As we climbed above Chefchaouen it began to rain, and we saw the green immensity of the hills and valleys of the Rif through scudding clouds and sheets of driving rain. We passed through the high pine forested Ketama, the centre of the kif industry, which is what keeps the Rif alive. We were chased by another Mercedes, a crazy with a fat joint of weed hanging out of the window, trying to get us to stop. Larbi was having none of it though; he didn't stop for anybody in this lawless part of the country, he said, except for the frequent police roadblocks.
It was a gruelling drive, on the high mountain road, in the mist and the rain, pursued by drug-crazed loonies. We stopped at a café and ate bananas and drank coffee while Larbi fixed a faulty headlamp.
In rain sodden Al Hoceima there was beer and belly-dancing - accompanied by the oud and electric organ - upstairs in the hotel. The town comes to life in summer when ferries come from France, bringing returning emigrants to enjoy its miles of beaches. In winter there's the fishing port, the belly-dancer, and the alluringly dressed girls and their beer-drinking beaux in the hotel bar.
Larbi decided to take us all the way to Melilla, as there wasn't a bus. We drove up through the badlands, the eastern slopes of the Rif, where the land is so poor that nothing grows, then across the barren flatlands towards the far east of Morocco. Dotted around the immense and unappealing grey plain were concrete mansions of a surprising opulence, many incorporating, oddly enough, a Chinese element in the curved eaves of their rooves and towers. Larbi reckoned they were built on the proceeds of drugs, and import-export activities across the nearby Algerian border.
At the border crossing to Melilla, a filthy place, conceived seemingly to degrade and depress all who pass through, we were the only people there, apart from a few wretched desperadoes, who, I fear, would never make it across that rubbish-strewn strip of stained concrete and razor-wire to the promised land.
