…so I get to the train station with 15 minutes to spare (which was just amazingly coincidental, because I wasn’t able to check the schedule from Oualidia and so realized I had just ½ hour until departure when I got to Ryan’s house).  It’s the last train of the day so that worked out so fine.  I could have taken a bus or grand taxi, but the train is by far the most comfortable and cheapest (and drops me off in my little town, rather than Marrakech).

The train goes to Ben guerir (pretty much straight east for about 250K) and then I catch another train south to my site (the main Casablanca to Marrakech run).  The Ben guerir  run is simple because there are a couple of small stops along the way, but pretty much everyone gets off at Ben guerir to either go north to Casa or south to ‘Kech (the train terminates at Ben guerir and everyone has to get off).

Can’t fuck that up, right?   You just sit your ass on the train until it doesn’t go any further, get off, and then I had an hour before my next train, so piece of cake…

…so I kept having to ask myself 4 hours later why it was that I was hiking and hitchhiking down a dusty road in the middle of nowhere, 60K from Ben guerir, with a 60 pound backpack strapped to me?

Well… it goes like this.  I fell asleep on the train and I swear it was a conspiracy by all the Moroccan passengers, making fun of the American (okay; perhaps I’m a little insecure).  I got jostled a couple of times and woke up, to find everyone standing up and toting their luggage toward the doors.  Literally, 9 out of 10 people were up and moving so, groggily, I jumped up, grabbed my pack, and joined the line.

Never in a million years did it even cross my mind that this wasn’t the Ben guerir stop!  It’s the only stop of any consequence along the way, and everyone (or so it seemed to my dull mind) was moving off the train.  So I jump off the train, drop down onto another set of tracks, climb up the other side (crosswalks are few and far between) and saunter into the station to wait for my next train.

But I was at the Ben guerir train station on the way to Asfi/Safi three weeks before, and it had dozens of seats, a restaurant, etc., and this place only had 4 seats and no restaurant.  So I immediately recognized my mistake and made a run for the train, right?  Well… no…  I dully, stupidly said to myself that there must be a larger waiting area somewhere else, so shuffled off in the direction I had not yet shuffled, saw a bathroom and ducked in, and then walked the remaining 10 feet of the station, without seeing anything even resembling another waiting room.

So the train is still sitting there and all I have to do is realize my mistake, drop down and back up the other set of tracks, and climb aboard, a bit embarrassed but no worse for wear.  But, nooooo…  I’m baffled at this point but not to the point of admitting any sort of error.  It finally dawns on me that the outside possibility exists that this isn’t Ben guerir, so I look for confirmation by checking the signs (which of course are in Arabic script, which I can read, but takes me forever).

The train whistles its departure, and it is only then that that sickening feeling hits me that I might not be where I’m supposed to be.  The last thing I want to do is get on the train if I am in fact in the right place so I really start trying to read the signs in earnest, but if you’re Arabic-script-reading abilities aren’t great, and you insist on looking for a sign saying “Ben guerir” when you ain’t going to find one (what with this station not being Ben guerir), you are just wasting your time.

So my realization that I was in the wrong place exactly coincided with the movement of the train.  Dropping down onto the other set of tracks, I run along those tracks in the direction the train is moving, but the climb up the other side becomes higher and so by the time I scramble up, the train is moving pretty good.  And Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid notwithstanding, the prospect of a 53-year-old man with a 60 pound backpack leaping to catch a train moving at 10 miles an hour was ill-conceived at best, and so I watched the train depart without me.  The people on the train were nice enough to wave at me as they went by, however.

…back to the train station.  Now as you will recall, it was the last train of the day, and there actually was a train station attendant still behind the glass, and he was nice enough to yell at me and tell me what a fuckin’ idiot I was, when I asked him how I might get to Ben guerir (actually, I have no idea what he said to me, but the level and tone of his voice certainly suggested that he wasn’t commiserating with my predicament).  I asked about buses (“walu,” which means “none”), Grand taxis (“walu;” I mean, for crying out loud, my little town has Grand taxis for christ’s sake), or any other means of getting to Ben guerir (“walu”).

So that was that.  Wait til the next day for the train, or figure out something for myself.  I asked the attendant how far it was to Ben guerir and he said some number in French that I didn’t understand (everyone in Morocco assumes you are French if you are white, even if you speak to them in Darija and tell them you’re not French and don’t speak a word of French). In an exasperated tone, I tell him again I don’t speak French, and he bursts out with two of his 10 words of English, saying 16 Kilometers (actually, “kilometer” is the same in both languages, so perhaps he was only using one of his 10 words of English).

Okay… So I can walk along the route to Ben guerir, hitchhike, and either get a ride or just walk (16K is only 10 miles, after all).  So off I go. Its late-ish afternoon and it really is a very pleasant day/evening, and the prospect of walking is actually quite nice. In retrospect, I reminded myself of Clark Griswald in “Vacation,” ‘cause I head off with no water or anything else to drink or eat.

People are very nice in Morocco, as I’ve mentioned several times, and so I definitely figured, being a middle-aged, white person, I would have no trouble getting a ride.  Hmmmm…. The people were actually nice enough to throw up their hands in apologetic sympathy as they zipped by me (in fairness, the main road to Ben guerir was still a ways ahead, and many people were traveling locally). 

I figured that out, and thought I would concentrate on getting to the main highway (which makes “YZ” avenue in Schoolcraft look like the Autobahn).  So I hike about 5K, actually run across a tiny hanoot, and buy a 2 litre bottle of water and a one litre bottle of coke).  I’m thinking life is good, what with me being on the main road finally (my confidence was high that I was heading in the right direction because I could see a road sign for Ben guerir up ahead) and already having walked 1/3 of the way there.

As I got closer to the road sign however, my confidence was shaken ever so slightly.  As I have seen before, Arabic speakers with only a slight knowledge of English numbers, confuse their “teens” with their “tweens.”  The man at the train station told me “16K” but he meant “60K” (actually, maybe he meant what he said, and just said it to fuck with me; I’d like to think the better of him, however).

So now I’m 56K away from Ben guerir, very few people are on the road, and those few don’t seem the least bit interested in stopping to pick me up (I’m not really sure how to hitchhike for that matter; I think the “thumb-out” concept is American, but not necessarily universal).  Part of me wants to keep walking so I feel some small sense of accomplishment, but the other part says that I’m just getting farther and farther away from the one town between me and Ben guerir, and its now late evening, with only an hour of daylight left.

So I finally just stop along the side of the road, set my backpack down, and stick out my hand. Vehicles come by at the rate of about one every five minutes, and so I stand and sip my water and wait (it was actually quite pleasant, and I was in the best of spirits).  A sign on the other side of the street tells me (for the first time) that I got off the train in “Eassoufia” and that there is in fact a hotel in the town.  Good news as daylight is fading fast.

Now three kids from an outlying house get up their courage and come and hang out with me.  I try to minimize conversation because now it looks like four of us are trying to catch a ride, instead of just one, and the odds weren’t looking that good for just one.  I explain that to them, and they think the answer is to help me flag down vehicles heading in my direction.  The first two they successfully flag down are (1) a horse and cart carrying a full load of god-knows-what, and (2) a donkey and cart with 3 people on board, when there is really only room for one.

I kindly explain to the nice people that I’m really not too excited about cramming myself into a cart for the 56K journey to Ben guerir, when the carts are traveling just about exactly the same speed as my hiking speed.

So the sun is approaching the horizon, my “boys” are good intentioned but not helping a bit, and I make the decision to head back to the Eassoufia, stay in the hotel, and take the train the next day.  I’m in total “adventure” mode, have no where I have to be anytime soon, so I’m really enjoying all of this, believe it or not.

My biggest dilemma at this point is whether to cross the street and try to hitchhike back to Eassouria, or stay on the “Ben guerir” side and perhaps get lucky.  I cross to the other side because I figured if I got a ride back to Eassoufia, I can ask the driver where the hotel might be, and any information about other possible modes of transportation.  Not far, however, is the main highway to Asfi (which, ironically, is where I came from earlier that afternoon), so I need to slip over to the other side of the road in order to avoid the quasi-chaos of the highway intersection.

Once across, I see an 18 wheeler coming toward me so I say “what the heck” and stick out my hand. I see the driver raise his hands and shrug his shoulders as if to say (“where are you going”) and I yell “Ben guerir.”  I immediately hear the hiss of pneumatic brakes as the truck zips by and sure enough, it stops some way ahead.  I jog up and say “Ben guerir”? and they say, “climb aboard” (or something, anyway).

There are three people in the truck, and it’s the shit, brand new, with all electronic/digital instruments, etc.  And there is a very comfortable bench seat right behind the front seats, and the passenger helps me hoist my pack into the truck, boosts me up, and off we go.

Of course, they are the friendliest people ever!  It turns out that the alternate driver speaks very good English, lives in Ben guerir, and knows the Peace Corps Volunteer stationed there (Bryant Harris, who was the awesome PCV who met me in Marrakech and took me to meet my host family when I first came to my site 3 months ago).

So we bounce along, chatting about such things as politics (the Moroccan government are all crooks, which is why the road is so horribly pitted with potholes, I learned), religion (do I believe in God; why not; blah, blah, blah), religious music/Koran reading (of course I love that music, I said; oh, I hate it, he said), and other interesting topics.  It was an incredibly long 56K however because the road really was a piece of crap, but we eventually reach Ben guerir.

I tried to give the driver a bit of money but he adamantly refused (even refused when I tried to offer them the remainder of my water).  They went out of their way to drop me off right at the Grand taxi stand, said their good-byes, and went on their way.

And that, as they say, is that.  I jumped in the first Grand taxi heading to Marrakech, asked the driver to drop me off at my little town, grabbed an awesome skewer of chicken, tomato, and onion (tucked into a hollowed out piece of bread) when I got to my site (5D, or about 60 cents), hiked the 100 yards to my house, and was home by 10:00pm.

…and if I got to do it all over again, deciding whether I wanted to take the train straight to Ben guerir or the crazy diversion I ended up taking, I would choose the diversion every time!