The Progressive and Highly Modern Islamic Kingdom of Morocco

From Stab issue 75…

Before we dive in… This’ll probably make you wanna go dance in Morocco. And Surf Maroc is your absolute best option for riding the breeze. Noa and Jay dined on their delicious food, slept in their excellent rooms, and rode shotgun with their real helpful surf guides. And, @surfmaroc is probably an IG that can enhance your life marginally. 

Words by Derek Rielly | Photos by Matthew O’Brien

And it’s late now, but not too late to be promenading in the great square in Marrakesh. The air is warm, balmy for February and the indigo sky is spangled with bright stars. And here is Noa Deane, all black, including his normally yellow hair, and from his seal-brown countenance gleam two rows of pearly teeth.

Jay Davies, meanwhile, in tight-fighting wool jumper and jeans, reveals his sinewy figure to all who gaze upon him, and all gaze, especially the famously repressed Moroccan man.

Monkeys on chains, bent men selling so much of that famous hashish that you vow never to smoke before lunch time every day but you find yourself pecking at by nine, mint tea, dusty rugs, red sunsets.

And Jay and Noa are good now, good now that Noa has recovered a modicum of positivity after showering the gang with complaints for days. And the sickness that felled everyone on the trip, except Noa who beat it by staying high, has gone.

Now it’s time to buy bottles in night clubs and draw fingers across skin that is clear and soft as velvet, with soft brown eyes that seem to beg. Later, rhythmic clapping as you dance and hammering on portals!

What a trip! Waves that ran for a mile; a house in the snow ruined by drug-addicted hookers; murders; secret alcohol runs.

Now let’s shove that microphone into the talk to co-star of the trip, Noa Deane…

Noa eats a hunk o snow in the Atlas Mountains.

Stab: I want you to describe your experience in Morocco, a kingdom I adore for its contradictory nature, for its repression that makes even the tiny kinks a pleasure palace!
Noa: It was pretty fucking dry. It was so hot there and we kept getting calls that the banks were ruined by the Hercules swell or some shit that had hit earlier. We kept driving around, thinking we were blowing it all the time that we ended up blowing our minds. And now I look at the shots and they’re the best shots I’ve ever had. So what was I worried about? Jay nearly punched me because I was getting under his skin so bad, being so negative. He told me to fucking shut the fuck up. Half-an-hour later we were sweet.

Can you describe this mood that enraged Jay? Oh fuck! I was trying to bail on the surf trip and go shoot photos and he didn’t want to do it, really. He wanted to do that lifestyle shit a couple of days later. The surf was doing my fucking head in. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I was, I wanna get outta here, I fucking hate this same shit, it’ll be fucked, let’s fuck off. And we left to go to Marrakesh and he was bummed but when we got there he was fucking psyched. We had the best time ever in the last five days. We went everywhere. Up in the mountains. Driving eight hours to a new place every day and we’d hang out at night and shit. It was the coolest thing.

Give me a little timeline on this trip… Well, we went for two weeks and the first couple of days it was fucking eight foot or 10 foot. Matt (O’Brien, the photographer) got so sick he couldn’t get out of bed. Everbody got sick apart from me. I got sick for an hour. I puked once and I was sweet. Matt was sick for three days. He was fucked. Me and Jay surfed this point and it was the most fucking pyscho-est thing ever. The wind was 100 knots and it was eight foot. I got the fucking craziest barrels, the biggest cave. Shane (Fletcher, the filmer) was filming but the wave was two kay’s long so we didn’t get it but I was still psyched. We’d fucking catch waves for a million kilometres, step off down the line after riding the wave for a minute then a car would pick us up and drive us back up the point.

Anything adventurous happen in these difficult conditions? Jay got stuck in a rip and thought he was going to die. The wind was blowing him out even further, half a kay out from the lineup. You could go forever on these waves. It was like skiing. It was so fucking wild. And I randomly saw Rasta and Ryan Burch out there. It was fucking weird.

The name of the wave references an evil character in fiction. Can you paint a picture for me of the wave? You pull up to this carpark in front of a wave called Boilers and it’s up from that. It wedges off this thing and then it fucking breaks. It’s longer than Snapper to Kirra. When it’s huge it breaks out the back and and there’s a wedge way on the inside, a pscho wedge beach. The next day when it got real big there were 20 waves in a set and you could jump off your wave and catch the next one. Fucking crazy, right? Matt couldn’t even shoot it. You might do nothing for a hundred metres and then your window in front of the photographers is done.

How was your personal ambience? I was having a shocker. I kept getting drunk every night so I wouldn’t get sick and then I stopped and got sick for 10 minutes. I was in it from the start of the trip to the end. I didn’t have a day off and I was so fucking cooked We started to surf out the front of our place, then the long point, then this wedge place and then we went down and surfed this Trestles-kinda wave. It looked about four foot and it was eight foot. We got this acid shit in our eyes when we paddled out and it felt like it was eating our eyes away. There’s an acid dumping factory there, right there! So that was fucked. I was paddling out and just like looking at Jay, saying, what the fuck are we doing out here! We thought there were ramps but we were swept into the beach. We tried to surf a little right. Me and Jay would come in from these surfs blowing up at the same time about how bad it was and Matt would be psyched. We were still doing good shit but having fucking trouble landing shit. And he was saying, this is epic!

Around this time I was going to Israel and you were so on but then you pulled ‘cause you heard, oowee, them Muslims hate Jews and if I get an Israel stamp I ain’t getting in to Morocco! Apparently there’s a fuckload of Islamic countries that don’t want to let a Jewish person in. I was super bummed.

What was the best thing you saw in Maroc? The blue city called Chefchaouen. We drove in there at night and when we woke up we walked up to the top of our terrace and everything was blue. The road was blue. The houses were blue. The whole thing’s blue! We went walking around and everything was rendered and painted either light or dark blue. It was the weirdest place I’d ever been to, in this random valley, six hours inland, closer to the Med than the Atlantic and in this big fucking crater hole.

What was the worst thing you experienced? We were walking through the streets and we had this Moroccan surf guide and the government has a law that you’re not allowed to be shown around by a Moroccan because they think you’ll get ripped off, and we were walking down this super crowded street and this super fucking gnarly undercover cop grabs him and runs off with him. I couldn’t even remember where we were staying and suddenly our guide was stolen by the police! We followed him back and told ‘em that he was our friend and eventually they told him he could go. He was so lucky! He would’ve been screwed if he’d been locked up.

Marrakesh? Talk to me about it? We were went there and me and and Jay smoked some hash and we were so high we went and ate snails.

It’s a surprisingly delicious treat, a remnant of the French influence. They’re so sick. Like abalone, a little chicken-esque, too. Then we went up and cruised on top of this rooftop bar and watched the city. After that I went to a super club.

How super was the super club? Fucking huge, man, it was psycho. I got pushed up against the wall by four security guards. I was kinda drunk and didn’t know what was happening but it turned out some shiek from Abu Dhabi had arrived. I was in that club for a couple of hours then another one.

Were you a dancing bear? Kinda. You weren’t even allowed to go in unless you bought a bottle. It’s gay but I bought one, anyway. I was hanging out with some Moroccan chicks. They were brown-eyed and had brown hair. Something weird happened but I can’t remember what it was.

What about Casablanca, an Islamic Paris on the Atlantic. How was it for you? We stayed there on the last night and didn’t do anything cool. Maybe next time I’ll session on that place.

The hash is delicious, too, and even though I’m normally opposed to it, and weed, on a number of grounds, I find myself enjoying it in Morocco. It’s fucked, huh! Hey, I’ve got a good story for ya! We went to this place called Ifrane, an alpine snow town in the Atlas mountains. The day before we were online picking a house to stay at. There was this one that was real sweet but it was 200 euros and I was, like, fuck that, that sounds too expensive for one night. It would’ve been sweet once we’d split it up but, then, fuck, we went to this other joint. It looked sick. Old school. It fucking had a garden. Snow out the front. We turned the fireplace on and everything started going downhill from there. Why are the window’s boarded up? Jay goes to the toilet downstairs and sees all these lipstick kisses on the back of the door. On the terrace there was graffiti that said, you died tonight! And in the backyard there was this creepy dude cutting up wood. All the mirrors were smashed. One bed had all these weird stains. It was so sketchy. The lady who rented us the house kept asking us if we wanted hookers. Are you sure you don’t want hookers? And the lady pointed at one door and said, don’t go in this door. It was wigging me out that we were obviously staying at a haunted hookers house. I slept with my fucking shoes on and shit and tried to green out but I totally kooked it. But I got to sleep for one second and felt this thing poke me in the back. Are you fucking kidding me? I started stressing out for hours, trying to put alarm clocks on to wake everybody up. By the time we got out, it was, fuck yeah, we survived that. Fucking hell, that was the heaviest thing that’s ever happened to me. I was so tripped out the next day but psyched that it happened, just cause you got that story to tell.

You love beer, but it’s a muslim country. Did this present problems? It was kinda hard but we‘d go to this supermarket down in Agadir and just buy a bunch at once. I bought a shit ton one day, four cartons, so we didn’t have to do it again. It sucks that you can’t get a beer on the water. You just wanna grab a beer and watch the surf and you can’t do it. You gotta creep into your place and have a beer and fucking hide the can.

And tell me all about your airs! So much tweak! The theatre! It’s a style thing, the more tweaked out, the better style and the better it is. Obviously, it’s harder to do, but I used to watch Dane when I was a little kid and it was all I ever wanted to do. And then when I saw Creed and he was doing it, I knew that was the fucking titties. (Tom) Pringle used to do it too, indy grabs, and put his crane arm over the head. It looked so sick. I think if you do a big air and you bone it, it shows how passionate you are about airs. It’s so much harder to bone it. You can do an air and not bone it and land it all the time. Christian (Fletcher) used to do it and he’s fucking sick.

There’s elements of ballet in your airs. Yeah, there is, with the crane arm, with the legs tucked in. What shall we call ‘em?

Theatre airs? A good theatrical air. Like airs flying across the stage. A Swan Lake air!

That air on the cover? Talk! I got so fucking high I didn’t know where I was!