Rock the kasbah

The worst thing about getting lost in the twisty turny identical lanes of the medina is having to walk past the same group of giggling 20-something boys each time you backtrack. I feel defeated and frustrated. And I'd thought I was so prepared for Morocco! Having survived India when I was a wee young slip of a thing and with my iron constitution. More to the point, I've read The Sheltering Sky three times and seen Hideous Kinky twice. But I still had no sense of direction.

Tangier is a city in the thrall of Laughing Cow cheese. A "La vache qui rit" logo hangs from every shop doorway. The streets are the domain of men; men deprived the company of women for too long. I am in my H&M burka today, hair firmly covered, so the heckling is disappointing. The next day, I experiment with briefer attire, and the results are no different. Only tagging along with Xavier, a brooding Frenchman, and Jake, a young American puppy with an entertaining line in logo t-shirts, render me invisible.

We ransack the market for lunch. Coriander in the air and fish heads in the gutter. It's not all beautiful. Tripe hangs from windows. A row of cow heads, skin peeled all over bar the furry nose. It must be picnic time.  We climb a grassy knoll and pool our spoils: a beautiful sour goat's cheese, wrapped in plaited leaves, baby plum tomatoes, a crusty wheel of bread and olives from the pick n mix stall. This is washed down with Hawaii, a product of the Coca-Cola company, doubtless banned by European health authorities because of the twelve E numbers needed to create its authentic fizzy coconut-passion fruit-orange kick. It's delicious.
 
Night shopping in the souks is great fun. Hostel Man cooks up our purchases then drives us down to the ice cream shop he co-owns to feast on the day's leftovers: almond, caramel, nougat and chocolate. It is all right to take sweets from strange men in Morocco, apparently.

Next day, the beach. We're joined by the love child of Julian Assange (a Dane named 'Mads') and South African Steve, a fellow English teacher living in Granada. Hitch hiking back, I can hardly believe that this is only Day Three. Of seventy four. It's nice, but a tad over indulgent, surely?

Fried sardines for lunch and tagine in the evening. Freshly squizzed orange juice and a little mouthful of sugared-pistachio-filo-pastried-delight. I go to bed each night uncomfortably full. In Seville, I grazed four or five times a day on little insubstantials. Now I'm presented with a wheelbarrow of couscous three times a day and expected to enjoy it.

Scant sights to see in Tangier, but after three days, I'm no longer surprised that Paul Bowles spent his 52 years here. I will be back.

It began in Africa

I had planned a holiday I would love to have gone on three or four years ago. Boats, buses and trains, cross-continental, rock pools. The works. I was Very Lucky to have two months of work to see Morocco and Turkey. I had a job, an apartment and good chums worth returning to. I had just turned 29 and still had my health. The sky was my oyster.

Instead, I found myself doubting my abilities to do this again, to haul myself from city to town to important ancient monument, and enjoy it. A year in Seville had made me soft, and the romance of adventure had deserted me. I'm incredulous that I have agreed to undertake this trip and rather hoping the thing won't come off.

I decide to ease in gently, spending a day on the beach in Tarifa, the southern most point in Europe, allowing me to
look out over Africa and get used to the idea.

Tarifa is windy. It screams through your ears and whips up the sand throwing haphazard showers of crushed glass against your skin. Sunbathing is not pleasant. No conditioner forged by the hand of man will unknot my hair tonight, but the pleasure of a breeze is so novel after the airless high 30s of the last month. Tarifa has a very high suicide rate. You either throw yourself into kiteboarding or the sea. The wind is that annoying.

You can choose between a dip in the Mediterranean sea or the Atlantic ocean. If the Atlantic side is grudge-bearingly cold, the Med is positively vindictive. The elements are against me today.

A final tostada by the harbour. It's a good one. There is nothing sadder than a lacklustre tostada. My last bit of jamon before it is replaced by cous cous and long hemlines and covered hair.

It takes just 35 minutes to cross from Europe to Africa. I reread The Heart of the Matter. Tales of ex-pats thriving in foreign climes. In the port of Tangier, Passport Man looks at my passport for a long, long time. It does look suspicious. Four pages dedicated to my undercover work for the Japanese embassy. Countless drug runs to Malaysia/Indonesia. A full page for India. A single day in Macau. He stamps over the top of the 2008 Marrakesh logo and waves me through.

Something sensational to read in the train

"Why would you bother keeping a diary?" asks Paddy, over dinner in the plaza after work. "There's no money in it. And it's not like anyone's going to read it."

This was an unexpectedly callous approach to the creative arts, coming from a man who is a published and prize-winning author. I didn't know how to respond, and but was not too distracted to snaffle the last chip.

Aye, there's no money in it, but wouldn't it spoil it if there were? The idea of it being weakened and marketed, tailored to a mass audience, instead of savouring the very private pleasure of turning verbs into adjectives... inventing words, playing last and foose with punctuation and the lore of grammar that I've spent the last nine months drilling into Spanish 10-year-olds.

It's a gloriously self-indulgent mental masturbation, messy and mine and all over the page. Unlovingly crafted for an audience of one adoring fan.

But then the summer comes, and solo travel throws up more bizarre scenarios, eccentric characters and non sequiturs than my inner monologue can handle. It's mandatory to reach out and touch. A little task to focus on while On Tour, and an excuse to write again, this year's diary being one I used less and less as my friendships grew sweeter.

So I'm excited and happy to have my little pet project again. There may be no money in it but I like the thought that someone is reading it.