The last time I stood staring at the waves spilling over reefs below me was in December of 2001 when we made our camp here for two weeks. I had driven to Morocco in a van with an Australian couple, Jon and Raylee, who I’d met on the surf trail in South America a year earlier and traveled with for a spell in Peru and Chile. We were all well-addicted surf explorers back then and before we parted ways in South America, we hatched a plan for a surf trek from England along the Atlantic Coast surfing all of the waves that we could find in France, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. After South America they went to Scotland and I left for South Africa before returning to California. Eight months later, they picked me up in France in an old Mercedes Sprinter van with a fresh home paint job of white with a red stripe down the center. Strapped to the roof inside were six surfboards that I had delivered to London from South Africa on my way back to California earlier that year. Everything we did back then was somehow directed to the next destination and finding the next wave. Even standing on the same spot where we enjoyed many a dinner of baguette and Laughing Cow cheese, looking at the same chunk of reeef, it feels like a lifetime ago.
After spending last week surfing in Safi I’d ridden to Sidi Kauki – a tiny, sleepy coastal village with an authentic charm and a handful of little cafes, one owned by French expat with a passion for fresh ingredients and superb cuisine that he served up in the most unlikely seeming of locations. There was traffic on the beach. But it was just donkey traffic.
There was traffic in the trees too. But it was just goat traffic.
Traffic on the road was mostly camel traffic.
There was a good wave nearby that I made a halfhearted attempt to reach. The poor road eventually gave way to sand dunes and with my bike fully loaded, running road tires at high pressure, I was quickly stuck. After a couple times digging myself out, I decided that the terrain had bested me for the moment and I retreated to hunt another day.
The wind had not subsided the entire night and continued the next morning, so I packed up my camp and motored south, leaving the sand dunes behind. The road climbed some coastal hills and eventually rejoined the coast where I saw that there was still more swell in the water than I’d expected given the last forecast I’d seen. The first small pointbreak that I came to was completely overpowered by the swell, so I knew to keep heading south where larger points waited that would bend the lines of swell energy to into peeling lines to of fun to ride.
That night I surfed by myself at the reef break just below our campsite from years ago. There were plenty other surfers about, but the wave that I saw breaking just in front of the exposed chunk of reef had been overlooked. I sat waiting for sets that appeared on the horizon 15 minutes apart, trying to judge the correct distance that I should be from the nasty looking pieces of rock. At low tide, the wave sucks up quickly making for an exciting take-off and first 20 meters riding past the exposed rock shelf.
The last time I’d surfed here years ago I’d misjudged that distance and ended up planting myself and my board right onto the reef in very ungraceful fashion. But it wasn’t all my fault. It was partly due to the yogurt. In the spirit of the trip, we had procured some recreation enhancers. We kept trying to think of ways to use the hash other than mixing it in a joint with tobacco, which none of us cared to smoke. We eventually settled on melting it into some oil and mixing it with yogurt. So when the mood struck before a surf session as we were pulling our wetsuits on, the query would come: ‘Anybody want to yogurt up?’. And we would yogurt up. The whole thing was phenomenally silly.
With all my wits about me, I managed to keep myself off of the reef this time around. Rejoined with my riding mate Jonathan, we made a camp on a hill perched high above the surf.
Every morning I get up about 7, throw on my board shorts, eat some yogurt (just vanilla flavored) and bananas, load up my board and wetsuit and motor down to check the waves. It’s an absolutely fantastic feeling bounce over the dirt tracks on the way out the surf every day, park my bike right on the rocks at the top of a point and jump in the ocean. Some days after surfing for a bit I’ll hop on the bike still in my wetsuit and blast up to another reef or point for some more waves. Following this routine day after day is incredibly energizing.
Local guys ride around in these cool little high riding Renaults to the beach.
While we surf, women from the village collect mussels from the rocks. The fishermen in the village haul out their catch straight in front of the restaurant where they are served.
Life is simple and people are friendly here. While there are many more surfers here than there used to be, and my exuberance about the madness of it all is more subdued than it was a lifetime ago, this is a good place to come back to.