1001 Moroccan Nights

During my time at Caltech, I worked in a paleomagnetics lab for a researcher named Joe Kirschvink doing research on plate tectonics. Many years earlier, Joe had done some work in an area of Morocco called the Oued Souss.

You might be familiar with the English loan-word wadi, which refers to a dry river bed, or wash. Oued is simply a French spelling for the same thing. Incidentally, this is also where the Spanish place name "Guad-" comes from, as in Guadalupe, Guadalcanal, Guadalquivir, etc. etc.

Anyway, the Oued Souss was a dry river bed inland of the town of Taroudannt, in the Anti-Atlas mountains, where there were some extremely well-preserved Precambrian-age deposits with some beautiful Ediacaran fauna. The idea was to get some core samples from a box fold in the valley to see if the magnetic signal in the rocks predated the folding event, and might possibly even be preserved from the original time of deposition. Joe had collected samples there many years ago, but was not concentrating on paleomagnetism at the time so they were not collected properly for that purpose. However, he had noticed the box fold in the oued at that time, and was itching to get back there to sample it.

While we were poring over his field notes from his previous trips, I asked him to explain the note for an expense marked "prostitute for driver" -- he mentioned that the only way to get this particular driver to slow down was to get him a woman each night, and I replied that it sounded like Pavlovian conditioning to me. To this date, despite extensive research, I have not found that sex decreases my need to drive at high speed, and much less to have my passengers facilitate it. Research continues.

The chance came for me to help out a colleague of Joe's at Wyoming State University, Jim Ogg, who was going to Europe that summer to collect a series of cores spanning the K-T boundary (Cretaceous-Tertiary) of dinosaur/meteorite/Maastricht fame. Jim needed a set of field assistants to help, and Joe offered me (and offered Jim a whole lot of money, I now realize) if at the end of the European segment they could continue on into North Africa. Actually, now that I think of it, I had a choice between going to Morocco and Kazakhstan that summer -- both pretty exotic locales.

So I accepted the Moroccan offer, travelled to meet Jim and another student Janet, and we set off on a Volkswagen van with Wyoming license plates into the heart of Europe, and then down into the heart of darkness, Africa itself. Well, ...OK maybe we only made it partway down to the shoulder into Morocco.

We crossed from Xeres (Jerez) to Ceuta on the ferry, and were able to see Gibraltar in the distance, as it slowly slid off the South margin of Iberia. In Ceuta, we were exposed to the African 'attitude' even though it was still technically Spain - the Spanish border guard was pretty rude as he explained that our insurance was no good in Africa, and that we needed to buy a new policy. Of course, he had a friend who could arrange this for us for a fee. The coercion and bribery had begun not 10 minutes off the boat.

Sometime later in the trip, we were driving in a pretty isolated part of the country when we came across a road block - it was not manned by the police or by the army, but by a bunch of younger men. My immediate thought was that we were about to be robbed, and I worried about Janet's safety, but when they approached us and began speaking, we realized that they were simply stopping us to try and sell us something. After some banter in my attempts at Arabic and French and their attempts at English, I realized that they were selling hashish, and that we were not going to get by the roadblock without buying some.

Now if you are a Moroccan, the gendarmes tolerate your having hashish, but if you are a foreigner, possession is severely punished, so we all got a little nervous. Eventually we had to give in, and we bought the smallest amount they were offering - I can't remember how much it was, or how many dirhams it cost us. What I do remember was my absolute panic as we finally pulled away from the road block. This smelled like a set-up, so I was desperate to get the hashish out of the van. I grabbed the drug and simply threw it out the window to the amazement of Jim and Janet, who were possibly contemplating another use for it (I don't honestly know if they were users or not).

Sure enough, after a couple of turns on the road, there was a police road block, and they asked if we had any drugs. After we answered 'no,' they proceeded to go through the car to try and find what their accomplices had just sold us.

At this point, I have to describe the van. They are probably pretty rare by the time you read this, but Volkswagen vans are basically large tin cans with a lawnmower engine in the back. We had stuffed this particular tin can with all our living and working requirements for several months on the road. Clothes, tents, sleeping bags, food, cooking gear, etc. etc. - all standard camping gear, but - in addition, we had every piece of drilling equipment you could think of - bits, chain saw engines, water cans, pumps, hose, gas cans, tools, etc. etc. - a real joy to unpack and search, that's for sure.

The guards were totally confused by our most carefully packed cargo - hundreds of drilled rock cores, each carefully labelled with numbers and individually wrapped with toilet paper. It quickly became clear that the guards were not going to find the drugs easily in our nest, so they began to fixate on our equipment in order to find some reason to fine us and get their time's worth.

Fortunately we had been to the capital, Rabat, and obtained the proper permits from the Ministry of Mines to go and drill little holes in Moroccan rocks, and so the police were finally stymied, and had to let us go. After we had finished in the Oued Souss, I had to get back to California in time for the new school year, and so I took a bus from Taroudannt to Casablanca. I took an overnight bus, and all I remember was a burning thirst, wailing music, a middle-aged British couple made miserable by the music, and stopping in darkened towns and seeing body bags loaded onto the roof of the bus. It was a strange bus ride indeed.

From Casablanca I took a quick flight to Lisbon, stayed overnight in a cheap hotel, and flew on to Los Angeles and the very different reality of Southern California the next day.