[Part of  Series. Introduction: For Movement]

Tanger, Morroco, June 2009

Sometimes you just have to seek the travel moment. Yes, the best moments are unexpected, everyday, hidden. Sometimes though, the textbook travel guide moments, mass produced as they are, still work. Try this for a classic travel guide must-do: you drive down to the south of Spain, get to a ferry, put your car in the hold and cross the water in an hour long ride from Europe to Africa. West to.. well… not West. Continent to Continent. Universe to Universe. It’s a [good] travel writer’s worst nightmare and a travel publisher’s wet dream.

The twist, of course, is that when you cross the ferry from Algeciras in Spain, you can go [as I did] not directly to Tanger, but to Cuetta, a city of about seventy thousand which [ready for it?] is Spanish. One of the three cities and a few naval bases and fortresses that are “European” while being in Africa. So my ferry from Europe to Africa was actually Europe to Europe, and then a drive to a land border into Morroco. Serves me right for chasing the moment. Europe, apparently, is harder to shake than it seems. Damn it.

The other twist is that “Africa” in that essential non-Europe-ness of it starts actually at the ferry pier in Spain, where an approaching car is met by the classic desi-style “helpers” clad with forms, tips, insider secrets, and the perfect ferry price. There are about four young men dressed in classic Sarojini-jeans and tight t-shirts when we pull in and they take us happily to the “ticket counter” which we realize ten minutes later is actually a travel agency. Classic. No prices are displayed, everything seems to happen rather randomly and there is a smell in the air of convenient pricing. At the ferry point across, Europe seemed to have conceded some ground to other ways of managing. I was beginning to feel at home.

I was traveling with an American and a Portuguese, in a car with Portuguese license plates. My friend told me tales of being chased by dozens of touts everywhere because of the license plates of the car. I shuffled a bit uncomfortably. I was about to ride into Morroco in a car with European plates. It felt …. wrong, somehow. But how? In my years in the US, I was firmly and insistently an “other.” I insisted on it. I was “brown people”, the “global south” was my place, my part of the world. Morroco was my part of the world. I wasn’t either European, or white. Why would touts chase me?  I was somehow, in my head, closer to the Morrocans than either one of my friends. Funny, isn’t it? Apparently, I am one with the global South. I, an elite Indian with enough capital to drive into Morroco in a European car on holiday, am apparently closer to the Morrocon young men trying to peddle five euro margins off a ferry ticket than my friends in the car we share. Where are good slaps in the face when you need them?

We needn’t have worried though. We arrived in Tanger, looking for the global South. The cities without grids, the cities of informality, the cities where the “rich and the poor lived side by side”, where “modernity and tradition meet”, the cities yet to come, the cities constantly unmade, the maximum cities, the cities where travel clichés came true. We came instead to Tanger which, we discovered happily, didn’t really give a shit about us. Welcome to the post-tourist city of the “global South.” Tanger glitters. Brand new airport, brand new roads, brand new waterfront bars and hotels, brand new train stations. You know something is happening when the train stations in a city are made of shiny new glass. New developments are everywhere, more housing units in construction than anywhere I’ve seen other than the peripheries of Indian and Chinese cities. Even the medina, the “old” city of Tanger had broadened its roads, opened up new cafés and hotels. The touts were nowhere to be seen – the city considered us idly and then went on its way. I loved it, relishing the snub of a city that didn’t have to pander but could still welcome you. Our post-colonial selves, apparently, aren’t all that post: a fuck you to the world elite still feels good.

Yet something felt missing. I looked around, disappointed at the city for not being “Morrocan” and at myself for searching for something “Morrocan.” Yet some part of my dissapointment I still keep. Developers – in Tanger, I found out, it was two big companies [sound familiar?] – build like developers, no matter where they are. A city that has a long history of managing the presence of Spain, England, France and Morroco itself for so many years, defiantly remaining international in its own way, was now becoming international in another way: it was beginning to look placeless. Global, you could call it. A fascimilie of so many cities – a coverging point for cities built by developer design. Overnight, lego blocks of identical apartment buildings laid out next to each other have spread like weeds over its landscape. Is this the new cosmopolitanism – a sense of familiar placelessness everywhere you go? I didn’t want Tanger to be “Morrocan” but I wanted it to be something, something more than the city I saw.

But then I think maybe the city is actually taking its time to make up its mind about me. Cities hold many secrets. In many of them, my own city included, you have to put in the time to discover them. I think this as I write on a scrap of borrowed paper in a café. Tanger is a city of cafes. Dozens of them line every street, serving coffee and desserts. They’re full of addas that would make Kolkata proud. The best part about Tanger’s cafes though is that they have stadium seating – all the seats face outward to the seat. Friends sitting together sit on the same side of the table, side by side, watching the world go by, sometimes even when the tables are inside the café! The cafes feel like Tanger. A city that has seen many peoples come through trying to claim it and has quietly watched them come and go, as it does today, sitting on seats that face the street. Perhaps this is Tanger. An expectant city that has seen it all. A post-tourist city. A city that won’t put on its Sunday best for you. A city that defies the traveler’s selfishness. A city that is sitting back in one of it’s cafes, waiting to see what will come next. Getting back into the European license plates to head to Fes and the “real Morroco” [we never learn, do we?], I look back curiously, still unsure as to what I’ve seen.