Scribbles

A few things before I continue: the straw on the ground outside the broommaker's shop, and him sweeping it up. Sharing a cup with an Arab Jerusalemite. When he started telling me his views on Blacks and Hispanics, I made a vague motion that I was going to blow my nose, then went into the next room and ignored him. Downtown Amman like Lego blocks, framed between the two pillars left of the temple of Hercules. Plastic water bottles deposited by the side of the road in a huge pile look like glittering crystals from the window of a moving bus, and the way an unlit room always feels smaller once you turn on the light.

Casablanca-Chicago Pt. 3

Khalid's daily life doesn't seem to have changed much while I was gone. He still works long hours at an accounting office, still supports a family that is loving as always.

And Khalid's spirit still rattles its cage. He shows me a YouTube video that some travelers made of themselves going through customs at an airport. It was the most mundane activity imaginable. Even had I known the people in the video, it would have been boring. But to Khalid it is fascinating.

I think his position is really coming into focus for me now. He grew up seeing foreigners visit his impoverished hometown, watching them gawk and giggle, exult in the whimsies of travel. To them the pomegranates and figs which were his daily fare were exciting new things.

One night we wandered the nightclub district, Ain Daib Beach, on foot. As we walked, the beach resorts on our right and the chic marina strip to our left, we watched the limousines and Porsches roll by, dazzling men and women entering clubs with names like "Havana" and "Manhattan," as if they were embassies of more glamorous cities.

We sat at the McDonald's and bought McFlurries. It felt like window shopping with empty wallets.

"This is a very nice club," he told me as we walked past "Tahiti Beach." I know for a fact he had never entered the place, nor any of the 2-drink-minimum clubs in this area.

Khalid's conception of Western countries is built mostly from travel programs on TV and home videos on YouTube. He imagines that all the bad things about Morocco are nonexistent in the West.

I'm astonished to discover he believes that in the United States and Europe, thieves don't exist.

Let me clarify: not that they are rare. Khalid believes that in the West there simply are no thieves.

In Morocco the poor have trouble paying medical bills, and so he believes that in the West this is not an issue. Possibly he believes that this is because there are no poor people in the West. I didn't ask.

As we talked in his dining room over tea, he listed complaints against the state of his country while agitatedly kneading a chunk of cheese-wax in his hands. His father, a janitor at the nearby school, walked in and laid on the sofa. He grabbed the remote, and as the satellite kicked on, a message in English appeared on the screen:

"Welcome to TV World"

"People, tourists come here, they see the monkeys in Marrakesh, they see the snake charmers in Fez, oh yeah the weather is nice today, then they go back to their hotel and say 'I love Morocco,'" says Khalid, shaking his head.

Casablanca-Chicago Pt. 2

I've been down and out in Calogira five days now; without money, without responsibilities, without plans. It's gotten to the point where I don't bother picking destinations anymore. I rarely look at maps. I pick a direction and I start walking. When I'm tired, I sit for a minute and read or write. Then I return the way I came.

On Saturday I walked North, on Sunday West, on Monday South and today I rest, since I've already been East and it leads to the airport where I will go tonight.

North
The industrial zone. Thick, dirty air. Four-lane roads and crumbling sidewalks; glass shards. The kind of big empty space that makes you feel closed in. I passed a complex obscured by high walls topped with razor wire and cameras. What could require such tight security? A prison? Military base? A sign read "Oxygene Maghreb"---Moroccan oxygen.

West
A happy walk that didn't make me tired. Carts piled with pomegranates and small sweet oranges; sidewalk cafes with cloth awnings. Broken-down old Benzes cruised, playing Arabic music with the bass turned up. Kids played soccer on dirt fields, stray dogs sleeping in the shade. I decided this was the most beautiful face of Morocco.

South
The ugliest face of Morocco: the shantytowns. I walked after dusk past huts made of scrap aluminum, plastic sheets for roofs. They looked like piles of trash scattered in fields which grew no crops. The only light came from the passing motorbikes sputtering through the fetid night. Emaciated livestock stood despondently in the cold mud, their waste flowing out into the street through a narrow ditch winding between the huts.

I came across a man lying on his face in the middle of the sidewalk, his clothes torn and his feet bare. Others were stepping around him, but something about the pale soles of his feet, exposed to the night air, gave me the thought that it could have been a corpse and I was horrified. I crouched down and nudged his shoulder. He awoke, craned his neck and looked at me calmly and without recognition.

"Are you OK?" I asked.

Before that moment, I had thought I knew what a stupid question was.

He rolled over and fell asleep.

Casablanca-Chicago Pt. 1

After 46 days of traveling, covering more than 10,000 kilometers, I've returned to the house where I spent my first night abroad, a guest of Khalid in the village of Calogira, outside Casablanca.

My shoe soles are worn thin as paper, every one of my socks has a hole in it and both pairs of pants I brought have lost their fly-buttons. Perhaps most significantly, I am down to my last $30. With five days until my flight home, and no means for visiting anywhere else, I find myself with time to reflect.

So, what the fuck did I do here?

I walked a lot, rode in a ton of buses and taxis, flew some; hitched rides on trucks, cars, scooters, donkey carts and one wheel barrow. I photographed rocks and seas, people and holy places. I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and read and wrote. I met loads of people, had a bunch of conversations and a few really worthwhile ones. I distributed the entirety of my savings between the economies of six different countries.

That's an accurate description, but it's not an adequate one. The best way I can describe it is "wandering with purpose." When I began the trip I was under the impression that I would plan a series of destinations, and my travel would revolve around achieving those destinations, like collecting items in a scavenger hunt. In fact my itinerary was more like a pub crawl, staggering around on indirect routes to destinations chosen on a whim. An important thing I'm starting to realize is that the destinations were less important than the routes taken.

On one muggy afternoon in Ajloun, Jordan, I visited a forest preserve. After a couple hours I realized I had lost the trail completely. I had left all my belongings in the park's field house. I was carrying only a camera and water: no phone and no money. I found myself in a village and asked a minibus driver for directions. He insisted on giving me a ride and dropped me off on an unfamiliar back road and pointed in a vague direction, leaving me much more lost than before. I walked for hours seeing no one. Eventually I found myself among rows of olive trees. I startled a donkey and, dreading an encounter with the owner of the olives and the donkey, I decided to exit the grove by climbing a thorny tree and hopping over a barbed-wire fence.

I landed on a small village road, to the wonderment of a group of children playing. It's a good thing I like kids. I picked a random heading and set out, seeking someone I could ask for directions. The children, giggling, fell into step behind me. That gave me renewed energy. A commander should never show fatigue in front of the ranks---it's bad for morale.

Eventually I came upon a woman hanging up laundry to dry. I greeted her and began to ask for directions, but she interrupted and urged me to sit on a chair on her porch. She ran inside and reappeared wearing a chador and asked if I would like water or coffee. I had been hiking through desert scrub for hours and the wind-blown dust had settled in thick layers on the back of my throat. Water was good, but coffee was Manna from heaven. She served me cold water and strong coffee flavored with cardamom and introduced me to her children: my loyal troops. We sat and talked, or rather she talked and I did my best to understand her, offering observations in broken Arabic when I could. She gave me directions to the field house which was only a kilometer away.

I realized I had never been lost at all but had only found a more interesting trail. I shouldered my bag and thanked that woman who, though desperately poor, gave kindness to strangers as easily and impulsively as some people bite their fingernails.

There's a unique tranquility which is only achieved on an overnight bus. The leather on the headrests of the East Delta Express, Taba - Cairo, is peeling and I can feel the knees of the person behind me through the thin seatback. It's alright because I won't recline until I'm truly exhausted, which means I won't do it on purpose but instead let it happen with headphones singing softly and some murky, well-worn thought stumbling through my mind.

Out the dirt- spotted window, I watch the sun set behind the mountains of the Sinai and as the last reds and yellows bleed out of the horizon we dive into an inky blue and the spines of the peaks look like great black whales swimming besides us, oblivious to our passing. Eventually even the whales deliquesce into darkness and all we can see out the window is our own dim reflection, mirthless and smooth. Watching the pavement pass below us one feels like a manufactured product on a conveyor belt, not quite finished yet but waiting for another screw and coat of paint, a final inspection and then a welcome to frigid pre-dawn Cairo.

Then we'll all stumble into the wide world and our bags will feel heavy and our necks stiff. And very few will remember anything at all about the half a day we spent together in stygian silence as we embark on the next leg of our journey.

Remarkable events on long bus rides are studiously ignored but privately relished by all passengers. An overloud phone conversation. An exceptionally pretty girl across the aisle. A near-crash by a reckless driver.

Once my 14-hour bus along the southern coast of Turkey broke down after 13 and a half hours, outside the tiny village of Cizre in the southeast. First the AC started blowing hot air and suddenly we were all bus technicians, each one of us opening and closing the vents above our seats, testing the air with the backs of our hands every few minutes and muttering in consternation. When the engine finally quit we were only a couple kilometers from my stop; I hopped on the back of a passing donkey cart and I was at the station in a minute, the drivers and me laughing our asses off the whole way. It was the best bus ride I've ever taken.

"What do you think about the peace talks?"

"I don't care," Ahmar told me, curling his grin around the end of a nargileh pipe. "I don't pay any attention."

Egyptian music videos sang out from a large plasma-screen TV on the wall opposite our table loud enough to block out the calls to prayer from the mosque downtown. Another screen below it was playing a Richard Gere movie set to mute. This was the sort of upscale Palestinian cafe where you could order New York cheesecake and Amstel Light. It was easy to forget we were in Ramallah.

Ahmar's friend Hamid had not forgotten. He told me how the streets had once sparkled with the bullet casings embedded in the asphalt by Israeli tank treads. Paved with gold. He seemed like he might laugh.

He tapped an unlit cigarette against the table and popped bar nuts into his mouth.

"They tell us to forget, to go on with our lives. It's like they fucked our mother and our sister, and then told us to forget about it, do our own thing."

"This subject gives me a headache," Ahmar said from his reclined position. "Change it."

I had been in Ramallah three days and this was the first I'd heard a Palestinian mention the elephant in the room. Hamid continued at my encouragement.

"Many of my friends have left. Now they live in Egypt, America, Germany, Switzerland. I don't want to go though."

"Home is where the heart is," I offered lamely. I thought I'd have to explain the idiom, but Hamid understood me immediately.

"Yes, what you love: your girlfriend, your land."

"How can there be peace? The conflict can't continue forever, can it?"

For this question Hamid had no answer, nor did Ahmar, nor the farming family living on land being steadily encroached upon by settlers, nor the Muslim peace worker living on the Mount of Olives in Israel---none of the Arabs I talked to wanted to venture a hope, as if hope were something they didn't dare express for fear of exposing it to failure.

But those thoughts must exist, and they're too big to hold inside. Sometimes they're held so tightly that they slip out in their ugliest form, like rotten grapes crushed underfoot. They're seen in the swastikas spray-painted on walls in Ramallah, the rocks thrown at IDF soldiers in Ni'ilin.

Children, who have not learned to control their confused emotions, unleash them wantonly. They fight anything in their path. As I walked through the market in Hebron little boys kicked me and shouted, "Hello!" in the most menacing voice they could muster. I do not know if they thought I was Israeli; probably not. In eight days in Palestine and Israel I've witnessed five brawls, all of them Arab youths fighting each other.

On a hot and listless day in Ramallah I visited Yasser Arafat's tomb, in the old headquarters of the PLO. A concrete obelisk marked its spot, the tallest thing for miles around, challenging the sky like a minaret. Except that where minarets are beacons for the faithful, the tomb was a monument for the hopeless. A stark white stone courtyard, wide enough for hundreds but that morning accepting only me, led to the small room containing his coffin.

Two guards in dress uniform stood silently over the marble entombment, watching my approach with interest. A single wreath adorned the coffin which was inlaid with flowing Arabic calligraphy. A rectangular pool of crystal-clear placid water edged two sides of the room, its surface smooth and inscrutable as the sentries. I nodded my head slowly, carefully, whispering a greeting which was not returned. The wind had stopped blowing and also the birds and insects, I'm sure, were momentarily holding their breath.

In such situations it's important to act slowly and with great severity, and so I stood for a moment and pretended to read the Arabic in front of me, conscious of the soldiers' steely gaze which I didn't dare meet. Then an about-face and I was out. In the corner of the courtyard I saw toilets, but when I walked over a guard stopped me.

"No toilets?"
"Yeah."

Umm al-Jimal

A place of lack. No roofs to shelter from the cloudless, birdless sky. I've never seen anything so desolate. Empty desert would be less so. Alone, I wander aimlessly through the ruins. The bleating of a goat somewhere sounds like a warning. My mouth dries up. Black basalt stones smell sweet and musky in the midday sun. A pencil sketch of a city rubbed out with damp eraser. The stones absorb time like a dry sponge does water. Looking at the time I sprint to the entrance to catch the next bus back to town; I realize I'm terrified of being left here.

Petra

I'll always remember this Wonder of the World as the place where I realized I had contracted traveler's diarrhea only after hiking up a mountain, five kilometers from the nearest toilet. An old beggar woman stopped me to play her flute; I gave her more money than I should have to avoid being rude as I shouldered past her, intestines roiling. My steely resolve as I marched through that desert canyon was an homage to the rock-face fortresses of the Nebataeans.

Marmure Castle

I rode a rented bicycle along the beach, majestic Mediterranean lapping at my feet, to the Armenian castle. I climbed the stone ramparts, worn smooth by millenia of salty exhalations from the sea, to the highest lookout. I could see the whole town of Anamur and beyond, lush mountains to the north evaporating mist into the sky. The sea reflected the sun so violently it looked like molten chrome frothing against the rocky shore. I felt more than ever like turning and saying to someone, "Are you seeing this?" But there was no one there, only a rusty pole carrying the Turkish flag. I'd never felt so lonely.

Olympos

I set out with a conviction to be awed by the history of the ruins, a place that Cicero had called "ancient." Clambered over the stones of the necropolis and rested under an olive tree to write. Then I saw an incongruous object jammed into a crack in the wall. "The hell is that? Ram's horn? Snake skin?" No. The mysterious artifact was a dildo. Not an ancient one either, very modern.

The discovery precipitated something of a revelation for me. Rocks are just rocks. These rocks may have been a kingdom millenia ago, but now they're little more than the private refuge of some orange farmer's wife. The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was a church, then a mosque, and now a playground for bovine tourists to be herded through by guides whose tinny voices ring over the chatter to say, "This way please! Keep moving!"