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.
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