OCTOBER 16, SUNDAY

MOROCCAN ALPS

We left Marrakesh at 7:30 a.m., had a good breakfast at a great cafe we lucked on after a couple of hours, didn’t find a place for lunch and ate goat cheese on baguette and got to Fez at 7:30 p.m. after driving all day.

The first five hours were through a flat and often barren landscape with occasional green irritated areas. But then we came to low hills and went up and up. And then, all of a sudden everything changed. Before Azrou the mountains were. suddenly covered with a cedar forest, low, thick round trees packed so closely together that the sudden forest looked impenetrable. Even the architecture changed from flat roofed Moroccan houses painted pastel shade of pink and red and yellow to white houses with orange tiled peeked roofs that looked like German or Swiss houses, presumably with peeked roofs because of snow in the winter. We passed a country club with a golf course. There was a ski resort somewhere around. The next town, iFrane, was equally elegant with the streets and the beautiful parks in both towns crowded with Moroccans escaping the dust and the heat of the plains. And then as suddenly as were were in forests they were gone and we were back into the traffic leading into Fez.

But as we drove I began to wonder more and more about the two Morocco’s, at least, that were apparent to an outsider who knew little about Morocco and was suddenly trying to deal with where he was.

On one hand, since I’ve been here in almost every encounter with Moroccans on any level I have been met with extreme kindness and helpfulness. And from the outside on first impression anyway, Morocco seems to be a very civilized place. The schools are modern and the school children in their school uniforms seem serious about school and well behaved. The streets, after all of the warnings at home, seem safer than Asheville and certain safer than Barcelona, Paris and London, places where I have been robbed. Morocco seems so civilized, that is the only word that seems appropriate. Out of a mixture of tribal cultures and a long French colonial history Morocco seems to have developed into a sophisticated and civilized place that is not European but Moroccan. Even the trash pickup is so efficient that the cities all seem to be swept clean daily.

But at the same time there seems to be a huge gap between the sophisticated cities and the rural conservative villages. I was berated at in the flea market for having my iPhone in my hand because of the risk that I was taking photos. (I was without anyone being able to know I was triggering photos from a device in my pocket, so I didn’t complain.) It was the possiblity of a photograph that was threatening to conservative poor people. No one in the elegant part of town would have cared.

The women in the villages are all covered by loose robes, sometimes covering all but their eyes while in the cities women are often in Western dress and the Europeans look half naked in short shorts and tight bodices.

In the rural areas there are a huge number of horse drawn or donkey drawn carts moving slowly at the side of the road. In the city there are almost none. In the cities we are in an Internet, cell phone world. There are cell phones in rural areas but I’m sure the worlds are different.

I think of the United States and our great tensions between rural people with traditional American values and identity which are threatened by liberal values and elitist condescension. In India there is this same tension between rural values and Hindu fundamentalism and liberal cosmopolitan globalist values.

And I am sure there must the the same tensions here between rural and urban that are invisible to an casual wandering American who can’t see beyond the smiling friendliness and civility and I wonder how Moroccans deal with this tension.