Marrakech to Tangier
Trip Start
Feb 10, 2008
1
24
43
Trip End
May 13, 2009
Tangier,
Morocco
Friday, July 4, 2008
The Hotel du Tresor is an oasis in noisy and exciting Marrakech - there is a small courtyard with a small lap pool, every bedroom has been beautifully and uniquely decorated, and breakfast is on the rooftop, lounging around on sofas and looking out over the city.
Our first night we make a beeline for Djemma el Fna, the vast central square of Marrakech. It's a site to behold - the whole square is thick with smoke from the scores of open air restaurants and foodstalls making every variety of food (snail soup, grilled meats and fish, egg sandwiches, etc), there are musicians, story-tellers, snake-charmers, etc.
Next day we meet up with Lisa and she took us around to some of her favorite places and through the souks, and we ended up having a 2-hour session at a hammam. What a wonderful experience - you wash yourself down, then go into a steam room, then get rubbed down and massaged with an abrasive, then slathered in argan oil from head to foot and massaged again, then coated in seaweed and trussed up in plastic for half an hour, before finally washing it all off, and going to a relaxation room where you are served mint tea
Courtyard of Hotel du Tresor, Marrakech
. Definitely a good sleep that night.The next day Lisa invited us to the house where she is staying, which turns out to be a luxurious villa and associated guest quarters set in acres of garden. A great breakfast has been set up in a pavilion and we lounge about eating fresh fruit, going for dips in the pool (there are several), sunbaking, walking around the grounds, eating a delicious lunch served by servants, drinking wine, etc. After 2 weeks of harsh desert conditions it's most welcome.
I decide to make up for all this unexpected luxury living by climbing Jebel Toubkal, Morocco's highest mountain at 4,167 metres. I set off next day, driving up into the High Atlas to a mountain village called Imlil (1740 metres), and set off for the 4-5 hour hike up to the Toubkal Refuge at around 3200 metres. Next morning all my room mates in the dormitory leave about 5am to see the sunrise but I sleep in until about 9am and take off alone up the track.
I don't have a map with me (you've heard this before :) although I do have half a litre of water and a hat (and gloves and a light jacket). I follow a well-defined track for some time then climb a very steep zig-zag path to a pass from where I have a great view into the next valley which has a beautiful lake far below. However there are much higher mountains all around and I don't know which one is Toubkal. I spend the next 2-3 hours climbing a huge rocky outcrop above me then descending down treacherous scree slopes and over a snowy area and across a fast flowing stream to another path, then climbing to another pass, and climbing another mountain to a summit of shattered rock
Breakfast on rooftop, Hotel du Tresor, Marrakech
. I am at around 4000 metres judging by the other mountains around and I am feeling the combination of altitude, lack of water, lack of food (haven't eaten anything all ay), heat (the sun is scorching down, and the wind is so strong it has blown my hat away and has ripped another button off my shirt, which I wrap around my head to provide some protection).Finally, after spending 6 hours up here I return to the refuge, and find that Toubkal was only 2 hours away directly above the refuge. It's another 5 hours trek back to my car at Imlil, then a 1 1/2 hour drive to Marrakech, and I arrive back at the lovely Hotel du Tresor exhausted, sunburnt and dirty.
We leave Marrakech in the afternoon and drive through an extremely flat hot countryside - it's 47 degrees as we leave. It's melon country - town after town we pass through has long lines of thatched market stalls stuffed chock-a-block with melons - mainly watermelons, but also rock melons and honeydew melons. Nothing else seems to be grown here but you wonder where they are grown - as far as the eye can see there are dry, dusty fields with not a skerrick of greenery. In fact they look like carefully cultivated fields of small rocks.
Essaouira is about 200kms away on the Atlantic coast and for kilometres before our arrival we drive through fields of Argan trees. Everywhere there are little co-operatives, nearly all run by women, selling Argan oil and other products derived from the nut of the Argan tree
Alison eating a snail, Djemaa el Fna, Marrakech
. The oil is one of the rarest in the world because of the small growing area of the trees and the labour-intensive process.As we drive into Essaouira young men and teenagers stand by the side of the road and wave keys at us and make sleeping signs, touting for business for their hotels. Essaouira is virtually booked out because of the Gnaoua festival, and it's very windy and cool there besides, so we stay at Kasbah Zineb about 15kms inland (we hear that it's 51 degrees in Marrakech, and probably much the same here). It's a sort of resort and has a pool, so it's nice to lounge around there during the day, then go into Essaouira at night for the Gnaoua Festival (Gnaoua is a type of popular religious music). This fetival is held every year in Essaouira and all the best Gnaoua masters come here, as well as many other musicians.
On the Saturday night we attend a fantastic concert with a lineup of Toumani Diabate, a master of the kora (a 21 string instrument), then Bassekou Kouyate (a leading exponent of the n'goni), then Maalem Mahmoud Guinea (one of the best Gnaoua masters - his grandfather was from Mali and was sold as a slave in the Sahara). Alison, who among her many other talents is a music promoter (with a special interest in African music), has toured Toumani and Bassekou in Australia wangles her way in to see them backstage.
Essaouira has a completely different feel to the other parts of Morocco we have visited so far - the architecture is different, it's more laid back, seafood is prevalent, and it's cool and windy.
After the fetival we drive north along the Atlantic coast
Snail soup vendor, Djemaa el Fna, Marrakech
. It's made up of long, sandy, windswept beaches, interspersed with petrochemical complexes and towns. We spend one night at Oualidia, which is built around an inlet on the coast. After dinner we go for a walk around the town - the atmosphere is amazing - the air is thick and moist and full of salt. Visibility is less than 100 metres an everything is slightly blurred. We continue on up the coast to Azzemour with it's Portuguese fort and walls. We stay at a beautiful place called Riad Azama in the medina - there arre no tourists here at all. Wandering through the medina the Portuguese influence is obvious - we notice it mainly in the women, in their features and eyes, but also in how they dress and walk.
Alison is at he end of the Moroccan part of her trip so I drop her off and say goodbye at Casablanca airport, then drive past an enormous smoking rubbish dump with lots of people and cows fossicking about into the crowded and chaotic city. Th name Casablanca conjures up visions of the famous film of that name starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, but the current reality is a far cry from that.
I first visit the Hassan 11 mosque - it' either the largest or second largest mosque in the world and it's minaret is the tallest - 200 metres high. The main prayer hall is 20,000 sq metres (the floor is all marble) and holds up to 25,000 worshippers. The ablution hall has 41 fountains and there are 2 hammams - Moroccan and Turkish. After visiting the mosque I walk back to my hotel through the medina, which is far grittier and grungier than those of Fes and Marrakech
Djemaa el Fna by night, Marrakech
. I have dinner just inside the medina wall, joining half a dozen men sitting on upturned plastic crates in the open, eating fried fish and other items I can't identify, cooked in a huge vat of boiling oil by a young girl squatting on the ground and a man, presumably her father.Thre are quite a few bars near my hotel and I want to go in to see what they're like, but I lose my nerve as they look really seedy and seem to be full of sad-looking drunks, who I'm sure would not appreciate a curious tourist like me. The area is also full of laiteries - little bars that blend milk with the fruit of your choice, making a sort of smoothie. I particularly like the avocado - it does seem strange to blend avocado and milk but it tastes great.
I also go down to the Corniche along the seafront, where Rick's Cafe from the film was supposedly located. Someone has opened one up to cash in on the name and the area is full of bars and restaurants called names such as Miami, Tropicana, TGI, Texas Ribs, and even Notre Alsace - it's all a bit surreal and tawdry.
On my way to Tangier I stop in at Asilah and Larache - before she left I read Alison's copy of a book called Streetwise, which covers a section of the life of the author, Mohammed Choukri, when he decided to learn to read and write at the age of 20 and lift himself out of the hard and tawdry life he had been leading, and much of it is set in these locations so I was curious to see these places.
I finally arrive at Tangier - what an exotic and evocative name
View over Marrakech by night
. From the 1920s to 1956 it was an 'international city' administered by European powers, separate from the rest of Morocco. An incredibly diverse range of people live and visited there - spies, writers (Paul Bowles, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, etc), musicians, Barbara Hutton the heiress, Malcolm Forbes of Forbes magazine, and so on.I have great fun asking directions - ou est le Kasbah? as my hotel, La Tangerina, is in the Kasbah. It's in a fantastic position just inside the Kasbah walls, facing the Strait of Gibraltar, and my room is on the 4th floor with a view across the strait to Spain. I spend a few very pleasant days in Tangier seeing most of the sights - the Café de France where spies and expatriates hung out, St Andrew's Anglican Church, the Petit Socco (where William Burroughs used to pick up boys), the Grand Socco (where I eat Moroccan style fish & chips at a table on the footpath), the Grotto of Hercules, and I have my first swim in the Atlantic at a surf beach near Cape Spartel.
Finally my day of departure comes and I drive around the coast, past Jebel Musa (842 metres), the southern Pillar of Hercules (Gibraltar is the northern one) at the entrance to the Mediterranean, to the border just past Fnideq and on into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta.
Unlike a month ago when I had serious hassles getting into Morocco with my car, this time I breeze through the border confidently, although my car is searched for drugs, including taps all over the body to see if there are any hidden in some secret compartment.
A quick look around Ceuta then I drive on to the ferry and a short time later am back in Europe.
Although I have been in Morocco for a month and have seen a fair bit of it I feel I have barely skimmed the surface
Alison at entrance to house, Marrakech
. The lack of speaking the language and the difficulty in speaking in any depth with people (and as a man virtually impossible to speak to women) means that I can only have the vaguest idea of what life is really like here.Nevertheless it's been a colourful and fascinating experience and has made me curious to know more - hopefully I will visit another time.
A couple of random thoughts and comments:
Food - I was a bit disappointed with the relative lack of variety of food (I can only comment on restaurants and eating houses) - generally it was a choice of tagine, tagine, or tagine, and the use of spices was very light. My favourite food was fried sardines with chili sauce in a bread roll.
Housing and interior decoration - stayed in some very beautiful places and loved the tiles, carved doors, copper and brass fixtures, lights, and especially tadelakt, a waterproof plaster made of quicklime mixed with sand, eggs, and pigments (originally developed by the Romans), which enables organic shapes such as a bathroom basin to smoothly extend from the wall in an unbroken curve.
