The British Guy
Don't be fooled by this glorious sunset shot of Jemaa el-Fnaa square, Marrakech is truly one of the worst places in the entire world © Calin Stan / Unsplash
Marrakech is the worst place in the world. Maybe that's a little harsh and not objectively provable, but there's still a lot of truth to it. This was the conclusion I definitively came to in May 2019 after spending all of 14 hours or so in the city, half of which was spent sleeping in a run down guesthouse. This was the first day of what would turn out to be one of the best road trips - and best trips overall - that I'd ever take.
My original intention had been to go to Minsk for the May holidays. In all of the world that isn't the United States, Labour Day is celebrated on 1 May, which almost all countries have as a work-free day, while the former Yugoslav Republic of Slovenia has both 1 and 2 May off (in Russia it's first four days of the month, and it used to be a full week in the Soviet era), in addition to 27 April, which is known as the Day of Uprising Against Occupation and marks the official beginning of the Force's long slog against the Empire - in real life played by Tito's Partisans and the Axis stormtroopers of Germany, Italy, Hungary and Croatia.
Partisans on patrol in the snow (1945) © Edi Šelhaus
Resisting the urge to follow this historical tangent any further (you're welcome Croatia!), the point is that anyone working in Slovenia gets a load of free days at this time every year. Depending on when the three free-days fall on the calendar you can get a solid nine days off by taking only two holiday days.
So my original plan was to go to Minsk. Why? If Freud were still in fashion I'd probably have to say because of Seinfeld. More specifically because of that one episode in season four known as 'The Movie', where the fictional Rochelle, Rochelle and its tagline "a young girl's strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk" plays a prominent role in the plot. A more direct explanation would be that I'd never been to Belarus and they'd recently changed their visa policy - offering visas on arrival to the usual suspects, even freedom-loving Americans.
Was this directly connected to 90s B-movie action star Steven Seagal eating carrots with their crazy dictator in some bizarre photo op a few years earlier? While they say that correlation doesn't imply causation, in this case we're going to beg to differ. If Dennis Rodman can befriend Little Rocket Man and play peacemaker between North Korea and the world, why can't a bloated caricature of Steven Seagal chomping away on carrots straight from the garden of Europe's last dictator lead to a change of visa policy? So my heart was really set on Minsk for a few days. But then a closer inspection of both the weather (fucking cold!) and the price of Airbnbs (fucking expensive) made me look at other options.
I'd also never been to Copenhagen or Oslo, mainly because of the high prices. So I thought if I was going to pay an exorbitant amount for a less than appealing Airbnb, it'd might as well be in a Scandinavian country. Another couple days of being excited about finally visiting these socialist utopias came to an end after hours spent staring at the current and historical weather forecast. Not Minsk cold, but cold enough to not be pleasant. It was at this point that I opened Google Maps, zoomed out a bit, and asked myself where I could go the following week and still be warm. Perhaps it was time to reconsider Morocco.
Minsk would have to wait, but only a few months, as I ended up making it there for a week in August 2019. Strange place. It feels like it exists in an parallel future where the USSR won the Cold War © Yuri Barron
Now I'd always hated Morocco. Or if not 'always', then at least for a solid 16 years. This was based on a single three-week visit back in 2003, when it'd failed to live up to my expectations of what an Arab country should be. At the time I'd already spent quite a bit of time in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, where the food was amazing and the people were genuinely warm and welcoming.
In Morocco everyone seemed only to want your money. And more than that the people were creepy. Not fluent English speaking cosmopolitan Lebanese, not friendly as fuck Syrians who seemed to exist in some totally detached, alternate world, not laid back Jordanian Beduins. No, Moroccans were aggressively creepy, dishonest folks who made visiting Morocco a largely uncomfortable experience.
Did they have incredible attractions? Definitely. But at every one of them there were Moroccans trying to take your money. That was my first impression of Morocco. Which ended up lasting for 16 years. Then I took this last minute two-week road trip by myself, starting and ending at the airport in Casablanca, and it went from one of my least favourite countries to one of my favourite.
The one place I didn't hate on my first visit to Morocco in 2003 was Tangier, in fact, I loved it. This was the view from my room at the Muniria Hotel. Room #4. Where Kerouac and Ginsberg stayed when they came to visit Burroughs in the late 1950s and famously cobbled together the book Naked Lunch from papers they found laying about his room. Or at least that's how the story goes, which actually makes sense if you've ever read the book © Yuri Barron
Marrakech though remained a terrible shithole. If anything, my opinion of Marrakech got even worse. Or maybe I was just better able to articulate what I disliked about it, with the hindsight afforded by 16 years of travel that came in between my first and second visits. The description I settled on was 'Marrakech: Combining the worst of a soulless tourist resort and a heaving African metropolis'. How's that for a tagline? It's no Rochelle, Rochelle, but the Moroccan Tourist Board is welcome to use it if they want, no credit needed.
All of this brings us back to that sunny late spring day in 2003 when I met The British Guy. I was standing in line to get a shawarma on one of the main pedestrian streets just off of Marrakech's famous Jemaa el-Fnaa square - a paved over Disneyfied version of what it must have looked like back in the 1960s when Marrakech was a magnet for hippies and known as the Paris of the Sahara. I was standing in line waiting for an overpriced, under-flavoured wrap of dry chicken shards slices off a vertical spit in the heart of this cringeworthy 21st century tourist Mecca, when the kid standing behind me in line started talking to me.
Okay, tourist trap or not, the snake charmers are still admittedly pretty cool to see in person © Raul Cacho Oses / Unsplash
How's it going? Where are you from? Etc. As usual I was suspicious, but it turned out he was from the US too. A Moroccan-American in his early 20s from Miami. He'd come back to visit his family for a few weeks at Christmas, and had now stayed almost half a year. His girlfriend back home was pissed. She was Puerto Rican. No idea why this fact has stuck in my head for all these years, as I don't remember anything else about the kid. No name. No face. No height. No clothing. No shoes. Nothing else about him at all.
He completely faded from my memory after we'd exhausted our biographical small talk and he asked me 'Do you know the British guy?' The British Guy? I knew some British guys, but couldn't say I knew the British guy, no. Who is this British Guy? 'Oh man, you don't know the British Guy? You've got to meet him!' Can't argue with that. It's not like I had any other plans that day anyway. I'm sure we got the shawarma, and it was both overpriced and under-flavoured, but I have no recollection of that either.
This wasn't the first, and certainly wouldn't be the last, time that I'd follow a stranger down streets in a city I barely knew © Alex Plesovskich / Unsplash
What I remember is following the kid down the streets to some unmarked door, ascending a narrow, steep staircase up maybe four or five floors, to some covered rooftop terrace, where the eponymous British Guy was holding court with an audience of maybe a dozen people, both Moroccans and foreigners, none of whom I remember except for two. It really did have the feeling of someone holding court. The air was of course thick with hashish smoke, emanating from the joints being passed continuously around the table at a ratio of approximately one for every two people. It was a rooftop, but still had walls on two sides, with the other two open to the corner of the building, but well protected from the sun. The Moroccan-American kid with the angry Puerto Rican girlfriend introduced me, and we took seats.
Now for obvious reasons I don't remember too many details of what transpired over the next few hours. But several things managed to etch themselves seemingly permanently in my memories. One is that The British Guy looked just like the lead singer from Jamiroquai. In fact, the way memory works he now and forever is the exact same visage as the lead singer of Jamiroquai. Just a much gaunter, sicklier, paler version. The lead singer from Jamiroquai after a few weeks’ heroin binge or something. I guess that's one of the ways your brain saves space. Frees up some storage by lumping folks together. I think the lead singer of Jamiroquai is perhaps most known for his funny hats. And The British Guy was wearing a funny hat as well. A traditional Moroccan cap. Along with a traditional Moroccan djellaba.
“The Hashish Smokers” by Gaetano Previati (1887)
Now when I said holding court earlier, I just meant that he was the centre of attention and did most of the talking. What did he talk about? If you said regaling the motley crew of hash smokers I'd unwittingly joined with tales of Sufi mystics and various fables with twist endings, then you are correct. And regale us he did. Somewhere in some notebook a few of these tales are transcribed, but since those are perhaps lost forever, the only fragment I remember is something about two disciples of a Sufi master, one good and one bad. At some point the Sufi master tells the bad one that he'll one day be standing on the grave of the master he's just killed. Yada yada yada, the real master was the good disciple all along and the bad one ends up killing him and standing on his grave just as was predicted. I'm sure there was a moral there that totally blew all of our minds, but that too has unfortunately misplaced.
The two other people I remember from that table were an incredibly attractive Indian girl sitting next to The British Guy, and a slightly younger Indian kid sitting next to her. She looked about 18, but I never found out her age. I did however come to suspect that she might be quite older than she looked, since the kid sitting next to her was actually 18 and also her son. They were also Bangladeshi, not Indian, and she was now married to The British Guy. The son must have been from a previous relationship, as he looked nothing like the lead singer of Jamiroquai. And wasn't even wearing a hat.
While The British Guy did most of the talking that evening, this adorable Bangladeshi woman who was approximately twice as old as she looked was responsible for the most memorable line. At some point The British Guy was volunteering a bit of his biographical information. Something about spending half the year in Morocco and half the year in England. I rarely ask questions about personal information, but after I heard this I said something along the lines of “Oh, do you work here then.” At which point the cute Bangladeshi woman who looked half her age snapped "That's a personal question, inn't it!"
When you put it like that, I suppose it was. When you put it like that I also suppose the answer was yes and had something to do with drugs or other nefarious activities. Or maybe the guy was the older brother of the lead singer of Jamiroquai and living off some allowance from his much more successful little brother and felt bad about it. That could indeed be a real blow to the self-esteem. Things aren't ever necessarily as you expect them to be. Although in this case I'm still pretty sure this crew was importing hash to the UK.
“The Dhikr” (Remembrance) by Eugène Baugniès (1885) © CC2.0, Gandalf's Gallery / Flickr
So there were several long Sufi tales. There was offence taken at a not at all personal question, which implied a certain answer. And then there was Prince Charles. There was lots and lots said about Prince Charles. Yes, that Prince Charles. And keep in mind this was back in 2003, when Prince Charles was still just a prince pining away for his mother's job. Well before Prince Harry married an American divorcée and opted out of being a Royal. It was even before Harry's half-brother Prince William had turned into a dream boat, and then almost immediately thereafter turned into the younger version of his decrepit father.
And of course it was before Prince Andrew's depraved sexcapades with his buddy Jeffery Epstein were publicly known. No, this was back when Prince Charles was still a laughing stock of the family. The odd black sheep who cheated on everyone's favourite real life princess with an old lady and then had her murdered (allegedly). Prince Charles was not a popular guy at the time. That's my point.
The Black Sheep of York and his future ex-wife arriving somewhere in Queensland, Australia in 1988
But he was not only a popular person with The British Guy and his adorable Bangladeshi wife, but he was the most popular guy. The platitudes that they exhaled about the much maligned prince along with the hashish smoke include how he was entirely misunderstood. He cared about the environment. He was the one living human being who could bring all of humanity together and save the world. Seriously, they said that, and really seemed sincere when doing so.
In fact, they were both so passionate about the subject that even I believed them. How could you not? They were practically royalty themselves, holding court on this rooftop terrace in Marrakech. I guess Prince Charles really has just got a bad rap all these years. How fortuitous that I stumbled about these truth tellers to help me see the light. The world clearly needs a saviour (at the time, the Iraq War was still a week away from being "Mission Accomplished") and I guess Prince Charles is the guy. It all makes sense. At this point I was of course too high to walk.
King (née Prince) Charles III, the last, best and only hope for saving humanity and our planet © CC2.0, Dan Marsh / Flickr
Not too long after this last big reveal, the party was slowly coming to a close. The royal family, the Moroccan-American kid and me were all who remained. Back downstairs, outside on the street, they were all headed back to The British Guy's house, and invited me to join them. For some reason I declined, but have always wondered what other life changing secrets I could have had my eyes opened to if I'd gone along. A real sliding doors moment. But all things told, I'm still quite thankful for the short, hazy time I did get to spend at the bizarro British court.
Yuri Barron is the editor-in-chief of In Your Pocket City Guides and a frequent contributor to Travelling Curmudgeon. The preceding was an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, entitled 30-Cent Life: A Decade of Moderately Irresponsible Travel in Dodgy Countries, which pushes the boundaries of what the word ‘forthcoming' means.