Saturday 24 September 2011

Ports, Potters and the Portuguese

Morocco's Atlantic Coastline

Originally published in Khaleej Times WKND Magazine, 08/07/11


A salty wind is blowing from the west. The broad, white-capped sweep of the Atlantic stretches away along a fading coastline, and the blue sky is full of bone-white seagulls. I am standing on the corner bastion of the walled Portuguese quarter of the Moroccan port of El-Jadida. Below me the madcap jumble of the town stretches towards a distant line of palm trees, the honey-cultured sandstone glowing in the bright morning sunlight.
***
Morocco’s Atlantic coast is a world of wind, waves, fresh sardines and fiery sunsets. When the summer heat of the imperial cities of the interior gets too much, generations of travellers have headed west to catch the breeze, in towns steeped in maritime history.
For the past decade Essaouira, due west of Marrakesh, has been the Atlantic getaway of choice. But with ever larger hordes of sightseers clogging its white alleyways, those with a little more imagination are searching out quieter spots.
I have come to Morocco to explore a string of lesser known seaside towns, three alternative Essaourias that are nonetheless just a short hop from Marrakesh or Casablanca. My first stop is El-Jadida.
***
Below the ramparts I enter a tortuous network of tangled alleyway. The walled quarter is known today as the Cité Portugaise, though the Iberian incomers who built the place in 1506 knew it as Mazagan. They had chosen a spot where a kink in the long line of the Moroccan coast provided shelter for ships, come to load up with the produce of all North Africa.
The Portuguese held Mazagan for two and a half centuries, but in 1769 the Alawite sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah evicted them and built a sprawling medina outside the walls, dubbing it El-Jadida, “the New”. The old quarters were abandoned until the 19th Century when Jewish settlers from other coastal towns moved in.
Today it is a place where sunshine falls in molten pools, a cubist cityscape of pastel tones where weathered doorways open to elaborately tiled stairwells. Pink geraniums sprout from windowsills and black cats lounge in the heat. I wander between light and shade, dodging dead ends and ducking under crooked archways. Here and there I catch a tantalizing whiff of cooking from a shuttered window.
A handful of old townhouses have been turned into boutique guesthouses, and foreigners and middle class Moroccans scared off by the soaring prices for medina properties in Essaouira and Marrakesh have started hunting out El-Jadida bargains in recent years. But for now this is still a quiet place, and I am the only visitor when I explore the Citerne Portugaise, a church-like underground chamber of vaulted arches and shimmering water, originally built as a reservoir. It was for the surviving gems like this that UNESCO declared El-Jadida a World Heritage Site in 2004.
El-Jadida’s post-independence fortunes have been based in part on its dark-timbered fishing fleet. A short walk from the Portuguese gateway, and close to the entrance to the port, I find an enclosed courtyard where rival stalls serve up platters loaded with freshly-landed seafood for bargain prices. I opt for five salty sardines grilled over charcoal with a hunk of bread and a bowl of coriander-scented tomato sauce for the princely sum of Dh10.
***
The following day I make the short hop up the coast to the smaller town of Azzemour. Many Moroccan cities have their own color schemes; if Marrakesh’s is earthy red, and El-Jadida’s is honeyed yellow, then Azzemour’s is white and blue.
The medina here was also built by the Portuguese, but today it is a sleepy backwater. Casablanca lies just an hour to the north, however, and hidden behind heavyset medina doors there are a few stylish guesthouses here too. There are also dozens of artist’s studios, and the stark white color scheme of Azzemour is broken with bright splashes of color – murals daubed on blank walls by resident painters.
Elsewhere a crumbling Portuguese citadel looks out over the white roofs, a handful of cannons dotting the ramparts like beached whales, their carriages long since rotted out from under them. There is a strange kind of melancholy to these former Portuguese possessions which dot the world’s foreshores from Morocco to East Timor, the remnants of an empire of outposts.
***
The potter lifts another simple, uncast cup from the rack and with a few deft flicks of a wooden cutter he has sliced a tiny star-shaped hole in the creamy clay and paired it to a crescent moon puncture. Swiftly he begins to repeat the motif all over the smooth surface. He can turn out 150 of these pieces in a day he says casually, without looking up from his work.
From Azzemour and El-Jadida I have travelled 150 kilometers south down a stark coastline to another little-visited port, Safi, and now, just outside its bulky walls, I am exploring its most intriguing neighborhood – a hillside potters’ quarter. I am being shown through the process by a tall, lean potter named Mohammed – “Like the Sultan,” he says with a grin, meaning Mohammed VI, Morocco’s current king; “But not the Sultan of Morocco – the Sultan of the potteries!”
It is amongst the warren workshops and wood-fired kilns here – clustered around the white shrine of a local saint, Sidi Abdurrahman, patron of the potters – that the unmistakable Moroccan ceramics that show up in gift-shops and on restaurant tables all over the country are made. Clay is brought in from local quarries before being kneaded – by foot. Pots, plates, and all manner of other crockery are then crafted, decorated and double fired.
The potteries rose to prominence in the 18th Century after artisans arrived from the royal city of Fez. However, Safi’s modern ceramics owe their reputation to one man. In 1918 the Algerian-born, French-trained potter Boujemaa Lamali settled here, teaching local apprentices, reviving old patterns and color schemes, and pioneering motifs which have now become Moroccan standards.
The yellow and black plate I buy from one of the stalls after bidding goodbye to Mohammed features the classic olive kernel design, a Lamali invention.
***
Like the other towns I have visited, Safi was once a Portuguese outpost. But they were only here for 33 years, and they did little more than build a sturdy fortress, the Dar el Bahar, knock down all of the Almohad Grand Mosque except its minaret, and start work on a cathedral, which was never finished, and which the returning Moroccan forces subsequently turned into a hammam. The caretaker, who shares a name with the Saint of the Potters – Abdurrahman – points out to me the spot where the roof vaulting is still stained by the smoke from the charcoal used to heat the bathwater.
But despite the tit-for-tat mistreatment of houses of worship, Abdurrahman explains, Safi was long a place of tolerance. The Jewish communities of other Moroccan towns were confined to their own ghetto quarters, known as mellahs, but here they lived amongst their Muslim and Christian neighbors.
Today most of the Jews and Christians have gone, but there are still quiet corners, and in the evening the little paved square at the seaward edge of the medina fills with food stalls like a miniature version of Marrakesh’s iconic Djemaa el Fna. Unlike in Marrakesh, however, and unlike in Essaouira, just two hours down the coast, there is hardly another tourist to be seen.
I eat a tasty dinner of merguez – Moroccan beef sausages spiced with paprika and served up in a hunk of fluffy bread – from one of the stalls, and then make my way to the Corniche, a cliff-top walkway south of the old town. A pale moon is slipping up above the white rooftops, and an amber sun is sliding down in the opposite direction over the wind-chased Atlantic. Whirling flocks of black-winged swifts are dancing in the clear air.
This is the end of my Atlantic excursion, and tomorrow I’ll make the three-hour trip inland across the blistering plains to the hustling heat of Marrakesh. Maybe one day people will be proclaiming El-Jadida, Azzemour and Safi, “spoilt” and “too touristy”, but for now, I decide, they make a fine seaside sidestep off Morocco’s beaten tracks…
© Tim Hannigan 2011

Thursday 8 September 2011

Walking on Fire

"Gunung Bagging" - climbing Indonesia's volcanoes

Originally Published in Trek and Mountain Magazine, June 2011


I huddle in the darkness, tucking my hands under my arms and shrinking down inside my jacket. Through the gloom I can see Maman squatting over the stove to boil water for coffee while Cokie sits shivering nearby. I flick the switch of my flashlight and scan the surrounding vegetation. It is three hours since we left the tea gardens, and somewhere along the rough, muddy, and agonisingly steep trail, we have passed beyond the tropics. There are no more broad-leafed banana plants or jungle creepers; we are now amongst gnarled, crooked trees draped with the wispy, blue-grey lichen known in Indonesia as jengot angin – “the beard of the wind”. It is an hour before dawn, and from a village mosque somewhere far, far below, the first prayer call rises, very faint, but unmistakable through the clear, cold air.
Ahead the trail continues, onwards and upwards towards the bare, 3173-metre summit of Gunung Dempo, Sumatra’s third highest peak, a mighty volcanic eminence towering over the Pamesah Highlands.
With the coffee finished we scramble to our feet, stamping and slapping our sides to get the blood moving again. I ask Maman, a local mountain fanatic who has climbed Dempo fifteen times, how much further we have to go. Two hours, he says – and the air is getting thinner with every step…
***
Indonesia is a land of volcanoes. A great, 4000-mile arc of shattered green land stretching across the equator, it owes its very existence to tectonic violence. It is part of “the Ring of Fire”, where the Pacific and Indian Ocean plates are forced beneath the thick crust of the Eurasian continental plate. The western and southern flank of the archipelago is one long line of fiery mountains – known as gunung in Indonesian. There are 129 active volcanoes in Indonesia, more than in any other nation, and many more extinct and dormant peaks. The tallest – Kerinci in West Sumatra – stands 3805 metres above sea level.
But despite this plethora of peaks, most visitors come to Indonesia for beaches, coral reefs and culture. For those who do pack a pair of boots, however, this is probably the place where you can tick off more serious summits in a short space of time than anywhere else on earth. And with the recent categorisation of mountains with a prominence of at least 1000 metres into “Ribus” (from the Indonesian word for “thousand” – ribu), on criteria similar to those used internationally for Ultras, and in the UK for Corbetts and Grahams, there is now a target list for would-be trekkers. It runs to 222 summits – it’s time to start “gunung bagging”…
***
Volcanoes are not like other mountains. That might seem an obvious statement, given that nothing in the Scottish highlands has a steaming bowl of sulphurous smoke at its summit, but there’s more to it than that. Volcanoes are formed, not by a slow crumpling of the earth’s surface, but by a single upwelling of molten rock. Because of this they often stand alone, towering in a steep cone above low-lying flatlands to a height of several thousand metres. For this reason an attempt on an Indonesian volcano is usually a short, sharp shock. There is little chance for acclimatisation, and in the tropics temperatures drop dramatically as you rise. You can start the day sweating at sea level, and then finish off shivering in the sunset at close to 3000 metres. This makes the effects of altitude particularly pronounced (though the chance for swift descents means that AMS is not a major risk on even Indonesia’s highest volcanoes).
Most of Indonesia’s volcanoes are “trekking peaks”, demanding no technical skill or specialist equipment to scale. But have no doubt, it’s a tough business. Lower slopes are almost always cloaked with thick, steamy forest where mud, leeches, and dehydration are the main concerns. As you rise, however, temperatures drop to teeter on the brink of freezing point, and final ascents are often over soul-sapping scree. But the fact that an Indonesian peak high enough to be worthy of a ten-day trek elsewhere in the world can be the object of a weekend outing, or just one chapter of a multi-mountain trip, makes “gunung bagging” an addictive pastime, and the experience of standing at dawn on the brink of a gaping crater, high over a sea of pale, creamy cloud, is always something to relish.
***
There are well-trodden trails to the tops of Indonesia’s best-known peaks. You can summit many independently, and local guides are usually easy to find. The highest concentration of accessible mountains is in Java, the England-sized loadstone of the archipelago. Gunung Pangrango, 3019 metres tall and just 50 kilometres short of the seething capital, Jakarta, is one of the most popular for weekenders. In neighbouring Bali, meanwhile, the mighty 3142-metre Gunung Agung is easily accessible too.
All these mountains have clear trails, kept well-trodden by gangs of student hikers, and visiting trekkers from overseas. Most can be tackled in a single hit from the trailhead. True summits are usually simply the highest point of a crater rim, a gravelly patch above a great stony hollow, often holding a cobalt-blue lake or a steaming sulphur vent.
If smoke and sulphur add a certain frisson to the summit experience, they add a similar tension to daily life in Indonesian too. Volcano slopes – with their rich soils and wet microclimates – are the most fertile places in the archipelago, and red-roofed villages huddle high on the slopes. The risk of eruption is the pay-off for the fertile fields (Java’s Gunung Merapi erupted violently in 2010, killing several hundred people). The dominating character of the peaks has given them a place in Indonesia’s belief systems too. Local traditions often see the craters as the receptacles of the souls of village ancestors, and many peaks have taboos and traditions of animal sacrifice to appease the spirits.
As well as the wealth of one-day wonders there are mountains that demand a more sustained assault. Gunung Rinjani, towering over Bali’s eastern neighbour, Lombok, is Indonesia’s second highest volcanic mountain – at 3726 metres – and one of its very finest trekking peaks. Most people tackle the mountain over three or four days, summiting in the early hours of the morning on the second day before traversing the huge caldera and descending into the jungle. Another headline star in the ranks of Indonesia’s fire mountains is Semeru, Java’s highest peak, accessed by a three-day route across the wild Bromo-Tengger Massif.
But all of these mountains are just for starters. There are hundreds more – Inerie, Ile Boleng, and Tambora out amongst the islands of Nusa Tenggara, forgotten Javanese giants like Argopuro, and little-known peaks in Sulawesi and Maluku. And then there’s the 1200-mile, volcano-studded stretch of Sumatra, home to Kerinci, Marapi, Leuser and the mighty Gunung Dempo…
***
Two days have passed since I arrived in the little upland town of Pagaralam with my eye on Gunung Dempo. The mountain, rising sheer from the forests and plantations, swimming in and out of cloud, and casting a long shadow across the rice fields, is a tantalising prospect. But despite its huge height this is not one of Indonesia’s well known peaks, for it stands far from any of the major tourist trails, and seven hours by road from the regional capital, Palembang.
I had struggled to find information about routes to the summit before I arrived, but then, in a typically Indonesian piece of good luck, I ran into Maman. A serious 27-year-old trekker with an enviable string of Ribus under his belt, he grew up in the shadow of Gunung Dempo, and cut his teeth on its high slopes. He told me the he was planning to make yet another ascent the following day with a friend from Palembang, Cokie, and invited me to tag along. We made our way by motorbike to a ramshackle climbers’ hut, 1000 metres above sea level on the fringes of the huge state-owned tea estate that skirts Dempo, spent the evening drinking endless cups of coffee, and then two hours after midnight – following traditional Indonesian practice of aiming to summit at dawn – we set out along one of the toughest forest trails I’d ever seen.
And so now here I am, struggling up through the thinning trees, lungs burning and thighs throbbing, reaching for withered branches to support myself, as thin, pearly daylight begins to leach out over a vast, inverted cloudscape. The last of the forest gives way to stunted scrub, and knuckles of grainy rock replace the tangled roots of the lower trail. We’re just short of Dempo’s false summit, Maman says, so we stop to watch a steely sun slip into a pale sky cut with skeins of charcoal cloud. Dempo stands just three degrees south of the equator, but at 3000 metres in a sharp breeze it is shockingly cold, and with sunrise over we press on, crossing the false summit – an unprepossessing hillock cloaked in tangled bushes – then dropping to a small plateau before making the final slog up a stony slope to the crater rim.
The altitude is sapping all of our strength now, and we move silently, finding our own pace, searching out meandering paths over the rocks with short footfalls. And then, with a few final, staggering steps, I’m on the crater rim. A deep bowl of broken rock the colour of builders’ rubble opens below me with a blue-grey pool in its belly. The bitter wind is driving in from the northwest; shreds of cloud rush across the crater, and, with the rising sun at my back, for a moment a “glory” – my own swollen shadow ringed with a rainbow halo – shows on the far ridge.
Leaving Maman and Cokie huddling on the edge of the overhang I pick my way to the highest point of the rim, and look out on the surrounding panorama. Away to the west I can see the distant blue line of the Indian Ocean coast, backed by descending green ridges. In the east Pagaralam and the tea gardens are hidden beneath a sheet of cloud.
Another Ribu bagged, I think happily to myself. But beyond this crater I can see a long rank of other unnamed summits, and in the opposite direction the dark bulk of Gunung Patah – a wildly remote jungle peak that Maman pioneered just last year – shows above the cloud. There are plenty more still waiting to be climbed…
© Tim Hannigan 2011