Europe Book Sample

Europe 77

Sample - Hitchhiking across North Africa

It took me two excellent rides to make it to Casablanca, home of Humphrey Bogart's Rick's Café. Then I made a serious logistical mistake. The signs were confusing, and I took the road to مدينة الرحمة Madinat instead of مراكش Marrakesh, sending me down the less traveled coast route instead of the direct highway. This last leg of the journey was rough – extremely hot and dusty, and the few cars that drove by ignored my outstretched thumb and rather desperate expression. Without rides, I trudged for two days, the relentless sun beating down on my face, sweat drenching my t-shirt under the weight of my heavy pack.

I kept walking until a wise older man under the shade of an expansive palm tree gestured for me to sit beside him and handed me an orange. The juice stung my blistered lips, reminding me of the thirst and dehydration that left me lightheaded. With a smile, he lowered his hand to the shaded earth, encouraging me to lie down and rest. When I awoke, he was surrounded by smiling young children clambering over him and gazing curiously at me. It was clear that they were from a rather poor nearby village. Their shirts and short pants were all some shade of brown, a bit ragged, and covered with dust, as were their bare feet.

One precocious four-year-old settled into my lap as I sat up, giggling incessantly. He glanced up at me every few minutes, smacking his forehead with his right hand as if to say, "I can't believe this guy."

I had reached the limits of my North African hitchhiking journey – exhausted from the relentless heat, sick, and as spaced out as I would have been if I had smoked all the hashish we'd been offered. With his brutally cracked brown feet and dusty maroon hat, the old man continued to gesture towards the ground as if to say – "Relax, relax."

The other children gathered around me, bravely touching my backpack and shoulders to be sure I was real, while the boy in my lap kept laughing. I reclined and drifted off, daydreaming that it would make a good story if I died on the side of a deserted Moroccan dirt road. I was wiped out, too exhausted and sick to be nervous or blame myself for trying to hitchhike down this relatively deserted coastal road. Despite my firm belief in Kurt Vonnegut’s “peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god,” I was starting to think that this may not end well.

An engine roar to my left awoke me, and the air was suddenly filled with the distinctive smell of diesel and a cloud of dust. My salvation was barreling down Highway R320 and somehow knew to stop at the old man’s palm tree.

"Agadir, Agadir, Agadir!" shouted the spry 12-year-old atop the green rattletrap public bus as the vehicle abruptly stopped beside me in a cloud of dust. "Agadir, Agadir, Agadir" – he repeated, it wasn't a question. The skinny kid climbed down the jungle gym ladders at the bus's rear, pulled me up, smiled, and grabbed my pack with his other hand. As I slowly walked toward the door, he ran up the ladder like a monkey, tossing my pack atop the mass of baggage and tying it down.

The stench of packed humanity hit me hard as I stood on the bus’s steps to wave farewell. All the kids stood, beaming and waving their arms. The four-year-old had tears rolling down his cute, chubby cheeks while the old man sat, offering an all-knowing nod instead of a wave.

The baggage kid pounded on the bus roof, yelling, "Lufhum, lufhum," sounding like "Roll 'em, roll 'em" from a TV western. The scene repeated itself at every tiny town on the excruciating seven-hour bus ride to the center of Agadir. I staggered to the town's campground and collapsed onto my sleeping bag, too tired to set up a tent.