A decade ago I’d quit my desk job, packed my life into a van and headed out along Europe’s coastline with Chris. We were going to write a book about surfing and travelling the continent, the characters we met, the stories we heard, the waves we found. When we hit southern Spain we looked across the waters to Africa and knew we had to keep going. We spent nearly 3 months in Morocco touring the world-renowned waves, stumbling upon empty points, exploring the landscape, the lifestyle and the culture. We were mesmerised. Eventually we came home and wrote the book. Now, some 10 years on, we retuned to Morocco to stay with our friend Den from Moroccan Surf Adventures who we’d met out on a magical point back in 2001 to find that while the sands had shifted the essence remained. – DT

 

SHIFTING SANDS / DEMI TAYLOR / ISSUE 37 COOLER MAGAZINE

It’s a strange feeling travelling down a road that’s familiar and not being able to quite pin point where you are, to have those crucial coordinates on the edge of your consciousness stubbornly refuse to come into focus. The disorientation of returning and realising that everything is the same but everything is different. “I just feel like it was here,” I say to Chris, my fingers probing the air hopefully as we pass yet another headland that looks kind of right. Driving north along the coast road from Taghazoute we are bypassing bustling world-class waves and fabled breaks looking for a point, the point, the one we’d hidden out at a decade before gorging on secret waves and sun ripened bananas. We are taking a nostalgic trip down memory lane but unfortunately the turning for said lane is proving to be somewhat elusive. The markers have moved, dusty pink and grey villages have sprung up and expanded along the roadside, while the cactus and Argan trees have knitted themselves together into protective, thorny barriers between the cracked tarmac and the sea…Cont.

This article appears in the Jun / July Issue Cooler Magazine