself on the backseat and showed the bottle, as if he was going to give it to me, to the moment after taking it back. Kids prank. He did that sometimes, until I lost my short patience. The driver heard me speaking with a mad tone of voice with him and expelled him from the bus. I opened my wallet and looked to the five dirhams’ coin, last Moroccan money I had, exactly the price of his cookies.

I should have given the coin to the boy, instead of treating bad someone that already suffers in life. And I’d still have cookies. What would I do with 2 reais? Is this a good way of treating a Moroccan kid, after all they did for me in their country? I was so remorseful that I almost cried.

The trip was slow. From the other side of the hall, a cheek man stretched his legs to the sit next to mine, as if he was trying to touch my feet with his feet. I felt his socks touching my feet and I immediately raged on him. He apologized and shrunk in a corner.

About 10 p.m, they made a pause for dinner. I was so hungry that I thought I heard the worms in my stomach. But what could I do with five dirhams?

A blind man entered the bus asking for charity. After him, another blind man, with a very good energy. I put my last coin in his hand. He stopped in front of me and talked a lot in Arabic. Then he said something that made everyone laugh and he started a collective conversation on the bus. I regretted learning so little of Arabic.

I watched the croissants, cookies and chestnuts hanged on the sale tends, through the dirty windows. The engine was on again. A movement on the sit next to mine called my attention. Someone put a small bottle of avocado yogurt and a pack of madeleines next to me. It was the cheek man. He touched his own chest with his right hand and said “enjoy your food” in Arabic. I smiled.

When I was finishing the food, I felt something falling in my legs. It was a rolled paper. I stretched the paper and saw his phone number. He blanked his eyes from his sit. I went back to sleep.

The watch on Agadir’s bus station was almost aligned to Saturday’s zero hour when we arrived. I dragged my backpack in a hurry through the halls. When I was crossing the street, I felt on the sidewalk and flay my arm. It wasn’t desperation to arrive at the airport, where I still would wait for three hours. Hamsa, that super gentle host from Agadir, was waiting for me on the other side of the street. I struggle to believe that there’s a better ending to an intense day, to a journey that insists not to end, than the comfort of a friend’s hug – this spiritual state that symbolizes so much my Moroccan experience.

About the author

th ívia Mendonça Costa has a nomad life since May 2013 .​ She knows over 60 countries, on the K ​ five continents,​ and travelled hitchhiking thought half of them, usually alone. She’s a journalist graduated in São Paulo’s University (USP) and author of the blog Kíviagem.