On the Way to Alnif

By Jody Hanson

The directions Aziz, my Berber friend, gave me were easy enough: “Take the train to Marrakech, then catch the luxury bus or a grand taxi to Quarzazat. Once you get there, take another bus or taxi to Tinghir, about another three hours. When you arrive phone me. I'll meet you and take you to Alnif.” Being invited to a Berber wedding in Alnif – an isolated village in the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco – was an invitation anthropologists would kill for. All the couples in the village get married at the same time – there were 29 brides last year – and it was a three-day event I didn't want to miss. Aziz and his fiancé Khadijah had married in the ceremony last year. (Their baby was only three days old and yet to be named Tifaout.) Getting to Alnif, as it turned out, proved to be an adventure in itself.

My plan was to arrive in Marrakech and get a ticket to Quarzazat on the luxurious bus that left at 6:30 in the morning. Then I would be free to spend the evening exploring the souks and soaking up the ambience of this imperial city. But the last ticket had been sold an hour before I arrived, so the only way to get to Quarzazat, the first port of call, was by grand taxi. Thirty-year-old-plus, white Mercedes Benzes, decades out of production and now yellow with age, comprise the grand (French for “big”) taxi fleet. Their tires don't have much tread anymore and the chrome bumpers generally hang at suspicious angles, while the upholstery – what is left of it – is ragged and stained from the numerous passengers the weary vehicles have ferried over the years.  

When the grand taxi had the required six passengers, everyone piled in. The last passenger, however, wandered off to buy some grapes at a stall, and then proceeded to visit another to have them washed. The people in the taxi glared at him and the driver honked. I opened the door and stepped out. I'd claimed the window seat in the back – the best in the grand taxi – and wasn't about to let the grape guy elbow in on the territory I'd staked. All passengers accounted for, we pulled out of the taxi park and headed for the highway. The driver seemed competent, so that was a good sign. I glanced around the taxi hoping none of the other passengers had recently annoyed Allah, because it is His will when you are going to die, and I really didn't want to go down with the culprit.  

On the far side of the back seat there was a guy in his 40s. He was dark haired and rather non-descript, except for the white patches around his mouth. He looked as though he may have been scalded with water when he was young. Or perhaps they were birthmarks. Next to him sat a muscular teenager who looked as though he might be a student, someone who played sports. The 20s-something grape guy squashed in next to me was podgy, double-chinned, and had an extra roll of fat around his belly. He wiggled slightly. Nothing blatant enough to be offensive, but still obvious enough to let me know that rubbing up against a foreign woman was about the most exciting thing he'd done all month – perhaps all year. But such is the personal space of grand taxis. Not wanting to engage in conversation, I shifted and decidedly stared out the window, feigning fascination with the scenery. The green landscape around Marrakech became terracotta coloured, sandy and more mountainous as we progressed. Soon we were high enough that there were mountain peaks everywhere I looked. Before me lay a dry, dusty, desolate desert.

The road climbed sharply as it snaked up the mountain. The steeper the drops on either side, the tighter I clung to the handle above the window to steady myself. As I peered over the edges of the hairpin curves, the drops became more pronounced. And when we reached a point in the road where they plummeted, almost vertically hundreds of metres, I blanched visibly – especially when I saw a gap in the flimsy tin fence where a vehicle had gone over. The only redeeming feature of the fall would have been instant death.

The driver's eyes never veered from the road, nor did his hands ever stray from the steering wheel. Taxi drivers in Morocco are notorious for smoking marijuana, the logic being that nobody in their right mind would drive the mountainous roads in an old car in questionable mechanical condition if they were straight. Even when he was following a slow-moving truck into a curve he didn't try to pass, as three vehicles in such a narrow space would mean at least one had to go over. And it was a long way down.

As the summit came in sight, my grip on the handle over the door relaxed slightly, and I wiggled my jaw to unclench my teeth. But my relaxed muscles tensed again when we reached the top, as we were confronted with yet another set of switchback mountain roads to navigate. “It is a damn good thing I didn't know what I was getting into, or I wouldn't have slept for a week,” I muttered to myself. I closed my eyes, but they didn't stay that way for long.

When the road finally leveled out – after nearly five hours of sheer terror that felt like five days – and the grand taxi started speeding across paved roads, my panic evaporated. Finally, it pulled to a stop in the grand taxi park in Ouarzazat. I stepped out, flexed my muscles, and tried to regain my sense of balance.

“Thank you,” I told the driver in my schoolgirl French, as I gave him some dirham and a Canadian flag pin. “You are a good driver. ” He smiled and got back behind the steering wheel.

Jody Hanson is a Canadian freelance writer and travel junkie currently living in Buenos Aires. She has visited 98 countries, lived in eight and holds passports for three.

Monsoon in Bhutan:
A Kingdom for a Pinch of Salt

By Tony Robinson-Smith

"Bee sting or a... What is potom in English? Hornet?" says the nurse. She looks closely at my hand. My fingers are sausages, my knuckles invisible under a glove of flesh. The swelling has now reached my elbow.

"Not snake or scorpion?" She laughs at my ignorance. "If snake, you be dead by now! And don't scratch those leech bites."

We must be a sight to behold, plastered from head to foot in mud, arms grazed and bloody, legs dotted with purple blotches. And we've only been in the bush two days.

***

Fed up with being stuck indoors, my wife and I decided to leave the guesthouse and head up the nearest mountain. It was late September. Monsoon season in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan was supposed to be over.

It was hard-going from the start, the path all mud and mashed leaves, so steep in places it was three steps up, one slide down. First we had to negotiate waterlogged paddy fields then dense forest, sweeping aside weeping lianas and low-hanging branches. Rain lashed our backs, cloud rolled over us. The bushes were home to leeches, black rubber bands that slipped through our fingers when we tried to pick them off. If we hadn't been so hasty to leave, we would've thought to bring salt.

After a night camping in a clearing, we stumbled on Taga: four bamboo huts,

ten people, two black dogs, and a dripping yak wearing a leech like a monocle. They didn't have any salt in the village, but soaked to the skin and socked to the knees in mud, we appreciated the tea.

"Oga deley?" inquired grandpa, arms folded and shaking his head in disbelief. Where you heading? He had crinkled eyes, a baggy throat, and a blue pebble hanging from one ear on a bit of string. We sat on packed dirt round a smouldering fire with a blackened billycan bubbling over it.

"Korbi den cha," my wife said after a moment's thought. Just wandering.

Ten minutes out of Taga and the rain began in earnest, a savage downpour that stopped us in our tracks. When it let up, we found the path so pitted with puddles we had to abandon it and thrash a way for ourselves through the bush with a stick. Something sheltering under a leaf or parked in a barky crevice objected. My allergic reaction started my heart racing, made my breathing ragged. We made a b-line for the motor road a thousand feet below, beating back the jungle, skidding and tumbling down greasy precipices, snatching for branches and swinging from them like monkeys.

***

The nurse gives me two anti-inflammatory tablets. I feel achy, itchy, woozy, tired, but happy. Next time, we'll take salt with us. Antihistamine might be a smart idea too.

Tony Robinson-Smith has written travel stories for the Globe & Mail, Perceptive Travel, and Tashi Delek, Druk Air's in-flight magazine. Back in 6 Years, his travel book about circling the planet without using aircraft, demonstrates how refusing to fly can land you in plenty of trouble.

Top image is © by Nadya Ladouceur. Simon Reip's images can be enjoyed at http://www.flickr.com/photos/reipy/.

A Different Strain of Travel Fever

By Annette Greene

I would advise anyone living in or travelling to a tropical region to find out if dengue fever is prevalent there. If it is, the only precautions one can take to avoid getting infected are to apply a strong mosquito repellant and to wear a long-sleeved shirt and long pants. I no longer live in the tropics, but if I go back for a visit, I certainly will be cautious because I do not want to be the first of Dr. Liu's patients to get dengue a second time.

I was having a hard time concentrating at the school in downtown Singapore where I was working as an English as a Second Language teacher. As I closed my eyes and put my head back against the chair, I asked myself, "What is wrong with me?" The next day I found myself in Dr. Liu's office.                

"I think you probably have dengue fever," he said, matter-of-factly.                

My eyes opened a little wider and my jaw dropped. I'd heard about this mosquito-borne virus when I first moved to Singapore but never imagined that I would be one of its victims. With this diagnosis, I stayed home from work and slept — sometimes up to 16 hours/day. Each day I returned to the clinic for a blood test to check my platelet count: Dengue fever causes your blood platelet count to go down and you can be at risk of hemorrhaging if the count gets too low. Over the course of a few days my count dropped, stabilized, and then started to increase.

Within a week, I felt fully recovered and then found out more about the virus. Dengue fever is more dangerous for children, older people, and people who have serious health problems. Healthy adults can usually recover from the virus within a week. As there is no vaccine against dengue fever, the only method of prevention is to avoid getting bitten by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, a species known to bite during daytime hours. Having one of the four strains of dengue does not give you immunity against the other strains. It might be more dangerous to get infected with dengue a second time, as it could develop into the more serious dengue hemorrhagic fever. When I asked Dr. Liu about the dangers of getting dengue again, he brushed me off.

"I've never had a patient get dengue twice." This did not set my mind at rest.

A few weeks later I started losing my hair. A dermatologist reassured me that this was temporary, caused by the stress my body had been under as it struggled with the disease. He told me that I wouldn't lose it all and that what I did lose would grow back. I found this reassuring and he was right. Another post-dengue symptom was the peeling of skin on the bottoms of both of my feet. This felt strange and went on for a number of weeks, leaving me with very smooth, pink soles, reminiscent of babies' feet.                

Within a year or two of coming down with dengue fever, other people I knew also contracted the virus. In Singapore, my husband and a colleague were stricken, as was a friend living in Jakarta, Indonesia. All of them recovered within a short time. The website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov) gives this information on dengue fever: "With more than one-third of the world's population living in areas at risk for transmission, dengue infection is a leading cause of illness and death in the tropics and subtropics. As many as 100 million people are infected yearly…When infected, early recognition and prompt supportive treatment can substantially lower the risk of developing severe disease."                

I was excited to read this past summer about new research out of Australia which suggests that scientists may have found a way to eliminate this virus by injecting the Aedes aegypti mosquito with a bacterial parasite that prevents the transmission of dengue.   Where did I come in contact with the mosquito that infected me? Was it at a nearby beach or perhaps even in my own backyard? I will never know; however, the important thing is that it only took one insect and one bite to give me dengue fever, an experience I hope to never have again. 

   

Annette Greene is a freelance writer and educator from Vancouver B.C. She lived in Asia for 18 years and currently lives in Washington D.C.She writes on a variety of topics including health and wellness, education, travel, and cross-cultural communication.

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