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ANDREA KIRKBY
Andrea's grandfather started her travel habit when he took her to Norway at the age of nine. Since then she has walked to Santiago de Compostela, climbed Oman's highest mountain, walked round all St Peterburg's canals one summer night, helped feed the market cats in Meknes, and fallen in love with Bulgarian bagpipes. Following a Cambridge English degree, she has worked in the City and as a business journalist - including an interesting time in Eastern Europe in the 1990s - and is now developing a travel journalism portfolio. She also runs a small busines offering downloadable audio guides to European destinations (http://www.podtours.co.uk).
THE NIGHT KITCHENS OF ZEIDA
We've dozed fitfully on the way here, as the bus swerves its twisting way through the Atlas foothills, passing headlamps and the dim glow of the dashboard the only light that breaks the absolute Moroccan night.
I'm half asleep as the bus pulls into town. Rubbing my eyes, as the blur of waking dissolves, I see a wide street, low buildings, a line of buses. Gravel crunches under the tyres as we pull over. It's one o'clock in the morning.
We'll be here an hour. I try to sleep, give it up as a bad job after ten minutes, decide to get out and look around.
Above, the stars shine sharp and cold in the utter dark. The puny streetlights of the town are too few to taint the sky with orange. On the other side of the road, the houses are dark. Cats slink across the parking lot, fix the bus with shining eyes, and with a flick of tail disappear into the night.
But this side of the road glares with electric lamps.
This is a nowhere town. Low buildings of breezeblock. A single long road. Somewhere between Azrou and Midelt, in the blank space in the map in the Rough Guide. I can't even find out what the place is called. Nondescript by day, it seems the place comes alive only at night, when every bus travelling the long road from Fes or Meknes to the south stops here.
Every stall facing the road is brightly lit as a stage or a peepshow. In one, a sweaty man moulds minced meat into brochettes, pinpointed by the light in his grid-like box. (I'm reminded strangely of a Vermeer.) In another, a butcher cleaves a joint in two.
I hear the grudging hiss of a sharp knife through meat. The smell of blood is oddly heavy and sweet. Outside the next stall, a half carcass is hanging, the bull's tail still attached. A man comes, buys a half kilo of meat, sees it carved off the bone, and takes it next door to be cooked.
A cat brushes my leg as it scuttles past, looking for scraps.
The line of stalls seems to extend for miles. There must be twenty or thirty buses stopped here. The noise of their engines never stops.
It's so like a surreal dream that I pinch my leg through my jeans pocket to make sure I'm awake. The smell of mint prickles my nose, and I wander over to one of the stalls where a waiter is pushing fresh mint leaves roughly into a teapot. I hadn't realised how cold the night had become till the sugary liquid warms my stomach.
The engine of a bus starts turning over. A man with an anorak over his djellaba dashes out of a cafe; it's a false alarm. But I look at my watch; it's nearly two in the morning. Time to get back to my bus.
Back into the black night, past bright shops where customers seem frozen in the moment as if by a flash light. Back on our way through the dark, from this town we didn't know existed to the deserts of the south.
As we leave, I see the sign. Zeida. I write down the name on the back of my bus ticket.
MORE SHORTLISTED TRAVEL-WRITING COMPETITION ENTRIES
Dragon Boat Martin Alexander
T Time in Buenos Aires Sally Blake
Colours Unknown Kate Cantrell
Snaps Sophie Coulombeau
November, 2008 Jo Forel
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