DECEMBER 12, 2018 WEDNESDAY - LUXOR-CAIRO – MOROCCO
“We are brothers…of a different mother "
Cairo International Airport is, slick, shiny, with 5 security checks, and all the usual bells and whistles of 21st Century travel. Except places to sit, flight Information displays, and signs other than ‘Duty Free This Way’. At 1 in the morning it is also a sleek desert, abandoned by nomads of the air, inhabited sparsely by sleepy salespeople in stylish black, nodding off in their ‘spend-a-toria’.
We wander, like Columbus, at sea, looking for anything to land on. We find a tiny archipelago of 3 hard metal seats outside Givenchy, Chanel, and Lancôme, and colonize for our 7-hour night time layover---2 hours longer than our next flight, to Casablanca. Our wallets are safe from the fragrant temptations of the natives. Our memories hold onto whiffs of the Nile, keeping sleep at bay.
We sleep on the plane, arrive in Casablanca to meet Ruth, 15 hours after leaving Ramdan in Luxor.
After Randam, Khalid, and Moussad, I think we can’t luck out again. Wrong. Roly-poly guide Said and tall, lanky, VERY handsome driver, Ahmed, are warm, laid back, funny, easy laughers, jokesters. Dennis, ‘Madame’, and ‘Ali Bobby’ slip right into the car, the 5 of us instant buddies all around. This is good. We have 9 days together, some of them long drives through the non-touristy rough terrain of the Anti-Atlas Mountains. (Note for the puzzled: Morocco has 2 major mountain ranges. The Atlas Mountains are the Big Boys. The Other Guys are Not the Atlas, and why come up with another name when you already have a perfectly good one? Thus, Anti-Atlas. In Europe it would be The Alps and everything else The Anti-Alps).
We drive through the Anti-Morocco. Morocco of the travel posters---and our expectations--- is sand-colored desert, sere, and stark. The Anti-Morocco out the window is rolling hills, bright green, and lush. Then we get to the sea, strands of white between us and the Atlantic.
The town of El Jadida flutters along the coast, bustling, white, tourist-anchored, and famous for its seafood. Our grilled dorado, a foot long, sweet, flaky, perfect, our first taste of Morocco’s famous cuisine IN Morocco, sweeps away all travel fatigue. We babble between bites, oohs and ahhs replacing words.
Said and Ahmed just laugh as we groan. These two are obviously friends, close in personality and age---29 and 24 to our 74plus---so much so that Said’s joke that “We are brothers…of a different mother” sits true with us.
Four hours, later our host for the night meets us on his
bicycle outside the gate into the ancient walled part of Essaouira. We follow
him down the street, past shops draped in the captured colors of the desert,
sea, sky, the beauty of Morocco. The shop owners are not the hawkers they are in
Egypt. They gesture to their goods, which speak for themselves. For now we
ignore the call of rugs, caftans, fabric, scarves, shoes, turbans, leather things.,
seductions drowned by the louder call of a comfortable bed. Our riad (traditional
house) is down an alley, through a thick door, its rooms opening onto balconies
hanging over a central courtyard, a typical riad Our room is long and narrow, a collage of rugs
and tiles, and double-layered. I claim the loft. Sleep claims me.
DECEMBER 13, 2018 THURSDAY – ESSAOUIRA-MIRLEFT
“Not Moroccan”
I’m thankful for color vision and I’m a sucker for rainbows. I and my wallet survive---just-- the alley that connects the door of our riad to the main street of the medina. It's a tunnel of temptations, hung and stacked with wool and clay reincarnated as rugs and pottery, delicious.
We squeeze past the alley's temptations into the main street of the medina. To the right I see one of the two main gates in the massive walls of this city within a city. The other is out of sight swamped by the clutter of people, push carts, bicycles., and tourist schlock, all upstaged by the audacious architectural artistry of the olive sellers. Their wares are heaped into two -foot high conical Jackson Pollack pyramids, green, yellow, black canvases dotted, swirled, dripped with the colors of lemons, oranges, spices, herbs. Samples are free, come with addictions. All our overloaded senses demand reward. We choose Taste, well satisfied with a kilo package of moist dates. There are 400 kinds of dates in Morocco. We can’t go wrong.
“Not Moroccan” says Said at first bite. Sure ‘nuff. The tiny print under the big photo says ‘Produit de UAE’, the United Arab Emirates. We eat them anyway, not purists.
We follow the green of the ‘Anti-Morocco’ south to the small town of Mirleft. The women here walk in swirls of color, Rorshach tie-dyes stirring memories of other places way further south in Africa. “Mauritania starts here" says Said. Culturally, anyway. Colonialism's fossil borders are arbitrary, not informed by culture or geography, misinformed by arrogant entitlement and power. The colors swirl, culture triumphant.
Our digs are a surprise in this dusty town way off the tourist track. We spread through three stories of perfect design in pale yellow and white. It can sleep 7 in 5 bedrooms. We take 2, pay $40 total. The whole house, with its ground floor living room, dining room, fully equipped kitchen, garden is about $100 a night in high season, $80 the rest of the year. Down the road, the owners have a tiny café in the covered arcade that is downtown Mirleft. We sip tea at dusk and watch a pair of dogs play in the fading light.
Dinner is fresh grilled fish, outdoors on rickety tables,
‘salade marocain' of chopped onions, tomatoes, green peppers, scooped with
pieces of fresh thick pita loaves, all seasoned with the smoke of wood fires.
We absorb it all.
Morocco is taking hold.
DECEMBER 14, 2018. FRIDAY – MIRLEFT -TIGHMERT
“I am Berber"
The surf is up, but no surfers bob at Legzira, straight due east across the Atlantic from Orlando. It's just the 5 of us, miles of sand, waves rolling in, even rows of lace, white on blue. The Atlantic is chill on my feet. A puffy rogue wave wets me and my pants almost to my knees. No matter. They dry in the breeze, wispy on the flat beach, then puffed up as it pushes through the funnel of the spectacular natural stone arch that drags the coastal hills into the sea.
We turn away from the sea and climb the hills. Green ‘Anti-Morocco' slips behind us, giving way to the red and brown Morocco we expected, even more beautiful. Lunch also turns its back to the sea. It's inland fast food, Moroccan style: a half-acre platter sporting one quarter juicy roast chicken, crispy right off the spit, fresh chopped salad, sided with rice and pasta, and topped with french fries. For two dollars.
Tighmert is an oasis, deep green beneath a web of date palms. Our home for 2 nights is with young Ibrahim in ‘The House of the Blue Man’. He is a Berber, as are most of the people of Morocco. One branch of his people are the Touareg, nomadic ‘blue men’ of the Sahara, blue because they wear robes and face- wrapping head cloths of sky blue, and blue because the dye colors their skin. Blue is the theme in the cloths and furnishings, pieces of sky grabbed by the ochre of the mud walls. Our oasis home is beautiful.
“I am Berber" says Said, and tells of his people. Most Moroccans are Berbers, not Arabs, originally very early Christians, now mostly Moslems. Berbers call themselves Amazigh, ‘free people'. They have been their own rulers for millennia. The Romans tried to control them by force, but never managed it. They tried to control them by marriage, giving the daughter of Cleo and Mark Antony as bride to King Juba the Second. That didn't work either. The Romans called them ‘barbarians', whence the term ‘Berber’, for millennia derogatory. The Berber Pride movement now embraces the name. Take that you Latin snobs. By the way, the Berber alphabet may be one of the oldest of all writing systems. (See previous comment).
Tighmert is way off the tourist track. Only travelers find it. We share the four rooms with a French couple on their fourth stay here. Over a stunningly good tagine, fragrant heaven on blue plates, Tighmert slips into future plans.
DECEMBER 15, 2018 SATURDAY – TIGHMERT
We five drape across red rugs in a tea house at the edge of the market, leaning against thick pillows. Ahmed pours our tea from two feet above our small glasses. The cascade, dead on target, froths the tea, as it must, but not yet enough. The custom requires several cascades. Ahmed pours each glass back into the pot, then releases more cascades, each now carrying a decanted tinge for our noses from the mint leaves in the pot. The guys order a late breakfast for themselves, an omelette baked in a tagine. Eating such flavors is close to worship.
Just across the narrow walkway from us, the Saturday market has been unpacking the bounty and colors of Morocco since dawn. Farmers heap three kinds of oranges near the sheen of red and green peppers, beets and onions, bubbles in white, red, gold, eggplants, elegant in royal purple, dusty but still glowing carrots, huge cauliflower, convoluted as coral heads, but stark white and trimmed in green. Ahmed leads us through the color, fills a plastic tub with some of each, pays 20 Moroccan Dirham, about two dollars, and turns it over to the Tea Guy. We wander off to visit the camels. Two hours later, Tea Guy delivers our lunch: veggie tagine. The bounty of ‘Before’ becomes the scraped clean tagine of ‘After’. The worship continues.
By late afternoon Ahmed and Said have found the street of cloth sellers in the town, whispered what I should pay, approved of my bargaining skills, agreed with Ruth and Dennis on the color, et voilà, I have added a ‘foukiya’, traditional Berber embroidered ankle-length robe in traditional blue---the color of Morocco's sky--- to my wardrobe. No one looks as good in a foukiya---or jeans or sweatpants, for that matter---as handsome Ahmed, but mine suits me just fine, thank you.
And it gets a thumbs up from Ibrahim at night when Berber music grabs our feet and we dance to drums and strings and Ibrahim's plangent voice under a black sky, waxing moon and the date palms of the oasis.
DECEMBER 16, 2018 SUNDAY – TIGHMERT -TAFRAOUTE
“I like to meet people".
We see few vehicles, overtake only donkeys. The Anti-Atlas is terra cotta and ochre, sharpened under that blue sky, colors warm as the day, stippled with the green of argan trees. This is argan country, the only place in the world where the trees grow. Hand grinding on a stone mill coaxes pale gold oil from the raw seeds in the olive-like fruit. It's essential in Moroccan cooking and cosmetics. Toasted first, then ground into paste, argan is bronze, thick, rich, gooey-drippy, nutty icing on pieces of bread torn off flat rounds still warm from the oven at breakfast, balm for our tongues.
We stop for tea and coffee in the courtyard of an inn backed up to the red rocks, in the cool light filtered by the palms. The inn keeper also cooks. Why leave this place? He chops in the distance, the only sounds. He makes tagine kofte, tiny balls of beef and spice (parsley leaves for sure…and coriander? ginger? cinnamon?) under baked eggs and stewed with veggies, onions always on the bottom to caramelize and carry smokey sweetness upwards. Three black cats sense some easy touches and carry sleek shadows through the dappling to our table. The furry shadows mew in vain.
Later, Said points to the left as we cross a wide flat break in the mountains. “There are nomads out there”. We see pale smooth tents and rough coated sheep and goats, lights spots on the ochre. Nomads follow tracks to the water and pasturage their flocks need and have for millennia. The artificial borders drawn on maps by the colonial powers have had no meaning for the ‘free people’. Next door neighbor Algeria now disagrees. That arbitrary line on the map is now a ditch the herds cannot cross. The leaders of the two countries could work it out but… “You have a very bad President. In 2 years he can go. We have a king, so….” A shrug wraps the conclusion.
Our elegant host at Azur (of course, Blue) offers cashews and dates, cascades of tea on his ‘terrasse'. A line of shade creeps across our table. The temperature drops with the sun, now diving behind the red mountains, early, as the shortest day of the year creeps closer.
We end the day with laughs. Ahmed has wrapped 5 meters of cloth around his head into a smashing multi-color turban, our dinner genie. I am ‘Ali Bobby’. We have the cast for a story and our host provides it. In French. I translate.
A man leaves his village and returns years later, very, very
rich, to find a childhood friend. He's very poor, the villagers tell him, and
lives way up in the mountains in a cave. The man finds the cave and his friend.
The reunion is emotional. The old friend is ashamed that he can offer only tea.
He taps on the one object in the cave. A genie pops out, bows, hands folded,
and asks “How can I serve you, Master?” “Please make tea", and Poof! Tea
appears.
The rich man is astonished. He offers to buy the box and
genie, but the hermit refuses, kindly. The rich man offers a house, a business,
a huge amount of cash. It is only when he says “please" and calls upon
their old friendship that the hermit agrees. The deal is sealed with paperwork
and a handshake and a farewell hug. The hermit is now a very rich man.
The next day, the rich man reads that a ship laden with valuable
cargo has arrived unexpectedly nearby. He taps the box. The genie appears,
again with hands folded, and again asks “How can I serve you, Master?” “Transport
all the cargo of that ship to my warehouse.” The genie looks puzzled and
hesitates. “Didn't you hear me? Transport all that to my warehouse". “Yes,
Master, I heard you, but…I only make tea.”
Our host laughs. “Rich people are like that. They always want more. Me? I have enough with my pension. I have this guesthouse because I like to meet people.”
DECEMBER 17, 2018. MONDAY – TAFRAOUTE[RF1]
“They are shy".
We rise almost a mile into a piebald sky.
Under us, the back of the Anti-Atlas is ancient and rare red lava, congealed then broken into rounded monoliths, boulders, shards, pebbles, dots. We snake up, crest in the sky, then snake down, the red closes in and we are swallowed by the gorge of Ait Mansour.
The gorge walls narrow the sky. We walk for 3 miles through the bottom, a true oasis, of date palms and olive trees. A flop-eared yellow dog walks with us, grants us an ear to scratch, and nibbles on dates and olives, flattened specks in the red dust. Farmers respond to “salaam" or “bonjour" when offered, but otherwise ignore us and pass by silently. “They are shy", says Said. “Country people are shy”. I don’t mind being invisible. It's their world, not mine. We're specters. We appear briefly, then disappear, nothing to seize upon. Or acknowledge.
We add the gorge to our list of places to return to. Soon.
We eat in a garden under orange and pomegranate trees. It’s ‘tagine poulet’, chicken and veggie tagine, and a worthy way for a chicken to go, though perhaps not to the chicken. I scrape the last patina of onions caramelized in argan oil onto thick bread. And thank the chickens.
Tafraoute is famous for ’babouches' traditional flat-soled, pointy-toed leather shoes. We haven't seen other non-Moroccan travelers for days, and there are none in the souk here either. Some may come to Morocco as the ‘high season’ born as the end of year holidays empties Europe of sun-seekers, but perhaps few will get to Tafraoute. The shoe sellers are keen, anxious, but not pushy, and they know their bottom price…and read accurately that gleam in Ruth's eye for the two pair dripping from her hands. The bargaining is languid, the price acceptable, the deal sealed. Eventually.
Our elegant host at Azur once again lays out tea, cashews, and dates on the ‘terrasse’. Our day, wanes, perfection, patina on our memories.
DECEMBER 18, 2018. TUESDAY – TAFRAOUTE[RF2] -TAROUDANT
“It hard to find job now"
We turn northward onto the back leg of our short trip, towards Taroudant, and its casbah and medina, its intact walls wrapping it up as a ‘mini Marrakesh'.
First we have to sort out a ‘wee’ wrinkle in our plans. TAP Portugal Airlines tends to have an abstract approach to their schedules. This time the TAPsters have sent an email: So sorry, but we have changed your flight between Morocco and Senegal, via a short stopover in Lisbon, to one a day earlier. Do Not Reply To This Message. Translation: You lose a day in Fès, but gain a night and most of a day in Lisbon. Don’t call us. You're on your own.
Lisbon! Complaints would be churlish, but…TAP has a history with us. A year ago they changed the flight schedule FROM Senegal and wiped me off ALL of the new flights. Sort of. I was listed on the flights, even had seats assigned, but there was no proof I had a ticket. I flew in the Twilight Zone from Dakar to Lisbon to Newark to Tampa, at each stop having to prove I existed. I know the drill: get confirmation. But the TAP website is down…
Wiser now to the imaginative bureaucratic arabesques possible at ticketing, airport entrances, check-in counters, and immigration processes we drop our packs at Riad Taroudant in search of a way to print out proof of our existence, our next flights and of our right to be troubling airport minions. Newly wed Mohammed, cheerful ‘do it all' from the riad, leads us on a grand tour of the medina to a first choice print shop (sorry, no Internet) then to a second, doubling as a children's book shop. The lady at the counter points behind her into the deep recesses of the shop. I leave Dennis and Ruth to it. They disappear.
I grab a floppy book from the shelf and see how to legibly form the letters of the western alphabet, upper and lower case, block and script, something I obviously missed during my first childhood. It's too late now to rescue my handwriting from its comfortable scrawl.
People watching from the doorway is more rewarding. ‘Tous le monde' of Taroudant cycles by on hefty gear-free bikes, easier in shin-tight jeans than in ankle-length caftans, a lot trickier for the few who pump by delivering tea, pots and glasses hanging onto thin metal trays.
An hour later, Dennis and Ruth develop like dusty photographs from the dark of the shop, shaking their heads, defeated by the dim light, and the French/Arabic keyboard which has gobbled up the @ key. Suggestions, reformattings, copyings, pastings, re-sendings, and printings at the counter, in daylight, invoke and fly through Yahoo, Google, Whatsapp, Bluetooth, and perhaps the orbit of Mars. Slowly.
I go back to people watching. Donkeys are cuter than those dinosaur bikes, caftans and head scarves have it over those jeans and baseball caps, and voluminous ladies, generous from side to side, but skimpy from top to bottom, balancing tagines and bundles on their heads…well, they are just visual panâche. A few may notice the foreigner holding up the storefront, perhaps marginally more interesting than the donkeys.
Dennis, Ruth, patient Mohammed emerge victorious. Pages of semi-unintelligible airline gobbledygook seem to confirm tickets and schedules. Or they may be reservations on the first flights to Mars. Time will tell.
Coffee, please. Now.
There are no other guests at the Riad. Mohammed has time. He leads us up worn stairs to the top of the walls that enclose and protect the medina from the modest spread of modern Taroudant. Then we 4 sit in the central square of the medina with coffee, like everyone else.
Mohammed is 24, with a new wife and ‘un bébé’ soon to arrive. He has worked at the riad for a year, doing what needs to be done, learning English as he goes. Some nights he has to stay at the riad, away from his wife, but “It hard to find job now".
We see no other obvious tourists amidst the kaftans under the trees. “Good place" says Mohammed and points to tables under a wide brown awning. Indeed! Later, the square dark in early night, finely chopped ‘salade morocain’ and a plate of spiced olives usher in moist-crisp ‘tagine poulet’, yet another version of the classic, without vegetables, except for that bottom layer celestial caramelized onions, so fundamentally good.
Mohammed makes us breakfast in the morning, cheerful, a natural, genuinely friendly and helpful, even among people famed for hospitality. This job is a good fit for him. We leave him with a photo of the 4 of us and a gift for ‘le bébé'.
Ahmed and Siad drive up, we wave goodbye, and we leave Taroudant. Mohammed will stay with us.
DECEMBER 19, 2018 WEDNESDAY– TAROUDANT- OUIRGANE
We crest the road in the High Atlas Mountains at 7200 feet.
All 7200 of them are stacked one below the other straight down right outside Ahmed's window. Down. Right outside. Behind us the far, far higher peaks, freshly white with snow, etch a sharp line across the blue sky. Way, way below, mud brick villages are scrambled sharp edges cutting up the green fields. Everything else is pure air and space. Lots of space. Down.
We haven’t seen any other vehicles on the road for miles. One comes around the curve, head on. Ahmed squeezes us into the mountain wall, three inches to spare. The Other Guy takes the outside, a bare inch from Ahmed's mirror on this side, enough tire on the road to keep going past us. Forward, not down. The drivers wave, two hands obviously not required for this magic. The wave may be to Allah. It's over in a second. Inshallah. (No kidding.)
A bit lower in altitude-----and adrenalin----we sip tea in the sun at a tiny shop, solitary companion for a 12th century mosque, guardian of the peaks. Long distance buses crossing the Atlas stop here for the mosque and maybe the local crafts in wool, clay, metal. Dennis, always sharp-eyed, hands me a bracelet of 3 metals twisted into a band. Ruth votes yes. Said says its old. The shopkeeper says 40 Dirham. For 4 dollars my embroidered blue foukiya and blue leather shoes are now fully accessorized.
The place is too peaceful, cool, and bright to leave. We sit in the sun, half dozing, half hearing the chop-chop from the kitchen, the only sounds. Lunch appears piece meal. First olives and bread, then fresh chopped ‘salade marocaine' with corn kernels, new to us, then veggie and omelet tagine topped with peas. Tea rescues us from nodding off.
A man walks by leading a laden donkey. Ahmed runs to him offering a bottle of water, life here. And scarce.
At Ouirgane, water---a dammed lake of it---defines the landscape, once again Anti-Morocco, a green velvet drowned Vermont. The tiny town, summer escape from Marrakesh broiling in the oven of summer, is quiet now in the cold nights of winter. We’re the only guests in the small hotel, the only odd faces we see along the lake. But the five of us fill our last dinner table together, sufficient in laughter and memories shared. Tomorrow they leave us.
DECEMBER 20, 2018 THURSDAY – OUIRGANE – MARRAKESH
“I just fell in love with him.”
Thursday is market day in Ouirgane village. But a few piles of oranges, a stack of new tagines, and a sleepy donkey do not a souk make. At 09:30 we are way ahead of the local souksters, still missing nothing when we leave at 11.
It's a short drive down to Marrakech, our last hours with Ahmed and Said, our 8 days together too few. Promises are made. “We will come back.” “Next time, we take you to the desert.” Both are very likely. Inshallah.
Said finds a wagon to haul Ruth's bag, and heads off to drop her at her friend Sergio's house. We say goodbye by phone. Ahmed turns us over to a Hotel Guy who will lead us to our riad, down an alley too narrow for the car. There are hugs, then Ahmed is gone, too. We have been lucky. I think they have been, too.
Just after sunset, sweet Sergio and Ruth lead us through the mayhem of The Big Square, Jemaa el-Fna Marrakesh's World Heritage Site and core. We survive the temptations of the lippy, funny, insistent hawkers of rugs, tiles, brass, leather, cloth, shoes, spices, dates, candy, fruit, hats, and mind-numbing/taste-devouring variations on tourist-schlock.
Sergio’s alley is away from all that. He lives here several months a year in a wild and marvelous residence cobbled out of three old and huge traditional houses. We walk across 3 courtyards open to the stars (one for each house), all with fountains, some with orange trees, through rooms that respect and enhance these houses, retain the purity of the traditional Moroccan use of space, height, shade to protect from the fierce summer sun.
Caretaker Guy and Sergio prepare a delicious meal to follow the gin and tonics and wine. We take turns being the Pillow of Choice for the sweet, sweet tuxedo cat that wandered in and took over the house. “I just fell in love with him.”, says Sergio. We get it. The cat is warm, friendly, and easy to be with…just like Sergio.
Later, we leave Ruth to find her way through the maze of rooms to her bedroom, and follow Sergio through the maze of alleys, past the now shuttered shops, and into the still raucous Jemaa el-Fna to familiar landmarks near our riad. Sergio is Italian from Venice. His surname, Francescon, so similar to mine, lacks a final vowel, eaten by the language of the Venetians. Still, even without the câché of a final vowel, he is Italian: we part with hugs.
DECEMBER
21, 2018 FRIDAY – MARRAKESH DAY 2
“It's all the same shit, but our shit is better”.
Jemaa el-Fna in full eruption at night is a once in a
lifetime indulgence. It's as much fun as midnight on New Years Eve on the
streets of Boston when the thermometer has dropped lower than that ball in
equally frozen Times Square. Once is more than enough. But, we are hungry and
the center of the square is cheek to jowl restaurants serving all the foods of
Morocco, including cheeks and jowls.
Young guys are hired by the cooks to importune, grab, rant
at, block, harangue, and corral passers-by to sample their wares. These
Prandial Pimps are good-looking, quick-witted, smart-assed linguistic
chameleons tossing phrases in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese,
Japanese…whatever the market requires. My favorite, pimping platters at Stand
65, hits me with “It's all the same shit, but our shit is better”. That
deserves a reward. We get vegetable soup only, skillfully dancing around his
semi-bribe to go for the full service. He returns to hawking “better shit".
The noise, gimmicks, too up close and personal, wear thin and
we retreat from the food stands to the relative quiet at periphery of the
square. The guys with performing monkeys, aloof hawks, and cobras ready to
dance and weave on command, are a more phlegmatic lot, keep their distance.
Further out, the shawl sellers drape, and wave their wares, creating not a
flutter of air, or interest. Further out still, the shoe sellers hold their
tongues. Their stock speaks for itself.
Our night in The Big Square ends with double ‘boules' (scoops)
of gelato. One scoop of Jemaa el-Fna is enough. We've ‘done’ Marrakech, look forward
to quieter Fęs tomorrow.
DECEMBER 22, 2018 SATURDAY – MARRAKESH – FEZ
“I don’t know how many rooms there are"
‘Anti-Morocco’ flattens and greens outside the train window, desert, mountains, snows behind us, or way ahead along the Mediterranean, or way east and over looking Algeria. Inside our compartment, the other four seats fill, empty, fill, empty as the train moves north to Fès. It feels very Agatha Christie. Do they really get off the train? Why is the ‘professor’ wearing Nikes? What is that odd look the guy with the piercings gives the Moroccan woman in knee boots as he leaves the compartment? I leave it to some other ‘Aircool Pwarow’, and doze off.
Fès train station is every bit as 22nd Century as the one we left in Marrakech 7 hours ago. Have any if ours lurched out of the 19th?
Our digs, billed on AirBnB as ‘a small room in Palais Mokri’ costs $16 and are way down off the heights of the medina, so we figure the ‘palais' is a misprint or delusional. We are so wrong. Our ‘small’ room is palatial, tiled walls soaring to twenty-foot ceilings over aged and patinaed rugs scattered across more mosaics, a double bed, a couple of divans, 3-foot wide floor pillows. And Palais Mokri IS a palace, of the Mokri family, now being restored by a brace of cousins, descendants of a patriarch who was a friend of Winston Churchill. Ali, tall, bearded, handsome, is overseer of the project and its inevitable cast of cousins, and our host. “I don’t know how many rooms there are", he says, but he has about 10 ready for guests. They will help pay for the revival of the palace. I wonder how much $16 can do.
It has been hours since our ‘petit dějeuner sûr le train'. Stomachs in charge, we follow Ali's directions from the palais out the door, aiming for the restaurants around the souk, across and up the medina at ‘the blue gate'. The first and second turns unfold as promised. After that, ‘tout droit’, straight ahead, becomes poetic license, every turn tangling us in the inky spaghetti of the medina’s alleys, deep and narrow to protect from the fire of Africa’s sun and to confuse invaders. We invade, successfully confused, but benevolent and hungry. Stomach is impatient but Eyes are seduced in the soft canyon light, vote for---and get--- time with the ochre walls, inlaid with massive doors, dark, carved wood, or brass/bronze/copper, polished, flattened and squared mini suns, etched with the flowing ribbons of Arabic, and edged with color wheel fantasies of Morocco’s famed ceramic tiles.
We climb upwards into the sun, fires stoked back this time of year, to a square, get more directions, pass a fountain, a few cafés pushing out into the road, a cart of red pomegranates ready for juicing, into a narrow alley, narrowed more by the tables and menu signboards of ‘Chez Hakim’. Mohammed (of course), nephew of Hakim, leads us up to a balcony hanging over the alley. He's a serious ‘foodie’, recognizes kindred taste buds ‘in extremis', even at this early hour by local custom. The ‘tagine poulet’ does well by its chicken. Dessert is the fruit we expect from Moroccan kitchens, with a touch. Mohammed's sliced oranges and bananas sit in sweetness under a dapple of sesame seeds and cinnamon. We have found ‘our' restaurant.
The alleys unfold on the way back. No longer invaders, baptized by Moroccan food, and the way is suddenly no secret to us, and, indeed, ‘le palais est tout droit’. So is sleep.
DECEMBER 23, 2018 SUNDAY – FEZ- LISBON
“Come back. I'll save a space”
There’s an ‘auntie’, somewhere in the nether regions of this walled palais, a medina within the medina. She makes our breakfast, fuel for an expedition up our alleys into the souk. Just around the corner from the tables of Chez Hakim, past a row of cafés, is the vegetable souk, then the meat souk, then grains, then fruit, then spices, pyramids of color, courtiers to the absolute royalty of turmeric and chili powder. We walk through the medina walls at the Blue Gate and the gate beyond it into the modern city, pretty but not seductive. We return to the ancient city within the walls, detour through the souk of the sellers of used clothing, folded and stacked by type and color, and walk downhill under the cloth awnings, percolators of sunlight into pools of light and eddies of shadow.
Commitment to a ‘No shopping' covenant evaporates. The hand painted soap dish will crown our outdoor shower. I finally spot the long, hooded galabiya I have been looking for. It’s thin cotton, white striped with grey, quietly embroidered, well made, and it fits. Bargaining gets me a 15% discount.
I have a thing for ethnic clothing, especially the flowing robes of north Africa, and the colorful pants and tops of Africa south of the Sahara, miniscule thievery of the elegance and peacock splendor of the men. Wearing them is like speaking another language, a bit of a revelation about another way to think and be yet another version of myself.
Ali takes us up flights of stairs to the top of le palais. We walk across acres of mosaics, under carved ceilings, look out over ‘our’ courtyard, then over the white houses of Fès, tight packed around their alleys, stark in the harsh afternoon light.
Ali rides with us to the airport. He knows Fès has invaded us. “Come back. I'll save a space.”
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