We cross under arches and pass old men with ancient beards, cloaked figures as if preschool ghosts, and nine year olds selling toys and Fanta. Mohammed tries a round of cheese – a white pie wrapped in palm fronds. “No good,” he says, “we keep looking.”
“Sorry,” I say to a storekeeper, “quite sorry,” as I hit a number of dead chickens, making them swing back and forth. It’s hard work keeping up with Jane and Mohammed, who move like the wind in the narrow passages.
Between 1923 and 1956, Tangier was a kind of free-for-all ‘International Zone’ ruled jointly by 9 countries, including the United States, Britain and France. It is the Tangier we know best - a pre-hippie come-as-you-are that attracted everything from scorned homosexuals to beatniks to poets and painters to pedophiles, drug-pushers and a vast child slavery network.
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Walking through this place – which resembles the culture of Spain and Italy as much as that of the rest of Morocco, you cannot escape the legacy of this odd time. An old European man we meet on the street has a crooked nose, a deep tan and a straw hat. He came to Tangier so many years ago for this lifestyle, and when I asked him about the International Zone days, he kissed his hand and threw it in the air. “Such beautiful times. Fantastic. That was life. Life was right here in Tangier.”
Long before this time – seven hundred years before the International Zone, Morocco was still the far end of the Muslim world, and even then radically different from the Middle Eastern heart of the Arab world. Because of this difference – because Tangerines considered themselves at the periphery of their Muslim world, Tangier would become the departure point for the world’s most incredible traveler.
Ibn Battutah was a Berber from the fourteenth century, although thoroughly islamicised, and at the mere age of twenty-one, he left Tangier on a walking quest into the heart of this Arab world, under the assumption that he would gain insight and enlightenment by approaching the center of his religion. His journey would take him a chunk of his life, and he covered 30,000 miles, three times the distance of Marco Polo.
According to Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who followed in Battutah’s steps in a 2001 travelogue, Battutah was likely influenced by a travel writing predecessor, a fellow by the name of Ibn Jubayr – a thirteenth century hero to the Arab travel writers of the fourteenth century. Jubayr was a Spanish Muslim who sought Mecca and returned a travel writer. His accounts of foreign lands were wildly popular, and likely a grand motivator for Battutah.
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At home, Jane makes the pasta, but I shave the Parmigiano-Reggiano. One day during this ritual of what-I-call mutual responsibility, one of us asked the other if maybe someday we could commit to traveling the world in a quest. A quest to visit the towns and countrysides where artisanal cheeses are made.
This act was also a ritual. What if we traveled the world in search of stage clowns, in search of palm trees or artichokes?
With this particular whim, however, we made a pact – a six-year commitment to explore the world’s artisanal cheese towns - tasting farmhouse cheeses in the very towns where they were produced.But Jane and I are no cheese fanatics. Rather, I see cheese travels like Jerry Garcia described improvisational music – you need a thin structure and beyond that, whatever happens, let it happen.
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