Bruce Valluzzi's article on Morocco, with photos by Art Brewer, was the cover story for SURFER's August 1982 issue. This version has been slightly shortened and edited.

A sarcastic wind ruffled the bay as traffic jostled aboard the boat in Algeciras. Our tickets said "Africa Flash." How true. The passengers were a collection of seedy men in rumpled suits, hooded Arabs, German skinheads, some over-ripe goat farmers, truck drivers, assorted creeps, weirdos and of course, us. Standard fare on the boat to Morocco. Maroc is French for Morocco and “us” was Team Maroc: Art Brewer, Rory Russell and myself. Brewer, you may remember, is the large and fearless Don of surf photography, easily given to thundering tantrums, who thinks Helmut Neuton is a pussy-whipped choirboy. Russell is the Pipeline Tubemaster whose game is audio-visual entertainment for the Bolt Corporation but who, once out of Big Duke’s sight, clutching an expense check, becomes a demented Pleasure Hound hell-bent on sniffing out every wench and sleazy beer joint from Laguna Beach to Marrakesh.

In Lisbon five days earlier these two stumbled off the plane from New York at seven a.m., swilling the dregs of a quart of Jack Daniels. Rory tried to hustle the stewardesses while he flashed the grin of a convicted sex offender. I sensed trouble. The plan was to drive to Morocco, shoot an article for SURFER, then hook up with a film crew from ABC-TV’s 

. They had just won an Emmy for their piece on surfing in Indonesia and were ready for a sequel. Our trip was organized independently of ABC's, but it plugged neatly into their 'exotic locale' format. Management hoped the dual tasks would squelch the ludicrous tendencies inherent in a trio of notorious screw-ups. But after hanging around Portugal a few days hoping the fifteen-foot storm surf would clean up (it didn’t), it was obvious their worst fears were justified. This was to be another episode out there on the lunatic fringe. We trespassed all boundaries of social outrage, lechery, drunkenness, and bad breath. In short, we were on a surf trip.

The arid north of Africa has been called various names over the centuries: the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Morocco, etc. The desert's origins are subject to wide speculation. One theory is the Flood, brought to you in Christianity as the fable of Noah's Ark, but contained in creation myths the world over. This version has a sudden tilt in the Earth’s axis causing the oceans to slosh out of their beds like sodden drunks at a beachside camp.

The Sahara is extremely harsh on any life, but in the northwest corner the Atlas Mountains affect a change. There, some of the highest peaks in Africa leap up to gouge moisture from the clouds, like hungry teeth cleaving meat from an artichoke leaf. Flowing mountain waters irrigate the high plateaus and wide Atlantic coastal plains, making Morocco a pleasant, temperate place. Good crops grow under the abundant African sun but the soil is thin and rocky, and cultivation is laborious. It's a hard life, but it beats wandering around the desert collecting camel turds to fuel campfires, which is what the Moroccan farmers’ nomadic ancestors did. In good years, Morocco produces ten percent of the vegetables exported in the world, yet is still very poor, like Egypt, an Arab nation with no oil.

Arrival to Morocco by air is a painless affair, with visitors breezing through the bureaucratic functions. For land travelers, unfortunately, Morocco’s welcoming committee is a gang of cranky thugs in military-looking outfits who thrive on the hassles they create. While Art and Rory hid behind the language barrier, I fenced with a strutting little 5'2" pile of sullen egotism who had a fresh black eye behind his cheap aviator shades. He extorted a $600 “refundable deposit" on our five surfboards. A shabby welcome.

Shortly after arrival, pilot error struck hard. Blazing down a dirt road, miles from nowhere, Rory managed to hit a big rock and wrecked the front end of our car. It felt like an anti-tank mine. WHAMMY! The beer in my hand hit the roof then fell back to soak my crotch in warm foam. I swooned. It was the closest thing to total pleasure in Far Too Long.

The dashboard had knee dents from restraining my catapult exit through the windshield, and my Mickey Mouse watch crystal was broken. Rory was already kneeling in front of the car, moaning. "Oh cripes, the suspension's wasted.” “Forget the car!" I snarled. “It's a rental. MICKEY’S WOUNDED! We need a watch repairman or a veterinarian, quick!”

Brewer was reeling. Cameras and lenses littered the back seat like a swarm of dead bats. His lap, like mine, was also drenched in beer and a grimace of bliss played across his lips. Then he saw his equipment and started screaming. "YOU DRUNKEN IDIOT! YOU HIT THE ONLY ROCK FOR MILES IN ANY DIRECTION!"

Rory, of course, claimed the rock jumped out and bit him. Having crashed right out of the gate, limping back to town was the only avenue. While Brewer muttered threats of dismemberment, I begged Mickey not to die and Rory recited the common litany of the premature lover, “I am sorry. Oh, I am sorry. So sorry. Gee, I’m sorry.”

Checking into a hotel in a coastal city one evening, the young man behind the desk looked at Rory and asked if he were Gerry Lopez. That was how we met Madani. Camaraderie and curiosity form a natural bond for surfers in much of the world and Madani is a member of the embryonic community of Moroccan surfers, friendly and eager for progressive news on anything surf-related. Moroccan hospitality, when genuine, is extremely gracious and this charismatic young surfer was the first of many people in the country to extend to us every possible warmth and courtesy. A few days later we met Hammid, who supplies tidbits to 

, and dined at his parents stylish home. Hammid and his chums are caught in the wild, thrashing throes of terminal surf-stoke. It’s all they think or talk about. His mother hates it. His schoolwork is shot to hell, she claims, and when he sees a parabolic curve in geometry class, to him it represents a wave. Introducing the friend who started Hammid surfing she said, “This is the one who gave my son the sickness of surf.” World Motherhood, apparently, is unanimous on the subject.

Wintertime surf in Morocco is often a dangerous seething violence; a liquid conspiracy involving the whole ocean in a concerted assault against the shore. Massive storms marshall their forces in the North Atlantic and rampage down, disciplining the seas across a great fetch. Undiluted by island or reef, swells barge in with organized, elemental malice. On a Moroccan cliff above the raging but strangely ordered confrontation between the old rivals, wet and dry, it is comforting glad to have the continental mass of Africa at your back.

Lacking a suicidal volunteer for on-site inspection in giant surf we tried to gauge the size of the waves against animals grazing in the foreground. The practice began with small surf, when the waves were a sheep-and-a-half, maybe two-sheep high. Things get serious when you start talking camels, and many days had three- and four-camel sets.

The winter sea here is frequently too turbulent to ride. You surf the swell in ascent or descent or find somewhere sheltered. The best wave in the country, ranking as a world-class surf break, is just such a sheltered configuration. Myriad other spots can be found, all with a common component: Cruel and Radical Rocks. Morocco's rugged coast is geologically youthful, unlike California and Australia where eons of oceanic abuse have humbled the boulders into roundness.

Several places have potentially perfect setups but either the wave-forming shelf is too shallow beneath the surface or impudent crags insult the contour. With a bit more erosion they will become excellent surfing waves. It won't be long, a mere tick of the geological clock. Say, a couple of thousand years.

Few of the quality breaks have sand beaches, much less sand bottoms. You leap off the rocks to get out and scramble up the rocks to get in. Misjudging either move can be costly. Leashes are an absolute necessity, as are wetsuit boots. Not because the water is so cold (although it is) but without them the barnacle-encrusted rocks will grind your tootsies to hamburger.

We named our car Nellybelle. She was a zippy little unit crammed with three crazies and enough knives, cameras, wine, surfboards, wetsuits, maps, binoculars and suspicious materials to incriminate a herd of nuns. When the boys were blazing in the Full Tilt Boogie mode smoke clouds puffed out the windows like a little choo-choo chanting, "I think I can, I think I can . . . but why bother?” In short, Nellybelle was a four-wheeled felony, a mobile breach of the peace, hurtling over the potholes just this side of slobbering chaos. Brewer was banned from driving because of his old lady style at the wheel. Good surfers are notoriously wild drivers. This is natural. Good surfing is aggressive motion pushed to the limits, waffling on the knife edge between control and catastrophe. A car is a moving vessel subject to the same laws of physics, the same speed, distance and timing principles as a surfboard. In the hands of a wild-eyed surfer, road travel is just another medium for aggressive motion. A four-wheel drift through a merry-go-round intersection is like a full-rail roundhouse cutback. Playing chicken with dump trucks on single-lane blacktops is like shoulder-hopping thick mokes at Ala Moana. But for sheer no-tomorrow craziness, it's hard to top passing buses on mountain curves at night. This was Rory’s specialty. The trick is to see the dust in the air illuminated by the on-coming lights before the vehicle itself actually rounds the bend for a head-on hello. The intensity of illumination tells how close it is. For a surfer in the ‘vessel-in-motion’ frame of mind, a winding mountain road has a flow like a pointbreak wave. Take it a step further, and buses become sections in the wave, tricky but makeable. A dark-dust pass needed no comment but lit dust might evoke a “could be tight, guys" from the pilot. One night, hell-bent for an early grave, Rory was passing a bus and started with “could be tight, guys.” Suddenly the dust in the air was very bright. “Could be REAL TIGHT, boys!” and all of a sudden this huge mastodon of a bus whipped around the turn, trumpeting as he charged. “TOO TIGHT!! TOO TIGHT!” The bus horn was blaring, people hung out the windows screaming, and we plowed off to the left shoulder, catatonic with panic and gratitude there had actually been a road shoulder instead of the usual cliff. After a second of dead silence, Art asked nobody in particular, "how’s the drop?" I glanced over the edge into the black abyss. “Perfect. If we go over we'll plummet, not roll, so our bodies will be more easily identifiable.” Outraged at the foreign devils who had endangered his life, the truck driver screeched to a halt and climbed down waving a crowbar. We left with no goodbyes.

Violent crime is rare in Morocco. The locals are into more subtle varieties. Thievery is a time-honored tradition, so popular it could be called the national sport. Government corruption, meanwhile, rages like fire in a coal mine, ardent, sinuous, unquenchable. Given these two things, tourists, for the most part, are viewed not as people but as a resource to be exploited, gouged like fleshy mounds bloated with silver.

Nowhere is worse than the area around the country’s premier surf break. Some distance from any town with police, a virtual state of war exists between the campers, mostly surfers, and the young punks that case the place by day and return for their marks at night. The locks on car doors and trunks are useless. In the dark, thieves will quietly slice the rubber windshield seals, remove the glass, and scavenge the trunk from the back seat. One couple told of awakening to find a Moroccan, his head and arms leaning through the hole he slit in their tent, trying to steal a necklace from the girl's neck as she slept. Another guy was asleep in his station wagon when a boulder crashed through the window to land on his chest. Then a hand reached in, grabbed the cassette player next to him and disappeared. Some English guys had their boards stolen, a fatal blow to any surf trip.


Retaining refuse for proper disposal is practiced erratically by industrialized societies and generally ignored in underdeveloped countries. In the sad fashion of the third world, Moroccans trash their own country with abandon. But Team Maroc was loathe to litter and three gluttonous surf dogs generate a lot of garbage. Nellybelle’s belly clattered with beer bottles over every bumpy kilometer, along with candy wrappers, sticky yogurt cups, rancid cheese, evil-smelling towels, the foulest socks known to man, and all manner of vile debris sloshing around ankle deep, breeding unimaginable stench and vermin. Your basic surfmobile. This good citizenship was not without hazard, however. Decelerating for a police roadblock outside Tiznit, (they’re everywhere) a beer bottle rolled forward and jammed the gas pedal. With the clutch in, we were breaking to a respectable stop but the motor was roaring full blast. When the road cop heard the pistons blazing and saw a carload of white trash bearing down, he was seized by abject terror and lunged off to scramble up the side of his van, as though Nellybelle was a snarling Land Shark he could evade by reaching higher ground. We thought that was hilarious but our giggles changed his fear to rage and the 

 began raving in Arabic which brought his military buddies running.

Suddenly Team Maroc was about to have its ticket perforated by six machine guns. It was a Delicate Moment. We played dumb tourists and the soldiers, absent for the original event, thought their comrade, scarlet-faced, sputtering and drooling on himself, was suffering from some kind of seizure. They helped him out of the sun and we rattled on intact, more or less.

As a veteran traveler to the Third World and other areas of marginal sanity, I am accustomed to the personal irregularities one finds among the natives. I mean, you expect slovenliness from Ubangies, or people that surf Sebastian Inlet—you know, the real primitives. But not among your own travel companions. Art and Rory eat with all the slobbering daintiness of cannibals masticating missionaries in the Borneo wilds.

My subtle hints went unheeded, muffled by their grunts. Across the table from me, morning after morning, day in and day out, wads of food bobbed in their mouths visibly, like the heads of tiny gophers struggling in flooded holes but finally going down.

At one especially obnoxious feeding, I finally made some pointed remarks about table manners. Rory jerked his face out of his plate and angrily told me that they knew how to act around people but this was just us so there was no need to be civilized. As he spoke, flecks of shredded mutton fell from his chin like dandruff. What could I say? Social defectives are immune to reason. I closed my eyes, screwed wine corks into my ears and got on with it.

Surfing under friendly skies in now-familiar waters, I was disrespectful of the danger. There is no beach. Every set slams into the point and rakes across rocks that bristle with barnacles, mussels, and urchins. Leaving the water is tricky, but I have lunged across these rocks, surfboard in tow, countless times before. It’s all in the timing. Floating with one arm around your board, you wash up the rocks on a rolling swell then cling fast at the height of the surge so the ebb won’t suck you back. A bad mistake in big surf and you’ll be keelhauled. I learned the hard way. Incautious with enthusiasm from several deep tuberides, I misjudged my exit. Half-in and half-out, the most vulnerable place, the wave behind blasted me and I bounced across the rocks like a side of beef tumbling out of a speeding meat truck. I made it to the shore, but my hand was shrieking with pain. The tiny yellow globules of fat that puff the palm curled back like the curdled lips of an ugly sneer, baring muscle, while the whole forearm of my blue wetsuit was blood-stained to a deep purple. At the nearest hospital, a kind French doctor, Madam Gabrielle, assigned three interns to attendance. Once the novocaine did it's magic, the interns gathered round to watch. Hunched over my hand with their foreheads almost touching, they looked like a team of palm-readers, and I looked on as they did their best to salvage my mutilated future.

Rory is a genuine world-class surfing talent who rips in all conditions. He has also completely embraced the character of a Party Animal on a Rigid Pleasure Program. Although versed on practical subjects from clothing design to sexual aberration, he refuses serious pursuits. When the mood wanders he interrupts impatiently, like a hedonistic sheepdog herding his wooly thoughts back to pleasurable pastures.

Brewer is generally mild-mannered but when a frown, like a cloud, darkens his brow, bystanders must beware the thunder of a large angry man capable of great destruction. (There’s a fist-hole in the wall at SURFER Mag’s offices where Brewer vented his displeasure on the plasterboard instead of an offender's face.) After becoming one of the world’s best surf photographers, he wedged his way into the photographic mainstream. Except for weddings and baby portraits, which he classes right down there with herpes, he’ll work anywhere on anything, with a personal preference for the really sick and deranged. Which is why he agreed to come on this trip.

The American Sportsman crew were relaxed travel vets who’ve seen everything at least twice before in some guise or other. Casual professionalism is the trademark of network television production and anyone obsessed with posing, on either side of the camera, won’t fit the program for long. With seasoned tolerance, they endured rain, fog, dust storms, fraud, police intervention, flat tires, finicky talent, and erratic surf. When the dust settled, they got what they came for. The piece on surfing in Morocco should air sometime in the spring of ’83.

After the TV crew left, Team Maroc hung around a while longer to be certain we had left no scandal untried and no chastity untempted in a quest to thoroughly burn out our welcome. Nellybelle was 6,000 miles the worse for wear when we finally dumped her, ruined and abandoned, one more pleasure-source used far beyond rational limits.

"MOROCCO: SURF MADNESS AND 1001 MOORISH DAYS AND NIGHTMARES," BY BRUCE VALLUZZI

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