Morocco

Wow!  We have just returned from our fifth international trip to five continents in the past ten months!  These include Europe (Netherlands and Belgium 9/00 – Sara’s work), Asia (China 10/00 - vacation), North America (Canada 1/01 - Sara’s family), Australia (4/01 – Sara’s work), and now Africa (Morocco 7/01 - vacation).  As Sara reminds me, I wanted to travel after I retired, but I did not expect so much exotic travel in such a short time.

Morocco was a hard trip, made so in part by an allergy I developed the day after arriving that kept me mildly run-down and is still with me.  However, very interesting and very different it was.

We started the trip with a Saturday flight from Washington to New York’s JFK airport which included 45 minutes waiting on the plane after landing, a half-hour wait for the shuttle bus to take us to the adjacent terminal (construction prohibited walking), and computer problems checking into the Royal Air Maroc flight – welcome to the third world before leaving the US! Fortunately Sara’s conservative attitude toward international flying gave us enough time to catch with ease our flight from JFK to Casablanca, which went smoothly.  Merritt, our friend in Rabat, had arranged for a car and driver to meet us at the airport, so the 90 minute drive from the Casablanca airport to Rabat went as easily as possible.

Once we got settled in a bit, Merritt took us downtown (she lives within walking distance) and through the medina (the old part of the city, often open to foot, scooter, and animal traffic only), the kasbah (fort), and related residential areas.  The medina is where one can buy anything from food to clothing to housing appliances, all sold from small open stalls along a narrow pedestrian walkway.  Some are very complex, but Rabat’s is quite simple, with only two or three branching lanes.  The kasbah has been converted to housing and coffee shops, with some retail activity.  While there we viewed a couple of beaches mobbed with people apparently just standing in the water but not doing much swimming.  90% of the beach population was male, with the adult women being fully covered up and staying out of the water.  There is optional use of the veil and headscarf here, but jellabas (long robe-like, light-weight coverings) are very common among both men and women and women are socially urged to dress very conservatively.  Unfortunately, pictures of people are discouraged, so we don’t have many pictures of the local dress.  However, we did find the doors and architecture to be very interesting and worth photographing, so we may find we have too many of these.

On Monday, we visited some Roman ruins in a Muslim fort called the Chellah (lots of storks roosting all over the place) and again walked into town and through the medina.  These ruins were occupied by the Romans from about the second century BC until the end of the Roman empire. The statuary and brass items have been removed to a local archeology museum which we visited later.  We did most of our Moroccan shopping in the medina on this visit.  That evening Merritt invited a USAID couple Sara knows and a Peace Corps volunteer (Danielle) who is working with health programs in northeastern Morocco.  These folks gave us a great introduction with their varied experiences in Morocco.

Tuesday we took a train from Rabat to Marrakech, in the south.  This was a nice ride, with European-style compartments, that took about four hours.  We had the compartment to ourselves most of the way.  First class cost us all of $15 each.  Land transportation in Morocco is inexpensive and frequent.  The rail network is limited (basically Fès to Marrakech via Rabat and Casablanca), but there are many buses, both good and bad and there is an extensive “grand taxi” system – basically a Mercedes car running a defined route between cities when it fills up.  Locally there are “petit taxis,” mostly small Fiats.

Our Marrakech hotel was in the medina, so the petit taxi dropped us about three blocks away and we walked to the Hotel Sherazade.  We had a lovely room on a courtyard with beautiful carved plaster walls inside and out.  From the roof we could see (and hear) eight mosques (calls to prayers occur five times a day from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m.).  Danielle had recommended a nearby restaurant so we went there for lunch and had a wonderful time watching the people, donkeys, and vehicles all jostle for the same piece of the huge square it overlooked.  If jay-walking is a problem where you live, you should see Morocco – people and animals cross anywhere and everywhere, making watching very entertaining and being part of it very thrilling. 

That afternoon we walked all over the place – we had not yet realized it was a good idea to lay low and quiet during the extremely hot part of the day (everyone else does – businesses and museums close from noon to about 4), so we exhausted ourselves.  We did take a horse carriage ride through part of the medina and around the walls, which was a great way to get an introduction to the city. Every evening the great square is mobbed with performers and food stalls.  Starting at 5 p.m. the cars get forced to the edges and the food stalls start setting up.  There were belly dancers (with no belly showing – in fact, Sara was convinced some were men), musicians, magicians, storytellers, and lots of other clusters of activity going on.  We enjoyed dinner in a restaurant overlooking the entertainment.

Wednesday we toured the souq (usually a marketplace in business only once or twice a week, but in Marrakech and other large cities a full-time marketplace) and mellah (the former Jewish quarter) as well as some museums.  There are guides in every city to accompany one through the souqs who can be useful as they are very much a huge maze.  We did not go very far in and found our way out successfully without a guide.  The mellahs are now much like medinas, except for the architecture – the Jewish housing had windows extending above the street, while the Muslim housing faces inward to a courtyard.  Colors tend to be different as well.  Many of the museums we visited formerly were private houses of very rich people.  In one of these, I was waiting for Sara to return when a fellow came up and told his story of his family having left Morocco in the early 1960s to emigrate to Israel with many other Jews in the Arab world.  He now lives in Australia and has not been back to his homeland in forty years.  He looked up the house he lived in and found it occupied by several Arab families and in worse condition that he recalled. 

Sara also wanted to visit a pricey hotel (one person described it as the best in the world, a description we doubt, as nice as it is), so we walked over there and enjoyed a stroll through its garden.

That evening we went to a performance at a place called Chez Ali.  It included dinner and a “fantasia” along with music and a performance.  The “fantasia” is several horse riders charging across the grounds and firing muzzle-loading muskets into the air – we can’t figure out why it is called that or why it seems so popular.  There also were a belly dancer (with belly showing and definitely a woman), musicians representing various parts of Morocco, horse riding acrobatics, and a Berber walking around with a camel.

Thursday we started our grand adventure by car around Morocco.  We had hired a car and driver (Tarik Amlal tarik252001@yahoo.fr, an excellent driver and nice person who speaks English, French, and Moroccan Arabic) for not much more than the car alone would have cost us.  We hired him for 13 days, traveling around much of the country.  I think I would have had great difficulty driving there – very confusing with no one paying attention to lanes, people and animals walking everywhere, and some signage only in Arabic (most signs have Latin characters as well).  Tarik met us on schedule in Marrakech, quickly loaded our baggage and we were off to Essaouira, a coastal city about three hours to the west.  

En route, we passed argan trees.  These are used to make a wonderful oil that does not appear to be exported out of southern Morocco, which is used in cooking.  The trees are described as endangered, yet goatherders let their goats climb into the trees to eat the leaves and fruit.  We passed some trees with goats in them – a very unusual sight!

Upon arriving in Essaouira, we again walked from the nearest parking lot to the hotel Villa Maroc in the medina. This hotel is a charming place with stairways leading in various directions and rooms in all kinds of unusual places.  Our room had a great view of the port and a seating area immediately outside.  There is much use of blue doors and white walls, so the town has a bright and clean look.

We met my cousin, Casey, here.  She is nearly finished with her Peace Corps tour working in health care in a village a few hours south of Essaouira and has a great command of French and Moroccan Arabic, the two national languages, as well as the local Berber dialect of southern Morocco, so traveling with her was very easy and interesting.  Moroccan Arabic seems to be a mélange of classical Arabic and French.  Newspapers and television are in classical Arabic.  Moroccans theoretically are taught both Arabic and French in school, but some had very inventive French pronunciations (“lait,” milk, is pronounced “lay” but we heard it pronounced “lou,” for example), so negotiating the country with my limited French would have been interesting. 

Casey gave us a tour of the medina during which we met the Peace Corps country director who was visiting the city and Casey’s boyfriend, Aziz.  Dinner was in a fish restaurant on the pier.  Casey wanted a fish they did not have in stock, so someone went off to buy it from the nearby fishing boats.  We asked for mineral water and French fries, so someone else went off to buy these items elsewhere.  “We don’t have what you want?  No problem, we’ll buy it from someone else.”  This was a policy found in some restaurants, while others simply said they did not have almost everything on the menu.

Friday we drove south along the coast to a point south of Agadir, where we turned east to Taroudant.  En route, Casey asked to stop at a MarJane – almost identical to a Wal-mart with everything one can imagine – quite a contrast to the country outside its walls.  Our hotel in Taroudant, the Palais Salam, was quite a luxury place backing up against the walls around the medina.  Again, the architecture is very interesting and here there are two swimming pools.  After spending the heat of the day near one of the pools, we toured the medina, which is more complex than that of Rabat with few pedestrian-only passages, so we had to keep an ear out for cars coming up from behind us.  Dinner was had in a small second story place overlooking a small interesting intersection.  The menu was limited, but again they went out to get some items not in stock.  Casey apparently spent the late evening watching television and walking outside the medina, as she reported back on many things in the morning.

Saturday, after a wonderful, complete breakfast, we went to Tiout, a half-hour away for a morning’s hike.  En route into town we encountered the first of several “guides” we would meet and use during our trip.  This guide, a man apparently in his 60s and walking in what we would call bedroom slippers, kept a pace as good as I wanted over rough terrain.  He first took us into a wonderful house presently used for weddings and then on a two hour hike to a village of 60 inhabitants where we took mint tea (extremely sweetened) in a house occupied by 15 people.  The terrain is very dry, with limited vegetation once we left the oasis near Tiout.  I found very interesting the fact that water is so scarce that a village will be perched on the hillside with absolutely no visible vegetation immediately next to a wonderfully green oasis.  We then hiked back to Tiout via another route, with great views of the (dry) river valley and oasis.  After we returned to Taroudant, we walked through the very interesting kasbah and more of the medina before returning to the hotel for dinner to give Casey a treat.  The hotel staff could not do enough for Casey!

Sunday we returned to the coast and took an extremely interesting one lane road (pull onto the shoulder to pass) to Tafraoute.  Fortunately, there was little traffic – with one exception of meeting a truck at a turn.  En route we passed sand dunes, huge boulders, and other variations of scenery.  Tafraoute is a small town one can explore completely in a half hour. We met another Peace Corps Volunteer, Julie, here.  The hotel (Les Amandiers) apparently had only five rooms rented that evening even though there were two buses of tourists at lunch (how did the buses negotiate that road?).

Monday we proceeded on to Casey’s village, Ait Ahmed.  She refers to it as a souq, as the main thing that goes on there besides the hospital and area administration, is a weekly market.  She has four rooms with cold running water and enough electricity for three 15 watt bulbs (preferably only one turned on at a time) provided by the hospital she works with.  She immediately changed from tight pants and a T-shirt to a long skirt, a loose blouse, and a headscarf before taking us to meet the local administrator who gave us tea and arranged for a lovely lunch in the nearby home of the town’s largest merchant. We ate tajine (a common Moroccan dish with meat and vegetables stewed in a unique dish – everyone uses pieces of bread to eat their segment of the food) in a room with beautiful banquettes along three walls.  The merchant gave us the full treatment, with hand washing, appetizers, tajine, fruit, and mint tea. 

After lunch we drove to the old site of the village before they moved in the 1970s in fear of flooding.  Unfortunately, the old site is much more attractive than the current site with a river (with water) next to it, vegetation along the river, and arcaded retail stalls on either side of the road.  We also visited a site further upriver that has unusual huge rocks not found elsewhere in the area.  Finally, we tried to get to a school where Casey was instrumental in getting a privy installed, but it was too far up a terrible road.   Dinner was in Casey’s house with Tarik and the male nurse working in the hospital joining us (she would not have been able to invite them if I, a relative, had not been there).  Sara was helping with dinner and said the lentils were just so-so before Casey added some Argan oil – the oil added a wonderful flavor to the dish.

Tuesday we moved on, leaving Casey in her village for another two months.  Before we left Casey made scones as good as any I have had, even with her primitive kitchen!  Sara wanted to take her “out of all this” and back to Rabat, but Casey looked happy there.  We returned to the coast at Tiznit, where we met a Peace Corps Volunteer working with the local jewelry industry.  After buying some silver, we continued north to Agadir, then east through Marrakech and on to Beni Mellal, where we spent the night.  This was a day of hard driving on two lane roads with lots of truck and other traffic.  We spent the night in a sort of motel (Hotel al Bassatine) some distance outside of town, so we had dinner and breakfast there.  There is a mosque on the property and a man stood outside calling prayer time during the afternoon. 

Wednesday we continued on to Fès and the Hotel Batha, just outside the medina.  We had heard horror stories about being hassled, pickpockets, and worse.  The hotel staff said we should not go out at night.  We found no more hassle than in any other city and had no problems walking by ourselves, day and night; only the guide we hired was a hassle at first.

Tarik had arranged for a guide, Ben, who met us as soon as we arrived and immediately took charge.  Sara had wanted to visit the Batha Museum but he said it was closed for renovation (we later found it was open and visited it before meeting him the next day), so we accepted his suggestion of his taking us to the mellah and elsewhere that afternoon, into the souq in the morning, and then on a tour of the city walls.  He returned a few hours later and took us to the mellah, we visited the local Jewish cemetery where Sara found a tomb she had read about, and a synagogue.  We then went to a pottery factory where we both were saddened by the labor conditions and cut the tour short.  On our way back to the hotel, Sara spotted a garden she had read about being near the hotel, so we got out there and enjoyed a relaxing walk among the trees.  I had seen some lovely arches from the taxi when we left the mellah, so we walked back there, strolled around the market, and then found a restaurant near the garden for dinner.

Thursday  we drove across Fès with Ben as our guide and plunged into the maze of the medina.  The medina is reputed to have 9400 streets and a map looks like a bowl of spaghetti, so having a guide is essential if one has destinations in mind.  We had decided on certain places we wanted to be sure to visit so Ben took us to all of them in addition to taking us along many interesting lanes.  We had to watch for mules, donkeys, and horses carrying large loads through the narrow streets and the place was very busy.  However, never, in any medina or souq, did we find that we were jostled; everyone made room for everyone else.  We visited beautiful medersas (religious schools), most now museums with wonderful tiles and carved wood and plaster.  We looked into, but could not enter, the mosques adjacent to the medersas.  We strolled through streets where people still sharpened tools on foot powered grinding stones, hand sewed beautiful jellabas, and otherwise accomplished amazing tasks in tiny spaces with poor lighting.  We were taken to a carpet factory where we saw girls about ten years old busily weaving (we saw no adults at work there).  Sara questioned the guide about their treatment and he assured us they worked only four hours a day and were given room and board and clothing (were they paid, too?).  This, as with the pottery factory yesterday, was very disconcerting and we aborted the carpet tour just as we had the pottery tour.  Ben then took us to lunch in yet another fancy building where we ended up paying $40.00 for the meal (we’d had a very satisfactory lunch for less than $10 every other day).  Included was a Moroccan salad which, in this case, consisted of 18 7” plates and five 5” plates, of which we ate very little.  A guy sat in one part of the restaurant solemnly making mint tea.  He would put water and several large sugar cubes into a teapot for two, pour the results into a glass, taste them, decide more sugar was needed, and continue until he had it perfectly syrupy.

Ben took us on across the medina and to a view of the city before going back to our hotel.  Afterwards, we walked back to the mellah to get pictures of the arches we’d seen yesterday and explored on our own.  We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in a sidewalk café watching the passing scene – something we saw men (no women) doing everywhere.  Sara could do it because she was with me, but probably would have felt criticism by herself.

Friday we continued to nearby Meknès where we walked to the granaries (a much longer walk than we expected) and the medina (we found both the mosque and medersa quite efficiently on our own).  We took a taxi back from the granaries and asked to go to the mosque, thinking it was on a regular street and surrounded by open space, as it appeared on the map.  He told us he could not drive there – it turns out he was correct, as the medina was just as narrow as in Fès.  We had lunch in the medina and then went on to Moulay Idriss, a small town near Volubilis, a wonderful Roman ruin dating from the time the Roman empire ruled the entire Mediterranean Sea area. This was a lovely town our guidebook said we (non-Muslims) could not have entered 70 years ago and even today are advised not to stay overnight.

Volubilis was built in the second century B.C. and was occupied until the end of the Roman Empire.  Unfortunately, much of its marble was taken for other places over the years and an earthquake in 1755 toppled most of it.  As with other Roman ruins we have visited, they had running potable water and sewers, fine tile work, a regular grid street layout, and wonderful statutes.  We hired a very good guide here (we could have wandered on our own, but he was very knowledgeable and took us to all the important places) who was a Berber from southern Morocco (the area Casey works in).  Our hotel (Hotel Volubilis) room had a beautiful view of the ruins (we almost got the room Prince Charles had slept in, but it was occupied). 

Saturday morning we walked around the community above the hotel and found a water system almost identical to that used 2,000 years ago in Volubilis.  The people were filling jugs at a couple pipes while animals drank the excess water from the basin the pipes flowed into and women washed clothes in a separate part of the basin.  We saw our guide from the day before and he proudly said running water was being put into the community as we spoke and they had recently gotten electricity – no wonder he was such a good guide, he had, until recently, lived in conditions similar to the Romans.  While we approve the capital improvements, the removal of the communal gathering place around the water source will change the lifestyle drastically.

We went on to Chefchaouen, a lovely town not far from the Mediterranean Sea.  I finally was feeling fairly well (I have been diagnosed with an allergy, probably from all the dust, animals, animal dung, and other stuff in the tight spaces of the medinas and souqs and being in the open spaces around Volubilis helped relieve that) and could speak Spanish, French, or a combination of the two here, so I really enjoyed this city.  It is clean, beautifully blue and white, and we had a great time just wandering the medina and sitting in the main plaza (yes, plaza (Spanish for a square), not place (French for a square), as stated on a sign there) watching (and finally figuring out how to get people pictures) the passing scene.  Our hotel here, Casa Hassan, was just as charming and interesting as any we stayed in.  It, again, was several blocks from the nearest car access.  I would never have found either the hotel or parking had we been traveling on our own. 

Sunday we had planned to do some hiking in the Rif Mountains, but given our reaction to the heat, decided to pass on that and return to Rabat early.  We stopped for lunch at a beach near Kenitra and got back to Merritt’s by mid-afternoon.

Monday we visited the archeological museum (to see the rest of what is left of Volubilis and other items) which is quite interesting and well done, though small.  We then spent several hours relaxing on Merritt’s patio sitting alternately in the sun and shade (hot in the sun, sweater conditions in the shade due to the breeze) before walking back to the medina with her and enjoying a lovely dinner in a French restaurant near her house.

Tuesday Tarik drove us to the Casablanca airport and got stopped for the first time at one of the many police checkpoints we had passed – he had been observed passing on a solid line.  After several minutes (and perhaps a bribe paid), we were again on the road and almost before we were out of sight, he passed another truck on a solid line!  He really was a good driver – the truck was going very slowly and sightlines were adequate for safe passing at the speeds involved.  Our flight home left and arrived on time, Immigration and Customs at JFK went smoothly, we were allowed to bring all the olives, olive oil, and argan oil in.  Everything went safely until we tried to land at National – we were coming in and almost had touched down when the pilot aborted the landing. He advised us there had been another plane on the runway!  The second landing attempt was successful and we got home at a reasonable hour.

As I said, it was a hard trip, but everything went about as well as could be expected and we saw lots of fascinating things.  It was easy to visualize Mary and Joseph going to Bethlehem or the Jews leaving Egypt – the scenery, animals, clothing, and buildings could have been the same.

 Bruce & Sara               July 2001