Camels, chaperones, and land mines
Before I arrived in Morocco, I wasn’t quite sure how things were going to work out, whether I would have help or how I would carry out the beach surveys. The uncertainty led me to romanticize about hiring a camel and doing beach surveys on camelback. However, my Moroccan collaborators were most generous and more practical and provided me with a vehicle and chauffeur and a biologist. A far more sensible alternative since I spoke neither Arabic nor Berber, and a camel and French wouldn’t have got me very far down the coast. I also quickly learnt that having two male escorts in a largely male-dominated society made data collection much easier. But a small incident made me realize that while the arrangements suited me, I was no easy responsibility for my escorts. We had arrived at a little fishing village in the cliffs along a long, broad, stretch of beach - my escorts chose to drink “Moroccan whiskey” (=green tea with mint leaves) with the fishermen, while I set off on my own to search for evidence of nesting turtles and stranded carcasses. It took me over half an hour to walk till the end of the beach and then head back. I was enjoying the evening and puzzling over why turtles did not nest on these seemingly respectable beaches, when I saw my escorts running towards me. They arrived out of breath and extremely annoyed: apparently, I had been gone too long, had ventured too far, terrible things could have happened because it wasn’t safe; I was their responsibility and I wasn’t to go anywhere alone! Henceforth, however tedious or tiring my data collection might have been for them, they chaperoned me closely up and down every beach and even to the local market on a sight-seeing trip. With such efficient transportation and wonderful help, I managed to cover much of the Atlantic coast; only the southern beaches in the Western Sahara region, close to Mauritania, remained unsurveyed because of buried land mines in the beach…