Setting an Ambush in Tangier

I can’t think of any big city in Europe where you wake up literally at “cock crow.” The roosters of Tangier, even more than the minaret’s call to prayer, make sure the city is awake early…and today, my day began at cock crow.

I step to my hotel window and see Europe across the busy strait, and ponder the view. In the distance is the Rock of Gibraltar. Seeing clearly every boat between here and there, I can understand why Britain is determined to keep that strategic piece of rock — and why, through much of the 20th century, Tangier was considered too strategic to be controlled by any one country, and therefore was jointly ruled by the European powers. No boat enters or leaves the Mediterranean without being noticed by Gibraltar or Tangier.

The vast majority of tourists here in Tangier are day-trippers. But, in spite of its “Arabian efficiency” (hotels have lots of doormen and maids, but their printers function more as wrinklers if you happen to be a travel writer in need of a printout), I like to spend the night.

Meeting my TV crew, we catch a taxi up to the kasbah (castle). I hear a tap-tap-tap, look back, and see my back window filled with the toothy grin of a little boy. He leapt onto the cab for the ride, legs and arms spread across its back side with nothing to grip. Seeing a sudden stop about to happen and with nothing to hold onto, his smile disappears and he slinks back, eventually hopping safely off the cab. Later, he and a little girl hop onto the rear bumper of a delivery truck, hitching an exciting ride as it threads through the keyhole gate out of the kasbah and down into the old town.

We’re in Tangier’s kasbah to film the tour groups herded through their predictable series of Kodak moments. I want travelers to side-trip from Spain to Tangier — but also to understand the consequences of opting for the popular bus tour. Waiting in the fortress square for the tour group, I feel like part of an ambush. The snake charmers are poised to turn on the charm. The folkloric musicians have taken their places. The woman at the gift shop stands ready at her door. Little kids organize their postcards. My cameraman locks the camera onto the tripod, which makes that loading-a-shotgun sound you hear in TV westerns. Then, like Apaches coming over the bluff, the tour group appears and follows their guides trustingly into the square. The snake is yanked out of his box, the drum and squawky horn play, and the folkloric three-stringed guitar player gets the tassel on his fez orbiting his head. Some giggling tourist gets a big, lazy reptile for a necklace, and all the group snaps photos. Moments later, the group is gone — rushing to the carpet shop — and the snake is thrown back into the box, lid shut, baking in the midday sun.

I don’t often think about animals. But imagining snakes in dark, hot boxes awaiting tour groups has me noticing the rough lot in life of animals in Tangier. A few minutes later, in the market, I see a writhing burlap bag lashed to the rack atop a beat-up old car— it’s filled with chicken awaiting sale at the market. Then I nearly step on a scrawny cat with a fishtail hanging out its mouth like a Bogart cigarette.

Cats seem to scavenge, stretch, and yawn everywhere. A family of cats fills a crusty doorway. A small truck pulls up, and a man with white gloves grabs five kittens, one by one. With each grab, the little cat stiffens its legs and is tossed ingloriously through a hole into the van. When the man with gloves runs out of kittens, he goes for the mother. She snarls. He jerks back. She scampers. The toothless man who feeds the cats — a fixture on this square — clearly knows that a trip in the white-gloved man’s truck is a death sentence, and shoos away his feline friends. The cats scram as the man in the gloves has a word with the toothless cat-lover.

Then a funeral procession interrupts the scene. Ten men surrounded by a happy commotion of children parade by, singing a religious song with the reverence of “Happy Birthday.” The body, wrapped in a blanket and set in a bed of fresh hay, is jiggled on its wooden rack as all the men jockey to “give the departed one a shoulder,” and the mobile ritual disappears around the bend.

Later, back down by the port, the same tour group passes me, heading down to catch their ferry. I see them clutching their bags and purses, attracting hustlers like flies. Saying no just makes things worse. Just as on my last visit to Tangier, when I encounter groups like this, I can only think, “self-imposed hostage crisis.” And when exploring this travelers’ fantasy on my own, I can only think, “How could anyone be in southern Spain — so close — and not hop over to experience this wonderland?”