The first sign that things are going wrong is when the people disappear. The bus station at Marrakech is cluttered with sleeping bodies coiled around each other’s contours, but the cramped cubicle where we bought our tickets to go east to desert town Ouarzazate is worryingly empty. The tiny black and white television on the ticket counter is still playing a scratchy film, our bags are stacked where we’d left them, under the staircase, but there are no passengers, no ticket sellers and, incredibly, no touts.
The clock shows 12:30 a.m, exactly the time that the bus was meant to leave. Just a few hours earlier, speaking animatedly in a weave of French and English the owner of the bus agency had told us about the changes morphing Marrakech — the new money, the influx of tourists, Bollywood at the Marrakech film festival and finally, as our shared bag of paprika chips dwindled to its final contents, reminded us to be here for the bus at 12:30.
For three hours we braved the blind, handicapped, poverty-stricken night crowds at Marrakech’s central square — Djemaa el-Fna. Touts and tourists, beggars and stray passers by combined in a swell of final activity as the food stalls shut down. And hours later, here we were, three tickets, the promise of a journey to the film studio town of Ouarzazate, and no sign of our bus.
Finally at 2:30 a.m, there is a burst of activity. Familiar faces are conjured up out of nowhere, passengers materialise, and a man is instructed to lead us to the bus. Five minutes later, shivering in the cold of the early morning, we watch as the bus pulls in to the station — already completely full.
We squeeze in somehow, in between shawled men on the last seat. Jasmine water is flung helpfully along the aisle to relieve the stench of overcrowding and black plastic bags are ominously distributed — our journey to Ouarzazate through the winding roads of the Atlas mountains is likely to be rough.
It is a rough journey, we discover soon enough, over treacherous curves and sparse landscapes, but it culminates in daybreak over Ouarzazate, a land of parched earth, dusty roads and many film studios, including ones that worked on Lawrence of Arabia and Gladiator. Summoned by the stately ruins of the Tamdaght kasbah appearing over the horizon, cradled in between shoulders of ridged rock, we take a taxi toward it, to the tiny scattering of houses that make up the village of Ait Ben Hadou.
On our first evening in Ait Ben Hadou, we walk to the kasbah, and once inside, tread mud passageways and climb dark stairways to our treat — mint tea sipped whilst sprawling on the terrace, watching an ice blue sky suddenly streaked by pillows of cloud.
Gradually as we watch, the shadows of dusk creep over the kasbah leaving a light outline of hills in the distance — our cue to head home. “Home” is the Defat Casbah where tiny cottages arch around an open pool; framing the swimmer is the stark contradiction of dry earth and cooling blue sky. The cous cous they serve here is light and fluffy, the tajine soft and luscious. Next door is a comfortable restaurant where Tracy Chapman helps to dissolve glasses of dry wine, poised in this unlikely venue with open earth and a kasbah ruin as its backdrop.
It is hard to leave this luring little chunk of paradise with its eccentric and colourful staff. Mohammed clumsily stringing Hindi words together on his guitar, hoping to charm an Indian girl into marriage; Ali throwing out an impromptu get-together every night for the multicultural guests. Berber drums and card tricks break the pitch dark of the night and the unfamiliarity between the guests.
But we must leave. From tiny Ait Ben Hadou to Ouarzazate, where you can hire self-drive cars into the desert, we travel part by hitching on a rickshaw ferrying gas cans, and part by shared taxi. At one end of Ouarzazate, an empty bar, its insides dark and cool, is the best protection from the dust and heat of the tiny town. A singer croons slow ballads to a giant piano, disco balls swing furiously and the bartender and barmaid have unfinished business that keeps them whispering at a corner of the bar. We sip our gin and tonic undisturbed at this 1970s style bar and plan the next phase of our journey.
It is late morning by the time we set out from Ouarzazate, cutting east to the desert through the Draa Valley, past views of sheer brown hillsides, praises to Allah carved out in gigantic alphabets on their face. Traffic is sparse and the steady journey broken by an occasional straggly village. In the dimly-lit tea shops, al Jazeera portends disasters to stray customers and we rest a while, sipping mint tea and strong coffee. By nightfall we reach Zagora, an oasis in the desert from where ancient tribes once took 52 camel days to get to Timbuctou.
The journey on from Zagora is along a seemingly never-ending stretch of road, mirages playing silver tricks along it, but even as we set out, a ferocious sand storm begins to brew. With just an empty road ahead of us and flatlands all around, we brave the storm.
The gusts of sand sweep and hoot around us, blinding our vision, forming shifting sheets of brown that make it impossible to tell if another vehicle is racing toward us on that curving road. There is silence all around except for the wind calling, occasional shrubs break the horizon — otherwise just a vast landscape in hues of dry colour. And then, a white outline appears: a sole person in the desert hitching a ride in the middle of a sweeping sand storm. We take him in, an itinerant Bedouin traveller, making a three-day journey (by foot) to Ouarzazate where his brother runs a caravan service.
At Kfar Ouled-Driss, one of the last villages before the desert and the undefined border with Algeria, we pull over for a break. Our new passenger leads us into a cavernous abandoned kasbah, its dark insides a soothing respite from the biting sand outdoors. Inside, gullies and niches wind and slope their way in a tentacled grip on each other, the paths becoming darker the further in we go, and the better protected from the vagaries of an itinerant storm.
The last part of the journey is an hour long. Sand dunes appear on the horizon and aggressive four wheel drives appear out of nowhere to roar past our bumping Indica. We drive through roads that reduce to little dirt tracks till suddenly, with no warning, we are forced to stop. A cluster of homes lies ahead, young boys are clamouring at our car window, urging us to lower our window panes and hear about their amazing hotel deals... but we cannot advance because we are, literally, at the end of the road. There is just sand all around. A cyber cafe. And in the distance, the magnificent, low rolling dunes of the Sahara.
