A secretary goes to Africa

As promised, here's an e-mail I sent home from Morocco, my first stop on the road, where I spent two of the most miserable months of my life. For those of you who don't know, I was a secretary for ten years before coming to law school, which explains the title.

Greetings and thanks to everyone who sent e-mail! I had 24 messages when I got to the internet cafe and I nearly cried when I read them all. I’m camped out on the roof of a hotel called Les Roches a million miles from civilization in a country where mule is food and all I can think about is brie and shopping. Sometimes I’m so homesick a message from a friend is all it takes to send me over the edge.

Speaking of the edge, tragedy struck today at the Hotel Les Roches while I was out scaling the rocks. As usual, the wind was blowing like a tornado and apparently my tent got caught in a bizarre cross-draft between the rocks and blown clear off the roof of the hotel. According to eyewitness accounts, it hovered for a minute in the air, then came crashing down on guests eating lunch on the terrace below. Much screaming and breaking of china and running for cover ensued, then the wind again caught my portable home like a big balloon and blew it right into the garbage. Imagine my dismay when I came home for lunch and found my precious tent in a stinky dumpster.
Fortunately, the tent itself suffered no damage. However, the contents inside didn’t fare so well. I had a full box of Tide laundry detergent (which sticks to everything like glue due to the crazy static electricity out here), half of which ended up in my sleeping bag, the other half in various unexpected places like my underwear and travel toothbrush. Not to mention the fact that the dumpster was full of ants and the hoteliers were so annoyed I fear my $1.50 per night rent will soon be going up.

It may not be my fault about the misfortunate terrace-diners, but if they ever find out who clogged their shower drains I’m definitely getting kicked out of here. The other night, fed up with split-ends and peeling skin, I got some avocado to put in my hair with the hopes of conditioning it (I still can’t believe they don’t sell hair conditioner and skin cream in the middle of the Sahara desert).

What seemed like a good idea at the time quickly turned into a mess of nightmare proportions: avocado in my eyes and my tent zipper, all over the Thermarest I need to spend the next 13 months on, mashed into my sneakers and smeared across a page in my journal.

When a big green glop fell onto my climbing rope, I decided it was time to cut my losses and dash to the shower. Before I started this genius endeavor I had checked to make sure we had hot water (the plumbing is very erratic here), but I soon discovered the error of my ways in having not checked to see if we had cold water, as well. So picture a green girl, covered from head to toe in avocado, hopping around a tiny, steaming shower stall trying not to get burned, and jumping naked from shower to shower as each drain gets clogged up with avocado. Rite Aid seems very far away and I can only dream of the days when I looked down my nose at Prell.

The whole thing may have been a waste of time anyway, because two days later I met five Spaniards climbing in the Gorge (Juan, Juan, Juan, Jorge and Victor) and they invited me to go see the dunes in a town near the Algerian border. Even though it’s a four-hour drive, I wanted to go because the dunes there are supposed to be some of the best in the world.

Juan drove, Juan was in the passenger seat, and Juan, Jorge and Victor sat in the backseat, while I spent most of the drive curled in a fetal position in the very back seat with the same spasming pains I’ve been experiencing in my stomach for 16 days now. I managed to fall asleep, but woke up three hours into the drive when the car got stuck in a sand dune. It was blazing hot and we were in the middle of a sandstorm, with the wind rocking the car and blowing the sand so high it completely covered the sun.

Everyone but the driver wrapped scarves around our faces and got out to push the car out of the dune. The heat was unbearable and our sweat turned to mud as it ran off our faces and I just kept thinking about an SUV ad as I put my shoulder against the jeep and tried to keep my breakfast down.

We finally got the car going again, but we were afraid of breaking an axle so we had to go slow and got stuck in the dunes again and again. Every time it happened we had to jump out of the car and push while the sand scraped under our eyelids and the hot wind singed the hairs on our arms. Tumbleweeds rolled across the road and made sounds like a Cuisinart when we ran over them and lightening flashed all around us, even though it didn’t rain.

After we pushed the car free about a hundred times we came to a dark, disreputable-looking old hotel without electricity near the Algerian border. Since other travelers were waiting out the storm there, too, there were no rooms and we had to sleep on flea-ridden sofas in the cafe. As I fell asleep scratching at bites and cleaning sand out from between my teeth I though, “Gee, it’s a good thing I have soft skin and shiny hair.”

It’s times like these I feel like getting on a plane and coming home and eating pizza till it comes out my eyes while soaking in a hot bath for three days. But when I left the gorge today and saw all the e-mail messages from my friends I felt like I could keep going. Now I’m on my way back to the Gorge to pick granules of Tide out of my sleeping bag and scrub the avocado off my Thermarest.