no photo identification, no cry

When there’s a will, there’s gotta be a way, even if it means waking up at 4 in the morning to take a 6 hour train ride that stalls due to mechanical reasons, followed by a 3 hour cab ride through desert terrain squishing 7 people into a 5 person vehicle (…without air conditioning).

The Festivale musique de gnaoua à Essaouira was the driving force and it was well worth the trouble that it took to get there. Even the decrepit train toilet with the flaking seat and the broken flush seemed alright, knowing the most renowned music festival in Morocco awaited us. Every year, the festival draws in tens of thousands of people from across the country and from all over the world. It features fusion, folk, and world beats, scattered over 7 stages throughout a town that is known for little more than this one annual celebration of music.

Our day began with a meltdown on Kellye’s part over fears that her unceasing cough might evolve into a nasty, rotting death on a train cabin in Middle of Nowhere Morocco. Not even my expired First Aid certification (which, FYI, took me 3 tries until I eventually passed) could ease her concerns. Luckily, she toughed it out and we eventually arrived to Marrakech safe and sound, lungs and excitement in tact.

From there, we organized a group of fellow festival-goers and bargained for a cheap ride to take us to Essaouira. Little did we know, however, that we had been swept up into some shady unlicensed taxi service – which explains why we were able to bargain for such a cheap price. Before we could get the wheels-a-rollin’, a mob of police officers and (very angry, licensed) taxi divers surrounded our van, telling us that we had to use one of their legitimate cab services, which translates to Moroccan as having to pay more only to ride in a cramped car with no AC for 3 hours.

Needless to say, by the time we arrived in Essaouira, we were not in any mood to crash on the floor of our friend’s flat as was originally planned. Tired, sweaty, etc. (no need to give details), we opted to invest in a hotel for the night. In order to do so, however, we both needed to have photo ID on hand. Being the genius that I am (really), I had left all forms of photo ID in Rabat, thinking that if anyone dared to steal my purse, they wouldn’t get their scheming hands on my unflattering passport photo. Brilliant, right? Not when you are dying to get rid of your bags and aching to rest on a real bed, not when you desperately need to take a shower in order to wash off the smelly Moroccan sweat (yours and the other dozen people you’ve rubbed elbows with) that has accumulated on your skin over the past 12 hours. Only the amenities of a hotel could lift me up out of the grubby state I was in.

I figured that since this country has its fair share of corruption, the hotel manager would have to budge and let me stay in her hotel. After all, she’d be making a profit off of my business! But for some odd reason - maybe I had found one of the few law-abiding citizens of Morocco - there was no way she would let us stay there unless I presented her my photo ID.

So off we went to the nearest cyber café, where I frantically searched my Gmail archives, sent emails, and even checked Facebook for a scanned piece of ID that I may have, in sensible days gone by, scanned and uploaded for situations such as this one. But alas, I couldn’t find anything…

...EXCEPT for an idea, one of the most brilliant ones I’ve ever had…

One thing that Morocco is not is technologically backward. Using Adobe Photoshop, a Google search engine, a Facebook photo, and lots of cropping & copying & pasting, I became Stephanie Brown with a Columbia University Student ID that was supposedly faxed from home.

(NOTE: This is the moment when I would like to thank my mom for passing on to me her awesome graphic design skills). After weaving in and out of the crowds in the medina all day, after having dinner with the Brits and the Bostonians we met en route to Essaouira, and after listening to one of Bob Marley’s (accounted for) sons perform his father’s classic hits, that hotel bed that took so long and so much work to get to was heaven served on a pillow.