Behind the Wheel

This from last week when we didn’t have enough wifi to post —

I woke up filled with apprehension this morning because we were scheduled to visit a Friend and his family in Imzzouren, and I am the designated driver here.  We have had a truck for the last few days, specifically for this occasion, and M had drawn us a map while we were still in Fes.

The thing about hand-drawn maps is that they make the journey look too easy.  You see the ink line indicating a road and some squares representing landmarks (such as ‘bus station’ or ‘shell of a building’), and you zero in on those.  What you don’t see are the other features surrounding the bus station, school, mosque, or all the numerous other shells of buildings until you’re smack in the middle of a sizeable city going the wrong way.

Before we left home, Jim had studied the hand-drawn map, his paper map, and the mapsdotme map on his phone, trying to make all three maps match.  They did not. Of course, the hand drawn map was ‘not to scale’ which we had assumed, but still he could not make the three or four roundabouts correspond with the two or three roundabouts on the other maps.  Armed with these cloudy directions and trusting the Lord, we set out anyway.

The gas tank was on empty, so our first stop had to be a gas station which, thankfully, was just a few miles away in Agdir.  Our Prius selves were a little surprised to have paid sixty dollars for a tank, but we did and were on our way again.

After having driven briefly through the Fes roundabouts the week before, I was relieved to find those from AK to Imzzouren nearly empty of traffic.  As usual, Jim was a great navigator, telling me to “drive straight through as if the roundabout wasn’t even there” or “exit at the second right”; advice I followed happily and soon we were approaching the city.  I say “city” because that’s what it was – not terribly large, but larger than AK and certainly not the blank white spaces on M’s map.  Streets in these parts are narrow and always lined with parked cars on either side, and if the driver ahead decides he needs to stop and let his passenger out or holler to his friend the butcher about acquiring a chicken for tonight’s tagine, he just stops.  When that happens, you can wait your turn and then drive around him, or drive around him without waiting your turn if the car behind you honks a few times, or perhaps honk at him yourself but how rude is that?

Speaking of rude, I’ve discovered, after my two recent driving experiences in Morocco, that things go best if I avoid eye contact with pedestrians.  If I look them in the eye, or if they catch my eye as they’re stepping into my path, I’m inclined to flinch or apply the brakes.  This is a no-no.  It’s best to assume that the pedestrians know their lives are in mortal danger and will time their pace accordingly, therefore I do not slow or stop for them.  Even for moms.  Even for moms carrying babies and ushering their wobbly grandmas alongside. 

Hand-drawn maps and GPS maps on iPhones have one important feature in common:  neither can predict when a souk will suddenly appear upon the road you are traveling.  This happened to us today, and besides the downtown Fes roundabouts, I think souks are the very worst places to have to drive in Morocco.  Souks are weekly markets where local farmers, fishermen, butchers, sellers of imitation “Crocs”, and a host of other entrepreneurs gather on both sides of a teeny-tiny street to peddle their goods, one that would be for only one-way traffic in places like Albuquerque or Silverdale.  Instead of blocking the souk area to traffic, city officials allow cars to travel in both directions and park wherever they like.  Or, make K-turns.  Jim and I debated briefly the feasibility of turning around and going out the way we had come in – others were doing so – but decided that if we hugged the bumper of the taxi ahead we would come out the other side eventually.  During the drive, we got some help from souk shoppers in negotiating a few particularly tight spots.  The gendarme was helpful, too, making an oncoming delivery truck skootch over just a tad so we could make a left turn.

We made it through and out the other end unscathed, but then could not locate ‘bus station’, ‘mosque’, ‘school’, nor the ‘empty shell of a building’ so Jim called our Friend, who put his English-speaking daughter on the phone.  She didn’t understand where we were, so after a few minutes and the help from a passing couple, Friend said to wait right there and he’d come get us.   He did, and we followed him right back through the souk the other way and finally to his house.

Tomorrow’s adventure – by the grace of God– is for me to drive Jim and three men to THE OTHER SOUK.  We shall, my dear husband assures me, park way far back and walk the rest of the way.