The Tropic of Cancer

I got a ride from a Moroccan business man transporting something or other between Nouadhibou and Dakhla(Dakhla's technically part of the Western Sahara, I think) in the back of a windowless van; the kind of vehicle assassins drive around in, or people trafficking plutonium. I sat in the back with a Moroccan guy who spoke some French. He bought several bags of snacks before we left Nouadhibou and ate -bananas, oranges, cookies, bread, fruit juice boxes- more or less continuously throughout the 12 hour trip. He kept patting his paunch, looking at me and saying: 6 mois, as in 6 months, I'm six months pregnant. He also, during the stretch of unpaved desert between where Mauritania ends and the Western Sahara begins, took out an FHM magazine (the French equivalent of a Maxim with lots of topless women and women wrestling each other in various substances), flipped through it and kept elbowing me and turning the magazine so that I could see the pictures too. I was saying no, no I wasn't interested in perusing FHM with him, shaking my head and thinking about the fact that we were passing through the portion of desert with landmines still buried in it, and thinking that this particular moment would be a funny one to be blown up and die -with my last visions of a green, three breasted woman illustrating the "What if Your Girlfriend Were an Alien?" article in FHM magazine.
Also, bizarrely, there's some kind of license plate trafficking that goes on in that no man's land between Mauritania and Morocco. All these cars were parked together, like a used car lot in the desert between the two border control posts, and apparently -my pregnant seat partner explained this to me many times, but I never really got it- people drive used cars purchased in Europe through Morocco to this spot in the desert to buy a black market Mauritanian license plate that permits them to avoid some nasty tax consequence of buying an official Moroccan one.
They dropped me off at a hotel in Dakhla, the first town in southern Morocco, situated right on top of the Tropic of Cancer on a peninsula sticking out into the Atlantic, around midnight. I slept and then took a 24 hour bus ride to Marrekesh the next day. Nothing of interest happened on that ride except that the landscape changed for the first time, after hundreds of miles of flat Savannah, and Sahel and desert, I woke up to green hills and olive trees. The desert was a disappointment. It wasn't the sinuous, prettily wind rippled thing I expected, but a parking-lot flat stretch of craggy, wind battered sand. I spent the night at a -for me- expensive hotel in Marrekesh with an underwhelming breakfast included; I watched The Wizard of Oz in my room, which made me crumble with nostalgia, as had several songs by Brian Adams and Toni Braxton played on the bus...the trip got me in touch with my feminine side...No, I was just spent, totally spent and weary, and luckily I arrived in Fes the next day.

Yes, all you smarty pantses who said Allen Ginsberg coined the title "Dakar Doldrums" were right. He also wrote a series of poems called "Denver Doldrums", in case you were wondering.