Morocco

Every time I go to write about our time in Morocco I am struck with a certain amount of confusion. I look back on the month there as reasonably well spent but when I try and recall individual experiences, the ones that spring to mind are often negative. This is largely to do with the nature of the people in Morocco that speak English. Morocco was under French control for some time so most people speak both Arabic and French, along with varying amounts of Berber in the south and Spanish in the far north. As such English is some kind of distant fifth place language and is only known to either the well educated or those that make their living from extracting cash from tourists.

This would be OK if the average Moroccan tout had taken a course in effective western selling techniques. The almost universal approach to selling something to whitey is to ask what country they are from, how long they have been in morocco, possibly what hotel they are staying at. All before even announcing what it is they would like to sell you because mostly everyone sells everything. They likely have a shop of their own but are just as happy earning commission by guiding you to a local hotel, or restaurant or even just by demanding baksheesh for directions or a pro bono history lesson when in site of anything vaguely historical. And while we've been to several countries with a haggling culture we've never seen such counterproductive and zealous attempts at overcharging as in Morocco, where as in most countries if you know the 'right' price you get the 'right' price, many Moroccans will not bat at an eyelid at not making a sale if it means lowering the price to something a local would consider. And then once you have hardened to the nonsense that goes on, some of them will even act offended when you ignore (or even just refuse) their unsolicited attempts to sell you things you don't want.

Wow that's an especially long paragraph describing the short comings of Moroccans, but the worst is yet to come. Once you've come to the decision that no Moroccans are to be trusted, or even talked to you get your rental car stuck in the sand (it looks an awful lot like dirt down south) and every single person that drives past in the next few minutes stops their car, leaves their air conditioning, rushes across the road and bodily shoves your car until it is free of the bunker. AND THEN wander off without expecting a handshake and a smile let alone exorbitant baksheesh. You can understand why it was so traumatizing right?

Our route around Morocco was pretty much clockwise starting in Tangiers and heading southwards through Tetouan, Chefchaouen, Fez, Meknes, Azrou, Errachidia, then west through the desert and Tinerhir, Boulmaine de Dades to Ouarzazate, South to Zagora, and N'Kob before heading to the west coast Agadir, and Essaouira, and then finally our outward leg through Marrakech to Casablanca.

Our second stop after Tangiers was Chefchaouen, a pleasant small town, with windy alleys painted pale blue, where everyone wanted to sell us drugs. Not in that furtive shady guy walking the other direction whispering '¿Dak Bro?' kind of way, but in the well dressed young men reclining in the public square openly offering high quality, low price marijuana and derivatives to all and sundry. I'm pretty sure we received five separate offers the first day, and to be honest the 'pushers' were a lot more relaxed and polite than the guy trying to sell you brass lamps, or carpets.

We stayed in another really nice budget hotel, and spent some time wandering the alleyways before heading off to climb a near by hill to a ruined mosque (the only kind of mosque non-muslims are allowed into in Morocco, bar two). The climb was green and goat strewn but on arrival there wasn't much of the mosque left but there was a nice man who sold me fanta and espoused considerably on the quality of Morocco's (and therefore his) hashish and its deserved dominance in the european market.

Chefchaouen was also a firm believer in the standardized Moroccan breakfast, with all restaurants in town offering almost identical renditions of toasted fresh bread, apricot jam, fresh cream cheese with mint tea. I should note at this point that mint tea does not ever on pain of death involve a tea bag in Morocco, nope you take your glass or your tea pot and stuff it with as much mint as you can manage, add as much sugar as will dissolve and then add your boiling water and stir thoroughly.

The big cities in Morocco all blur together somewhat, large old quarters threaded with impossibly confusing, historic and/or smelly alleyways. Market stalls piled with fresh foods, public cats begging at butchers just big enough for one cow to be delivered and dismembered. Many closed ornately carved mosque doors, and small boys lurking in the windy bits waiting for us to get lost enough to require paid guidance out.

And then the burgeoning Ville Nouvelle's, full of faded colonial buildings, mad traffic and male-only coffee shops where all the chairs point outwards so the men can look at all the passers by. Perhaps my favourite image I have is of the McDonalds in Meknes with a huge mural in the drive-thru of head-clothed Arabs riding horses, while brandishing rifles above their heads. Very Middle-East meets West I thought.

When we were in Fez we joined a random crowd lining the cordoned off main road only to see three black audis blast past us at way over 100kph bound for who knows where. Turns out that it was either the king or a royal decoy, and the real king caught up with us a couple of days later when we arrived in Meknes. The hotel we had chosen from the guidebook turned out to be completely inaccessible due to crowds lining the streets, and we were completely stuck in the throng with our backpacks for a good five minutes before King Mohammed VI cruised past in one of the afore mentioned Audis.

Our time in the south around the Dades and Todra Gorges was pretty good. First we took a taxi up the Todra Gorge, which was steep sided, had a small river flowing through it and was absolute party central for all the local young moroccans. Big groups of people sat on the pebble islands in the river and banged drums and tambourines and shouted and sang like you wouldn't believe. The swarms continued all the way up the narrow section of the gorge, but seemed to disappear immediately as we rounded the corner and headed up on a day hike over the saddle above the gorge. The land is really barren with little scraggly shrubs holding doing their best to hold the rocks together. On the way over we graciously allowed a British bloke to catch up with us, and proceeded up the hill and down the other side together. Turns out he was a producer of a mini-series being filmed in Ourzazate, and was out for his day off hike cum location scouting. The geology didn't disappoint as the hills provided text book views of distorted and upended sedimentary rocks that left us all terribly impressed, and in the end we even got a free ride to the next town in a clean, safe car.

The next day we headed out of Boulmaine de Dades by taxi again, and headed up the Dades gorge, and the valley of roses which was more an architectural trip than the previous day. The gorge carries a river and is lined with both palm trees and aging mud brick kasbahs (aka forts). We stopped several times and wandered down around the river, while admiring the bizarre rock formations on the other side. The river in the Dades gorge was much swifter and deeper than the day before at Todra, but this didn't stop some locals trying to convince us that we should cross the river and join them (probably so they could sell us a carpet).

On our second day in Ourzazate we succumbed to peer pressure and hired a car and spent the next three days alternately being excited about driving a car on the wrong side of the road, remembering how to drive a manual, getting stuck in the sand, and occaisionally exploring the palm lined river that led south to Zagora, and the desert east of there out to N'Kob. Before we booked the car I was very careful to note which roads we were allowed to drive on, as paved roads are at a premium in the south of morocco, and I was quite surprised that we were allowed to drive to N'Kob as it is a chicken road, one paved lane with broad gravel shoulders where anytime you meet someone coming in the other direction you must half leave the paved strip to make way. The main point of all the driving was the scenery on the way, and several times we just stopped and wandered off into the palmeries, amongst both the date palms and the fields of wheat which were being busily harvested while we were there.

We used our last day with the car to drive up to Aït Benhaddou which is probably the most famous of Moroccos kasbahs and has been in the background of a lot of movies. It was quite an interesting climb thorugh the still inhabited houses inside to get up above the valley and the river and see the town by sunset.

The other thing to do around Ourzazate is visit the film studio sets, Atlas studios was the big one and we got a cheap guided tour around several parts of the fake ancient world. The neighbouring studio had a huge double sided castle used for Kingdom of Heaven (and several movies since) which is at once the city of Jerusalem and Crac de Chevaliers in Syria.

After we returned the car we headed out west to the coast and the towns of Agadir and Essaouira. Agadir was a big modern town with a beach quite unlike anywhere else we'd been in Morocco. We had a bit of trouble finding a hotel with room, but when we found one, they immediately offered us a discount for us to take the biggest room we'd ever seen. If I had been feeling more athletic I could not have just swung a cat but my entire wife around the empty space available.

We visited the beach which was weird as Moroccans try hard to be modest but aren't experienced enough to realize that cotton is just not a modest seaside fabric. The other big news was trusting our lives in the hands of a strange hair dresser. Between a bad smattering of shared English and French we somehow both ended up with good haircuts, and the hairdressers floor ended up with at least half Jacquies hair after an extended thinning session.

Essaouira was different again with an old town perched on the coast, decorated with Portugese battlements and a lively port cum fish market. We didn't stay long but actually felt less stressed when we left, which had to be a small miracle.

Marrakech would have been just another big Moroccan city if it wasn't for our new found devotion to juice bars. The nearest one to our hotel would happily murder a punnet of strawberries to order and server them in a pint mug. No ice, no water, no milk. Just blended strawberry goodness for all of 2NZD. Needless to say we ended up heading over there just about every time our stomachs felt recovered from the last dose. Its other draw card was its main square which plays host to numerous BBQ stands, tassel headed drummers, and under appreciated snake charmers (never pick up a tambourine in Morocco you never know whats underneath it). The only act that actually drew a smile though was the kids corner were a much picked upon old man displayed a hedge hog trained to run around inside a mans hat, several tame pigeons and the most inert lizard you have ever seen. I was entertained even before a young girl made a break for it with the hedgehog and the poor old fullah had to chase off after her. He still seemed quite surprised when we passed him a few coins.

We didn't have high hopes for our day in Casablanca as it is the financial center of Morocco and not much else (apparently all the exoticness from the movie was based on Tangier). However we knew we were able to visit the enormous King Hassan II Mosque and so like obedient tourists we lined up and bought our 20 something NZD tickets stood by the English speaking tour sign and were issued with a plastic bag for the storage of our shoes while inside. And what a lot of inside there was, the main hall was rugby pitch big and cathedral tall but built as one large columned rectanguloid with marble everything, and a retractable roof. The roof is essential as mosques are never air conditioned and once you load the place with 25,000 worshipers the heat could get dangerous if there wasn't some serious airflow allowed in.

And then we left. Another month down and not a souvenir to show for it, but the flight to Egypt was quick and relatively painless and we did our best to charge straight into the Egyptian experience.