The taste of a journey

When I arrived at the airport of Bamako, the policeman at the control gate was a bit surprised: what
was that strange sort of white pinnacle I had in my bag? I assured him that it wasn't any drug, and
that he could taste it if he wanted to.
The “white pinnacle” was a present that a man gave me near Dakhla, in southern Morocco.
My boyfriend and I were travelling with and old van from Italy to Bamako, Mali, and we normally
picked up every hitchhiker we met on the way. One of them was a middle aged man that we
remember because of his incredibly white traditional dress and his mystic appearance.
To express his gratitude for the lift, he invited us to his place for tea and, as we could not refuse, he
phoned his wife to make sure that everything would be ready on our arrival. And so it was.
The teapot was on burning coals, large dates were on the coffee table along with several fruit juces,
cookies and other sweets. Everything was ready for the tea ceremony.

Don’t forget that drinking tea in Morocco is a serious matter: you cannot be in a hurry and you
have to be in the mood for talking and sharing time and thoughts.
If you travel from northern Morocco to the south of the country you can also appreciate how tea
changes: the tall glass with fresh mint leaves of the north becomes a short and extremely sweet
drink in the south.

What surprised me at our friend's house was a bowl containing something that I could not
imediately identify; it seemed sugar but it was the first time I saw sugar in such big chunks. I
enquired about it and as an answer- we hardly had any common language between us- he asked his
wife to bring an entire cone-shaped bloc of sugar: the white pinnacle!
Three kilograms (over 6.6 pounds) of sugar, which represents a family's average weekly
consumption.

The sugar traveled with us for the rest of the journey, it crossed Mauritania and arrived in Mali and
then safely to Italy, where it has been a pleasure to hammer it to pieces in order to use it!