OUT OF AFRICA

It wasn’t the most auspicious start to a holiday. For as we arrived at our chosen destination, it appeared that most of the locals were desperately trying to leave it. Every day, hundreds of youths crawl under the chassis of coaches departing from Africa for Spain, fugitives hoping to hitch a dangerous ride to a better life. Most are prised from the undercarriage before the coaches board the ferries. Some fall by the wayside, some are crushed like flies beneath the wheels. Others chance their fate by patera - the small fishing smacks that daily attempt an illegal crossing to Spain by sea. “The Guardia drive around them in circles in their powerful motor launches to capsize them,” elaborated our guide. “Then they leave them for an hour, returning to arrest anyone who hasn’t drowned. Anyway, welcome to Tangier!”

Long before we left the port of Algeciras, the guide had given it to us straight - in a way the brochures never do - about the high price of alcohol, the unpotability of the water, the effect on delicate constitutions of a surfeit of spicy food and the criminal tendencies of some of the inhabitants. His pep talk was reminiscent of the ones dispensed to tourists in Spain 25 years ago when no one would contemplate foreign travel unarmed with a supply of Diocalm, nor eat so much as a locally-grown tomato without dousing it in a mixture of  bottled water and Dettol.  

A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE

Tangier’s seafront is how the Dunkirk beaches might have looked, minus the barbed wire, after the Normandy Landings. It is an endless stretch of sand spookily devoid of all human life. There are no chiringuitos blaring out disco music, no ice cream parlours, no merry children building sand castles and (Allah Forbid) no topless sunworshippers. The promenade is a no-woman’s land of tired-looking men sipping mint tea at grimy cafes or patrolled by youths selling everything from Jesus Christ sandals to heroine. Unseen by day because they are kneading bread and hand-washing the clothes on some antique rub-a-dub rack, the women only emerge from their daily domestic thrall just before sundown when they walk the beach in their flowing jellabahs like exiles from a biblical painting or the set of Lawrence of Arabia. 

Tangiers is a city of ironic contrasts - the glory days of its colonial past a mere memory glimpsed only in the faded splendour of its old town walls or the crumbling paintwork of the Hotel Continentale, erstwhile haunt of writers, celebrities and the bohemian set who surely would not now, wish to take a steam bath in its dark and malodorous sauna. Chocolate - and not the fruit and nut variety - is sold openly on  street corners (is every tourist on the whacky baccy?) but a request for alcohol is met with a shake of the head in the negative or a furtive invitation into the inner depths of some dark café where Flag beer - a cocktail of Sin Alcohol and goat’s urine, judging by the taste -  is passed covertly over the counter along with a smeared glass beaker and a look of disapproval.

FOR RICHER, FOR POORER

In the Medina, a maze of interconnecting alleyways into which we are relentlessly herded by our guide, who is hoping to make a nice commission on the sale of a carpet or six, a river of rubbish running through the streets is a fun fair for flies. Ancient women with hands like claws and jaundice-coloured skin the texture of old parchment, sit in front of mustard and saffron-coloured spice mountains while the acrid stench of untreated sewage filtering through the doorways of restaurants quite puts us off the midday tourist menu of couscous and chicken tajini, although those with stronger stomachs are tucking in with gusto. Strange Rumplestiltskin-like men with rickety legs scuttle sideways like spiders out of shops with live chickens flapping under their arms - fresh today! Women of indiscriminate age, only their henna-dyed feet visible from beneath their flowing robes and coal-black eyes peeping from veiled faces, scurry with patty-tins of dough to the communal bakery oven to cook their daily bread. No proud Moroccan mother would ever dream of buying Mother’s Pride although something similar is available in the shops at tourist prices. The call to prayer of the muezzin from the mosque echoes through this Minotaurish maze, bringing an eery silence to the streets and freeze-framing, for an instant, this animated portrait of bustling humanity.

If the Medina seems more nightmarishly surreal than a Bosch painting, the garden suburbs are more reminiscent of a glossy magazine feature. A millionaire’s row of magnificent walled white wedding cake mansions patrolled by armed guards and belonging to kings and princes, sheikhs, shahs and oil magnates stand testimony to another world, as do the ornate lobbies of the tourist hotels where exquisite Arabesque decor and tinkling fountains give the impression of unadulterated luxury, even if the bedrooms and the plumbing do not always equate to this same opulence.

POIGNANT BEAUTY

And yet there is a sad beauty to this place, a sense that Tangier is a poor man’s vision of The Garden of Eden before the serpent arrived to tempt man with the evils of  alcohol, money and CDs by the Spice Girls. 

Setting out for Tangier from Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol, we were early for the coach and went to buy a coffee in a nearby pizzeria. It was seven o’ clock on a Saturday morning and what looked like the dregs from the night’s disco were slumped around the bar. Two beautiful young Scandinavian girls, dressed like expensive call girls, lurched in, cursing and slurring, while the barman (who was also drunk) slurred back at them. The music was pounding at full volume and an expensively-clad man in a white suit and snakeskin shoes was being sick in a corner. My request for a cortado was greeted with astonishment. “We don’ serve coffee a’ thish time o’ night”. 

Happily, I am out of Africa, but the subsequent trip to Tangiers made me wonder whether we - with all our western privileges and permissiveness - have got it so right after all. Is ours really such an ideal world?  Is it a world worth sacrificing a life for, under the chassis of a tourist bus?