The Road to Zagora

by Richard Collins

  We are in Aqaba, it’s a lovely warm evening and we don’t want to come home. We fly back tomorrow afternoon. It’s been good. I think this trip has challenged our preconceptions of the Middle East. We have felt more comfortable and safer here than on our other trips; very little crime, no bad tummy issues, friendly helpful people. I think that at home there is a kind of background noise of prejudice against both Muslims and Jews. I wasn’t aware of it until we came here and kept being surprised at how approachable and friendly people are – why so surprised? Hmmmm.... I spoke of this to an American volunteering for the National Park at Wadi Rum (a retired man, very nice). ‘That’s the value of travelling,’ he said. ‘It breaks down barriers between people, challenges prejudice. Don’t forget to tell people when you get home’. OK, point taken. I won’t forget.

  It was in Wadi Rum that we also met a nice Israeli peace activist called Elon, an intelligent well-informed man. Flic said to him something like, so you’re on the Palestinian’s side? He replied, no, I am on everybody’s side. Of course that is the right answer. I am on everybody’s side too. I like to think of the people of the Middle East as a whole and say that they are good people with a great deal of warmth, humour, kindness and friendliness. I’m not being soppy or unduly idealistic; that was our experience there. I talked to Elon for a while and ended up asking him the question: is there a chance for peace in the area? He didn’t pause for a moment before answering: No, he said, there is no chance.

  We have to hope that time will prove him wrong.

  Y is for York (England)

  One time I was in York with my old school friend, Phil (you may remember him from Fort William; he’s the one who may or may not be building compost toilets in Tahiti). We crossed the river by climbing on the metal girders under one of the bridges. We arrived at the other side and let ourselves down into a sort of builder’s yard. Someone shouted from the bridge that there was a fierce dog there and we had to climb up and back across the river. I don’t know why we did it. Perhaps we were drunk.

  Phil and I were at school together. Tiffin Boys School was modelled on the old public schools and had an ex-army head master, Brigadier JJ Harper. He was a monocle-wearing authoritarian who addressed his pupils with the words you boy and was answered in fearful sentences ending in sir. I remember some sixth formers starting an independent school magazine and being called to his office and threatened with expulsion. We were under a totalitarian regime.

  Pupils wore stripy blue and maroon blazers, ties and caps in the earlier years and black blazers in the sixth form. In very hot summer weather we might be given permission to take them off. Even the pupils in their final year who might be old enough to vote or get married were not allowed out at lunchtime without a note from their parents. But the greatest injustice we experienced was not being allowed to grow our hair long. This was the early nineteen seventies and we were listening to Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and Hawkwind. Long hair, and facial hair if you could manage it, was important. It was a statement of anti-establishment idealism. It could change the world.

  I remember wearing shorts on bitterly cold afternoons on the rugby field and long trousers on glorious summer days on the cricket field. I remember the extensive school grounds: tarmac and grass and trees surrounding fine buildings. I remember the school bell that signalled the end of a lesson and the end of the school day. The words five past four have a special, liberating sound for me to this day. And so it was on the final five past four, on my last day at school, that I stepped out of the school gates and found myself breaking into a run. I felt that my life was just beginning.

  26

  The Road to Zagora

  A great deal of discomfort, some pain, a feeling of humiliation, loss of self-esteem, frustration, anger, sadness. Then, several times a day, miraculous recovery. That’s my life with Parkinson’s disease. They say that depression is a very common symptom but I don’t experience that. I’m down and I’m up. Sometimes it seems as grim as can be. Sometimes, quite often as it happens, I’m in a mental state of mild euphoria; I call it happy moron syndrome. And I should also mention sleeplessness; I’m writing this at four o’clock in the morning.

  I have found that denial and not looking into the future are important ways of coping with the illness to some extent but they have their limitations. And so, a few years ago, I read up about the possible later stages of the disease. It can be very bad indeed with very severe disablement, incontinence and depression among the symptoms. I have heard of hospitalised Parkinson’s patients who are unable to swallow being fed by means of a tube. I decided that a long term plan might include suicide and I came to think of myself as having a terminal illness. I must say that the thought of suicide generally cheers me up considerably. There is a way out. And being alive suddenly seems a very wonderful thing. The world looks especially beautiful. I am struck by the need to live for now; to try to live more intensely. To travel.

  I have been lucky enough to have a great travelling companion in the shape of Flic and my illness has brought us closer together. She recently said that Parkinson’s has changed me and that when I feel rough I can be disagreeable. Disafuckingreeable, I snarled, in what way? Which made us laugh. Yes, humour is another strategy for coping, and one that we use on a daily basis.

  Now I had better mention two things that I have become aware of this year. I’ve noticed that the illness is progressing more slowly than I anticipated and I also have heard a lot about new treatments and possible cures. So, as I write this, suicide is not on the agenda; you’ll be pleased to hear that.

  At the beginning of this book I said that travelling changes a person. It does. We now have lasting connections to the places we have visited and the people that live there. We follow the news from the Indian subcontinent. I have tried to learn more about the politics of Latin American countries. And, of course, there is the Middle East, especially the Israel/Palestine situation. I find my opinion of the issues there shifting with every new piece of information. I have to say that I found Israel to be, in many ways, a fine country and Israelis, in many ways, good people. But that fine country and those good people are responsible for a great deal of suffering and injustice experienced by their neighbours, the Palestinians. Why is that? I’m afraid you’ll have to find out for yourself; I am not the person and this is not the time to go into all the complexities of those issues.

  Our connection with the Middle East did lead us to read a wonderful book by an Israeli writer called Amos Oz – A Tale of Love and Darkness. It is a very personal memoir of his childhood in Jerusalem in the 1940s and beyond. Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian who grew up a few streets away has also written a fine book about his life – Once Upon a Country. The books tell of very different experiences of the same place. The two men have both known unhappiness and injustice and have the right to be bitter and angry. They have reason be enemies. They are, in fact, great friends, visiting each other’s houses and both playing a part in the peace movement. They have both made the effort to learn from each other and understand the other one’s viewpoint. I admire these guys. I find myself wanting to emulate their open-mindedness, their willingness to learn from each other. And that is something that travel has done for me. It has brushed away some preconceptions, misconceptions and prejudices. And it has allowed me to see into other peoples’ worlds. To be lastingly connected to them.

  Our last big trip abroad consisted of four weeks in Morocco in February and March 2013. It seems like a long time ago now and we are sure, really this time we’re sure, that we won’t go travelling again. There are times of day and night when I’m very seriously disabled by this illness (I’m not going to give you all the details) and to be so ill far away from home is out of the question. Now it feels like we made a very good decision several times over in the last few years: to make a very special journey, a trip of a lifetime. And to be more intensely alive for a while.

  I don’t want to say much about Morocco. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine co
untry and we had a good time there. I would recommend it. It’s just that we had made five big trips to extraordinary parts of the world before we went there and we had begun to lose our capacity for wonder and our excitement at being somewhere new. So I only want to give some snapshots of some of the places we visited, a little taste of what made that country different and special.

  First there was Marrakesh. It’s a short flight from the UK but you get off the plane, take a bus ride into town and arrive at the square called Djemaa El-Fna, and are deep in the heart of an exotic culture, very different from our own. There are story tellers and acrobats, and live music and dancers and snake charmers. Some of it is put on for the tourists but much of it is for locals. We also loved the parks and gardens in Marrakech; sunshine and the smell of orange blossom are not things you find much of at home in February. And we came across a sort of hiring fair, I think it might have been called years ago in Britain; guys sitting in a row by their mopeds or bikes advertising their trade by displaying, for instance, some copper piping or electrical wires or carpentry tools, and waiting for someone to offer them work. Flic asked if she could take a photograph of them and they were fine about it.

  We went to Essaouira, an important fishing port on the Atlantic coast; touristy but with a huge fleet of boats big and small, and fish being bartered for on the quayside and a sky full of seagulls. We stayed in ordinary towns like Tiznit and watched the street life: the handcart men, the beggars, the brightly dressed women and the guys with pointy hoods like something out of Lord of the Rings.

  We stayed in Tafraout and did some cycling and walking among the curious rock formations of the Anti-Atlas. We came across a wild boar and tried to follow it which gave me the opportunity of writing the blog post title: Sometimes seeing more boar spoor – sometimes not so sure.

  One of my favourite places was Agdz where we stayed in a guesthouse on the edge of a palmerie, a sort of oasis with date palms, pomegranates, almonds, barley, and beans growing in the valley bottom surrounded by arid stark hills. The land was divided up by mud walls and people came and went on little donkey carts. It was especially beautiful at dawn and dusk.

  We had our usual bad moments with my health. Times when I would feel scared of being so helplessly disabled so far from home. Flic would patiently wait for me to feel better and braver and we would go on. We had gone through this often enough in South America and the Middle East for her to be an expert at not panicking and at being patient with me.

  I never wrote of these moments in my blogs. Denial, as they say, is not a river in Egypt. It’s a useful strategy for dealing with a long term serious illness. And so my blog posts would be all sunshine and light, like this one:

  Yesterday we tried to get a bus up into the mountains but the road was blocked by snow. That surprised us as it was hot in the day and warm at night in Taroudant where we were staying. So this morning we set off for Ouarzazate. But the bus stopped in this little town (can’t remember what it’s called) and we got off because it looked nice. The light is very clear here and the barren hills stand out against a blue sky. There are kasbahs, mudwalled castles, in various states of decay dotted about the landscape. The valley floor is very green with palm trees, alfalfa, barley etc. We walked through the farmland and along a river bank – yes, that’s right, a river with water in it. People wave to us and call out bonjour. Storks, six of them, drift about above the town in the wind.

  Travelling is a different state of being. You see new things every day: strange birds, flowers, trees; a thousand ways of meeting and greeting with combinations of handshakes, hands to heart, hugs, air kisses, kisses on top of the head and so on; a profusion of head coverings with hoods and turbans and baseball caps and more worn in combinations (yes, two hats per head sometimes – why not); unusual architecture, different ways of behaving...

  To while away the time on long bus journeys in Morocco we made an A to Z of place names, each one the name of a town we had been to and each one in a different country. It wasn’t easy and we got stuck on the letter Z. Then it looked like we might go to an end-of-the-road, edge-of-the-desert town called Zagora. Some of the places we visited along the way were moderately wonderful and we didn’t hurry. We dawdled in the palmeries of Agdz for far too long, ran out of time, and headed for home. There was a plane we had to catch and there were other places we wanted to visit on the way. We wanted to walk in the High Atlas Mountains and we had to go to back to Marrakesh. We never made it to Zagora.

  It was in Marrakesh nearly a month earlier that I had what felt like a significant moment on a rooftop. It was before sunrise but I was awake early, as usual, and up on the roof watching the day begin. I could see palm trees and minarets and countless other rooftops with their water tanks and TV aerials. In the south the snow-capped Atlas Mountains were catching the morning light.

  Then the call to prayer sounded out some distance away across the city and came in a wave towards me, getting louder as it got close and more voices joined in. It can be a beautiful sound in the Middle East or other places but somehow they do it differently in Morocco; it’s more like the braying of a thousand donkeys than anything else. I think the job of muezzin, the man in the minaret, is passed down from father to son and not awarded on talent. That’s my guess because there’s some rough and tuneless calling to prayer going on there. Or at least that’s how it sounded to me.

  Eventually the local muezzin in the local mosque, quite close by, started his call. He really did have a rough voice and, to my ears, it was not a good sound. But he was loud and he was enthusiastic, you had to say that. The call to prayer is amplified over loudspeakers these days but it’s live, not pre-recorded. And so it was that I heard one man’s heartfelt song above the general cacophony and got a sense of what it meant to him. His voice rose and his passion grew and I was unexpectedly moved. It was a lump-in-throat, teary-eyed moment. Belief in a bigger, more profound purpose and meaning to our existence, and a joy in that purpose and meaning, echoed across the city. And one man’s voice sung out above the rest.

  Most of all I was moved by a sense of something special about humanity, about the strength of the human spirit maybe. But I also couldn’t help but think, just for a moment, that there might be inside each of us something much bigger than us. This felt like a revelation, an almost spiritual experience. I had a strong sense of something much larger of which we are all a part. That’s as far as I’m willing to go. I have been an atheist all my life but in recent years I have sometimes wanted to be an agnostic, someone who admits to the possibility of a deeper meaning. And for a moment, between first light and sunrise, on a rooftop in Marrakesh, I moved a step closer to the possibility of belief. It felt good at the time.

  In Morocco signs are often written in our script as well as in Arabic. I noticed that shops are often named Al Quds, after the Holy City. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the centre of all the misery in the world, as we heard it described when we were there. I remember our experience in that city now and I think of it as the antidote to belief. And I remember Lumbini, in Nepal, and the temples that made up what I thought of as the Birthplace of the Buddha Theme Park. I think of the improb-able multilimbed Hindu gods in India and the libations to Pachamama in Bolivia. It all looks, from the outside, like superstition. So much for deeper meanings. Never mind.

  I think the meaning of life is in the living of it, nothing more. It feels pretty good to me. Perhaps this is a sort of existentialism but not of the angst-ridden miserable variety, more of a happy existentialism. Zagora may or may not be a worthwhile destination but it’s the journey that matters. Like everybody else I’ve experienced sadness and pain. But I’ve been lucky; much of the time my journey has been a happy experience. Not deeply meaningful but profoundly worthwhile.

  Afterword

  I am the princess and the pea. My glass is less than half-full. Sometimes I sing Nelly the elephant packs her trunk while walking through deep snow. And I am on the railway station at the end of the universe
again.

  It is August, 2014, and I am with Bill, who has come to help me while Flic is away for the third year in a row. We are on the platform of Dyfi Junction station looking out across the marshes and the estuary towards the sea. Sand dunes form the horizon in that direction and around and behind us are green-grey hills with rough pastures, forestry plantations and patches of oak woodlands. Shafts of sunlight come through broken clouds and illuminate random farmhouses and meadows and trees. The wind is blowing from the north-west and the air is cool.

  I notice that Bill has a wonderful way of looking out at the landscape and taking it all in, enjoying the distances, the space and the sense of wildness. Now he walks to the end of the platform and watches an osprey circling above its nest. I am happy to see how much he likes it here. But before our train arrives I interrupt his reverie and tell him about an experience I had on a boat earlier this year. I don’t know what makes me think of it.

  Flic and I were coming back from a brief holiday in the Canary Islands with friends, a trip that may very possibly be my last venture abroad, given the difficulties I now have at some times of the day. We were on the ferry from La Gomera to Tenerife and I was walking a deserted upper deck, swaying from side to side like a drunken man, partly because of the movement of the boat but also because of the effects of Parkinson’s disease. I felt weak, unsteady on my feet, and I needed to use the toilet. I came across a door with a symbol of a man on it. So far so good. The door was held shut by what seemed to me, in my weakened state, to be a very strong spring. I guess it had to be able to take the force of wind and waves in the event of a big storm. I pushed and pushed, leaned my weight against it and finally it gave way. I fell forward and staggered in, the door slammed shut behind me and I found myself in total darkness.