I met my fellow travellers that evening and our guide attempted to explain what was going to happen while the owners of the hotel undertook renovations possibly in the next room. Over the drilling he managed to convey that we would be catching a train the next day and that it would be wise to be on time as Rabat was quite a walk. Since I had inadvertently done about half that journey yesterday I was in no mood to repeat the process and presented myself the next day about an hour before I needed to.
After an hour’s waiting we were on our way. Bags were hurled in the general direction of taxis and we followed with enthusiasm if only so we didn’t lose sight of our luggage. With minutes to spare the taxis spat us out at Gare Casa Port, Casablanca’s main railway station. We scratched, clawed and bit our way onto the train and settled down for a peaceful journey to Rabat.
Rabat is the capital of Morocco and was a very different city to Casablanca, the taxis were a different colour for one thing. By promising to buy food later we persuaded a local cafe to store our bags. It’s a good thing we didn’t store them at an organ bank or we might have left missing bits of ourselves.
With luggage safely under the protection of vendors of light meals we set out on a walking tour of Rabat. The main street was handsome and we took photos of Morocco’s rather understated parliament building before heading towards the real attraction.
It is axiomatic that when you’re on a tour any building erected in the last century or so is by definition uninteresting. Therefore we headed to the most geriatric part of the city to gaze in wide eyed wonder at buildings whose principal claim to fame was the fact that they had been built several centuries ago and hadn’t fallen down yet.
The buildings it had to be admitted were indeed impressive. Rabat started off life as a military camp and while there were lots of tiny shops and houses there was also a great deal of massive walls, gates and cannon positions all of it overlooking the harbour that any would be invader would have had to land at unless they decided to walk.
Once all this (and some rather handsome gardens) had been admired we headed back towards the cafe stopping off to not visit King Mohammed V’s mausoleum. King Mohammed V is a national hero in Morocco as it was during his reign that Morocco threw out the French occupiers and became a truly independent nation again. The French selected him from amongst his brothers to be a puppet king because he didn’t appear all that smart. It turned out he was simply too smart to let the French know he was smart. He fostered and nourished the revolt that persuaded the French to leave.
We did see the outside of the mausoleum which was impressive enough and wandered around an incomplete mosque. The mosque was started a long time ago but its patron died and his heirs decided they had other things they wanted to spend his money on so it was never finished. This would be the closest I would get to a mosque on the entire trip as there is a law in Morocco preventing non-believers from entering mosques. The only exception being the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca and even that (as I learnt painfully) has to be on an arranged tour.
This structure is unusual as mosques normally welcome all comers except during Ramadan. The reason goes back to the French. During the French occupation soldiers had the unpleasant habit of essentially treating mosques as playgrounds and clumped all through in their dirty boots. The locals were incensed and in an attempt to mollify the natives the French authorities placed a blanket ban on any non Muslim entering a mosque. The law was still in place at independence and simply hasn’t been removed much to the confusion of our guide who bemoaned his inability to show them off to us.
With a whirlwind tour of Rabat thus completed we sat down to lunch to ransom our luggage. We were informed that on Fridays most Moroccans ate couscous. Guess what we ate?
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