The train from Tanger to Oujda had a spectacular landscape that was flat, rippled then rolled out into sand. Just after leaving Tanger was water that no picture could capture, so iridescent blue green like a hummingbird, a shock to the yellow and red pattern already established.

As we rode alongside it we didn't know it was also the last water we would see so plentifully in Morocco. People drove out onto sandbars and swam, at a later town kids dove from a bridge. Mostly the area along the track was sparsely people and when it was people, often whether adults or kids, they waved at the train going by. It was a time to soak in life instead of trying to snap it up digitally.

	There were no major towns near the tracks but regular intervals of people going about their lives.
	It became strange to see one's own thought think, oh, just another camel grazing. How fast things become old and normal.
	Occasionally there were plots that burst with irrigated green but mostly the land lay in grazing or post-harvest of hay and melons.

Further on the land looked more like California's desert or near Banff's foothills. Bedouin shepherds and goatherds led their sheep to eat what remained of ground cover. The drought has been long. Many of their tent communities have moved to better conditions but some remain on the hillside, visible often only through parallax.

Being close to the orange growing district in Morocco, Oujda had a lot of orange and orange juice stands and at a hotel we spent a night at, the Nationally owned Ibis, there were complimentary oranges in the room. A distinctive sort of touch. Wonder whether any hotel in Florida does that?

2002, Pearl and Brian Pirie      | Trip Main Page |