The Road Less Haggled

In a swashbuckling tale of fairly measurable proportions, writer and photographer Roger Norum barters for transport, encounters an Errol Flynn look-alike and helms a 4x4 through Morocco’s barren wilderness

Garbed from head to toe in a cumbersome indigo robe, a turbaned Berber tout is parked on his ocean-side throne under a bright orange umbrella, his umber feet buried in the Agadir sand. He sits quietly chewing his cud, but the humped, oatmeal-coloured beast crouched next to him is bellowing, snorting and flatulating in every which way. Suited up in its Sunday best, its huge eyes and wispy mane communicate one thought – open for business.

“How much?” I ask. The tout looks up, blasé. “Two hour, 50 euro.” The camel whinnies. They must be joking. Highway robbery. “Oor eefulkee. Eeghla,” I pronounce. The tout smiles, suggesting that everyone visiting Morocco tries to ingratiate himself with locals by learning two Berber phrases – “No way” and “Too pricey” – straight out of Lonely Planet Morocco.

“Sorry. Final price. La crise,” he quips, squinting as he casts his gaze back out towards the ocean. Sod that, I think, global economic crise or not. At €25 an hour, the camel would be earning more than most freelance journalists. I turn and walk away down the beach, trying very hard not to look back.

The faint whistle comes 30, maybe 40 seconds later. I turn nonchalantly around. The tout is standing tall. I trek back to him through the sand. “OK, I like you. Forty-five euro. Final price for good friend,” he says. “Fifteen,” I counter. “Hmph. Forty.” No swindling a Berber. “Ha! Twenty.” I offer my own final price. Did the French Foreign Legion have to haggle like this?

The tout smiles and holds out his hand. Ah, yes, the gentleman’s handshake. “Thirty,” he says as he grasps my hand. The knave! I laugh, hand him €25 in coins and crumpled bills, and swing my leg over the camel’s mane, pushing myself up onto the hump as he counts the money.

Negotiation is a way of life in much of the Middle East and North Africa, and as the link between the Sahara and the Atlantic, Agadir has been a hub of haggling for centuries. The city long served as a bustling trading post – its name is derived from the Berber term for “fortified granary” – and the destination of choice for Saadian merchants who would caravan here to bargain with Portuguese traders over stores of sugar cane, dates, oils, skins, spices and gold.

The camel is an invaluable beast of burden for Saharan nomads, with comical features well-suited for desert life: bushy eyebrows and two rows of long eyelashes that shield its eyes from the blistering sun; furred ears and slit-like nostrils to protect it from blowing sand; and splayed padded feet, long slender legs and knobby knees ideal for long treks with few breaks. Though romantically known as “ships of the desert”, camels are notoriously difficult to manage, ridiculously stubborn and very fond of maintaining gauche habits such as spitting incessantly and never flossing.

I sit perched atop an iridescent Moroccan carpet, as my camel (it’s a girl. I asked. It’s good to know these things) saunters along Agadir’s corniche past a mélange of shirtless Frenchmen, mini-skirted “Euroccans”, Berbers in billowing caftans and Algerian women in peach-coloured hijabs. Today most visitors come to play on Agadir’s 9km silky, sandy beach – where else, a few hours from Europe, can you find 300 days of sunshine a year, summery winters and an exotic and traditional culture open to Western bikinis-and-Bermudas tourism?

We tromp down the beach lurching and jolting – these are not graceful animals – and in no time at all my lower back and coccyx are sustaining some pretty major pain. Wincing with every stride, I quickly do the maths and realise it would take several days to reach my ultimate destination of the Souss Valley travelling this way. Faster wheels are needed.

I depart my carpeted perch after just an hour – it’s not lost on me that the tout got his original rate after all – and hop in a taxi to the Medina Polizzi, a seductive bazaar of bougainvillea and palms where artisans spend their days hacking masks out of tree trunks and pouring broaches from molten silver.

Here, I meet Jean-Richard, a pony-tailed, khaki-suited thrill seeker – born in Agadir to Spanish parents, and a seasoned pilot on overland trips into Morocco’s mountain regions. Leaning against his black Toyota 4x4 with his Ray-Bans, he vaguely resembles an older Errol Flynn. And I don’t even need to haggle – €49 for a day of devil-may-care driving sounds bargain enough for me (you know something is up with the world when a high-powered off-road vehicle costs less than a lazy, humped mammal).

“Pues, vamos hombre,” he calls towards me in a Castilian accent that strangely feels right at home here in French-speaking Morocco – much of the country, including nearby Western Sahara, was a Spanish protectorate for decades. We speed off past the busy market town of Inezgane towards the foothills of the Anti-Atlas, as the manicured blacktop quickly gives way to dusty, tortuous hammada, a stony desert blended with tufts of sand that demarcate the beginnings of the raw and cruel Sahara. Chleuh Berber tribesmen long dominated this unforgiving, desiccated region from their mud and stone huts, but today it is ruled by billy goats, jackals and packs of wild dogs.

I take the wheel, barrelling through the region’s pink stone valleys, where poisonous cacti and figuier de Barbarie plants huddle against the canyons’ granite cliffs. Several hours later we arrive, parched, at the nomadic encampment at Aït Harmed, a sprawling gorge of almond groves and date palms that empties into a shallow oued, a snaking river-bed containing something rarely seen in Moroccan rivers these days – water.

Khatima, the camp’s cook, leads me down to the river bank to instruct me in the delicate preparation of agroum, traditional Berber bread. From the shoreline she gathers a handful of thimble-sized rocks, pressing them into the flour before setting the loaf inside a small stone oven by the water. An hour later she removes the scalding stones and we munch on the hot, doughy bread during our scrumptious dinner of pastilla, a pastry of noodles and seafood, and meshwi, baby lamb broiled whole inside a large casserole.

Bleary from carafes of local Gazelle de Mogador wine, I’m awakened early the next morning by the trebly call to prayer echoing down from one of the valley’s slender minarets. After a quick coffee – the Berbers insist I drink mint tea, but at 7am my weary body is panging for some hardcore caffeine – we cut west to the Souss Massa, a protected reserve where galloping gazelles and wild boars reside alongside pink flamingos and the endangered bald ibis. We spend the afternoon exploring the desolate, blustery coves along the Atlantic coast, where Berber fishermen make their livelihood from grottoes right at the water’s edge as they have done for centuries.

Come evening, my driver and comrade-in-adventure drops me off at the beach south of town, where the cool ocean water is a sanctuary after the scorching mountains. Flip flops dangling from the fingers of my lobster-red trucker’s arm, I amble back along the shore towards Agadir, where I can spot a few humped figures waiting patiently for a good haggle, and just beyond, the scarlet Atlantic sun firing up the horizon before another dark night settles in.

THE DETAILS
SLEEP
The swish Soﬁtel Agadir Royal Bay Resort is a kasbah-style beachfront oasis that seduces with a palatial, open-ceilinged lobby and elegant rooms of wrought-iron furnishings, ocean views and Hermès bath products. The manicured grounds are bedecked with palm trees, hammocks and a sprawling pool, and staff service would pass muster in a sultan’s court.
BAIE DES PALMIERS, TEL: +212 528 820 088, www.sofitel.com

EAT
La Scala serves great Moroccan seafood in a lovely garden trattoria setting, a short walk from the corniche.
RUE DU OUED SOUSS, TEL: +212 528 846 773

DRIVE
Agadir Evasion lets you explore the wild sides of Agadir on guided 4x4 tours across the mountain oases, coastal plains and rampart towns of the Souss Valley.
192, BLOC7, BLD MOULAY ISMAEL CPH, TEL: +212 528 215 916, www.agadir-evasion.com