Home to Marrakech July 2011

It was the perfect homecoming.

Crowds milled around groups of musicians and snake charmers just as I remembered.

There was a fire on the sausage barbeque stand again; the fat was spitting out of the broken skins and flames were dancing in the acrid smoke, as the barbeque boy vainly tried to move everything to the side.

The call to prayer from a hundred minarets echoed through the square, and a donkey pulling a cart loaded with watermelons rebelled against the sharp sting of the whip, and bucked and kicked the underside of the cart, and then shat unceremoniously on the concrete as a palpable symbol of protest. A car, then a motorbike ran through the shit almost immediately and spread it like mustard on a kebab. The crowds then filled the space and spread the shit to the four corners of Marrakech.

Yes, it felt like home.

Hot and noisy, smoky and chaotic, pungent and urgent.

Women walked by in tailored silk pantsuits of pastel blues and greens and pinks with matching head-scarves and straight backs and heads held high.

The touts were scanning the crowds for new arrivals; tourists, the most valuable and sort after commodity in Marrakech.

A woman cleaning hotel rooms seven days a week earns 1,000 Dinars or 100 Euros a month. It was relatively easy to pick up 50 or 100 Dinars from a new tourist, before they became immune to the constant stream of beggars and pleaders, before they lost the guilt that most from the first world experience when confronted with the third world.

I walked down the alley off Le Place to Hotel Cecil, and was greeted like a prodigal son returning home.

“Salaam Aliekaam, Bonjour, welcome, welcome”

Everyone wanted to know about Essaouira, and I was given a room for 4 people at 50 dinars less than I previously paid. Most travellers stay only 2 nights, then are never seen again, so I was a rare commodity.

So I caught up with Nouradine, and Houda, and one night at the ginger tea stand I met the Cambridge twins; Robin and Rob.

They had just finished degrees in Mathematical Biology, and apart from being genuine genius’s they were really great guys. Robin is the opening batsman for the Cambridge First 11, and was about to tour India with the team. Rob, who is fluent in French, was taking a year off study and going to French Guiana to teach kids maths. We had a lot of laughs and agreed we would try to meet up when we were all in London again.

I spent a scorchingly hot afternoon looking at the 2 palaces in Marrakech with Eve. She had just completed a post-graduate business degree in Oregon, and was travelling her way through Morocco and Europe on her way back home to Bangkok, where she had previously worked as an accountant. We had an enthusiastic tout offer to take us to see an auction at the spice market, but when we got there it was just a room, and any auctions were long finished. We were then palmed off to the spice shop next door, and my sinuses nearly exploded when I had a bag of pure menthol almost shoved up my nostrils “to try”. Eve then nearly exploded with laughter when I told the tout she was from Siberia. “Velly nice,welcome, we love Sibleerlia”.

I moved to a new Riyadh called Azahara. It was away from the square near the outer walls and was much quieter and like moving back into medieval times. There were woodworking shops where craftsmen painstakingly carved intricate Arabic designs based on sacred geometry into cedar and pine, much as their forefathers had, and shops where women made carpets on looms, or cut out fabric to be hand sewn into shirts and Habibs.

Azahara was sumptuous. A large courtyard of marble tiles and columns, and a marble fountain. Five-pointed brass stars were inlaid in the floor, and under a canopy of intricately painted geometric patterns were heavily cushioned couches where breakfast was served, and mint tea or “Moroccan Whiskey” could be taken during the day. My room was the size of a house, with Berber carpets, a bar, and a ceiling I can only describe as breathtaking. The cornices and ornaments were so finely detailed, I had never stayed anywhere even remotely like this, it was so beautiful.

And I was the only guest.

Ibrahim, Ali and Rasheed ran the small hotel for a Frenchman, who lived in Paris and visited once a year. There didn’t seem to be much marketing going on to fill the other rooms, but I wasn’t complaining!

So the next week passed in a flurry of socialising with my new found Moroccan friends, and a disastrous two day trip to Rabat, the capital of The Kingdom of Morrocco.

More about that in the next post.