Sand Blasted

Once outside the city, panic overtook Abdullah. As our dirt piste steepened, careening through the bleak lunar landscape en route to the isolated pass guarding Zaouiat, Abdullah threw the van into third gear rather than downshift. It stalled and overheated. The coup de grâce came near the summit, when we cleared a corner to see an old snowbank on the shoulder. Abdullah, it seemed, had never seen snow — he jammed on the brakes and jumped out, muttering, and tossing our bags onto the hardpack.

To avoid being stranded, Brittany and I held fast in the back seat, while Andy and Jonathan blockaded the road with our bags. An angry Abdullah revved the engine and pulled a U-turn, heading full throttle toward the boys. In that clutch second, Andy sat in front of the bags, crossed his legs, and threw an “I dare you” look. Abdullah screeched to a halt a few inches from Andy’s feet. Meanwhile Mohammed, standing mutely on the sidelines, flipped open his cellphone. Some French guests staying at his gîte had a Land Cruiser, he told us, and were only 20 minutes away ski touring.

The Frenchies showed up a half-hour later, but Abdullah backed up his taxi and himself blockaded the road, in hopes of extorting more money. We crept past his back bumper, two wheels of the Frenchies’ Land Cruiser off the shoulder. Mohammed kept his poker face until we cleared that obstacle, and then he went off, insisting that the taxi driver was a crazed “Arab from the city.”

Still, due to the language barrier, we had no way of telling what he and Abdullah truly discussed. The whole thing seemed fishy. We wound up in Zaouiat late, with Mohammed too tired to saddle up and head into the gorge. We slept at his gîte, planning to wake early and mule-pack in.

The Taghia village marks a step back in time, with hogan-like adobe/mud dwellings, Berber shepherds tending their flocks, and veiled women working the fields. Very little goes on here. The schoolroom sits vacant, and there’s no mosque, as you see in most Moroccan towns. The food is on the bland side, lacking the classic Moroccan spices. And the mince is made with only goat and chicken gristle combined with locally grown carrots and potatoes. In most parts of Morocco, kids run up and ask you for candy or money. In Taghia, they run up and ask for a pen — for them, it has the entertainment value of, say, an Xbox in the States.

That morning after our taxi debacle — after we reached our final destination — Mo’s game became clear. The prices for the mules shot up, along with the price of our night in Zaouiat. Mo even hassled Said, the gîte owner in Taghia, demanding a cut from his profit for our eight-day stay, as he’d done with Abdullah. We lost the rest of a potentially great climbing day sorting the fiasco, though at least we were (temporarily) rid of Mo.