36. MARRAKECH EXPRESS

The gods of princesses are shining beneviolently (!) upon Luda and I.  

We've escaped Kathmandu, although I left with a lifetime of unbelievable  experiences I'd been fortunate to land in just 7 weeks.  Luda rescued me from certain pneumonia in the smoggy valley, and now we're on the next lap of our Year without Clothes Adventure, signed, sealed and promised on a white paper tablecloth in a Sydney restaurant when we both both mildly drunk and seriously sad.

So.  Here we go again.  After hearing the shrieks of the children on the jumpy castle at the beach barbeque in the Shangri La Abu Dhabi, and knowing we'd have to avoid the face painters insistent on creating us into a bumblebee or a witch when we'd rather tuck into grilled prawns, we opted for a feet up mother brown, another languid shower each and a bit of a snooze in our luxury room before the long trek to Casablanca.  Besides we'd overdosed on grilled salmon, Australian wines, chocolate brownies, nachos, New Zealand Brie, French Blues, caramelised onions on bruchettta, and another ten varieties of international cuisine, laced with mint and jasmine tea, at pre-prandial time.

At midnight, we swept quietly out of Abu Dhabi at 130km/hr on grand prix roads to the chaotic airport, currently under renovation.  We scurried from terminal to terminal, desk to desk, dragging our lives behind us.  Exhausted, finally, at Etihad check in, Luda offered - "I suppose the plane is full?"  Yes, mam, it sure is, said Hum the Sri Lankan checklit.  "Any possibility of an upgrade?" I countered, still radiant from the previous one and the day's doing nothing except eat, rest and shower.  "Sure! I can't promise, but I'll mark you Priority!".

I love Abu Dhabi Can't Promises!  Upgraded to Business Class, for the 8 hour flight to Casablanca. Ah.  Bliss at 40,000feet.  Shall I tuck you in Madam? Would you like some Evian? A salmon bagel? Mint tea? Here's some French face cream, a sleep impregnated eye mask, your preferential breakfast request, please, don't stretch, there's a button if you want more champagne. Let me adjust your seat ... feet out, back out, vertical becomes completely horizontal ...  I'll just ............ zzzzzzz.  Wake up an hour before Casablanca with an energy fizz drink and fresh thick toast with French jam.  OOOOH!  ETIHAD! You're so cool, you're so cool!  We arrived on the dot at 6.50am, in a green countryside, the air a very pleasant 19degrees.

Casablanca to Marrakech
- or the rise and fall of princesses!  

We'd been advised to take the train - first class ticket preferred if available from Casablanca airport, through Casablanca city, change there for Marrakech. First class was sold out, so we had no choice but to buy a ticket for Casablanca-Marrakech - a distance of 400km, and an estimated travel time of 3.5 hours - for 120 dirhams, or about $20.  The first part of the ride, from the airport to the train station - was 20 minutes, on sticky seats and dusty floors, through prickly pear and stone hut territory, where men tethered goats and women in great coats waded through poppy fields.

At Casablanca station our first inkling that this was not princess terrain:   to get to the Marrakech platform, we had to lug our 20kg down 50 steps, under the railway tracks, and up another 50 steps, cursing and bruising ourselves all the way.  The train was due in at 8.58am;  we only had to wait 20 minutes.  Unh Huh.  This is Africa.

Retard 20.  Retard 35.  Retard 45.  The train was an hour late.  The platform became more crowded with motley assortments of luggage, robed men and women, gorgeously beautiful doe eyed children, tall Moroccans and even a carpet seller until there was little room to move.  The train finally heaved itself in, grunting and clanking and spitting steam and diesel, clouds of dust sliding down the stained windows.  Desperate souls peered through the grimy windows onto the hopeful passengers on the platform, shaking their heads: no room, in any language. They barred the doors with their bodies, their luggage and their angry faces.  Others on the platform ignored their pleas and pushed and shoved and wedged themselves and their luggage up the three large steps and into the compartments.  I was running down to third class to find seats, , but Luda, in typical Luda style,  shouted "Run to First Class" so I turned direction with the music to Chariots of Fire firing us on. Her stricken face acknowledged we only had 2nd class tickets and my silent, equally stricken face said from across the crowds "Bugger that, this is Africa" as we kept running, fighting our way through impenetrable walls of desperate people, equally desperate to get on the train.  

We heaved open a heavy wooden door.  We pulled each other up the steps, over suitcases, even as others tried to push us back down onto the platform. Heads said NO!  Arms rejected us.  Bodies shoved us away.  Fists shook. Arabic curses rained on our heads.  French invocations had no effect.  That we'd been waiting an hour for this train meant nothing: some had waited much longer.  I had my camera pack on my back, and hauled my case up using every bit of strength I had.  I remembered someone telling me that if you want to measure a woman's strength, see how fast she can run uphill with a child in her arms if she's in danger. That's the strength I drew on.  I placed my hands on Luda's neat derriere, and pushed her up into the train, she then turned around and pulled me up holding my wrists as if I was falling from a West Side Story balcony. Of course, there weren't seats.  There was also no safe place to stand. No air to breathe.  So space to move elbows or scratch a nostril.  We exhaled everyone's damp, fretful breath of garlic and goat curries.  We struggled to rearrange other peoples luggage so that ours would jam tightly next to them in too small slots.   Between the stressed, sweating, crumpled shoulders and necks of the disgruntled passengers, we tried to inspect the compartment. 

Children fretted. Babies wailed. Exhausted mothers sat on the floor between seats, crosslegged with squirming, teething children gnawing on fingers.  Men stood in clusters in the "do not stand here while the train is moving" area, arguing middle eastern politics, with barely room for their gesticulating hands to move. Luda wedged her case between a mother with four daughters and a baby on her lap, so she could have somewhere to sit.   Later we'd notice a would have a lock-shaped bruise on her bottom.

I squeezed myself into a small area of the luggage rack. Enormous, whale-shaped women in wool coats squirmed on arm rests, trying to get comfortable, crushing those who were fortunate enough to have found a seat in the stations before Casablanca. Children climbed over mothers.  I stood up for a second to adjust my case which had slipped, and a much younger man immediately stole my place in the luggage rack. When filthy looks and sweet smiles and pretending to have a broken leg didn't make him move,  I offered to sit on his knee.  He declined.  The air was so thick, that not even a Moroccan switchblade could penetrate it.  I became obsessed with trying to get fresh air.  We tried prising open the windows, but they were locked from the outside. I had visions of this hell-train rolling over and us all suffocating. Please readers understand that to grossly exaggerate this experience would be pointless.  It was impossible to transverse any part of the passageway, or the compartment, without stepping over passengers and luggage.  If there had been a fire, or a rollover, we would have all been killed, as there was no escape. 

As I'd lost my place in the luggage rack, I squeezed my way to the concertina section that joins the compartments: where people have smoke breaks and between the toilets. Seven men argued furiously about the state of the world; another sat in a tight corner, between the sliding doors, reading the three national newspapers that he'd folded into tiny tight rectangles; a third had taken the discarded parts of the paper and had made a wad on which to sit.  Sweat ran down my face. My legs, my back, my scalp.  I hadn't had breakfast on the plane as I was jetlagged and not ready for much except dreams at my body clock time of 4am.  Clutching my throat, I gesticulated to an older man in a terribly thick coat to please PLEASE open the door, before I passed out.  The train was blitzing the countryside at about 200km/hr, but thankfully, he did, and a blast of "air" shot through our small section, lifting the hair, the newspapers and the dust and giving a few lungsful of life before a litany of French and Arabic curses forced the door closed.  

I sat right on the floor, on the grime, between the toilets. My thighs rocked and rolled with the train, bringing bruises that would later prove this journey. Whenever someone used the toilet, they had to step over me.  There'd be clanking and thumping and gushin: the door would lurch open and a wall of stink had nowhere else to go except up our nostrils.   From my spot on the floor, my eyes were groin height to 10 men, three enormous women, and chin height to weepy, sweating, fretting children, all who had sought solace in the postage sized spot near a door and window that would one day open.  

The train stopped at three more stations. At each one, we barricaded our doors, opening only to let a passenger and his ten packs of luggage out, but that then allowed another eleven passengers and their luggage in.  Guards on the platforms pushed and shoved the passengers up, while I shrieked "Are you all  **&^-ing MAD! We are going to suffocate in here!" but nothing worked;  they just kept on forcing their way in, almost climbing over each other's backs.  At one station we pushed ourselves against the windows to prove that there was indeed no room in this compartment as hysterical passengers on the platforms rushed up and down trying to board. I used my plastic water bottle to hit would-be passengers over their heads as they attempted to mount the steps.  Of those that managed to board our compartment, as if they were storming the Bastille,  I elbowed till it hurt me; but nothing deterred them. Personal space had no meaning, it didn't matter that a finger was accidentally up a nostril or a groin in an armpit.

I remained, defeated and scared,  on the floor for the remainder of the journey.  I tried to concentrate on scenery beyond the crush of humanity: the fields of wild poppies, lavender and yellow acres, on the prickly pears and donkeys in olive orchards and women sheltering from the blistering sun under tarpaulins, and donkey carts and scrub and rocky outcrops and mosques, and donkeys.  Then I'd need to breathe, and concentrated instead on the smallest hole I'd found in the floor of the compartment, between the door and the step, and I lowered my face to the floor to gasp as I watched the yellow stones and tracks and sun flash through here. I sucked that sliver of air because my life depended on it. If I could keep focused on this spot of life, I'd be okay.  I had air.  I had air.  I had some air.  If I stayed low, I'd have air.  And the aroma of sweaty feet.

Eye level here, all I could see were shoes.  And being Morocco, even through my fright, I still had some fashion sense: what gorgeous shoes!  Hand stitched woven leathers, yellow kid slippers, shoes polished like genie lamps, embossed purple leathers, red slip ons, Dolce Gabbana runners; even the children wore shoes to put Spain to shame.  Every half hour pins and needles would kill me so I'd haul myself up to a standing position, but then someone would snatch the my sitting stamp and I'd have to wait for them to stand before I could sit.  Luda was miming to me through the glass partition from her perch on the other side, that the man wedged under her armpit had awful B O. Luckily for me,  the seven men political manifesto were passing around the Moroccan equivalent of Aramis that they sprayed above our heads ... ahh.   Between the toilets and the hole in the floor, and Unesco, I had the best spot in the train.

After two hours two men attempted to traverse our compartment selling water bottles.  They couldn't move more than two metres, so gave up.  I'd rationed my Etihad water as if I was auditioning for boot camp in the Sahara, sip by sip, but the good news is that because there was nothing to eat or drink on the train, not many people used the toilet.  The temperature outside had climbed to about 35degrees as we sped further south: now opening the door when we slowed at a siding only brought in hot bread oven blasts and yellow dust.  A few mothers were offering chocolate biscuits so little chocolately hands left their imprints everywhere. Children fell asleep standing or collapsed on luggage piles.

We made Marrakech alive.  It was without doubt the worst train experience Luda and I have ever had. We both had to practice our be calm in all circumstances meditation techniques to prevent panic.  At once stage I did think that if I didn't zone out, I would lose it.  Visions of stripping off my clothes and abandoning that train in the middle of nowhere, just so I could breathe.  But we made it.  Both grey to the gills, dehydrated, exhausted beyond measure, the 3.5 hour trip, beginning at 9, landed us in Marrakech at 3pm.

Of course I didn't take photographs.  I wouldn't have been able to raise my arms.  It would have been a human rights issue.  The train photos are of other passengers' journeys ... other times. Sometimes, homework needs to be done.  

Manu, from Riad al Mamoun, met us at the station.   If we hadn't both spent so much time so close to the ground, we would have kissed his feet.  I'd earlier sent him an email to say we were arriving at noon, but the updates weren't reliable, so he'd been waiting for 3 hours.  He drove us through the modern, clean desert city of Marrakech, to the outskirts of the Souk, in which was his hotel.

We weren't able to drive to the door, so as we followed, dazed and practically delirious, he dragged our luggage all through the Djma el Fnaa into the recesses of the souk, into this amazing, gorgeous, beautiful tiny 16th century hotel, in which we were the only guests.  He showed us the jacuzzi. The internal pool. He squeezed us some orange juice and gave us mint tea and iced water. We were gaga.   He showed us our sensational rooms, each in different styles.  He made us Moroccan coffee.  We were zombies.

We showered. We perked up.  We wandered, dazed and confused, back through the souks, through the spice markets and the JEWELS!!!! and the nougat and leather and nuts and dates, and ate at the local eat all you can anything you can of chops, sausages, salads, kebabs, flat breads ... but were so beyond any level of focusing or enjoyment, that both of us were unconscious by 7pm.  In the most comfortable of beds I have slept in in two months. In absolute quiet.

Apart from the Muezzin and all his echoes, at 4am.

Luda burst into my room at 6am flinging open the heavy wooden doors.  AWAKE! She laughed.  I feel better!  Me Too! I said - I've just had an 11 hour sleep. Coffee arrived in a thick, pottery cup. And fresh squeezed orange juice.   We both look fifty years younger.  I think we'll begin the day with a jacuzzi.  And the flat bread made by the woman in the kitchen.  I can hear her kneading.

Roll on, Marrakech.  We have places to see and Things To Do.