Excerpt from Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book ---Travels with My Hat, 85,000 words 8 pages pictures. Chapters on Ethiopia, the Royal Tour of Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen. Pictured is the terrible Cafe Lemsid in the Western Sahara, from the final chapter on Morocco.
...I’ve often thought I’d found the middle of
nowhere on my travels, only to realise that I was on the edge of somewhere, but
the Café Lemsid was definitely in the
middle of nowhere. Caramel and raspberry
red, it resembled a giant lolly that had fallen off a desert transport and
surrounding it lay the detritus of local civilisation: burst tyres, perished
fan-belts, broken lobster-traps and empty port-a-gas cylinders. A rug was
stuffed in a hole in the wall to keep out wind-blown sand, and among items
stacked behind its counter were boxes of Gunpowder tea, flour, candles, packets
of “Tide”, balls of string and inevitably— tinned sardines. It’s owner said fresh fish arrived daily from
Boujdour, so that even in this god-forsaken place I was able to sit down at a
broken table for lunch (grilled dorade).
A lame, fish-eating chicken hopped about for scraps: it would never be
killed and eaten, I decided; it was much too horrible. As I settled my bill, a grand-taxi
pulled up and I half expected it to disgorge a host of characters from a
Fellini film—dwarfs, transvestites and
dancing bears—but they were merely crushed passengers from Dakhla, relieved for
the chance to stretch their legs on their long journey up to Agadir...
