Tangier: At the Edge
of Two Worlds

The first evening in Tangier required nothing more ambitious than the Medina after dark and a dinner table at El Contacto, a restaurant that operates on the principle that arriving early is its own reward. The traveller arrived at seven, claimed a table by the window, and ate well — the kitchen produces confident, unfussy Moroccan cooking at prices that feel almost apologetic given the quality. Outside, the Medina lanes filled and emptied in the way of all medinas: purposefully, noisily, and entirely indifferent to the observer's attempts to map or comprehend them.

The second day was given to the city in full. Morning began at the Casbah — that limestone fortress that has watched over Tangier's comings and goings since the seventh century, housing conquerors and merchants and, in more recent memory, the American Legation, the only building on African soil designated a US National Historic Landmark. The Musée de la Kasbah within holds fragments of Tangier's long argument with history: Phoenician, Roman, Berber, Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and the strange interregnum of the International Zone, when Tangier was governed by no single nation and became, consequently, a city of magnificent disorder. The traveller lingered. The tomb of Ibn Battuta — the great fourteenth-century explorer who saw more of the medieval world than almost any other soul — sits nearby, a modest marker for an immodest life.

Café Hafa is the correct place to spend an afternoon in Tangier. It perches on the cliff above the Strait of Gibraltar, a series of terraced platforms connected by steep steps, each level occupied by men drinking mint tea and playing dominoes with the concentrated calm of people who have nowhere else they need to be. The view from the upper terrace is extraordinary: the grey-blue water, the distant smudge of Spain, the container ships moving slowly through the straits like iron thoughts. The Rolling Stones came here. William S. Burroughs came here. The tea costs twelve dirhams and arrives in a glass with a sprig of fresh mint and a quantity of sugar that would alarm a cardiologist. Order two.

The evening of the second day was dinner at Saveur de Poisson — one of the few restaurants in Morocco that requires no menu, accepts no modifications, and offers no choices beyond whether one sits or stands. The owner leads the kitchen in the same fashion a general leads a campaign: with total conviction and no interest in dissent. Course after course of seafood arrived — soup, then fish prepared half a dozen ways, then more fish, then sweets — each plate placed before the traveller with the quiet authority of someone who has been right about food for thirty years. It has been noted by those who document such things. The traveller could only agree. B

On the second day, the traveller rose before the city did and joined a shared transport heading south into the Rif Mountains, that great folded range of limestone and cedar that separates the northern coast from the rest of Morocco. Three hours of mountain road, the landscape shifting from coastal scrub to something older and more secretive — terraced hillsides, goat paths, the occasional painted farmhouse in pale blue. And then Chefchaouen appeared in a valley, as it always does, as a kind of hallucination: the blue city, the impossible city, every wall and step and flowerpot washed in shades from pale cobalt to deep indigo.

The colour is not a trick of photography. It is real, and stranger in reality than in any image — because the images cannot convey the smell of cedar smoke in the cool mountain air, or the sound of water running through the medina's central channel, or the particular quality of the light as it bounces between blue walls and turns everything within them vaguely celestial. The traveller spent the better part of six hours walking these lanes, eating kefta from a hole-in-the-wall counter, buying nothing, photographing everything, and feeling the persistent pleasant sensation of being somewhere that ought not to exist.

Dinner that evening was back in Tangier — Saveur de Poisson, where the courses kept arriving and the traveller kept eating, long past any reasonable stopping point, because to stop would have been to admit that it was over, and it was very much not over yet.

The ferry terminal at Tangier Ville is not a beautiful place. It is a functional place — all queues and customs desks and the smell of diesel — but it is charged with a significance that more beautiful places often lack. Here, at the narrowest point of all the water between continents, the traveller joined the line of people moving between worlds. Some were returning home to Spain or Portugal. Some were beginning a journey into Morocco for the first time, faces alert with anticipation. The traveller occupied the middle category: finished with one chapter, not yet begun on the next.

The crossing took thirty-five minutes. The sea was choppy and grey-green in the morning light, and on one side the Moroccan hills dropped away, and on the other the white town of Tarifa grew slowly larger, its windmills turning on the headland. It was the twenty-sixth day of the third month. At noon, the traveller set foot on Spanish soil, and the world rearranged itself around an espresso and a sandwich, and the afternoon bus to Seville.