I landed my glider on the beach, turned to the bar, and gave Juan the signal: forearms pressed together and hands split into Y-shape of a cocktail glass. This was the cue for Juan to start making our margaritas. He knew the details: Allison’s without salt; mine with.  Both on-the-rocks.

A rumor circulated the Mexican village that Juan washed the cocktail glasses in the dirty lagoon behind his restaurant. We didn’t care. His bar was closest to the landing zone and after the steep climb to launch and our flights, we were too lazy to shoulder our gliders another step. So what if just a few trudges away, crisp-shirted waiters served up meals in pretty carved out pineapples.

Like most pilots on a flying vacation, we had a routine. The top launch was good at noon, and the sock straightened out on mid-launch around 2:00. We’d take a couple flights, then wash the adrenaline down with a margarita. Sometimes two.

I shook the sand out of my wing, packed it up, and slogged over to a beach chair. Juan flip-flopped toward me in his dirty apron and our two margaritas balanced on a tray. He set the glasses down side by side.

“Gracias!”  I said, lifting my glass. I took a sip. The rock salt abraded my lips slightly. Juan’s margaritas were the best in the world–cold, salty, gritty, like the sea embodied in a cocktail glass. Allison trudged over, dropped her glider, and stretched out on the chair next to me. Out in the bay, fisherman threw nets from their boats and a flock of birds fluttered over us like a fresh white sheet. I’d never felt a more uncomplicated happiness in my life.

We drained our margaritas and I took the empty glasses back to the bar. I fished a 500-peso note from my wallet—the smallest bill I had. Juan slammed the cash box down and glared at me.

“No change!” He went on to berate me in fast Spanish.

My mood dropped like a shot pheasant.

“Fu-fuu …Forget this place!” I yelled.

While most days Juan was pleasant, one out of ten times he would mysteriously erupt like this. At first I was bewildered, then angry.

It felt unfair. We were his best customers, dropping 80 pesos a day for a month straight. We put up with his grimy bathroom facilities—the seatless toilet and the lock-less door, the scummy hand-washing barrel. We endured the love-sick ranchera riffs that wept nonstop from his jukebox. Other pilots gave up on his place long ago, swapping their flight stories next door at Domingo’s instead.

“We’re never coming back!” I yelled.

“Adios!” he said waving me off. Juan pandered to no one.

This wouldn’t be the first time we tried to boycott Juan’s bar. Usually, by day four of the boycott, our laziness would exceed our anger and we’d end up in his beach chairs again, enduring the ranchera music and quaffing down his fantastic margaritas. Juan would pretend nothing happened.

“Margaritas senoritas,” he’d say placing our glasses on the table. In a matter of days he’d blow up at us again and the cycle would continue.

We didn’t know much about Juan, but he seemed to have a soft side. Like a crusty-version of St. Francis of Assisi, he tended a variety of animals—a stubborn mule, a brood of chickens, a few caged parrots, a dog that fetched rocks, and a cat with a freakish nervous tic. He’d even endeared himself to a wild pigeon by pouring a small pile of seed on the end of his bar each day.

Unlike the other bar owners, who closed up and went home for the night, Juan lived with his two teenagers and wife in a large canvass tent behind his bar. The local villagers patronized his placed in the evenings, often staying into the night playing cards and plunking pesos in the jukebox.

Sometimes, when standing at his bar, Juan would pull the canvass door aside and we’d glimpse his private world. Inside, an old television crackled on an upturned crate. His wife would be in there watching Mexican soap operas. She never spoke. She never came outside.

This second season, I began to joke with Juan about his moods, ordering “Dos margaritas simpaticas!” or “Two friendly margaritas”—as opposed to the mean ones. He’d laugh and play along. I began to like a few of the ranchera tunes that played from his jukebox. One evening a lover and I spun around sun-drunk to the Vicente Fernandez song Estos Celos—what pain, what love…

I remember Juan sitting in a chair, his head tilted back slightly and watching. He seemed almost wistful.

“Los Jovenes,” Juan said. The young ones…

It wasn’t until our third flying season that we learned that all this time Juan’s wife had cancer. Behind that heavy canvass door, between mixing our margaritas, he’d been tending to her illness.  He’d sometimes close the bar altogether, and take the water taxi ride to hospital in Puerto Vallarta where his wife was receiving treatment.

His temper still flared, but we were more patient. Now we understood he had bills to pay. His jukebox was gone that year, replaced by a small handheld stereo.  The owners of the nearby bars were complaining that the loud ranchera was putting off the tourists. Juan’s expression grew hard and serious.

He seemed to emigrate between two worlds that season—the one outside his door where we laid in the sun drinking margaritas, and the dark dank insides of his canvass hut, which may as well been a different country. The geography of our paradise—the palm trees, the macaws, the cocktails–was the geography of real life for him. Our vacation was not his vacation.

We returned for a fourth season. Juan was there as usual, tending his brood of chickens, the tame pigeon, the caged parrots, the stubborn pack mule, the stone-fetching dog, and the nervous cat. But something had changed. Weeks went by and he didn’t yell. We didn’t boycott.

We found out that his wife had passed away that winter. Though he’d cared for her with great love and fidelity, it was obvious that his burden had grown less. He was laughing with his patrons, drinking Pacificos, and playing rowdy card games into the night. I suddenly got it: all this time, Juan wasn’t jerk. He was just a person under huge duress.

“How could we not have known his wife was so ill?” I asked Allison hurling a stone into the surf for Juan’s dog to fetch.

With the Godlike views afforded by our wings, it sometimes felt like we knew everything about that place. We knew how thermals formed over the first-blooming Primaveras in March, how wind spilled over certain ridges at noon, and how to decipher wind lines on the ocean. We could see straight down into the village and all the way across to the Marietta Islands.

But our big view wasn’t always the best view. Details got lost.

It was good to arrive last season and see Juan happy. We landed our gliders and gave him the cue. He disappeared into the darkness of his hut and came out with a handful of shiny green limes to make the best margaritas in the world.

“Dos Margaritas Simpaticas!”  he laughed, setting our glasses down. And they truly were.

*originally published in the United States Hang Gliding and Paragliding Magazine

There have been times when I’ve wondered where the line lies between long-term travel and homeless. The borderlands between the two lifestyles can be thin, and sometimes I’ve wondered if there is a type of homeless person who doesn’t think of himself as homeless at all, but rather on a very long camping trip.

I don’t have a home-per-say—just a 10×10 storage unit. But I don’t consider myself homeless. Even as we drift from place to place on-the-cheap and rootless, I tend to think of myself as on a Grand Adventure. But occasionally I’m shocked into a different perspective: I’m walking with my backpack down a dumpster-lined alley enroute to a cyber-café, and someone directs me to free breakfast at the church; Or I wake in our truck, look around, and realize we’ve been living with a rat for two months. The glue traps are overturned and stuck to the rug, the spring-loaded snappers are licked clean of their bait, and the live trap sits untriggered with a half-nibbled crouton. I get out of bed, pull on a shirt, and flinch at a newly chewed hole in the shoulder. Is this my life?

This sensation came up most recently when planning a trip to meet friends in Oludeniz, a resort town on southern Turkey’s Mediterranean. We were happy to pay the cheap airfare, but after living in a van, are unused to paying for habitation; Andy perused dozens of hotel listings and quickly entered the seven stages of grief; the costs were uniformly high. Then, suddenly, he perked up.

“Check this out,” he said, turning his laptop toward me.  “This place is only ten bucks a night.”

I squinted. The screen flashed with photos of rose pedal-scattered bedspreads, flutes of champagne. The Magic Tulip Hotel.

 “Impossible.” The shoddiest place I’d found in Oludeniz was three times as much.

“There’s gotta be a catch,” I said.

Andy Skyped the agency and the price was confirmed. He was frothing to book; I was fretting.

 We paid The Magic Tulip in advance–$160 for 16 days. Weeks passed and our minds turned to other things: work, packing, coordinating meet-ups with friends. Then in preparation for departure, I pulled up some TripAdvisor reviews on the Magic Tulip. The list of horrors was unending:

Hotel from Hell, one read.

The rooms were comfortable … except for the beds, said another.

Pillows made of crushed concrete

 Vile food.

 Black mold.

 Broken water tap.

 Mice.

 Four cockroaches.

 Blood on the sheets.

 A death trap.

 I spent 4 days in hospital – I’m convinced this hotel played a part in the stress we had to endure as my health previous had been exemplary.

And finally:

 I would honestly say you would be stark raving mad to choose this hotel!!

Had our standards really sunk this low?

I blamed Andy who always gets suckered by the thrall of false economies. I remembered the cheap flight he once found us that arrived at 3 a.m.–after the public transport had shut down. We ended up paying $60 for a taxi. And then there was the outdated GPS he bought “for a song” which directed our truck right into the ruts of The Oregon Trail.

He directed my gaze to the photos of pedal-covered beds, and champagne. “It’ll be great.”

We arrived at the airport near Oludeniz the next morning. I sulked at the baggage claim while Andy sang Madonna’s “Holiday.” We grabbed our gliders from the conveyer belt and exited the airport where we’d catch a van into Oludeniz.

“My name!”  Andy pointed.

There, in the median, our van-driver was holding up a sign:

A.   Pagnacco

Magic Tulip Hotel

“I’ve never had a sign with my name on it,” he gushed.

We heaved our bags in the van and were off, traveling the windy mountain road curves to Oludeniz. Andy smiled wildly while my eyes teared at the prospect of 16 days of cockroaches crawling across my face in the night, 16 days of mice and mold and 16 days in paradise without the paradise. He would want to stay. I would want to move. We would fight.

By the time the van was speeding down the final stretch of highway toward the Roach Motel, my life had arrived at a crossroads: I was ready to get a real job and make real money–to start going on proper vacations. But who would hire me now that I’ve spent my “earning years” squatting in truck stops and borrowed houses?

The van pulled up to the motel and my mood lifted incrementally. Its wrought iron balconies were aesthetic. A ripe lemon tree grew near the door. We shouldered our bags and entered the lobby.”

“Welcome,” said the receptionist.

While he leafed through my passport I looked at a framed certificate on the wall:

Gold Award

Magic Tulip

Best Summer Stay

By Portland Direct

I exhaled. A gold rating? From Portland?! My (almost) home town? I pulled the reins on my encroaching optimism. The certificate was dated 1998.

The receptionist handed us the key

We ascended the steps found room 309, unlocked it, and opened the door.

And it was …

Fine.

Granted it wasn’t like the photos: there was no champagne, no rose-pedal covered bed. But there was also no mold blackening the walls, no evidence of rats, soiled sheets, or cockroaches. Clean towels hung from the bathroom rack, and the toilet paper holder was loaded with a brand new roll.

I hugged Andy.

But what was with the hostile Trip Adviser reviews? It was a mystery. Either the motel had pulled its act together since they were written, or someone had a serious vendetta against The Magic Tulip.  Either way, it definitely illustrated some of the problems with TripAdvisor. But that’s a whole different blog.

After a brief bask in the glow of Being Right, Andy—who gets anxious at settling anyplace without wheels—did something unprecedented: unloaded his back pack into a dresser drawer.

Let there be no doubt: For $10 per night, we were home.

George Rede kindly interviewed me about travel-blogging for The Oregonian: http://www.oregonlive.com/news-network/index.ssf/2012/04/featured_blog_partner_qa_with_11.html

It would be easy to pass over Youssef Bouhlal’s tiny shop in the Fez Medina. Its modest offerings of dried lentils, white beans, garbanzos, oil, and milk are unremarkable among the competing sights of souk. But like the plain facades that cloak the ornate interiors of the Medina’s mosques and medrassas, the splendor of Bouhlal’s shop is hidden. I wouldn’t have known about it without my expat friend, Sandy McCutcheon, who introduced me to Bouhlal’s shop on one of our Medina strolls.

“This is the best place to buy coffee in the Medina,” he said, placing his order for a half-kilo.

Boudlal, 37, upended a bag of Arabica coffee beans into a grinder and then sprinkled on an array of simple, but unexpected, spices: a pinch of sesame seeds, a whole nutmeg, a few peppercorn…

When the grinder switched off, Bouhlal held out a scoop of the coffee for us to smell. Inhaling the rich aromatic spices invoked cozy memories winter mornings, Indian chai, and holiday treats.

Although Fez is full of sidewalk cafes serving espresso drinks, spiced coffee is rarely on the menu. Moroccans mostly prepare it in the home. You can buy bags at several places in the Medina, but Bouhlal’s blend stands out both for its well-balanced flavor and its low price: just six Euros will buy you a kilo. And while blending your order, Boudlal also can converse about English literature.  He’s studied the works of James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and Herman Melville.

His coffee is as well-traveled as his mind. Guests to Bouhlal’s shop invariably buy a stash to take home. “My coffee has traveled all over the world,” Bouhlal said, twirling a bag of sesame seeds closed.

I wondered: Perhaps there is an international market for Bouhlal’s unique blend? “This could be the headquarters,” I declared, eyeing his small stall with big visions. “But we would need a larger grinder.”

Insha’Allah,” he laughed.

Bouhlal’s small shop is located in the R’Cif souk in the Fez Medina. If you can’t make it all the way to Fez, you can experiment with your own blend at home. Bouhlal does not measure by instruments, but by intuition. Here is what I saw him add:

Seasame seeds

Black Pepper

Whole nutmeg

Cinnamon

Anise Seed

Ginger

Combine these spices with quality coffee beans and grind. Brew in a stovetop espresso maker or percolator of your choice. Cream and sugar transform this spicy delight into a dessert. Prepare to be addicted.

Rounding the bend into Tarifa, I had to revise my expectations. I’d presumed the beach town, located at the southernmost point of Spain, was a winter-escape from northern Europe. My bikini and SPF waited at the top of my bag, and I was ready to toast the sunshine with a mojito.

But as a gale force wind tried to shove my camper off the road, it was clear: this town was no simple-minded Margaritaville …

For the rest of the story, go to: The Oregonian Travel Section

Abdul gestured to heaven.

I used to work for money. Now I work for Allah. We are sitting outside his ceramic shop in one of those rare beams of sun that filter into the Fez medina at midday. Just a moment ago, he was laying on a heavy sales pitch for a tagine; now he was praising Allah.

This was not like shopping in America. The sales clerks at Victoria’s Secret or The Gap are more interested in pushing a three-for-the-price-of-two panties, –or selling their credit line–than sitting in a ray of sun talking God.

But to be clear: Abdul did have a keen interest in selling his wares. Anyone who has spent a split second in the medina knows that the shopkeepers are relentless. They call out to you everywhere you walk, and sometimes trailing you down the street.

But what is redeeming about medina is that although overpriced gadgets may be plentiful, so are spiritual truths. The salesmen of the medina are shape-shifters. One minute Yousef-Carpet Salesman is tricking you into his shop and the next, he is waxing on like Khalil Gibran.

“One day sunny, one day raining. One day good, the next day bad.” Si Mohamud was standing amidst the antique vases of his furniture shop. “That your heart is beating, this is important.” He placed his hand on his chest. “Health. It is the only thing that matters.”

Somehow the shopkeepers of the Fez medina aren’t aware of the dirty secret of all thriving capitalist societies: that happy people don’t buy things. Dissatisfaction–not gratitude—is what fuels consumerism. Tell them they are not thin enough, blonde enough, or young enough and their wallets will turn inside out. And lose the Insha-Allah, that laissez-faire sentiment that turns our fate over to the Higher Power. Tell them that with the right pair of skinny jeans, they can be the master of the universe

“Enjoy every second. For you do not know when and where you will die,” Rashid counseled as I leaned toward the mirror to inspect a pair of silver earrings and formulated my bid. My heart leapt. He’s right! I plucked the earrings from my lobes. What am I doing spending money in this dark shop I should be out on the sunny rooftop, watching migrating storks and the springtime hills.

 It’s not just wise words that you find in the medina, but also wise postures. Old men in djallaba lean all day against weather-stained walls, content as horses turned out to pasture. They occupy sidewalk tables, taking in the scene over cups of mint tea that never seem to empty. On my way home each day, I pass the same plumber taking the same seat of repose in the same chair. Such postures don’t exist in America. There, time is money, and everyone must fiddle with their cell phones, be eating, or be on their way somewhere. In the contented body-language of the Fassi lies a sort of somatic advertisement for Simply Being.

No shopping trip is perfunctory in the labyrinthine byways of the medina.  The sacred and the profane mix like intimate aromas and aggressive sales pitches are in no way at odds with spiritual pursuits. False guides bamboozle you into tannery tours en-route to the mosque. Carpet sellers sing Hamdulla! and then rob you blind. The wisdom of the ages echo off walls hung with overpriced kitsch. You set off scouting for a roll of toilet paper, and suddenly find yourself standing in the center Si-Mohammed’s antique shop, spellbound by his wisdom, and giving thanks for the very beating of your heart.

For more stories from Fez, visit The View from Fez

This great Lonely Planet featured blog published a great entry about the Biotruck …

http://riadzany.blogspot.com/2012/02/global-eco-adventurers-arrive-in-fez.html

I’d been in Fez two days when Uri, a gal from my hostel, unfolded a map on the breakfast table and invited me to join her tour group for the day. I balked.

I don’t like formal tours—the sight-seeing, tight schedules, and gift shops leave me feeling flat. Plus, I had my stereotypes: Uri was from Thailand and her friends were from Indonesia and Korea. In my experience, Asian tour groups spend a lot of time taking snaps. And they probably had jobs in tech and would want to talk computers.

But by the time we finished our eggs and coffee, I was convinced. If we pooled our money, the tour would be cheap. Plus, the last couple days in the medina left me feeling like a walking wallet. Grouping up afforded protection from the aggressive street touts in the way that schooling protects fish from sharks. It’d be easier to get around.

 Our first stop was a museum. Uri and I walked down a freezing cold hallway lined with glass-encased heirlooms: an old sundial, some rusty earrings, tattered rugs. But both of us were more interested in the living than the dead inert objects of the past. We found our way outside again.

We strolled between rows of mint and orange trees, and talked about Thailand. I was there last year. My recollections were largely culinary: the crunchy streetcart Tom Sum, the ubiquitous phad Thai, the milky-sweet iced-teas that were my afternoon ritual. And, of course, it’s impossible to not remember the prostitution–the absurd upside-down universe where old-pot-bellied “Sexpats” strolled the streets with young tottering Thai women.

What’s the deal? I asked her. Is this really just “part of the culture” as I’d always heard (often from the Sex-pats themselves)

She flinched. Started to speak and stopped. A flash of adrenaline stuck her for words. The issue seemed close to the surface, and I felt bad for bringing it up.

”This is just the tiniest portion of the population,” she seethed, “but everyone thinks that all Thai women are easy sex.” Once, a guy sitting next to her at a conference turned to her and declared they would be having sex. And she is wary of English teachers in Thailand, unsure if they are viewing her in sexual terms.

There are many versions of Thailand, but in her version, prostitution is frowned upon and getting together with a foreign guy is questioned. But she added a caveat: sometimes real love blooms, and isn’t given proper credibility. A friend of hers is in a legitimate relationship with an American and struggles with the disrespectful assumptions people make about their relationship. Everyone is sure she is just after his money.

“Is this really what outsiders think of us–that we are just sex?”  she asked.

I had to admit that sometimes it seemed that way. Not a week went by on Facebook without someone announcing they were going to Thailand followed by a chorus of comments: “Don’t forget the condoms!” or “Have fun. Wink-wink.” And, even my own travels there left a strong impression: I’ll never forget the Twilight Zone that was Pattaya: an entire boardwalk lined with girls and old men—some even shuffling walkers—trolling for evening company. Admittedly, this was a huge tourist area.

“But people think of a lot of other things too,” I countered.  “Great beaches, kind people, gilded temples.”

After the museum, our group moved on to a café. As we sipped our mint tea, our discussion of stereotypes broadened to include the rest of our group: two were Muslims from Indonesia, and the other from South Korea. I mentioned that I’d just finished reading Ayann Hiri Ali’s book, Nomad, which although reflective of Ali’s own experience, seemed to fan many of the West’s greatest fears about Muslims: the oppression of women, forced marriages, genital mutilation, extremism.

Bowo shook is head. These stereotypes did not fit the Muslims he knew in Indonesia.

Noka was also Indonesian and had studied in The States—in a small Pennsylvania town. He said that sometimes people asked him if he had a television. Or, worse, if he lived in trees. One person asked if he drove to the U.S. from Indonesia.

“What is the stereotype of Americans?” I asked.

“Ignorant,” he said.  We all laughed. Though the stories about American naiveté often seemed exaggerated, it might have been the truest stereotype at all.

Afterall, I just had to consider the stereotypes I’d started the morning with: that we would spend the dull day posing for photos and talking about computer programming. Instead, we experienced what travel does best, which is rattle the rust off our world view that accumulates when we stay in one place for too long. That morning we’d left the hotel as a Thai Prostitute, a Suicide Bomber, a Primitive, a Techie, and a Moneyed Ignoramus, and returned as real people with real names: Uri, Noka, Bowo, Hyo and Christina.

It was never my intention to get involved in Morocco’s underground drug trade. I lack a criminal disposition, and tangling with law enforcement and winding up in a foreign jail is not my idea of a thrill. It was the legal enchantments that drew me to Chen: the mountains, the rivers, the blossoming almond trees.

But intention means very little in the labyrinthine medinas of Morocco. Set your GPS how you like, but you will soon find there are no routes, just blind corners; that you don’t control your destiny so much as get dog-tired and wind up in situations: cornered by a guilt-wielding carpet seller, or trying on dozens of djellabas that you never even wanted and will for sure never wear.

My criminal career began and ended over a plate of gnoochi at the Lotus restaurant. The Lotus was one of those expat sanctuaries–there’s one in every tourist city–full of candles, bead curtains, low cushions, psychedelic art and lots of One Love. I feel a little bad about these places because they are too easy and wrongly removed from the local culture but, as I said before, the medina has a mind of its own and it delivers you where it will.

The familiarity of it was comforting. It was the off-season and a difficult time to be a solo traveler.  The weather was cold and the main square was near empty. I’d spent the morning admiring traveling couples who perched together in inevitable places: on the walls around the old Mosque, over mint tea at cafe tables, near the river. They had the posture of contented people:  self-contained and satiated.I hadn’t spoke to anyone in a week. Andy would catch up soon and although the alone time had been beneficial—I always become a poet in the quiet drift of solitude—the need for human contact drove me out this one day, eyes wide open, looking for an In.

The host of the Lotus restaurant directed me to the top floor, and when I crested the staircase, I was happy to see three white faces. Each sat at a separate table and all looked up to greet me—in English–before getting back to their business: one scrolled an ipod, another worked a sketch, and a third in purple pants leaned back on a low corner couch.

The room had a vague haze. Smoke. I looked for a source. Burnt chicken tagine? Incense? Did we need to call for a fire extinguisher?

“Welcome,” exhaled the man from the low corner couch. A plume of smoke swirled around his beard.  “Martin. From Scotland.”

Of course.

Chen is famous for the marijuana—or Kif—that thrives in surrounding mountains. Though technically illegal, it’s proffered and smoked openly and a mainstay of the rural economy. It took me a while to see it out in plain sight–partly because I wasn’t looking for it.

What I was looking for was a glass of wine—which holds the opposite status in Morocco than pot: though technically legal, Mohammed forbids drinking in the Koran, and his law–in the minds of many–is mightier than any secular law. On Internet forums travelers sought advice on where to score a bottle in Chen, but the discussion threads led nowhere. Meanwhile, there were huge rounds of fresh goat cheese for sale in the street markets just begging for a glass of vino tinto.

I sat down at a corner table. The menu was an untrustworthy tome of Italian, Chinese and Moroccan. I turned in my chair. What’s good to eat here?

“Everything” Martin said, exhaling another plume of smoke. Then he qualified: to be honest, it was hearsay. He couldn’t afford any of it. After five years living in Chen, he’d achieved a nearly cash-free existence, working in the nearby mountains on an organic farm. Alongside a local man named Rachid, Martin grew veggies for bartering. He just waited at the Lotus on market day to catch a ride back to the farm.

I put in my order—gnocchi with blue cheese—and looked around the room. We chatted. The man scrolling the iPod was a DJ from Ireland. Recently divorced, he spent the last two weeks snuggling with a water bottle, smoking kif, and snacking his way through the medina munchies. The other guy was Jonah. He was the owner. He rarely looked up from his Bic pen drawing, except to take an intermitted puff from his chillum and to show us the picture he was working on: a couple of elaborately intertwined snakes.

I’d been told that owning a restaurant was at least as stressful as being a heart surgeon, but Jonah made it look easy—doodling, smoking, and changing the stereo tracks from Ray Charles to John Lee Hooker. His Moroccan waitor, meanwhile, ran show. Martin would later tell me that Jonah was navigating a heartbreak with kif and his drawings which papered the walls, hung midair from thread mobiles, and covered the menus.

My gnocchi arrived—blue cheese and almonds in a clay tagine dish. I dug in and it was excellent, but would have been so much more so with a glass of Merlot.  “You want a hit off this?” Martin extended his pipe. I held up my hand: No thanks.  Breathing the smoke-choked air alone made me high.

What I really want is a glass of wine.

“Good luck. You won’t find it here. This town is bone dry.”

Martin invited me to his farm and the next day I followed him. He and Rachid prepared a fish tagine in slow epochs, the cutting and passing of each ingredient into the clay pot the passage of a geologic age. Between episodes, they smoked kif, laughed a lot, and got distracted by other chores: picking up rocks, gathering wood. I followed Rachid around and we toured the farm: the onions, the garlic, the oncoming snap peas. Eventually we ate and I was grateful. In return, I invited Martin to dinner at the Lotus the following night.

 Before our dinner meet-up, I’d planned a three-hour hike with a guide named Achmed who I’d met in the square.  We walked a wide road up the mountain above town, stopping at a rock outcropping for a cup of mint tea. Then, instead of going down the nice clean trail in front of us, Achmed l suggested we go over the lip of the mountain.

I balked. “What about the time?” I asked, reminding him of my 7:00 meet-up with Martin.

He promised: “No problem No problem.”

Two hours later the sun was setting as we picked our way, heads down, through the slippery scree on the other side of the mountain. I twisted my ankles every few steps, and my knee took a hammering. When we reached the road, men in djallabas passed us with donkeys on the return route to their mountain villages. The sky was this terrific shade of black-blue and Venus blinked on. The silhouette of an almond tree stood out against the orange band of fading sunset, but I was too pissed to appreciate it. The hike was supposed to be three hours. We were pushing five.

I walked with a slight limp. We rounded a bend. The lights of town seemed impossibly far.

“Another hour to town,” Achmed said.  I tripped in a pothole and began to sniffle. I wanted to sit on that road and never get up.

“Ah Christina …” he consoled. “Christina I am sorry. Take my hand…”

And in what I can only explain now as some sort of Stockholm syndrome setting in, I reciprocated, grasping Achmed hand and allowing him to lead me down the mountain, strangely consoled and annoyed at the same time.

The band of light on the horizon had now darkened to the color of a deep cabarnet. I thought of my dinner and then remembered: another wine-less Italian meal. “Achmed, I wish I could find wine in this town!”

He was eager to make me feel better. “This I can find for you.” My spirits brightened and my limp went away.

When we arrived in town, we had just enough time before 7:00.  We skirted the medina for what felt like another mile. At last he stopped at an unmarked door. “You go.” He stood back and motioned me forward.  I pushed open the heavy wooden door.

Inside was a smokey din–all men with frothy beers lined up along the bar, music, and good cheer. A tall European stood behind the bar, a red light illuminating his baldhead.

“Una Botella,” I ventured.

“Tinto o blanco?”

Tinto.

He slid it into a plastic bag and we slid that bag it into my canvass bag and I paid him. It was that easy.

 I would arrive at Lotus late, but Martin was already up in smoke. Jonah was sitting in the same chair transfixed by his chillum and a new bic pen masterpiece. He ok-ed the wine, so long as we drank it on the low table behind the partition and kept it discreet out of respect for his staff. He rustled me up an opener.

I lowered onto the couch, knees throbbing and face wind-chapped and sun-reddened. I held the contraband under the table and pulled the cork.

Martin was impressed. I’ve lived in Chen five years and had no idea…

I ordered the gnocchi again, we toasted under the table, and while he freely exhaled lung-fulls of kif, I nursed my wine discreet sips which forbidden tasted better.

Martin’s conversation was as meandering as the medina, drifting from subject to subject like an aimless cloud and waylaying me in an eventual white-out. I was too tired to care whether he made sense or not. Mostly I just leaned back and felt proud of myself; I’d infiltrated the underground wine trade of Chen in five days flat and rather liked the sensation of being a criminal. “If you are not a “minor” criminal of some sort in this day and age one is not truly living,” my friend Pat has said.

In the ensuing days, I would acquire this x-ray vision, an ability to see beyond the surfaces of things—to the underworld ways that animal appetites find outlet: to threadbare cats hunched over dark-street dumpsters, to young couples kissing among tombstones, wishing for time to stop; to heroine junkies slipping out from behind a boulder that sheltered them from sight; to a fist-fight breaking in the alley just as the five-o’clock prayers sounded from the mosque.

Andy would arrive soon, and I’d have my nose out of trouble. Mischief courts only the solo traveler. I’d miss my criminal days, but be happy for the sobriety and the coherent conversation and a different sort of mischief. Until then, I had a half a bottle of wine left, a round of goat cheese, and the sweet free sensation of having let my law-abiding, politically-correct self take a wrong turn in the labyrinthine medina of Chen, all for a glass of Cabernet.