So, I’m the Director of SWAP and I have been for almost 30 years so I hope you don’t find it odd that we have a youth program here being run by some old fart. When such criticism arises, I fall back on my standard response which notes that you don’t have to be dead to be an undertaker. But as I am the Director, and as we do have a blog site, and as I have always fancied myself as some sort of literary lion… well pussycat of some sort… the inevitable has occurred and I am wading into this with a true, gripping yarn about back-packing in ancient times without the benefit of Facebook and cell phones. Yes, there were such times and although life was tough then, we did manage to get out and see bits and pieces of the planet. 

Back in ‘69, when even I was a youth, I decided it was time for high adventure and Europe beckoned. There was no Travel CUTS (at least not in Halifax, Nova Scotia) so I walked directly into the Air Canada ticket office and on the advice of a friend, asked for a return ticket to Lisbon. Of course, there were no direct flights between Halifax and Lisbon but there was one flight per week to London. As the crow flies, Halifax is actually marginally closer to Lisbon than it is to London and because of international airline rules in those days, the London-Lisbon return legs were absolutely free. They couldn’t charge you to double back a ways towards your originating city. It was wonderful, at least for those of us flying out of Halifax and I should add that the whole thing came to the grand total of $156CAD, all taxes included. Oh, the London-Lisbon legs as well as the return from LHR to Halifax were open-dated and no fee was charged whenever one wanted a date change! Did I mention $156CAD?!

After a couple of days in London I connected with three friends from Halifax and decided that the Highlands of Scotland were calling to us. So we rented a Vauxhall (that’s an English car) and after two hours of chaos sorting out driving on the wrong side of the road and then British roundabouts, finally found ourselves on the M1 Motorway in the correct lanes hurtling to The North. We arrived initially in Glasgow and checked out an address of some friends of a friend which proved to be in a condemned building. This was in the middle of the Gorbles, the notorious slums of Glasgow, now thankfully gone. We spent a few hours in this wee hell-hole watching a number of Glaswegian hippies consuming copious amounts of alcohol as well as a prestigious amount of contraband materials and as they had all passed out by midnight, we jumped back into the Vauxhall and drove to Edinburgh.  

Apart from a late night run-in with Incarnate Evil, we all agreed that Edinburgh was the nicer of the two cities and we stayed there for several days.  Upon arrival, we decided to sleep in the car for what was left of the night and did so in the parking lot of a large factory. It wasn’t long before we all had noticed an apparition in one of the factory’s massive and barred windows which looked very much like a 20 foot high robed figure intent at getting out at us. The tension in the Vauxhall was palatable until one of the girls pointed out that it was only a large curtain blowing around in the wind and that we should really try to sleep. Calm was restored and the Vauxhall was, for a short while, a sea of peace and tranquility.

Ever vigilant, two thoughts occurred to me that I felt I had to share with the others. Firstly, I noted that it was unlikely that the South East Scottish Coal Board (or whatever ) was into “window treatment” and that artfully arranged sheer curtains were certainly not commonplace in heavy industry. Secondly, I wondered aloud just why there would be a strong wind inside the building when it was perfectly calm outside. No one slept for what was left of the night. By dawn, it was evident that there certainly were no curtains at all in that window. Someone proposed breakfast and we all agreed.

We never did make it into the Highlands largely because the Vauxhall fell apart one morning near the battlefield of Bannockburn where King Robert the Bruce avenged the death of Mel Gibson. So we retreated back to London and after a number of adventures which would be inappropriate to recount, I decided to take that flight to Lisbon and see what it was like. Apart from being a police state at that point in time, I rather liked Portugal.

Myself and another Canadian I met in Lisbon decided that Morocco was our ultimate destination and found ourselves on a 15 hour bus ride from Lisbon to Seville in Spain which was also a police state at the time. (They have since invented motorways and democracy in that neck of the woods!) I have only two memories about that visit to Seville. One was the tomb of Columbus (well, one of them as some years later I saw the other one in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic.) The other was the constant search for toilet paper but we won’t go there. The next day had us on a bus heading to Algeciras and the ferry to Tangiers.

As the ferry slipped pass the great rock of Gibraltar, we had a political science  lesson. A huge aircraft carrier was just putting out to sea from that bastion of the British Empire and the Royal Navy. We were whistling “Rule Britiannia, Britannia rules the waves” , a very stirring little patriotic ditty when we noticed that the carrier was actually the USS John F Kennedy! Well… Britannia used to rule the waves!

Excitedly, we stepped on to the continent of Africa and the culture shock experienced by North Americans in Western Europe went up by several notches. It was my first time in the “developing world” and we could not believe the street scenes. The hustling was beyond imagination. As we trooped around the Casbah looking for cheap digs, we had a following of what seemed to be thousands of people, most of whom had something to sell. But apart from the maddened crowds, Tangiers was magical for us. We had, for all intent, stepped into another century. This was particularly evident at night as the long-robed and hooded population seemed to drift by us in an almost spectral fashion.

After a couple of days in Tangiers and an overnight in Casablanca which proved to be far less romantic than the film, we made it to Marrakesh naturally encouraged by the latest Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young ditty of the day, the Marrakesh Express. We spent several weeks living there and prided ourselves on the fact that we could manage very nicely on about $2.00USD per day. This naturally excluded the big weekly treat which was a full breakfast at the local Holiday Inn! I remember the first morning and I volunteered to go out and buy  something for breakfast and soon found a vendor walking along with a huge wicker basket filled with oranges. I quickly established a price of 3 Dirhams, about 60 cents and I assumed that would give me a dozen of them. However, once I paid out the money, the gentleman smiled, passed me the entire basket and went his merry way! We were both thrilled…. He had likely double-charged me but we had a weeks supply of oranges! 

After an interminable time in Marrakesh, my Canadian friend and I bought a train ticket back to Tangiers. Third class was the cheapest way to go if you didn’t mind the odd chicken landing in your lap. We discovered that one could keep buying tickets from the conductor so we pushed on towards the Algerian border with the intention of crossing that country into Tunisia and then taking the ferry from Tunis to Palermo in Sicily. Nobody mentioned Oujda to us until we got there.

Oujda is the last town in Morocco before the Algerian border. You don’t change trains there as there is no other train to change over to. This was the fatal flaw in our travel planning. It seems that the Moroccans and Algerians had such unbridled love for one another that they tore up the tracks for a few miles on both sides of the border so they couldn’t invade one another too easily. So after a night at the Oujda Youth Hostel, we had to take a taxi to the Algerian border which cost us 15 Dirham. After successfully exiting Moroccan Immigration, we quickly established that there was no way to change Moroccan Dirhams for Algerian Dinars. In retrospect, this should have been no big thing as we were living on about $2CAD per day at the time. But, a Moroccan soldier directed us to a robed gentleman squatting behind their guardhouse who was a veritable Thomas Cook.

We excepted his most unattractive rate of 10 Moroccan Dirhams for 5 Algerian Dinars  and proceeded across No-Mans-Land to the Algerian guard post where we were greeted with the sight of a French traveller being caught with hashish and dragged off by Algerian police to some unpleasant fate. I reached into my little passport pouch (sewn by my dear old mother) to bring out my documents and realised that there were certain traces, mere traces, of a well-known Moroccan agricultural product in evidence in the pouch. While I was considering the quality and quantity of toilet paper available to Canadians in Algerian prisons, I heard the official ask to see our Algerian visas. My friend was ready to argue about the need for a visa to pass through their be-knighted country. I, on the other hand, was a model of cooperation and understanding and more than prepared to return to Morocco to secure a Transit Visa.

So to my great relief, we left the Algerian post and marched quickly and sharply back to hospitable Morocco, stopping by of course for a quick transaction with the Thomas Cook or if you prefer, Algerian Express, agent squatting behind the shack. Having little choice, and no Dirhams, we accepted his exchange rate of 10 Algerian Dinars for 5 Morrocan Dirhams. The cab driver was awaiting us on the Moroccan side with a wide smile and charged us 30 Dirhams for the ride back to Oujda where he took us directly to the Algerian consulate although we hadn’t indicated that as a destination. Did these guys see us coming or what?!!! 

Try to imagine spending five days in Oujda, Morocco. There was not a great deal to do as it really was the middle of nowhere. We met three American guys with a windowless van who were heading to Tunis and offered us a lift. By the second day into Algeria, I was running a very high fever and my  coughing, which had been persistent for some time, was getting quite nasty. I should add that this was December so even North Africa was not what you would call “a day at the beach” at that time of the year. I was semi-delirious by the time we hit the Tunisian border and the guard there really didn’t like the look of me and was refusing to admit me into the country. Luckily, one of the Americans was a natural born salesman and convinced the guy that I was merely suffering from a hang-over and we drove on to the city of Tunis.

After checking us into a seedy hotel, the boys went off in search of the Canadian  Embassy and they arrived back at the hotel with the Second Secretary in tow who pronounced that they had to get me to a clinic and quick. Within an hour, I was admitted to the Hopital Charles Nicoll with pneumonia where I was to spend the next several weeks. I am told that my friends had to be quite insistent that fresh sheets be put on my bed as some poor chap had the misfortune of dying in it an hour earlier. It all meant nothing to me as I was past caring about much. By the next day, I was still in rough shape but capable of rational thought. It was an improvement. My friends came by to visit and in the case of our American friends, to say good-bye as they were heading to Palermo the next day. I convinced my Canadian friend ( we had met in Lisbon) to go with them as there was little he could do for me and the Embassy knew where I was. After some argument, he concurred and I haven’t laid eyes on any of them ever since. 

I spent six weeks in this public hospital which had over 40 beds in my ward. Meals were served by two women with blue facial tattoos and this was far from haute cuisine. They always had two huge, steaming canisters on a trolley, one filled with what I called pig swill and the other looked so bad I couldn’t even name it. I lived on lettuce, oranges and yogurt for the entire time. Once a week, the Second Secretary would come by with some books and treats and we became quite friendly over time. I spoke no Arabic but my high school French helped considerably in chatting with the other patients.

There proved to be one other “English patient” in the establishment and he was from Ghana. He was in a special room with a permanent police escort as he had just been arrested living at the Tunis Hilton with a stolen American Express Card. He claimed it was all a mistake, of course. So from time to time, once I was sufficiently mobile, I would wander down to his room for a chat. My visits became less frequent as all he wanted to do was read to me his poetry about “Africa, the Awakening Giant”.

To cut to the chase here, after six weeks the Second Secretary decided that the hospital was probably killing me and demanded my release. He was probably right! And it was quite neat being the focus of a potential “international incident”. The head doctor had kindly put my passport in his safe at home but had gone to Paris for two weeks. So stuck, I stayed with the Second Secretary and his pregnant wife in their home for the two weeks and convalesced quite nicely. And the “Royal Bank of Mom and Dad” back home arranged for a return ticket to Halifax via Paris and Montreal and I arrived home at midnight one night demanding a peanut butter sandwich!! Hey, a guy has his priorities!

Twenty years later I received a letter from a young woman at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario which caused me something of a jolt. It started: “Dear Mr Smith, we sort of met 20 years ago when you stayed with my folks in Tunis. I say “sort of” because I was an embryo at the time.”  She was writing to me looking for a summer job and one of the SWAP staff was heading that way the next day for a promotional talk. She interviewed the student who ended up working for us in Toronto for two summers. That summer, her dad (the Second Secretary) had just returned from Bangladesh where he had been the Canadian High Commissioner (Ambassador) and this allowed me to finally thank him by sending up a nice bottle of single malt scotch for his 50th birthday. 

Prologue: It’s true that I never again did run into the Americans who drove us across Algeria and I would never remember their names anyway. I started this tale off by noting that these were ancient times before “information technology” even as a concept had a name. So it is also true that I never ran into my Canadian buddy ever again either even though we were both from Halifax. So, I shall take advantage of this “information technology” stuff and ask if anyone foolish enough to have read this story might have a father/uncle/grandfather named Terry Irwin who went to Dalhousie University in the late 1960’s. If you know him, ask him to email me care of swapinfo@swap.ca . I’m sure we would both like to know what ever happened to one another! And so I will be sure that it’s him, he should mention the name of the one mutual friend that we had in Halifax even though we had not known one another there.

David Smith